Bob & Roberta Smith

Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War)

 

This illuminated peace sign – powered by the sun and the wind – questions our ideas about history and monuments on the one hand, and art and war on the other. The work, which is a collaboration between renewable energy specialists, structuralengineers and an architect, seeks to rebrand Trafalgar Square as a beacon of our cultural future rather than a memorial to England’s military past. Bob & Roberta Smith believe in ‘the power of art to act as a social force as great and necessary to our lives as the police, the military and the judiciary’; their proposal is meant as a ‘gentle provocation to the overwhelming “Hogarthian” stature of Trafalgar Square as the centre of celebration of Britain’s military achievements over the French’.

Biography

Bob & Roberta Smith, born in 1963 in London, invite us to question high art, and the role that aesthetic elitism has to play in society today. At the core of its practice Bob & Roberta Smith assert that art can and should be an essential tool in the democratic process. The means by which the artist explores this is through humour.

Key to Bob & Roberta Smith’s practice is sign painting. These works take the form of absurd, faux-political or revolutionary-in-spirit slogans. They are painted on reclaimed timber, old bits of board, paper or rather more traditional canvas. The sentiments expounded are often hard hitting, sometimes stating the obvious, sometimes highly opinionated, and mostly very funny. Bob & Roberta Smith have had a number of solo shows including The Beautiful Poetry of Bob & Roberta Smith at the Hales Gallery, London (2005/6) and Help Build the Ruins of Democracy, Baltic (2005).