Atop a Dumfriesshire hill in Scotland sits a large egg-like construction of stone. Three of the same can be found in a vast line across the United States: at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, at Iowa’s Des Moines Art Center and at the Neuberger Museum of Art in the state of New York.

Seen from afar, they could be relics of a bygone age, built of local rock such as Iowan limestone and with no binding cement. They are actually the work of British artist Andy Goldsworthy and his cairn-building team.

Since the 1970s Goldsworthy has been working in Land Art, in the tradition of Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Goldsworthy stages interventions in the landscape that range from the permanent structures of the cairns to ephemeral arrangements of bright-orange leaves plastered to trees, or icicles balanced on branches hanging over streams.

The permanent and the ephemeral are equally concerned with the passing of time. Over the years the cairns accrue signs of wear such as moss. His use of leaves and ice is intimately bound up with cycles in nature and the inevitable end of each piece.  Goldsworthy charts these changes in folio artbooks, such as Passage (2004) and Enclosure (2007).

He explains his method, tracks the progress of each piece and reflects on the result in a diary format. This mixture of sculpture, photography and writing is both a necessary documentation
of his practice and arguably the main result, akin to Richard Long’s use of poem-like notes tracing his thoughts in pieces like A Hundred Mile Walk (1971-2).

Goldsworthy has been dismissed as a sentimental creator of ‘pastoral fictions’. It’s true that he avoids polemic and refuses to make art obviously about environmentalism. This might seem out of touch with human complicity in today’s climate change, but Goldsworthy is fully concerned with our interaction with the landscape: he worked on farms in Yorkshire from a young age and engages with the communities that live near his rural works.

His work is not radical, he simply points back to nature with a conceptual simplicity. In an interview with the Tate he muses, ‘an artist has this amazing ability to show you what’s there’ – showing us what’s there is pointing out what we stand to lose.

His popularity has led to a second documentary, Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy (2018) by German director Thomas Riedelsheimer as a follow-up to the earlier Rivers and Tides (2001).

Public commissions include Garden of Stone, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York: a group of eighteen granite boulders each with a small central hole through which a tree is growing.

The piece commemorates victims of the Holocaust and is a beautiful reflection on hope and growth in the midst of an impossibly hard situation.

Compare this to the imposing Mastaba on Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake last summer, or the enormous inflated ballerina deposited outside the Rockefeller in 2017 right out of the imagination of Jeff Koons (now featured at the Ashmolean, if you hadn’t heard). Two pieces of ephemeral public art, they are the wrecking-ball equivalent of Goldsworthy’s tiny chisel approach.

It’s not all quiet interventions. Goldsworthy’s spell of recent commissions stateside reveal a lucrative business in what could be seen as the bio-art aesthetic, seen again in his award of an OBE in 2000.

However, his daily art practice is refreshingly playful; any- one could collect and arrange leaves into a colourful mosaic, given the time and some outdoor space.

There is something universal about handling nature, exemplified by children’s fascination with mud and sticks. Goldsworthy asks: why stop?

There is a certain intrigue when it comes to the ‘outcast creative’. Put simply: people like the abject outsider. It is, on the whole, far more re- warding to root for the underdog than it is to support those who are already on top.

This brings about images of the ‘Byronic hero’; the artist who mopes about on some windy hilltop, moaning on about his exile and great Romantic grief, but it also suggests that artists in an attempt to generate more interest in both themselves and their work may play up their perceived vulnerabilities. They can do this by upping the ‘working-classism’ so much associated with a Dickensian England, remarketing the struggle of the artist as a “cartoonish class war.” One of the most famous faces of the YBA (Young British Artist) movement, Damien Hirst, presents himself as a ‘class primitive’: So, in a way, the YBA’s presentation of their perceived ‘otherness’ allows for the ‘concerned privileged’ to dip their feet comfortably into the world of the outcast, thus the audience proves to the world that they truly root for the underdog.

YBAs rely on outmoded British stereotypes as the surface to their work, generating the persona of the easy- to-swallow outsider that does not too aggressively confront its own audience. According to a poll, sixty-three per cent of white Britons think that immigration has, on the whole, been a bad thing for Britain. This widespread fear of the ‘Other’ has caused a rift in the demand for abject art that celebrates the ‘outcast artist’. YBAs are able to fill this gap, by acting up their ‘Britishness’, yet still upholding their status as ‘other’. Legge describes how YBAs “opportunistically simulate lost avant-garde engagement, adopting a media-friendly ‘look’ of being shocking in the tradition of the angry young man, the working-class hero, and the punk”, from which foreign audiences have been entertained, but are relatively indifferent. If we look back at Hirst, we can see quite prominently featured in his work and his artist persona is the fact that he achieved ‘E’ in A-level art, that he is from a council estate in Brixton.

He plays this up, he is the ‘working class hero’. And yet, his work is still a “collage of quickly recognisable cliché”. In such, the YBAs create for themselves what Kobena Mercer refers to as a “cult of abjection”, a reliance on making themselves appear weak in the eyes of the ‘powerful’ art world, coaxing its audience into celebrating them, to ‘root for the underdog’.

Hirst, and his fellow YBAs, are cushioned by an army of followers in the form of critics, collectors, or gallerists, that allow them to push the boundaries more and more over the edge of ethical considerations.

Not only that, but YBAs also exhibit a sort of ‘sameness’ that has created an echo chamber so that little criticism can affect them. By being unable to criticize the YBAs due to their sup- posed ‘otherness’ (and as such, fear of being accused of being ‘pompous’) they allow the YBAs to surround themselves in a bubble where surface is all that is required to make successful art, creating an echo chamber which (perhaps unintentionally) outcasts others.

We can observe how the movements of Black and Asian British artists’ mirror some of the actions of YBAs that have been described above. As mentioned, there has been and still is a certain hostility towards minority artists due to their perceived ‘Otherness’. However, what separates black artists from YBAs is that abjection is thrust upon them rather than taken up by them. Indeed, successive generations of black artists have been received with hostility, and have suffered from the contempt of critics, galleries, and potential patrons.

Black artists are able to find some success by othering themselves and by actively taking up the role of the underdog, but many argue this causes them to sacrifice complexity. While white artists can carry on making art as they always have been, without making any show of their cultural identity, non-white artists are only able to enter dominant culture by, as claimed by Rasheed Araeen “showing their cultural identity cards.”

Black critical art theory calls for a shedding of the culture card to regain meaning and substance in individual art works, and thus to gain more respect as artists (and not as ‘Black artists’) within the art community. Rasheed Araeen argues that there is an acute struggle for non-white artists who wish to make art – just, art, in response to the contemporary movements of its time, no ‘Indian’ or ‘African’ or ‘ethnic’ art, but this has been denied to them.

In response to complaints of ethnocentric exclusion, the term ‘multiculturalism’ has been coined as a model of inclusion, and yet, it very quickly began to feel like a hastily configured problem-solving response. This too relied on the perceived ‘Otherness’ of non-white artists, although it did allow more artists be seen.

A notorious example of this was the exhibition celebrating multiculturalism in modernism, ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. 150 of the artists were of European descent and 50 of these artists were from the developing world’ The European artists chosen were trained artists, who had made a name for themselves within mainstream developments, and yet the artists from the developing world were chosen due to their folkish and tribal nature, and those artists who had been a part of Modern developments were completely overlooked, only seeking to celebrate the differences of these ‘Other’ artists than to truly give them equal visibility.

The issue that faces us now is that despite this, black and Asian artists still feel obliged to ‘play the cultural card’. Jean Fisher argues that, ‘cultural marginality [is] no longer a problem of invisibility but one of excess visibility in terms of a reading of cultural difference that is too easily marketable’. In an interview, Steven McQueen replied irritably when asked about ‘questions of visibility’, stating that he doesn’t constantly see himself as black when going about day-to-day activities, even though other people might see him as that.

“Just like everyone else I want people to think beyond race, nationality and all that kind of crap. This debate is tired, ugly and beat up … it is boring.”

When reviewing the above points, I am forced to think about my own work. I can’t deny that I have at times felt the obligation to and explore my Pakistani heritage. While, as a mixed- race person, I feel no obligation to explore my English heritage. My art is not out-of-touch with myself and my culture.

To ‘play the culture card’ and to ‘other’ my work would be to sacrifice the complexity of my work Within the upcoming generation of artists I am part of, I see that my other mixed-race or non-white peers do not focus solely on race as to do so would render little success. That is not to say that to ever make a note of one’s culture would be to make ‘bad’ art. Peers who have grown up in different countries give an international flair to their work without sacrificing all the other nuances of meaning. There is a fine balance between talking about culture and relying on culture.