Washington Diary 2003

Andy Goldsworthy made "Washington Diary" using photographic collage and text, probably sometime in the early 2000s. It's a drawing, but it's also a kind of photograph, and then it's also words. It makes me think about the way we try to pin things down, to capture something slippery. Look at how the three photographs sit at the top, a material record of something transient. Then, below it, like a caption, we get a diaristic text, a personal meditation written in the artist’s own hand. It's like he’s trying to catch the moment, like catching water in your hands, a constant process of trying to hold on. There's a vulnerability there, in the handmade quality, the way the text is so open, so diaristic. For me, Goldsworthy reminds me a little of Agnes Martin, in the sense that he’s doing something very, very simple but with a lot of complexity. It’s about the ongoing conversation we have with the world around us, and with ourselves.