Artist Bob and Roberta Smith opens the door of his colourful studio
‘I think of myself as a broadcaster. People intellectualise art, but I think it’s something that floats around in the ether – like love – and I’m interested in what you can do with it,’ says Bob and Roberta Smith, the pseudonym of Patrick Brill. I’m interested in songs as performances of art,’ he adds, as he swivels to face the piano in his studio of 20 years. A former garage in Ramsgate, it is packed to the rafters with bright paintings, musical instruments and found furniture. Bashing out honky-tonk chords, he launches into a melody: ‘Art is your human right! Art is your human right!’ The same phrase appears on his jacket, made by his wife, artist and academic Jessica Voorsanger, and has featured in his text paintings. Several are in public collections and some are in his current selling show at the Royal Academy of Arts. The earliest of these align in age with his alias (Bob Smith was adopted as a deliberately boring name when he lived in New York in 1989 and he collaborated with his sister Roberta in the 1990s) and he has developed them, using signwriting; into a means of storytelling and promoting ‘dialogic’ ideas. ‘The art is in what the viewer takes from them,’ he says. Opposite the piano is his Letter to Michael Gove, a diatribe on the importance of art in schools, written in 2011 to the then secretary of state for education. In the 2015 general election, to emphasise ‘art and music as self-expression – it literally gives children a voice’, Bob and Roberta stood against the MP for the seat of Surrey Heath. Recently, he had the children’s activity book Art Makes People Powerful published, ‘as a way of bypassing government policy’.
Flocked on the floor is a still-growing number of interactive birds fashioned from scrap wood, due to accompany an upcoming exhibition of paintings of storms in the Channel, and text works. A smaller room acts as the winter studio (‘it is easier to heat’) and also holds vinyl records that, alongside his own compositions, make their way onto the Resonance FM radio show, Make Your Own Damn Music, which Bob and Roberta has been hosting for 15 years. He confesses that he cannot make art at the same rate as his ideas form and this is another vehicle for putting his thoughts into the ether; it is compulsive listening. ‘Art really is all a form of broadcasting,’ he says.
‘Bob and Roberta Smith: We Have Only Got Each Other’ is at the RA, W1, until March 23: royalacademy.org.uk | ‘Storm’ is at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, WI, March 7-April 17: anthonywilkinsongallery.org | ‘Art Makes People Powerful’ (Wild Eyed Editions, £12.99)
