An image of the piece in question, from the Nelson-Atkins’ website.

Full disclosure: I work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, host and home to Andy Goldsworthy’s “Walking Wall.” What I’m writing here, however, I’m writing as an independent observer, albeit one with a very close view of the museum and its collection, and my views do not represent those of the institution. I specifically asked my bosses about this, and they said that as long as I make that clear, I should be okay.

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Since March of 2019, which has generally been a somewhat benighted year, I’ve been privileged to sit very close to Andy Goldsworthy’s performance/installation/project, “Walking Wall.” When it began, or closeish to when it began, I remember very excitedly watching from the windows of a Bloch Building lens as the workers and Goldsworthy himself began the construction of the work. It was snowing, because it’s Missouri and that’s just how things are — but they were out there, efficiently moving and stacking stone upon stone, already settling into the rhythm and group chemistry that characterizes people united in difficult, repetitive tasks.

I knew Goldsworthy’s work, prior to this, only through photographs, and quite frankly, I liked it because it reminded me of the computer game Myst, which has stymied me since the tender age of eight and which had a profound impact on my aesthetic development. His various projects and ephemeral works — his words — blend the numenous, confrontational, personal, and natural in a way that is extremely compelling: numenous like a gathering of crows, confrontational like a landscape.

Specifically, I knew his work through digital photographs: a document of a thing someplace else, endlessly replicable and manipulable. This is relevant.

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“Please don’t climb on the art.”

“But it’s called ‘Walking Wall’; I thought…”

“The wall is what’s doing the walking.” I’m trying to keep my tone friendly. “It’s actually inspired a line from a British pastoral poem.”

“Sorry.”

“No worries.”

Variations on this theme are, unfortunately, fairly common.

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The wallers and workers — these groups are frequently referred to collectively as the “wall guys” — approach the work with the friendly energy of craftspeople. They are incorrigibly good-natured, and it was sort of lucky that one guy threw out his back and so could act as a sort of PR person for the work itself, explaining genially how the wall was actually built and how it would remain, at least until its next phase. Visitors seem drawn to the activity, not only because of Goldsworthy’s notoriety but also because the wall is, as the artist has it, “constructed out of stone and human energy”: the workers use wheelbarrows and buckets and a robust blend of muscle and cussedness to build a stone wall that is unequivocally effective and very, very solid despite the lack of mortar. People who were not expecting this kind of thing are often surprised that the piece is, essentially, a pile of rocks that is built in the way people have built things all over the world for about as long as people have been building things out of rocks, and the fact that the workers are affable and very fast seems to add to the response.

Goldsworthy himself is acts as something between a foreman and a disembodied presence, documenting the work in photos and videos, achieved through various methods — the project itself, but also ephemeral works in conversation with the landscape. If you click that link, you’re going to see some of them, including a photograph of the ghostly outlines left by someone lying in the street while it was raining, and there are no points awarded for guessing how that photo was taken.

But the thing it, that photo was taken in part of the blocked-off section of Rockhill Road when the wall was crossing it, and for those not local to the area, Rockhill Road is heavily trafficked — or, you know, it is when it’s not blocked off due to art — and is right next to a museum that also pretty heavily trafficked, and what I’m saying is there were remarks from visitors about how those photographs were taken, most of which were, essentially, “Why is that man lying in the middle of the road?”

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Here’s one of the photos in question; the rest of the sequence is here. As mentioned, no points for guessing how it was taken.

Andy Goldsworthy’s artistic persona is as aloof yet earthy as his artwork is. In the documentary Rivers and Tides (2001), his speech is frequently interrupted by bouts of staring into space, his tone somewhere between childlike wonderment and semi-mystical transport. The same tone is struck by his remarks in the New York Times article about the project (note that that link does go to NYT’s website, just in case you’re out of free articles for the month), and in discussing the meaning of his works in this PBS segment.

But the PBS video also shows a little more of Goldsworthy’s demeanor in person: friendly, whimsical, and workmanlike. When asked a fairly specific question about the final positioning of the wall, I recall that he replied, “The making of the work will show me the solutions,” which made me feel very justified about not planning things too closely, and when asked about how much visitor interaction is permitted, suggested that people were very welcome to “nestle” in the curves of the wall, but added that, “They can’t walk on it; it’s my wall, only I can walk on it.” (As an aside, I am relying on personal recollection for these quotes, and I can barely remember last week, so add grains of salt as needed.) Tonally, this is very different from the relevant page on the website for the project, which reads, “[T]he wall itself is not intended to be walked upon. The artist will be the only person to do that and only then in order to document the wall as it is being made.”

He doesn’t really come off, in person, as the kind of guy who would take photographs of the place where he was just lying down in the rain in the middle of a blocked-off four-lane road. He’s also absolutely the kind of guy who will lie down in the middle of the road while it’s raining to take a picture of the dry spot where he was lying.

This, too, is a source of visitor confusion.

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“There’s no mortar or anything? How does it stay up?”

“How come I can walk on those walls but not this one?”

“Is this permanent?”

“Is this political?”

“Where’s it going?”

“Is Andy here?”

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People don’t expect it, and they don’t believe it, which is an odd thing to say of a tidily-contructed stone wall that rises to about chest-level on an adult standing upright. People walked up to it in its resting phases and would stop abruptly, their path interrupted by a stone wall. During its walking phases, it seems to come as a surprise that such a thing can be constructed as quickly as it is by a bunch of guys with wheelbarrows. Its permanence or lack thereof is a troublesome point to many people. On realizing that Andy Goldsworthy himself is not very involved in the actual wall construction but rather its design and documentation, they struggle to accept that it can be said to be his work. The fact that wall-building has been a part of Goldsworthy’s oeuvre since the current POTUS was a punchline to a joke and not actual reality does little to dispel questions about its meaning in light of the current political climate.

It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on with it. The narrowly-focused political conversations are the worst, and this Forbes article about sums up the tenor of those conversations pretty well; it’s worth noting that Goldsworthy specifically ties walls of the kind in which he specializes to enclosure in the UK. But as the news cycle shifts, those questions come less frequently — and I’m passing over the issue of accessibility, which arose as the wall walked around the front of the Bloch Building, and which was, I feel, not handled well — leaving the blunt presence of the thing.

It is very real. It is very solid. Despite looking — intentionally — like many of the retaining walls that cross the neighborhood surrounding the Nelson-Atkins, it is not like them at all. And despite the wall guys looking and acting like fairly normal dudes, they are craftsmen (or at least, the ones with British accents are), adept at a craft that many seem to have assume has been lost, and so they are not normal dudes either. And despite its seeming permanence, it comes down and goes back up further along at a rate of about ten yards per day.

Goldsworthy characterizes projects-in-progress like this frequently as, simply, “the work” — not by its name or title, but by what it is and how it’s made. The starkness of the word, its weight of connotation, its etymology even, speak to the nature of “Walking Wall” and Goldsworthy’s other large projects: deceptively simple to define and to construct but deeply situated in a temporal and creative lineage that gets weird and deep and old very quickly. It is work in every sense of the word, and in a society where “work” is positioned as a calling and gains prestige the less stuff you have to actually do, being faced with several equally true senses of the word all at once is kind of a lot, and there’s manipulation or room to doubt that is there. But that, for me, is what has made the project so exciting, and what I will continue to enjoy about it as it settles permanently into its final rest: it represents the real value of work in the sense of activity, but also in the sense of art for its own sake.

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"Part of the Work": Notes on "Walking Wall"