Andy Goldsworthy's The Owl Has Flown

Try to fathom the idea that an artist could a take stroll in the woods, along a riverbank, down a beach, and with no tools at all – no paint brushes, no sculptor’s chisels or knives, no canvases or pedestals or quarried granite or polished wood – manage to create absolutely beautiful art from the objects and materials he finds by chance. That person is Andy Goldsworthy, a sculptor that uses nature to create masterpiece. In some way, Goldsworthy’s work in Rivers and Tides relates to Sven Birkerts’ notion of deep time and vertical thinking.

First, in “The Owl has Flown” Sven Birkerts says “As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed-as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to

For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality” (Birkerts31). He explains how vitally important reading and thinking is. Plus, he mentions how we are shifting from vertical to horizontal reading. Vertical reading is someone who reads about a topic thoroughly and gains a lot of information. To simplify, Birkerts wants everyone to think vertically in everyday life and Andy Goldsworthy seems to agree with him and Goldsworthy‘s vertical thinking is shown when he is creating his arts. In the movie “Rivers and Tides” Goldsworthy shows that an art is meant to be ephemeral. In other words, a piece of art will destroy in a time period. Considering Andy Goldsworthy’s work we’ll just assume that it decays, just because he works with things already in the immediate environment around him and it looks like, yes because of that factor it must. What Andy Goldsworthy was talking about in stating that “the very thing that brings it to life causes its death” is this idea that when something in the environment decays, another one of its kind is produced from that decay. Examples I guess could be a tree rotting into the soil, only to have that soil give birth to a new tree, or