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| Quoted from Neil Campbell The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age | ||||||||||
| University of Nebraska Press 2008 | ||||||||||
| Whether about American trains or highways, [Cross] cannot help but evoke romantic, emotive journeys of departure and arrival, yearning for the open roads of Jack Kerouac or the boxcars of Woody Guthrie, drawing himself and his viewers back through personal and cultural memories tinged with excitement and guilt. Cross works from within his own memories and imaginings of the West, drawing on his own journeys through England as a child to project onto the iconic journeys implicated in any representation of the American western landscape. The romantic yearning and excitement so often associated in the European mind with the West, is however tempered by an uneasiness that places the viewer ‘between’ these responses, aware of the ideological baggage such romance carries in the twenty-first century, of the price of that supposed mythic freedom, and the reality of technology, economics, and class that actually determine and underpin these American cultural values. Cross’s work consistently wrestles with such issues, pulling his viewers between these poles of mythic yearning and political recognition asking in an under-stated, cool manner for us to look again, to literally and metaphorically re-vision our identities within landscape. Despite the inherent mobility of [Cross’s] landscapes, there is often a deliberate stillness to these photographs, ceasing the flow, re-routing the eye, creating moments in time where the visual experience dwells, encouraging the viewer to engage with the image or the film sequence. As always in Cross’s work it is in moments like these that we shift from the banality of the everyday and the endless repetitions of the journey into another sphere where ironic and critical narratives are created, emotions and memories emerge, and our perceptions are shifted. Something we never noticed takes on a significance all of its own and juxtapositions disrupt the immediacy of the frame: the absolute beauty of an RV park in Nevada, the surreal absurdity of a sign reading ‘Wrong Way’ on the highway, or the sheer immensity of the railroad cars leaving Wagner Mills, Nebraska. Although inevitably always an outsider to the West he records, what Cross reminds us under globalisation’s glare, is what we have always known, that ‘west-ness’ is translated everywhere in the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ landscapes of everyday lives, as likely evident in Rugby, Warwickshire as Rugby, North Dakota. |
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| Quoted from North & South exhibition catalogue, Southampton City Art Gallery 2007 | ||||||||||
| Andrew Cross is recognised by many for his work relating to the American landscape and its railways over recent years, but he has also made a particular point of taking a somewhat oblique view of the English landscape. The centrepiece of his 2004 exhibition An English Journey was a 110-minute road film featuring a lorry en route from Southampton’s container terminal to out-of-town distribution parks near Rugby and Manchester. A conscious nod towards J. B. Priestly’s classic state-of-the-nation tour made in the 1930s, An English Journey gives an account of how England’s post-industrial consumerist economy is reflected in its landscape. Most of the film is shot from the driver’s cab of the featured lorry, offering a view not witnessed by most. This formal approach to filmmaking—in which the camera is vehicle, and a given vantage point influences the perception of place—informs Cross’s new work commissioned for North and South. One half of ‘English Field’ is a thirty-minute film, shot in a single take from a glider overhead, recording a view of Salisbury Plain. The subject of ‘English Field’ is the area of agricultural and military land near the village of Upavon, where the artist’s father was farm manager during the 1960s. Through the evolution of his art practice, Cross has come to recognise that many of his interests and own sense of place—not least an attraction to wide open spaces, which he frequently finds in many parts of America, but also the understanding of landscape as both a site for production and a setting for machines—refer back to his early childhood spent in this corner of Wiltshire. |
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| Quoted from Bernadette Buckley Andrew Cross: An English Journey | ||||||||||
| Film and Video Umbrella/John Hansard Gallery 2004 | ||||||||||
| Passivity is paradoxical activity. This is what I’ve learned from Andrew Cross’s work. [-] But waiting, like passivity, is another paradoxical activity - a slow happening in which nothing happens. This is what I I’ve learned from Samuel Beckett’s work and have recognised again in Andrew Cross’s - that this nothing is nevertheless something meaningful. | ||||||||||