ARTISTS TALKING

High Street, West Bromwich and Limited Edition CD 23 November – 19 December

"It's weird. A flock of seagulls? An alien invasion?" "No, I think it's someone inside the building trying to whistle the theme tune to the The Sweeney!" Schoolboys walking home along West Bromwich's High Street are bemused and amused by Hewitt and Jordan's Whistler, a soundwork transmitted at three public locations including the pavement-fronted main entrance to the old town hall where it plays, most eerily, through the building's Victorian brick ventilation grilles.

Also available on CD, Whistler is a compilation of whistled theme tunes mostly from law and order television shows performed by local people and, more pertinently, by police officers involved with the community. Commissioned by Public Arts West Midlands as part of the action research project People, Identity and Place, Whistler is at best a hilarious, absurdist work. If the tunes can be made out then potentially the work represents the relationship of the police to the public in a new comic perspective. It reveals something of the underlying sense of conflict in this typically, run-down, red-brick industrial town which is, at least momentarily, transformed.

Whistler also shows the way that public art may be leaning. According to the artists, commissioning bodies should in the future be thinking beyond the permanent, three-dimensional aesthetic and should take on board interactive, temporary and multi-media based ideas and projects. Such a view is in keeping with the current curatorial thinking of many larger galleries in the city as the nearby Ikon Gallery's schedule this year has shown. Birmingham Council in contrast is rather behind the mark in this in spite of Birmingham's bid to be European Capital of Culture in 2008.

John Cornall

JOHN CORNALL
is a writer and lecturer based in Birmingham.

johncornall@aol.com