Today, a very quick look at a painting and a painter to cheer us up. Click the link to see the painting, which is called ‘make your own damn art’.
The artist is Bob and Roberta Smith (one person). He has painted this using sign-painting techniques, and I love it that he is sending us out of the gallery (in this case the Royal Academy in London), and packing us off home to make our own art using wood recycled from out of a skip. Or anything else we feel like using.
By telling us to ‘make your own damn art’, Bob and Roberta Smith is very succinctly saying that our personal creativity is the route to our empowerment – and it seems that ultimately he has in mind that it is also the route to radical political change. In his film of the same name, he points out the social inequality in our culture ‘sector’. Saying that in his view our culture is being made by ‘a sort of gentry in disguise’, which means that ordinary people’s stories are always getting written out of history, or maybe not getting written in, and that ‘I think art should be made by everybody.’
sian barlow 