Cross sees his oblique eye on the land and captures a whole new vocabulary of landscape imagery.
The Times
(Some Trains In America)
Through his pictures, Cross conveys in equal parts aesthetic interest, inter-cultural curiosity and wry commentary.
Doubletake
(Some Trains In America
The Solo
Time is mobilised weirdly in Andrew Cross’s art. The English artist’s photographs and videos of trains and railways and, recently, locations for 1970s rock festivals – now silent green fields – feel wedded to the past but situate one in the present, in an expectancy only a shade away from tedium. Its fitting, then, that his two-screen film The Solo, takes as its lucus a historical phenomenon which has cleaved many an audience between rapture and regret: the drum solo.
If Cross delights in the unhip – or at least the questionable or maligned, like trainspotting – then in Carl Palmer, whose soloing is this film’s burden of action, he may have found his perfect subject. [Cross] makes Palmer a serious proposition rather than a punchline.
The Solo is as much about time’s relentless loops as anything; but its most salient moments might be those where the viewer is bored. At these points, the imprisoning one-way street of video art – you can’t fast-forward it – finds its reflexive analogue in precisely what is represented here.
Martin Herbert – Art Review September 2010
The exhibition starts in total darkness. The film begins with an image of Palmer playing a single drum. On an adjacent large-scale screen, a close up of the detailed drumming and footwork can bee seen. Four speakers, one in each corner, periodically emit percussion sounds, making musical patterns that traverse the room. The spatial effect of sound is experienced as a powerful and physical environment surrounding the viewer. Characteristic of Cross’s work, the build-up of intense expectation is followed by a feeling of absence.
Five drum pieces have been collaboratively developed and filmed from various viewpoints. [An Ostinato] shows only Palmer’s torso and feet as military-style drumming evokes the space of a Kieferesque landscape. Cross describes this piece as emotionally close to the landscape where he grew up: Salisbury Plain with its armoured tanks and heavy military presence. [Cymbals] consists of a shot of the shiny brass undersides of ringing cymbals. Visually they form a continuous horizontal streak reminiscent of Turner’s golden sunsets.
Stephen Lee – Art Monthly September 2010
As Palmer builds his solo from a single snare into a full drum onslaught, Cross’s close up focus and minimalist editing defiantly and almost provocatively rescues a musical genre from cultural obsolescence.
Robert Clark– The Guardian 3 July 2010
An English Journey
..a quietly chilling work.
Owen Hatherley– New Statesman 11 May 2009
Thoroughly engrossing mainly due to the artist’s attention to composition and framing, plus his ability to create a feeling of suspense through the simple play between stillness and the expectation of movement.
Helen Sumpter– Time Out 15 February 2006
Andrew Cross’s artwork from the last five years retains an analytical curiosity derived from his previous, successful curatorial career. An English Journey is films and photographs which explore the true façade of the English landscape as it is these days commonly experienced when going about our high-speed travels. The overall impression is of a lush landscape, an awfully malleable and somehow alien world, barely glimpsed beyond the dense and tense networks of international commerce.
Robert Clark– The Guardian 2005
Foreign Power (Beck’s Futures Prize 2004) – see parallel website Sometrains.com
Andrew Cross has been a trainspotter since childhood. His digital video Foreign Power is shot beside the tracks of the US rail network. We wait. The camera doesn’t move. The day passes. We are at the mouth of the longest tunnel in the US rail network. Birds sing, insects bat the lens. The black tunnel entrance fogs with smoke. No train comes. Somehow this is interesting; all the waiting and expectation, all that time suspended. In the second scene, the track zooms to a distant vanishing point. The clouds are high, the tress in full summer flush. Eventually something happens – and it is certainly unexpected. The final image is a stalled image, two white wagons frozen on the screen, a second train passing behind.
Watching all this I thought of structuralist film-making of the 1960s and 1970s, and of early cinema – specifically the Lumiere brothers’ 1895 The Arrival of the Train, which had film’s first audience panicking and climbing over their seats in a bid to escape the approaching engine. I also recalled composer Steve Reich’s Different Trains, which like Cross’s Foreign Power is intended as a kind of meditation about where the tracks go and what cargo they carry. In Reich’s work they lead across America , and on, in a cattle truck, to that terrible vanishing point at Auschwitz. As much as waiting for trains in Foreign Power, we are waiting on an event both banal and whose magnitude we cannot grasp. The pictorial qualities of Cross’s work are important too – our place besides the tracks, the blackness of the tunnel’s mouth and where the perspectives lead and mislead us.
Adrian Searle – The Guardian 30 March 2004
Cross’s work is clever, cruel and if you hang around long enough, quite funny.
Martin Coomer – Time Out 7 – 14 April 2004
Andrew Cross takes his camera to the Cascade Mountains near Seattle. But instead of celebrating the sublime, epic grandeur of the countryside, he concentrates on filming the mouth of the longest train tunnel in America. We watch with him, waiting for a locomotive to erupt from the darkness. Although smoke seeps from the tunnel, only a distant6 unidentifiable sound can be heard. Cross calls the three-part work Foreign Power suggesting imminent invasion. And the sense of expectancy he creates in each sinister sequence becomes almost unendurable by the end.
Richard Cork – New Statesman 12 April 2004
Andrew Cross in his short films made on the US rail network, transposes the notion of waiting and travel into a formal proposition. Mechanical sound becomes musical, direction and speed a vector within a drawing and a tunnel full of smoke a living painting with obvious art-historical provenance. Anticipation, a well-wielded video-art tool, is not so infuriating in this instance, as we accept it as a meditative, even literary, aspect of travel.
Sally O’Reilly – Modern Painters Summer 2004
Along Some American Highways (published 2003)
A lens trained on the straggly off-shoots of American suburbia – motels, garages, trailer parks, diners, and truck stops – results in unusually sinister scenes of normality.
Wallpaper
Andrew Cross’ images urge us to take another look at the non-spaces and almost-places that are predestined to be driven by unnoticed. Monotony becomes mesmerising when fixed in Cross’s photographs.
Intersection