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’.
I love the way their work is always so eco friendly.. who would of art could be so creative ! haha !
What strikes me the most is how this work could quite easily be moved from place to place... for instance one minute it could be stuck in an art gallery but it could also be put outside (where it should be) because after all it is powered by the sun and wind. I wonder if they had planned to lock it up in a gallery?
The 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.
Have you seen Keith Arnatt’s ‘Notes from Jo’ photographs? Some of them can be found on this blog. http://pictureyear.blogspot.com/2007/12/notes-from-jo.html
ReplyDeleteIt’s what you could call a more sentimental approach to that human condition stuff that we all face. But as always the interesting issue is how does it work? In this case finding the left over moments from a life just finished and representing them as photographs. This is technically art giving things ‘honorific’ value and it stems from the concept of ‘moments of epiphany’. *
* A moment of epiphany is a sudden manifestation or an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple or everyday.