press release
An English Journey is the first solo
touring exhibition in the UK of work by artist Andrew
Cross. Short-listed for Beck’s Futures 2004,
Cross began working as an artist in 2000 following an established
career as a curator.
An English Journey presents two specially
commissioned film works and a series of photographs exploring
the seemingly prosaic experience of a place through continual
transit. Always changing, both films move through concurrent
landscapes that one can never remain situated in. 3 hours from
here was filmed through the unusual but privileged viewpoint
of a heavy goods vehicle. This piece is strangely mesmerising
and hypnotic, contradicting one’s expectations of a post-industrial
countryside that appears largely untouched and unrecognisable.
The second film in the exhibition, Where a man might well first
land, illustrates the pictorial quality of Cross’ work.
Revealing a serene, almost Turneresque landscape, the film gradually
evolves, detailing fragments of information as it describes
a ships’ passage along the Solent estuary towards the
port of Southampton before returning back out to sea.
3 hours from here is a Film and Video Umbrella
touring exhibition, commissioned in association with John Hansard
Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England and Scania Ltd, the
exhibition will tour to Rugby Art Gallery and Museum and Castlefield
Gallery, Manchester.
Where a man might well first land has been
commissioned by the John Hansard Gallery and Rugby Art Gallery
and Museum, supported by Arts Council England.
Accompanying
Book and DVD:
An English Journey by Andrew
Cross, published by Film and Video Umbrella and John
Hansard Gallery
ISBN 1 90427 010 7, 80pp Hbk, £10.00
artist interview
BB: Andrew Cross thank you very much for agreeing
to do this interview for the John Hansard Gallery. We will share
copyright of the interview.
AC: Pleasure.
BB: Let me just begin by asking you to describe
in your own terms, the two major film pieces that are in this
exhibition – not the photographic pieces...
AC: Right. So the first piece is the piece
commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. It documents a lorry
journey or journeys from Southampton to Manchester, via a location
near Rugby (which is DIRFT Logistics Park just off the M1).
It is filmed predominantly from the vantage point of the driver’s
cab which is eight feet above the ground. So you get a particular
view of the landscape which you would not normally do –
in a car, for example. The lorry leaves Southampton Container
Terminal and goes to DIRFT. It manoeuvres around the logistics
park and then ends up in an industrial estate in Manchester.
Looking at the film, you’re aware that there is a driver,
but you never know the driver’s identity. You never see
him properly. You don’t know what the lorry is carrying
although you know that it’s got a big white 40-foot trailer.
So you don’t know the origin of what that lorry is carrying
and you don’t know what its final destination is.
In a sense, there are two journeys: from Southampton to DIRFT
and from DIRFT to Trafford Park in Manchester (which is, incidentally,
the industrial park which formed the first ever industrial estate
in Europe, dating from the early 19th century or some such).
And so there are these two journeys. But in the film they are
transposed a bit, so that the journey leaves Southampton and
then when you’re half-way to DIRFT, the film cuts to DIRFT
and then you get half way up the M6 and then it cuts back to
the first journey. Then you arrive at DIRFT and then you go
to pick up again on the M6 and then arrive in Manchester. This
particular route is important in that…I mean notionally…
it’s what used to be the A34 – which is the old
truck road that links Southampton with Manchester via Birmingham.
The Black Country, essentially.
And whilst, these days – if you’re a lorry going
from Southampton Docks to either of these two places –
you do a bit of the journey still on the A34 between Winchester
and the M40, but actually most of the journey is now on the
M6. So it’s notionally still that route and it’s
still a kind of economic conduit. The old A34 links the port
of Southampton with the black country, with Manchester. So this
route still links these locations, except that you go part of
it on the new M6 Toll Road. And, particularly because the trees
haven’t yet grown, you get a really clear view of the
landscape nearby – which used to be heavily industrialised
with coal mines etc and is now all just open countryside. But
then there is DIRFT and DIRFT is now the economic hub rather
than the old industries. So, the film is about...it’s
a slice of English landscape from a particular vantage point.
BB: But it’s not just a physical vantage
point that concerns you – it’s also the historical
vantage point…
AC: Yes, yes it is.
BB: Could you talk then a little about the
relationship between this journey that you take and JB Priestley’s
English Journey – which also begins in Southampton?
AC: Yes. The A34 is a starting point for all
these – not only the M6 that we travel on. When I used
to live and work in Southampton, I would go up and down the
A34 a lot to my parents’ home (my childhood home) in Oxford.
And then when I used to go to my grandparents, (who lived in
the Wirral) we would have gone up to the top half of the route.
So that stretch of the M6 to Birmingham North, I’ve known
for as long as I can remember. They are both bits of roads that
I know extremely well.
JB: Priestley makes another reference to this
route. Priestley made a journey in the 1930s – principally
to find out what England looked like, or what constituted England
at that time, outside of London. He does a much wider tour of
England. He goes to the Midlands. He goes to the Black Country
and he goes to Manchester – not necessarily in that order
(well actually he does more or less and he doesn’t necessarily
go along the same route, but he does pass through these places
that we pass through in the lorry). The thing that really struck
me with English Journey (and I don’t know how great it
is in terms of literature) is that there are moments, passages
when Priestley is describing certain things, or proposing certain
solutions to a problem, or making a prophecy as to what is going
to happen – that you can take out of context. And so,
though it’s written in the 1930s, there can still be a
contemporary feel about this book. And then at times, there
are things that might contradict that ‘contemporary’
feel of the writing.
BB: So in a sense, this is a history which
in some ways is contemporaneous with the present. It’s
both your own and JB Priestley’s personal histories.
AC: That’s right. It’s interesting
because other people have made such journeys in England. JB
Priestley likes Southampton, but others might not have done.
I think that this is one of the points I’m making. In
a sense, you make journeys and your response is invariably personal
to places. I think that it’s difficult to make absolute
judgements, or make absolute definitions of places, without
taking that subjectivity into account. But there’s a difference
also, in that Priestley actually stops in these places. He stays
and spends the night in Southampton, or in Coventry, or Manchester,
or in Birmingham, and of course we don’t. We’re
on the lorry and we’re constantly moving. We go through
places (or we go near to places) which are indicated on the
film. For example, the film might read ‘Newbury’
or ‘Oxford’, or ‘Rugby’, but you don’t
see these places because actually everything is continually
being by-passed. It’s a very different kind of travelling
to the kind of travelling that Priestley made. But then the
sort of things that he talks about are interesting. For example,
he describes those little corner shops and says how awful they
are. And then he proposes a much ‘better’ solution
– a big warehouse on the edge of town, where everybody
could go to shop.
BB: Which is of course exactly what we’ve
ended up with.
AC: That’s what we’ve ended up
with! But of course at the time…
BB: …at the time that was still a kind
of utopian vision. Now we gripe about those ‘warehouse’
shops.
AC: Yes absolutely. Or we all claim to have
a gripe about them. But we seem to have no problem about doing
our shopping there. And there are lots of occurrences like these
throughout the book.
BB: There are many other fascinating analogies
that could be made with English journeys made but one of the
things that I want to ask you about now is with regard to a
similar route/journey that is documented in Alison Smithson’s
book published in 1982. Do you know the one in the book?
AC: No.
BB: Well, there’s no particular reason
why you should. It was a book aimed at civil engineers.
AC: Sounds all right…
BB: It consisted of photographs of the road
but taken from the front seat of a car.
AC: Oh yes I think I know this!
BB: The book itself was made in the shape
of a Citroen car.
AC: Ah yes I have seen that.
BB: Good, because I’m just trying to
build up a kind of historical take on what the work might be
about. I think your work is very different of course, but it
makes for an interesting comparison with the Smithson book.
The latter was all about the perception of the driver whereas
your work, it seems to me is much more dealing with the perception
of the passenger.
AC: I’m not sure. It’s interesting
because I actually know the book that you’re referring
to, but in the last year that I’ve been making this film,
I’d forgotten all about it. In the film, there are views
looking forward and there are views that look to the side. So
absolutely, yes, the views in which we look to the side are
like the journey of the passenger. But even when we look forward
we’re passive, because we’re not driving.
But there’s another aspect to the film. And that is that
there is a definite sense of being in a capsule, which is the
cab. Of course the cab is normally occupied… fact is only
occupied… by the driver. So there’s a relation between
being inside the space continuously, in relation to places,
and the geography, which is just passing by all the time. And
also I do think that there is something which is about the 8-foot
height that is a very different view of the landscape to the
one that you get from a car. I don’t know, but I would
suggest that lorry drivers have a particular view.
BB: Yes and people have already commented
on this quality that is evoked in the truck-journey-film. As
a viewer, it feels as if one is in a low flying craft of some
kind – gliding along the road. Or perhaps, one is just
above the surface of the road, rather than just driving along
on it.
AC: Yes, it’s very smooth and you’re
going at an average of about 55 mph – almost seamlessly,
continuously. Interestingly, I think that somehow, from this
perspective, cars are almost incidental. They seem to be getting
in the way. I’m not saying this to champion truck drivers,
but cars do seem odd. The way that the trucks flow in the film
seems to be much smoother, much more co-ordinated than the cars
zipping in and out…we still haven’t talked about
the other film yet.
BB: Yes well let’s come back to that.
Let’s just follow this line of thought for the moment
because I think it’s quite interesting. You mentioned
earlier about ‘passivity’ and about the notion of
passivity. I think that one of the interesting things that emerges
from the film is perhaps a new kind of passivity. – a
passivity that is always in motion. We think of the ‘passive’,
usually, as ineffectual but this is a kind of ‘passivity’
which allows one to think and to contemplate.
AC: Yes we think of the passive as being negative
– as an inconvenience – and in particular, the passivity
of travel, which we seem to be doing more and more…like
waiting in airport lounges and being on planes or on trains
or driving is seen as very negative. Whereas actually it might
provide a different kind of space – one which could be
seen in a very positive light.
BB: So in a sense this ‘passivity’
is in fact a vehicle for thought.
AC: Indeed. Absolutely. And because this is
a truck/road-movie, there is perhaps a romantic notion of the
truck driver being a part-time philosopher or whatever. And
indeed it’s true. I would think many truck drivers do
philosophise, but they also might be a musician, or be interested
in history, or do lots of reading, or something. I’ve
done bits of it. I like driving and I find it a very good situation
for thinking about things – imagining things, fantasising
about things and all sorts actually.
BB: We’re encouraged to think of the
passivity (and I suppose especially since the 1960s and in particular
since the revision of Clement Greenberg’s writings about
art), we are encouraged to think of passivity in the viewer
as being, as you say, a negative, a bad thing. Whereas in your
film, you give us a view of the passivity of the viewer as being
in fact, a place for thought.
AC: Yes and so far I’ve just referred
to the actual, literal experience of being in the vehicle and
travelling, but… maybe this is the opportunity to refer
to the other piece…It’s filmed from the deck of
a ship arriving at the port of Southampton and then leaving.
It slowly moves up the Solent and then returns down the Solent.
And you’re at the bow of the ship going up and then at
the stern going back and you don’t ever see any part of
the ship. Although, leaving the port you see the way, so you
do know that you are on the port of the ship.
It’s this aspect… where the camera’s fixed
in a position and you just let it run… and stuff occurs
which you can control, to a degree. You set the parameters.
And again, whilst the structure of the other film is, in a sense,
much more complex (there is more editing going on), in each
situation, the camera is fixed in a very particular position
and it runs. There is only one moment in the entire film when
the camera pans on its own.
So there is that thing about the vessel, the vehicle, becoming
the camera. But essentially, what you are doing is staring.
Or the camera is staring out into space at the landscape –
at whatever is in front of it. And as a viewer you are drawn
into that. As a viewer, it won’t provide entertainment,
in the sense that, formally things will happen. It will cut.
It will jump. It will provide activity. Actually the activity
is something that is, on one level, incidental, but these little
incidental things then take on a much higher focus/ meaning.
I haven’t yet worked out a way of properly describing
this. I never intended to find myself as a video/film-maker.
Opportunities just presented themselves and then suddenly here
I am making these things. Of course, there are histories in
structuralist film-making that you could refer to here and it’s
all very interesting being able to explore these and seeing
references but I find looking at these films (and not only when
I’m making them) what is important is that staring. If
anybody saw my piece, the one shown in the Becks show (it’s
the first time that a video piece was shown in Becks’)
then there, there was also a waiting thing going on. And it’s
not to say that there isn‘t also the waiting going on
in these two films too. But it’s a bit more like when
two people are on the shoreline having a conversation. They’re
not looking at each other but both staring at the horizon –
there is an aspect of that in the making of this film.
But also I think, for viewers of the film. This has occurred
to me myself – when I’ve been with somebody, looking
at the film. We start to talk about things and not necessarily
about what’s happening in the film. But the film provides
a kind of focus… in the way that perhaps, I don’t
know, a big log fire might. I mean it sounds very romantic but
hey what’s wrong with being romantic Bernadette! [Laughs]
BB: Well I think that most people will identify
with this situation…of sitting on the train, or the plane
and staring out of the window. It holds a combination of factors
that people will have experienced. One is the sensation of waiting
for the journey to be over. The other is the sense of being
able to indulge oneself…the sense that one isn’t
answerable in the same way that one is when at home or at work
or wherever. So there is the seductiveness of passivity, of
allowing ourselves to just go vacant. And this vacancy is in
fact something to be treasured because usually our minds are
so preoccupied with things and that vacancy allows other, new
thoughts to emerge.
AC: Absolutely. Slow is the new fast or the
new slow or whatever and I’m at the forefront! But no,
indeed people are starting to write about these things…
that the new Cunard, or even the new Queen Mary could compete
with the Concorde. And it’s interesting that the new Queen
Mary arrived at the same time that the Concorde went out. And
that actually that could quite seriously compete with airlines
because what is the point of getting there so quickly? It’s
interesting also, that thing about impatience, because you know
one of the things that I find with both these films is that
actually there isn’t an impatience to get to the destination.
Somehow there is a cyclical nature to the narrative –
something that is possibly there in the way that it’s
presented (people can walk about). But there’s something
that draws you in. Again, to be a kind of literal about it,
often on long-haul flights, throughout most of the flight, you
do, you really just want to get there and then suddenly, just
as you do reach your destination, there’s a real sense
of melancholy, of anticlimax. There’s a lot that could
be said about this…you know, when you’re in close
proximity with people and even though you don‘t talk to
them, there’s a shared experience – particularly
because you’re only that far away from death at any given
moment. But this is an interesting aspect of travel. I don’t
know what to say about it but I’m sure there are people
who do.
BB: But this example of the flight is very
interesting so I want now to talk to you about Auge because
you’ve said that you dislike this term, ‘the non-place’.
AC: Absolutely.
BB: And I’d like to know why you said
this, because the start of Auge’s book is not unlike the
example of the flight that you’ve just given here. Except
that Auge gives the case of a fictional character on board a
plane. The first chapter of his book tracks the journey of that
character from his car, through his bank machine, up into the
plane. It’s only half way through his flight that the
character, while listening to his Hayden concerto, begins to
feel that he is truly alone. Perhaps you could talk about this
antipathy to Auge in light of this
.
AC: Fine. Firstly, to be fair about this, I
think that there is something about his book on non-places which
is interesting. The big problem about it (and it’s not
necessarily his fault but the way that he is being appropriated
by people who probably ought to know better) is the snobbishness
about those kinds of places which some people do not think are
important. Now on one very simple level, there are two examples
of non-places – the airport and the supermarket. Well,
I think its extremely patronising to tell the 40,000+ people
who work in Heathrow airport that they are living in a ‘non-place’.
It’s very much a place.
So there’s that aspect to my dislike of the phrase. Another
thing is the way in which it avoids the possibility of being
able to identify place through means which are perhaps less
conventional, or on a different kind of level of detail from
‘the norm’. So it’s claimed that the world
is becoming increasingly homogenous because it’s being
occupied by airports and things like McDonalds’. So okay,
all airports and all supermarkets take on a particular form
architecturally…well there may be other things which distinguish
place – other kinds of details which are physical things.
Or perhaps it’s something to do with the behaviours or
characters of the people who occupy these spaces.
And then there’s a third thing which is that, the problem
with the ‘non-place’ mantra is that it still talks
about places in a very fixed, traditional and hierarchical way.
Well what the hell is wrong about the journey between places
anyway? It isn’t fixed in the sense that it doesn’t
have any xy co-ordinates? Hell’s bells. One of the best
places that I ever occupied was in a rental car in America when
I could play whatever music I liked without the style police
listening. And I like airport waiting lounges because they are
incredibly sexy places. They’re really charged in a very
exciting way.
I don’t think that Auge is against these spaces. If you
really want me to lay it on the line, I think it’s about
class. It’s why BA check-in staff are paid £11,000
a year. We want to be able to travel – we
want to be able to get to our Tuscan home as quickly as possible
but we don’t want to be responsible for the means by which
we get there. All these people can service us and that’s
great, because they’re out there in ‘non-places’.
Of course, absolutely, there are things about air travel which
are highly complex. For example, Doreen Massey in her essay
(which is going to be in a book accompanying this exhibition)
talks about being on a plane and flying over some incredible
geographical phenomenon like a desert or something and she can’t
look out of the window because people want to watch the movie.
And indeed people don‘t look out the window. You get on
your new Virgin train and it’s all about plugging in and
your I-Pod and your what have you;. And in fact half the seats
don’t have a window. And this appalling state of affairs
is a problem on a philosophical level in terms of what we’ve
just been discussing…i.e. about what is a ‘passive’
experience.
I think that all these situations are marketed and programmed
to assume that we find them highly problematic when maybe perhaps
we don‘t. Of course the other thing is that this really
skews our understanding of places in relation to each other.
There is a very positive thing about the example that Auge gives
– that indeed you can go through the seamless passage
of air-conditioned capsules – you can leave the centre
of London and arrive in the centre of NY and have no sense of
what exists in between, geographically. But then it’s
interesting that in the 16th century, people would travel from
city to city (posh people) and as soon as they left behind the
city walls, they would draw the curtains. They considered the
space in between cities to be wilderness. And this wasn’t
desirable and ‘romantic’ wilderness but something
that had to be avoided.
Now, we also have fears and concerns about it…like about
the ‘state’ of the English countryside. But actually,
how much do we really look at it? If we really do look out of
the window on the plane, you’ll see that most of England
is incredibly green and un-built on. This wasn’t the point
of the film of course, but it does show that you can go all
the way from Southampton Port to Trafford Park and near Oxford
you pass by the back of a few houses and that is the only built-up
area. The rest of it is endless green.
I don’t know, but I think that the experience of travelling
between two places is somehow considered to be a negative one
and I think that this prevents us from looking at them properly.
And the other reference in this is to a journey made by Ian
Nairne – in 1953 I think – for an architectural
journal (the name of which, escapes me now…it no longer
exists…). He also takes the A34 from Southampton to Manchester
(actually he goes on to Carlyle) and he rants, big-time, about
the state of the English countryside, saying that that it’s
going to get worse and worse and worse...It’s this thing
called “subtopia”. Essentially it’s about
the landscape becoming cluttered with the manifestations of
post-war industry. One of his concerns is about all the empty
airfields – which of course, there would have been after
the war – and the power stations and so on. It’s
interesting that, if anything, the country’s cleaned up
big-time since then. We’re possibly seeing the English
landscape at its most purely picturesque since before the Industrial
Revolution. But there is still this sense that it is in general
decline. I don’t know. I just raise it as a question.
BB: Could we talk now for a while about the
genre of landscape in relation to your work? Because these are
peculiar landscapes that you show us. They’re not like
Constable’s – rustic and idyllic. And they’re
not ‘urban landscape’ in that they’re not
featuring city sky-lines. Your work is dealing with another,
neither one nor the other, landscape.
AC: Lordee how much time have we got? Do you
want to know about ‘landscape’ as in the English
countryside? Or do you want to know about ‘landscape’
as in ‘Painting’, as in Constable? When I talk about
the things that influence me, interestingly they are nearly
always ‘Painting’. And this isn’t necessarily
because I see my work as ‘media-painting’.
BB: But your work has painterly qualities
nevertheless…
AC: It has painterly qualities…can I
get myself out of this before we go too far? Actually the formal
aspects of painting – and not just painting but sculpture
too – are important to me. Some of the abstract painters
of the 60s and 70s in particular. Or perhaps the sculptures
of Joel Shapiro – his early work, I find particularly
interesting. How it relates directly to me I’m not sure,
but I think it relates to the placement of an object in a wider
field. And whether that is about a purely formal element in
a wider field…or whether that is about a particular recognisable
object, like a house, or an image of something that Joel Shapiro
played with…A painter who\has been very important to me,
and was a teacher, is Peter Kinley. Peter Kinley makes paintings
of landscapes in a pictogrammatic way. There is one of his paintings
which I am particularly fond of and that is a painting of an
aeroplane which he painted, for very personal reasons, as a
diagrammatic, very child-like image of an aeroplane in the sky.
I’ve always thought of that painting as being of the sound
of an aeroplane – like on a summer’s day, when you’re
out in the countryside and a plane passes overhead. For me,
he kind of makes a painting of that sound and I kind of want
to make a film of that sound.
BB: Your films seem to be direct documentary
footage and yet there is a kind of abstract language creeping
into them. For example, the chevrons, the barriers at the side
of the road, the other road-markings appear, given the velocity
of the truck like white lines drawn on the edge of the film.
AC: Absolutely. Things like pylons for example,
have a very formal function in terms of articulating space.
This is a very positive thing in terms of how they function
in the landscape.
BB: And also there is a kind of seriality
at work in these films with their endless roundabouts which
all look exactly the same. There seems here to be some kind
of link with Minimalism…
AC: I came across a quotation by Donald Judd
which is going to be at the front of the book…where he
wants to make sculpture like a road and the thing about a road
is that you can never see it in its entirety. With a road, you
are either on it, or alongside it.
BB: Yes and Michael Fried picks up on this
too in his essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’ when he quotes
(with disapproval) Tony Smith’s comment about driving
down the highway and how he (Smith) thought that art would find
it difficult to compete with the exhilaration of that experience.
AC: Yes and this is what I find very attractive
about the moving image in that you can’t see it in it’s
entirety. There is this durational thing. And whilst you might
get glimpses of it, what you see is only part of a whole. This
relates also to the serial nature of sculpture. And there of
course, neatly [laughs], there is the serial nature of the red
car in the film. There are all these synchronicities which occur
in the film. There are certain edited moments where, purely
by chance, within secondsm, a red car appears against a green
landscape and it happens in a number of places and it’s
just like a Constable painting with the little boy in the red
tunic.
BB: What is it that interests you about synchronicity
in your work? What is it that is so appealing for you?
AC There is something that arises out of looking
and reading what happens as you do. You set up a situation and
things start to take on this synchronicity. I don’t know
to what degree this is to do with chance….you know, if
you have so many chimpanzees, they will eventually type the
complete works of Shakespeare… or whether it’s our
mind that lays on a kind of poetic patterning, so that we find
these things occurring. But throughout this film, you see things
in the rear-view mirror. For example you pass under a bridge
and you see in the rear-view mirror, that another truck is passing
over it at the same time – that sort of thing –
or when the vehicle turns so therefore the camera pans and it
picks up another vehicle which then follows it. Actually given
the amount of road vehicles that are on a road, the chances
of that happening are fairly high, but it still presents itself
as a nice little poetic moment. It does relate to other stuff
which I am involved in, in the process of making my work –
if it’s not evident already in the work. So for example,
when I was photographing trains, there was this thing about
arriving at a particular location just as a train is arriving
in the middle of an American desert or something. Your mind
always tends to think…the truth of the matter is that
there are good karma days and there are bad karma days and synchronicity
is an example of it. But just on a crude level, you set up a
camera and you point it at activity and its very interesting
to see what occurs. This film – in terms of the structure
of the journey – was kind of structured. I had anticipated
certain things which I hoped would occur on journeys and many
of the things didn’t occur. Other things did.
BB: Okay, so before we finish now Andrew I
just want to ask you about the ‘politics’ of your
work…I mean here politics with a small ‘p’.
We could talk about these places that you film in terms of there
important with respect to network distribution, economic structures,
local and global structures etc. Could you say something about
this aspect of the work?
AC: I’ve referred to it already in terms
of class. There is inherent prejudice and hierarchy towards
certain kinds of activity and as a producing country or a nation
that produces things, there is a tendency to want the benefits
of an economic infrastructure but we don’t want the things
that generate these, close by. You know, wind farms are a very
good example of this – the fact that people don’t
want to be reminded of the fact that their electricity actually
has to be generated. They want it but they want it to be somewhere
else and for other people to deal with.
BB: And you’re very interested in what
might be in the cargo that these trucks carry and that usually
we have no idea what this might be…
AC: But isn’t that part of it? We don’t
want to know, in a sense. There is that political thing about
where things are located that manifests itself in a form of
NIMBYism. But that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m
not arguing for, or against certain industries or infrastructures.
These issues are far more complex. It’s not a question
of whether we can, or cannot have something. Or that we cannot
pass it on. We all participate in it. Things are very conveniently
vague. We no longer know what production looks like. Factories
no longer look like factories but are meant to look like farms.
These days they are sort of ambiguous. Things move around on
containers. We don’t know what they are, where they are
coming from or going to, and of course there is now a big global
thing because much of what we consume is now produced on the
other side of the globe. I don’t know what my position
is on this. On one level, I think it’s fascinating in
regards to our perceptions of it. Whether they are informed
by class or imperialism, I don’t know. But (I’ll
stay calm this time) for example, there is a definite disengagement
or disembodiment between ourselves as consumers and ourselves
as producers. We seem to know less of what that relationship
is. For example, we think we live in a high tech age but there
is more stuff moving around by ship than at any other point
in history. And this is a very very old form of technology.
All that stuff doesn’t just come down a fibre-optic tube.
It has to be delivered somehow. Essentially, there is more stuff
being moved around the world between Britain and America than
ever before. So the new technology generates a bigger economy
that employs these older forms of technology. Now the consequences
of this might mean a degree of damage in the environment or
in social conditions. Indeed I think that that kind of disembodiment
or disengagement is highly problematic. Although I’m not
sure whether the fact that people work or they consume…I
think the fact that the high street is in decline for example….I
think that the issue is more subtle than that. If you read JB
Priestley, it seems that we might have a nostalgic view of the
past and that we’ve kind of gotten distracted by things
like out-of-town shopping centres. Because out-of-town shopping
centres are identifiable. And that’s part of the problem,
because they are only the things that we can really tangibly
identify in this matrix of an economy. And whilst on the local
level, of course, absolutely, some of them are as ugly as shit
and probably there was some dodgy planning thing going on...absolutely…but
the principle of them I don’t think is the problem. Having
said that, the work isn’t Political as such but of course
good art can and should be very political, without having to
state so.
BB: Andrew Cross, thank you very much indeed
for taking part in this interview for the John Hansard Gallery.
AC: Thank you.
project room
July 7 - August 28 Stuart Ross, The Hidden Gardens,
2004, video installation work
A garden without a fence is in fact no longer a proper
garden.
Anne van Erp-Houtepan, ‘The Etymological
Origin of the Garden’, 1986, in Journal of Garden
History, 6: 3, p.229
The word garden is derived from the old English word
geard, meaning yard. It is no wonder then
that this word so often evokes for us, the idea of a confined
space. Think garden and in your mind’s eye, you
will probably see a familiar patch of home-grown flowers, a
rain-stained collection of outdoor furniture, a potting shed,
a clumsily hung washing line. Regardless however, of what is
in your imagined garden, one thing’s for sure. You know
it’s yours because it’s surrounded by a privet hedge
– or a red brick wall, or a latticework fence from Homebase.
Or this, at least, is what Peter Ackroyd claims in Albion
– The Origins of the English Imagination, when he
says that the English garden is a “nationalist icon”
– one that evokes (and here he makes a contrast with the
grand and formal gardens of the French chateaux) the “very
image of defensive privacy”.
What are we to make then, of the domestic gardens of Grundisburgh,
into which, on an annual basis, residents invite the world for
a good look around. It is this gesture of openness, this eschewal
of any ‘defensive privacy’ which Stuart Ross takes
up in his video work The Hidden Gardens, 2004. Filmed
by the artist’s mother, the gardens of Grundisburgh are
here subjected to another kind of public gaze. Where previously,
the annual fête may have presented opportunities to nose
around a neighbour’s garden, shown here in the gallery,
The Hidden Gardens presents random viewers with the
chance to observe an annual institution in English village life.
Thus villagers’ own curiosity is now reflected back upon
itself and magnified to a perhaps uncomfortable degree. What
is revealed in the same moment is a rare and slightly oddish
form of life that many might have thought to be now extinct,
or (more truthfully perhaps) to never have existed at all beyond
the fictional confines of Ambridge. In this way then, The
Hidden Gardens, though drawing on the ‘real’,
more properly resides in a metaphorical realm –
as a kind of cipher that gently teases at some of the national
myths of Englishness.
Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
forthcoming exhibitions
Winter 2004
Joan Jonas
16 November - 23 December 2004
A John Hansard Gallery exhibition in association with Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
Winter 2005
Gerald Giamportone
18 January-5 March 2005
A John Hansard Gallery exhibition
Spring 2005
Per Head
15 March-20 April 2005
A John Hansard Gallery/CCAR exhibition
