I BELIEVE IN JOSEPH MALLARD WILLIAM TURNER

© The Artist

I BELIEVE IN JOSEPH MALLARD WILLIAM TURNER 1998

Bob and Roberta Smith (1958 – )

Details

Dimension
162.5 X 122.5 CM
Media
GLOSS PAINT ON WOOD PANEL
Accession number
P7098

Summary

Bob and Roberta Smith’s brand of art activism takes many forms. Gaffs are the bane of political campaigns, but Smith employs them as a campaigning tool. Among his many ‘I believe in’ texts, this proclamation of faith in JMW Turner owes its charm to a kink in the spelling. Usually referred to by his initials, the misplacement of ‘o’ from Turner’s middle name (Mallord) constructs a malapropism, confusing the great British landscape painter with a common duck. Both laudatory and levelling, Smith plays the fool, as if to provoke a response in the viewer. To present a painted text is to cut through issues about ‘reading’ a picture; the misspelling is an immediate hook for the eye. Smith cocks a snook at anxieties about the relevance of the medium, where painting is something of a sitting duck. In his hands, painting is a direct and cheery mouthpiece. He painted the signs, he says, ‘because I believe in People and their creativity and not in God.’( )

His signs draw on sculpture and performance (having started as a painter, cash-strapped and anti-establishment, he moved between media with a punky attitude). I BELIEVE IN JOSEPH MALLARD WILLIAM TURNER is a single panel resting informally on the floor – hinting at a past life as a sandwich board or shop sign, but also at its possible use as a placard, ready to be winched out of the gallery. An enthusiast for rubbish and everyday things, begging a reaction and shunning the pretentious, Smith paints on boards scavenged from skips or the streets. This piece has a makeshift quality. A panel has been sanded down and given a white ground, upon which the lettering stands out, a spectrum of kitsch colours. The joggled placement lends them a gimcrack jauntiness, while the drop shadow of the block capital typeface is a simple graphic technique that pushes the letters forward, redolent of fairgrounds, comic strips and homemade protest banners.

Speaking in 1997, he said ‘In England we define ourselves by our jobs far too much and I think we ought to define ourselves by the reality we want to construct around ourselves – define ourselves by the things we enjoy rather than the things that earn us money.’( ) Other giant texts of his explore the heroes, memories, likes and dislikes that count for personal experience. They might be guileless or insulting (see I BELIEVE IN DÜRER or I BELIEVE IN THE CLASH, ARTISTS RUIN IT FOR EVERYONE, MAKE YOUR OWN DAMN ART, or, as Tate Trustee, TATE MODERN HAS BEEN AS IMPORTANT TO BRITISH LIFE AS THE National Health Service). This is the personal writ large, or art writ democratic.

Bibliography
Brehm, M., Urban Legends (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, Germany 1997) Button, Virginia and Charles Esche, Intelligence: New British Art 2000 (Tate Publishing, London 2000) Bob and Roberta Smith, Make Your Own Damn Art (Black Dog, London 2004) Bob and Roberta Smith, Art U Need (Black Dog, London 2007) Bob and Roberta Smith, I should be in charge (Black Dog, London 2011)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Medium

    Refers to either the material used to create a work of art, craft or design, i.e. oil, bronze, earthenware, silk; or the technique employed i.e. collage, etching, carving. In painting the medium refers to the binder for the pigment, e.g. oil, egg, acrylic dispersion. The plural form is media.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.

  • Panel

    A wood, cooper, Masonite, or other hard surface on which to paint. Sometimes it is referred to as a board.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.