New World Order: Andrew Shoben

"It’s not the only one, but sound is the favourite weapon in my armoury,"

Public art for the greater good

Transforming public spaces into thought-provoking works of art is what Andrew Shoben’s Greyworld collective is all about. Their installations are as powerful as they are unique: they sing, speak, screech and howl. “It’s not the only one, but sound is the favourite weapon in my armoury,” says Shoben.

Shoben founded this artistic band of brothers together with painter and furniture-maker Neil Gavin in Paris in the early ’90s. There’s always been a focus on public spaces in both Greyworld’s art and in internationally prestigious projects such as their 2007 Monument to the Unknown Artist outside the Tate Modern in London.
The statue of a young man holding a paintbrush isn’t your average bronze monument: the kinetically charged, six-metre-tall installation mimics the moves and poses of amazed passers-by.

Starting out

Shoben left home early to try his luck in Paris as a composer, focusing his work on electro-acoustic compositions. “I would write a 30-minute opus to tractors, using chainsaws and so on,” he says. But Shoben was never comfortable with the music – or with his audience for that matter. “I wanted to write music for people who I could go to the pub with and this wasn’t it.”

It was the elitist attitude towards music that he couldn’t stand, and that point of view has continued to influence Greyworld’s art. It was his flatmate, Shoben remembers, who questioned the constant use of a beginning and an end in his music. “I realised I only wrote linear pieces,” he says. That made the decision easy. In 1993, Shoben quit and started Greyworld to pursue a lifelong goal to make the “banal look and sound magnificent”.

Sound art

That’s a good way of summing up Greyworld. Their ideas and art objects are simple, yet often neglected and seldom thought of in an art context by anyone. For example, two bus stops in Bradford were equipped with colour-sensitive cameras along with a female voice recording that would compliment awaiting passengers on their green jacket. In a square in Leicester earlier this year, steel bollards were made into noise jukeboxes that were triggered when people walked passed.

The list goes on, but perhaps most famous is the 1997 Railings installation, which appeared in both London and Paris. The idea is simply genius: Shoben and friends fine-tuned railings in a random fence to play The Girl From Ipanema when

"When is public art good? Like everything else, it’s subjective."

someone ran a stick along them. Here, as with many of their other art pieces, the observer was asked to interact with the installation – to become part of the sound art. “We wanted to create an aural wallpaper for the city,” says Shoben. “In many ways it’s the purest work we’ve done.” And the choice of song? “Oh, that was easy. Everyone knows it. You’ve either heard a jazz-rock version, or heard it in Tesco’s. In many ways, it represents public space as such, but you can’t listen to it without a smile.”

When is public art good? Like everything else, it’s subjective. But Shoben believes that you shouldn’t have to add to the space, arguing it’s better to use existing objects and possibilities. That’s where the Greyworld fascination with sound comes in. Says Shoben: “Sound is great to work with because it’s 3D – you can go around it, stay inside or go through it. Sound shakes, trembles and vibrates, it’s delicious!” Indeed.

Ben Nordberg

Speciality

Skateboarder

Starting out

Pretty much just same old story. My good friend at the time had a skateboard so we just started doing it around my local area and after a while I just kept at it and started going to the skatepark and the rest is all a blur.

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