Andy Goldsworthy's Rivers & Tides

There are two kinds of people that will see this video. One will think it's interesting. The other will find their perspective has changed completely.

An artist unlike any you've ever seen. He creates works with and from nature, and understands that everything has a limited lifetime. He creates beautiful works, even though he knows they are transitory - although his stone walls may last for quite a while. I've seen those walls, and they're quite an amazing thing. If you like unique, individual works of art, you really need to see this video. He may be the most different, and maybe even the most important artist of our time.

Just the most beautiful film about a an artist whose canvas and materials are nature.

The film maker's skill matches the sensitivity of Goldsworthy - - a seamless relationship. I watch this over and over. EVERY time, I see something that startles and wonder how I could have missed it before. In this way, the DVD is an ever renewing source of jolts... the best kind. It has also become something of a barometer of my own ability to SEE, to be in the moment. My tiny TV is in front of windows that look into the forest. I often have layers of nature in front of me, real and virtual. I hope to see another DVD like this in the future. I will be first in line.

Andy Goldsworthy creates art that a 5-year old can understand, stacking rocks, arranging leaves, piling sticks, drawing in the snow. His "work" (as he keeps calling it) is simple in concept, but maybe not so simple to execute as well as he does.

And that is both the strength of it, and its downfall. The simplicity is unpretentious and pure in a way that art very rarely is, these days. At the same time it is fun and silly and unsophisticated in a way that makes Andy's serious pronouncements about "his work" and "my art" sound like a 5-year old kid who never got his parents' approval. The fact that he spends so much energy building contructs of such fragile beauty, which are almost always blown away by the wind or tides until nothing remains -- and the fact that he gets so agitated when the inevitable collapse occurs -- make you wonder after his sanity. Why does he torture himself so, what drives him to such Sisyphean frustration?

The film, by Thomas Reidelsheimer, deserves five stars for the languid portrait it paints of the hunger artist. Like his following film Touch The Sound, it is a masterful exploration of a driven personality, one which manages to both illuminate -- and puzzle over -- the subject artist. Both films also benefit from stunning soundtracks by Fred Frith.