Leaning Into the Wind

The first sequence of the new documentary Leaning into the Wind shows its subject, earth artist Andy Goldsworthy, in an abandoned house in a Brazilian jungle. Ostensibly, he’s in there to examine the native construction techniques and figure out how it was made. But in one almost completely dark room of the dirt floor shack, he sees a small beam of light coming through a hole in the ceiling. Goldsworthy tosses a handful of dust at it, revealing the beam’s bright, straight path from the roof to the floor. Wordlessly, he begins scooping, then kicking, then sweeping dust at the light, filling the room with a cloud that turns the simple spot of light into a blazing, almost holy-looking tower of illumination in the darkness. The dust begins to settle and the light thins and changes back from a moment of spectacular, transcendent beauty to just a bright spot on the ground. 

 It's fitting that the film begins here as the sequence is a perfect metaphor for Andy Goldsworthy’s art. Active since the late 1970s, he’s famous for making large, site-specific sculptural works usually made entirely with natural materials found in the area. He works with leaves, reeds, stones, sand, driftwood, ice, snow, bark, thorns, sheep’s wool, dandelions, mud, and just about any other natural material you can think of. It would be impossible to describe all the different things Goldsworthy has made over the last forty years, so I highly recommend you just do a Google image search or go to the library to check out one of the many oversized coffee table books that feature his work. You’ll see what that initial sequence in Leaning into the Wind reveals – Goldsworthy is like a wizard who coaxes magic and wonder out of the most common elements, whether it’s something as simple and utterly ephemeral as a passing beam of light or a monumental arch of natural stone like the one that stands in the Meijer Sculpture Garden just down the road in Grand Rapids. Leaning into the Wind, rather than a structured explication of his work, is more meant to make viewers feel what it’s like to experience Goldsworthy’s art.

The film follows him, seemingly at random, as he travels around the world to different big commission sites and intermittently returns home to Scotland. There is no exposition or explanation as he uses a crane to get a giant fallen tree sideways into a building in San Francisco’s Presidio where he covers it with a smooth layer of mud which time lapse photography captures as it grows a web of cracks. There are no talking heads discussing the importance of him carving a series of body shaped depressions in slabs of white stone in the Spanish country side. The camera doesn’t even bother to capture the reactions of passers-by in downtown Glasgow as he pastes together paths of bright red leaves ascending a public stairway. Even when Goldsworthy himself addresses the camera and talks about his experiences, the viewer doesn’t necessarily understand the work any better because it seems the artist is still figuring it out himself, trying to decide why he does what he does.

Leaning into the Wind is a sequel of sorts to 2001’s Rivers and Tides, which is also a documentary about Goldsworthy directed by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer. Both are extraordinarily quiet, somewhat slow-moving films that require and reward patience. The two together form a fascinating document of one man’s pursuit of truth and beauty. There are moments here and there in the film that might inspire an eye roll or two, such as Goldsworthy’s hedge-walk experiments where he spends hours painfully crawling through English hedge walls. But for the most part, Leaning into the Wind is like the artwork it features: still, surprising, beautiful, and moving in ways that aren’t always easy to articulate.