Andy Goldsworthy's "Red Flags"
I walked into the ancient wharf with no expectations whatsoever. Just that it was a Goldsworthy exhibit, hence massive and crystalline at one and the same time.
I remember walking on the sinuous trunk of Wood Line in the Presidio, some years ago, at the height of the pandemic. It was an object both monumental — in the curvilinear path of fallen tree trunks, elements once reaching far up into the sky... now gathered, shaped and set in the ground — and intimate all at once; I mean, how can something not be so close and familiar when you're literally walking upon it.
Then there was his Spire, an orthogonal mirror to the ground-snaking logs of Wood Line, about half a mile from the latter into the heart of the Presidio. Wood, still, but this time gathered and shaped into a massive obelisk broad-circumferenced at the base, then spiraling upward to a singular point in the sky. Someone took flame to it one time but it didn't burn down and still stood, a charred ziggurat to the obstinacy of art. Or the often accidental aspect of it. ::chuckle::
So when I saw the sign for the Goldsworthy exhibit a few days ago, walking home towards the end of my afternoon constitutionalm I was sure what was inside the old military pier was going to be along the same lines: organic, but repurposed within an aesthetic that would contain meaning but in an entirely novel fashion.
I had no idea that the flags were not about its natural substrate of air, but about the very ground on which one might be placed. 50 grounds. 51 in all, counting the artist's admixture of every one of them into one constitutional hue.
From the exhibit's entrance:
"Organized by FOR-SITE and presented with Fort Mason Art, this exhibition centers on Andy Goldsworthy's monumental installation Red Flags: fifty flags, each stained red with earth collected from one of the fifty U.S. states. Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, its presentation at Fort Mason reflects on geographic and political boundaries, and on the ties between people, land, and nation. Rather than marking the differences between states, Goldsworthy's flags ask us to consider what unifies them-and us."
And so it came to pass, as I walked in and spent a couple of hours there, at the very last afternoon of the exhibit. I did take special note of the 13th (Rhode Island, 1790) the 31st (California, 1850) and especially the 50th (Hawaii, 1959; the year I was conceived in the hinterlands of the Mountain Province, in the Philippines) ... but the whole panoply of stained cloth was indeed one and a singular entity. Many hues, one nation. Even if some of the indigenous nations within its continental and pan-Pacific scope HAD been subjugated and integrated, by happenstance, by hook, by crook, by force, by blood in the baleful history of the country.
As such, spending some time reading Homer there, sitting in a shady alcove my back to the west and the setting light, felt appropriate somehow. Book 2. Telemachus challenging the suitors. Athena in mufti.
It felt right, reasonable, vivid.
Photograph 1 of 40 selected.
~ L.