Interactions & Interventions Explore Public Art
At the Bournville village, an old pond in the Women's Recreation Ground is cleared of rubbish, restored and reopened to the public. And then the water is dyed Cadbury's corporate purple.
Liverpool's Bluecoat Gallery holds a one-day Record Fair, advertised as such in Record Collector – but listed in Art Review as an happening. Two very different audiences meet.
Three grass verges are closed off for the duration of an arts festival by heavy-duty, industrial security fences. The community complain.
And a bright red Gnat jet fighter leaves a smoky anarchist symbol across a blue sky. These are some of the interventions, actions and encounters which make up the combined public art practice of Cornford & Cross.
The two artists - Matthew Cornford and David Cross – first worked together at Central St Martins. Since then, they have produced dozens of challenging and perplexing works of art in public spaces, exploring and often redefining the very notion of public art.
They produce work that is on one hand elegantly simple, but on the other complex, and layered with meaning and understanding. It's not easy and comfortable sculpture – it's rough, tough stuff that's thought-provoking and frequently controversial.
new book, the unimaginatively title Cornford & Cross, records these, with documentary photos, relevant ephemera and simple, explanatory text abut each project. It also, unusually for a world where only the biggest successes are usually recorded, documents proposals for projects which were never completed.
'Painting As A Pastime' was a planned competition, open to the public with a £10,000 prize for the best painting of Compton Verney Manor House. 'Coming Up For Air' would have seen a modern architectural folly, an industrial chimney in the lake of a Country Park. And 'This England' would have seen a useless concrete flyover built across a section of London's Green Park.
Of course, most people will never encounter an original work by Cornford & Cross in public; more people encounter the documentation Cornford & Cross produce, the photographic or filmed record of the action, than ever see the 'orignal' artwork.
So – reading about an unfinished, uncommissioned work is equal to that experience. In this book, for example, it's only by a careful reading of the text that you can tell which projects happened, and which are just an unmade concept.
Which just adds another layer to the tangled, complex work of Cornford & Cross. Rather than big, bronze, monumental sculpture, it's quite possible that here – nothing is real.
Cornford & Cross, with essays by John Roberts & Rachel Withers, is available from Black Dog Publishing.