Rivers and Tides paints a hypnotic portrait of an artist whose material is nature itself.

Some artists paint landscapes, but for Andy Goldsworthy, the Scottish artist at the center of Thomas Riedelsheimer’s hypnotic documentary, Rivers and Tides, making art about the land is a two-way street. The film opens in Nova Scotia, where Goldsworthy, alone except for the camera crew trailing him, is building sculptures out of icicles, using his teeth to gnaw the pieces into shape. After a while, he moves on to rock, and begins to build an ovate cairn on the moist sand. Either the sand shifts or the rocks prove unsuitable, but we watch as, several times, Goldsworthy builds the structure to an impressive height, only to watch it collapse again. "I’m trying to understand the stone," he says after the fourth collapse. "I obviously don’t understand it enough yet."

Goldsworthy's medium of choice, if he can be said to have one, is nature. From Canada to his home in the Scottish countryside and back to the woods of upstate New York, we see Goldsworthy craft sculptures that range from a chain of leaves held together with thorns to a massive blanket of bracken (one of the rare materials on which he will use any kind of tool) whose design is only apparent from a height. Some are as durable as the cairns, which time-lapse photography shows us lasting through a full change of seasons, some as ephemeral as dust in the wind -- literally. Though Goldsworthy often photographs his creations -- the only way anyone else would know most of them existed -- they actually seem better captured on film, where time is the most basic unit of measurement. One of Goldsworthy's "dust throws" captured in a photograph takes on a concreteness antithetical to its fleeting beauty. Film provides enough distance to appreciate the swirl of dust in the air as an artistic event, but preserves the entropy that gives its brief existence meaning. "I often take [a work] to the edge of its collapse," he explains. "That's a beautiful balance."

There's the possibility, of course, that Goldsworthy might be performing for the camera, but you never get the sense that he's doing anything differently than he would if there were no one else around. (He acknowledges its presence just enough that you know he's not pretending not to see it.) Certainly to a skeptic, Goldsworthy would seem to be getting away with murder, creating work that a reasonably patient child might duplicate. But Riedelsheimer takes you inside Goldsworthy's vision, helped immensely by Fred Frith's score, which blends traditional Scottish sounds with ambient electronic flourishes. Goldsworthy's back-to-nature philosophy can shade into hippy-dippy rambling, as when he complains how difficult it is "to get to the essence of sheep," but the sheer physicality of his creations, so beautifully captured here, speaks its own entirely persuasive language. (sam@citypaper.net)

Rivers and Tides

Directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer A Roxie release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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