Part one of a two part series on the extraordin­ary work of UK artists Greyworld.

Pub­lic art is suf­fer­ing from a ser­i­ous iden­tity crisis. How much of it actu­ally con­siders the pub­lic it pur­ports to serve?

Think about the pub­lic art in your city. No doubt there are impos­ing trib­utes to his­tor­ical fig­ures that preside over parks or plinths that com­mem­or­ate vic­tor­ies or defeats. There may be the requis­ite mod­ern­ist mono­liths, heavy metal flour­ishes dom­in­at­ing windswept plazas out­side cor­por­ate head quar­ters, with office work­ers eking out space around their bases to catch the sun as they send text mes­sages or eat lunch. At best, these works serve as hang-outs for pigeons, obstacle courses for skaters or impromptu play­grounds for kids. Some are dra­matic enough to polar­ize pub­lic opin­ion while oth­ers barely register on your radar as you carry on with your daily life.

Is there another way? Is it pos­sible to cre­ate art that truly con­nects with the pub­lic, that cre­ates moments of won­der and ima­gin­a­tion in urban life, or offers oppor­tun­it­ies for reflec­tion and inter­ac­tion in pub­lic spaces?

The girl from Ipan­ema goes walk­ing… Rail­ings in Lon­don and Paris | Grey­world 2009

Grey­world make extraordin­ary pub­lic art for ordin­ary people. The art that Grey­world makes doesn’t impose itself on you. It doesn’t put the viewer in its shadow or force you into the corners of a park or square. It doesn’t require a PhD to under­stand it. Greyworld’s art sur­prises you in unex­pec­ted moments and invites you to pause or play.

“We’ve often said Grey­world is about people who are going to buy a can of beans, not people who are going to buy a paint­ing, or digest some art,” Grey­world founder Andrew Shoben says.

“We want to inter­vene in people’s jour­neys as they go about their busi­ness, but giv­ing people the oppor­tun­ity to not inter­act is also very import­ant. I think you have a real respons­ib­il­ity in urban space to make works that are legible and access­ible quickly, but you also need to make sure that some who don’t want to involve them­selves have that oppor­tun­ity. Get­ting that bal­ance right is where the art is, I think.”

Park Bench 2 | Grey­world 2009

Start­ing out as “hard core sound artists” Grey­world have now evolved into a multi-disciplinary, many-headed beast that puts the idea ahead of the medium. They focus enga­ging the senses and ima­gin­a­tion of the viewer. They’re aware of the respons­ib­il­ity of cre­at­ing work for the pub­lic, but import­antly, they also have a sense of humour.

“Sound art was our first attempt at dis­tan­cing ourselves from the rel­ics of pub­lic art that are littered in our cit­ies — the men on bronze horses, the highly pol­ished rocks, the big bits of glass and steel – and so we wanted to cre­ate a new art that was more sonic, and didn’t rely on the primacy of site, this rather bul­ly­ing visual push that is fois­ted on us in urban spaces,” Shoben says.

Rather than demand­ing atten­tion, in Greyworld’s work, it’s almost delib­er­ately ambigu­ous where the “art” is. These are works which invite won­der in the every day and leave you ask­ing, what if the world worked that way?

Col­ourstops | Grey­world 2009

What if benches joined in your con­ver­sa­tions and could eagerly gurgle their own memor­ies back to you? What if the bins in your local park needed to be coaxed into help­ing you out with that trash? What if the hid­den human stor­ies of your city were revealed in liv­ing col­our once the sun went down? What if the rail­ings on your street played “The Girl From Ipan­ema” as you ran a stick along them, bus stops paid you com­pli­ments and bol­lards ser­en­aded you?

How would you react if you found your­self in that world for a moment – and how would that change the way you saw the world you live in every day?

As fant­ast­ical as their work sounds, it’s often more than subtle, it’s prac­tic­ally invis­ible, a delight you dis­cover by acci­dent or by word of mouth, some­thing that becomes part of a place and doesn’t need to announce itself.

And when she passes, each one she passes goes — ah… Rail­ings in Lon­don and Paris | Grey­world 2009

“What’s the worst that can hap­pen? You pick up a stick and run it along the rail­ings and you get that lovely sound any­way. That’s just a nice idea in itself,” Shoben says.

“Besides that, what would I do, have a little plaque? That would be so silly. The art doesn’t start in one place and end in another. It’s integ­rated into the whole thing. So the idea of put­ting a little frame around it just seems too odd.”

Musica in front of the Curve in Leicester | Grey­world 2009

Much of this is heretical talk in the world of pub­lic art. Ima­gine try­ing to talk a coun­cil, developer or arts fund­ing body into sup­port­ing a work that most people may never notice, or a work which refuses to respect tra­di­tional notions of what “art” is and where it sits in our pub­lic spaces. An example of this approach is Musica, Greyworld’s work in Leicester (UK) which con­sists of 40 bol­lards (short, func­tional posts for man­aging traffic flow) that are more than meets the eye.

“We often get given plans for an area and there’s a clearly marked area where they expect the art to be,” Shoben says, “We decided in this instance to take over the whole square.”

Musica | Grey­world 2009

“We decided to pick up all the bol­lards in the area and replace them with bol­lards that look almost exactly the same, and they stop you park­ing your car there, they still serve a func­tion, just like the railings.

“How­ever when you approach one of these it begins to rotate, little points of light begin to illu­min­ate, and each one is in fact a music box, you can set off a little trail of music to accom­pany your trip through the city. Music boxes them­selves are just joy­ful things, and the idea that these things would sud­denly spring to life and then fall back asleep was quite an excit­ing prospect.”

“Our audi­ence is not an audi­ence who are prepped for a bit of art, so you’ve got to us that to your advant­age. That’s why a lot of our work uses the clichés of mod­ern art and pub­lic art, but also the street fur­niture around you.”

In part two: find out why Grey­world are obsessed with park benches, what hap­pens when they take on the tra­di­tional big bronze statue or turn a whole town into a work of art, and dis­cover which cit­ies are fall­ing behind when it comes to pub­lic art that works.