The man built a wall that refuses to be a wall. It doesn’t keep anything in or out. It just exists, this undulating spine of sandstone crawling through grass and under trees, going nowhere in particular, and that’s exactly the fucking point. It’s not trying to be profound. It’s not begging for your approval. It just is.
What I love about Snake River is how honest it is about time. Goldsworthy knows this thing is falling apart from the moment it’s finished. The stones will shift. Moss will grow. Weather will have its way. He’s okay with that, no, he’s counting on it. That’s the work. Not the construction, but the slow, inevitable decomposition. The collaboration with entropy.
There’s something deeply human about building something beautiful knowing it won’t last. We do it anyway. We have to. Whether it’s a stone wall or a relationship or a moment of clarity at 3 AM when everything finally makes sense, we grab it, knowing it’s already slipping away.
That’s not pessimism. That’s the deal. Goldsworthy just made it visible.
We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate
from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature,
we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
Andy Goldsworthy
Snake River, 2001: Cantor Art Museum, Stanford University.