Nature's Masochist

All by Andy Goldsworthy. 

Being artistically uneducated and a cultural dipstick I've managed not to pay much attention to Mr Goldsworthy's art over the last 50 years. Twigs, leaves, stones, ferns, rivers, dead animals all figure in his strange, huge and brutal works. Often they are quite beautiful and disturbing but I'm still not a fan though. The slavish effort to gather and cut and twist, to line up and to build and unbuild doesn't quite work for me. All those machine and man hours and the hard labour. I don't really understand it but I respect that there's a lifetime of toil and expression invested in there, pushing out deep but obvious messages. Perhaps he should've built sleek ocean going wooden boats or elaborate log cabins in the wilderness instead of this relentless and wild artwork.

It's impressive and expansive but as empty as a ploughed field, neglected woodland or an unkempt lawn; he fights nature within a self made arena, looking like he's winning but it's all just some kind of fake wrestling match. Romantic and aggressive Victorian follies spring to mind, populating an artificial reality for effect and perspective and then slowly crumbling away. All the resource, diesel fumes and sweat whispers what we already know, life is tough but art isn't really as tough as it thinks it is when it tries to improve on what nature does easily, just by being itself - left alone.

Now it's all curated and on display in the grand halls of the National Gallery in Edinburgh via photographs, film and examples. Nobody has to get their feet wet or their boots muddy. That in itself is quite strange.