Unexpected Views- Bob and Roberta Smith on Turner - National Gallery

Hello, I'm Bob and Roberta Smith. I'm an artist and I make art about you. I make art about the relationship between me and you because art is like love. Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. My name is Priyesh Mistry. I'm a curator here at the National Gallery. It's wonderful to see you all here for this evening's talk. I'm absolutely thrilled that we're standing in front of this glorious painting by J.M.W. Turner. Perhaps one of the most we're celebrating Turner's birthday this week as well. So I'm thrilled that actually we're joined here by Bob and Roberta Smith who's chosen this painting for this evening's talk. And also I have to say it's brilliant that we have not just one fantastic British artist but two with Bob and our series of talks called The Unexpected View. And this is a series where we invite an artist in to come into the gallery, to select a painting as the subject for a talk, to explore its themes, its subjects, some of the ideas, perhaps the life of the artist as well, and use some of those subjects to think about the artist's own work as well. Perhaps to learn a bit more about the painting but also to learn about how contemporary artists work today in all of the different myriads of ways that they do. Before I continue we should thank Hiscox for their generous support of this series of talks and this evening as the National Gallery's Contemporary Art Partner. So Bob and Roberta Smith is based in Ramsgate and if you don't know his work he uses words either painted on canvases, made into signs, written in newspapers or sung in songs to make statements about art and free expression. His work has influenced generations of educators and students to embrace the idea of art as a human right. He believes that all schools should be art schools. Are you ready? What should all schools be? I can't hear you National Gallery. What should all schools be? As well as his commitment to arts education and numerous museums and galleries, in 2015 Bob and Roberta stood in a general election in the constituency for the MP Michael Gove who was then Education Secretary to directly confront him over his diminished focus of teaching art in schools. Some of you might have the pamphlet from that time. Since the early 1990s Bob collaborated with other musicians and artists to create a lively art music scene with his band the Apathy Band and also regularly broadcasts a radio show on Resonance FM so you might be able to tune in and listen into that. I know we'll sort of touch on some of these projects and other projects throughout the talk but also explore Bob's interest in Turner as well and perhaps some synergies between your work and the way that Turner might have worked as well. Bob is shown at MoMA PS1 in New York as well as at Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool. In 2019 he had major retrospectives at the Harris Museum in Preston and the La Pantinée in Montpellier curated by Nicholas Bourieux. You may have seen his work recently at the Royal Festival Hall during the half-term school holidays for the Imagine Children's Festival and you can see his paintings currently at Tate Modern, this fantastic series called the Thames Mead Codex which I hope we might touch on during the talk and also continuing, like all of those years ago, like Turner, Bob is a Royal Academician and you can see some of his works currently in the Keeper's House if you go round to the Royal Academy and Bob was also awarded an OBE in 2017. I think that deserves a round of applause but we can do that later on. So we're very honoured to have you here Bob. Oh it's very kind of you to invite me. So out of all of the paintings we had a really interesting discussion about, you know, coming to do this talk, opened up the entire gallery. How did we come to Turner but also how did we come to this painting in particular? Well it's a long story and there's so many different aspects of it but I'm a child of an artist, two artists actually, and they used to bring us to the National Gallery so I've been coming here since I was really little to see paintings and actually over the years I've done a couple of talks for the National Gallery and I've talked passionately about how the Van Gogh at Arles is my favourite painting and on Front Row the other day I talked about how the Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus is my favourite but actually with my really thinking about this seriously, about this invitation, I thought about the relationship with my father and my dad wrote a sort of chapter. It was originally published as an individual book in the 1960s. He wrote a book on Turner's Peace Burial at Sea which was his favourite painting and there's so many different strands to it but one is that my dad was a painter, he was obsessed with Turner and the other is that we were both obsessed with the Great Western Railway because it's God's wonderful railway and that whole Victorian period, late Georgian period, is such an extraordinary period in Britain and he wrote in this book about how Turner was born in 1775 into what is essentially an agrarian country where you could walk amongst sheep from the centre of London in half an hour but towards the end of his life we were in the Industrial Revolution and this painting represents that a little bit. So all of these funny stories float around in my head so and this idea of the railway, we'll talk more in depth about the painting but the idea of the painting but also really importantly Turner was a regular guy and in this book almost the first thing that he says, he talks about Turner being the son of a barber and Turner's dad selling Turner's drawings in his barber shop. Well one of the earliest experiences is my dad taking some of my drawings and taking them to the local butcher in Yorkshire and hanging them up and saying to the butcher what about sticking these up in the butcher shop and so when I was about 11 I had this sort of drawing of this hill, Penn Hill, in this butcher shop in Leyburn in Wensleydale and I thought what's that about and I was reading this book and I suddenly realised that it was to do with his love of Turner and you know my dad was a regular guy, he started life mixing margarine on the Fulham Road in the Blue Band margarine factory. He identified with Turner because Turner was a self-made individual wasn't really about class but he understood that Turner's journey through making artworks constructed Turner. It's a cliche to say he went on a journey but his life is about discovering the world, responding to it, sometimes opportunistically, sometimes with great love and warmth through making artworks and that's I think that's why my dad was so obsessed with him and it's also slightly Turner this relationship with Turner being somebody who is you know seeing an event like the coming industrial world or maybe seeing and he made an amazing painting of the Battle of Waterloo which is all these corpses at the Battle of Waterloo with women or lovers pilfering the corpses or looking for keepsakes. It's not an image in that time that Wellington would have wanted of the Battle of Waterloo but he makes that image and through his life there are these moments where Turner interacts with the society of Britain in that period in a unique and revelatory way unlike any of his Royal Academician pals. So there's a bit about the railways we can talk a bit more about this painting but it it's really this kind of idea of what an artist is and Turner is very different from every other artist he's almost very different from any it's I mean there are very few contemporary artists who operate in that way so he is a unique kind of character he has a conception of art as a social engine as a thing of self-discovery and then there's the painting itself which is beautiful so it's not just the enterprise of it but it's actually that it's mind-boggling you know so it's those all of those things that's a long shaggy dog answer but I mean I adore your response and that idea that your father Frederick Brill you know was setting you up on this kind of Turner-esque journey you know should we talk about the painting yeah and what we see in it so the painting shows this moment of a train traveling through the storm battling the elements you see it traveling across the Maidenhead Viaduct and this swirl of the mix of the rain the steam coming out of the train the light that sort of pierces through all of these kind of moments it's quite extraordinary the way that Turner was pushing painting to really show the experience of what it was like to be in in that kind of environment and it shows that really that exactly as you said you know that moment of real change real progress in society with the all of these and you know all of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution you know we think that actually we assume that perhaps these new inventions were traveling quite slowly but this train was traveling at 60 miles per hour at that time which is perhaps slow by today's standard but phenomenally fast at the time you know and calling the painting rain steam and speed you know it's about that experience of all of those things right it is it's all about it's it's really it's a painting of um it's a painting really of everything uh everything happening all at once and I mean you can romanticize about it but it is a painting of it's also an impossible painting you know these all of these paint I mean we've got some other really earlier but really magnificent Turner's surrounding it they're all made in the studio so it's an you know he's he's not on maidenhead Viaduct with this canvas making this it's an act of the imagination I mean he's has this vision and there were lots of joy he made Turner was all about making drawings not taking paint out into the landscape but making lots of drawings and then improvising uh extemporizing innovating in his studio making these paintings and it's so it's an amazing act of the imagination like a piece of magic really but it's everything and that's that's that's the thing it's about experience you know it's about the human experience the experience of you know water hitting you in the face the experience of the sound of the train all the senses are there you know you've almost got the taste in your mouth of a of a of a really crappy day in maidenhead you know and and uh and so it's quite and it's also this is another thing it's quite a conceptual and philosophical painting because it's a moment it's an image of a moment that train is moving it's not a static image so it's a it's it's a bit like his obsession with the wave you know the wave comes it swells it grows it dies the train is like that and in a way the train is a human invention but the train is a wave you know the train is speeding across that viaduct and it's a very poetic thing you know i think there's lots of things that he may or not be saying but what he is obsessed with in much of his work is that moment you know the moment of the light the light hitting the thames estuary at margaret and creating venice you know uh the the uh you know the moment of the swelling wave the moment of this train speeding across this and it's all an invention that's why he's so amazing because he did it you know he was able to make these extraordinary images of this fleeting fleeting thing it doesn't exist this painting you know that you know that it didn't sit on that bridge for half an hour i told you made some drawings of it never existed but exists you know that's the amazing thing about it what i really enjoy about turner and particularly in this painting is the sort of signals the little signs that he makes to um to tell us that this is traveling at great speed that this is quite a phenomenon you know to be within this storm so there's little symbols of um showing the speed there's a little um uh sort of painting of a hair we're running in front of the train you know perhaps kind of you know symbolic of the idea of the the racing hair you know the speed of this train perhaps it will kind of be faster than train perhaps not we don't you've got it also the the signs of the life before in industry you know so you've got a boat traveling uh here with um uh you know two small people with an umbrella you know trying to shelter from this storm on the river you've got a a man with a cart being pulled up by um two cattle or two horses on the other side so that he's making this deliberate um contrast you know to say that we've advanced this is the new age in a way you know yeah and it's a it's a curious uh train as well because it's definitely an you know an early steam train i mean i think tate britain did a show turner a few years ago and they made a poster and they had this train which was from the 1950s whizzing through a you know a filthy storm or something it's completely wrong really in a way and this this train is definitely a train from this this is 1840 isn't it it's definitely sort of early period in the industrial revolution and this bridge is i mean it's it's brilliant to think about this because this is really i mean maybe it's an obvious thing to say but it's a bit like painting um captain kirk going up to the stars with any elon musk spaceship it's very similar you know it's a very similar idea because it's going into the stratosphere you know we're going into the weather we're going into you know the elements and uh and this is the this is uh an image of the future this bridge is built by brunel it's a very it's a very radical piece of engineering because it's a it's a viaduct it's built out of uh portland stone i think it is and it's very it has very shallow arches and when it when it was you know kind of handed over uh to the great western railway the great western rail was so freaked out by these shallow arches in this viaduct that they they said don't take the wooden structure which was built to support the workers building the bridge the kind of template don't take that away because we don't believe it will stand up without it and of course it's still there today and at some point there was a storm and swept away the wooden structure so when turner was making this image that bridge had only been built a few years before so it's a celebration of uh you know it's a celebration really i mean it is it's obviously been said million times before but it's a celebration of a kind of modernity isn't it it's a celebration of uh human ingenuity uh but it's also and and it's contradictory you know it's a celebration of the elements you know that can wash it all away and it's a celebration of our ingenuity all colliding at the same time that it's not you know it's not oppositional these things are happening both at the same time it's very exciting and it symbolizes that change you know which i think is really um it's a sort of painting that commemorates and marks that moment of great change bob you've included turner quite frequently in your works i think you know but also you've made a um sort of sculpture a sort of portrait of turner yeah i made a made a sculpture of him uh recently yeah yeah which i showed might be an image of it floating around yeah yeah yeah it's a bit hard to describe but it's uh it's a series of wooden boxes with a story about turner on it and uh i was thinking i was thinking two things i was thinking i i mean i don't want to i don't want to talk about timothy's ball too much but i don't believe in the image of turner from the timothy's ball movie when i saw mike lee's film i thought the character was much more like charles lawton's portrayal of rembrandt but also charles lawton portrayed the hunchback of noctredame as a kind of idiot savant kind of character you know a kind of peculiar strange kind of character and and uh i don't see turner like that i think if you had met turner he would have been like michael caine or he would have been like alan sugar or he might have been like esme from the uh from the sewing bee i think he was a no nonsense kind of character but he wasn't an idiot savant he was a self made man and i think a lot of the accounts of turner are from critics of him later on from the period of this period of paintings and then the paintings when the paintings became even more radical when they became almost white on white paintings when they said that he was making paintings with soap suds people used to be punch was incredibly cruel about him and his paintings and but also fellow royal academicians who were from a completely different background they understood that he was a genius but they didn't understand where it had come from and they didn't understand him so i wanted to make a sculpture to put to sort of say that's not what in our conception of turner of course we look at the paintings the paintings his bequest is an extraordinary thing the paintings that he left to the nation uh on including this one including this painting you know this was unsold you know this is in his studio when he died his bequest is actually what the tate gallery is and this is the interesting thing about it for me so well this is one of the interesting there's so many things that interest me about turner but one of the interesting things about turner is that he leaves his old artwork to the nation he leaves it really to the national gallery so the bequest becomes to the national gallery the tate is actually the national gallery's collection of british art and that gets hived off at a certain point and becomes and goes down to milbank and it's only in 1937 that that name tate comes about and it comes about because we have the turner's bequest we have the national collection of british art which is the national gallery's collection of british art handed over to that institution and we have henry tate's uh collection of pre-raphaelite paintings well the one of the stories on that sculpture and this is this is well this is the principal story on the sculpture is that turner four years before he paints that is four years before he paints this he paints this painting the slave ships zone well turner you know turner turner was an abolitionist at the end of his life he he made a painting that's in the tape called the deluge he sold he gave prints of that to be sold to raise money for the abolitionist cause and he paints this painting the safe safe ship song this is a totally you have to be you have to accept the imagination for this and we don't know what turner would have thought but i don't think this is 1937 the tate is called the tate i don't think turner would have been happy that his bequest in his in this institution uh named after sugar production basically in the it's not slavery ended before uh you know ended around the time that uh you know before turner but i but i don't think that turner would have been happy with that so the point about the painting is to sort of open that question up and then i thought well that's great let's call the tate the turner that's the answer to all our problems let's just let's just call the tate the turner and then i started talking to a curator at the at the tate and she said there's been all this research by a guy called sam smith and she's found out that turner had a share when he was a young man he bought a share in a sugar plant in a in a plantation a cattle plantation which was worked by slave labor so this then that becomes very interesting so i thought well that's that's thrown my idea out of calling the tate the turner but hold on a moment then you sort of think about it and when when turner i'm going off on a long shaggy day but it's one of the reasons why i really admire turner because he he responds to the world and he wants to make a piece of art about it you know when he's a young man he's on the make he's he becomes a royal academician when he's in his mid-20s and there are there are there are a lot of royal academicians that are quite young and they're invited by a man called borthwick and then also the the guy who built harewood house the cell to make topological pictures of the buildings that they're building to create great cathedrals or neoclassical mansions money that they made from slavery and in that period turner buys this share and a number a couple of other royal academicians do as well so they buy this share in his cattle farm but go and have a look at the information if you're interested in this by this research by this amazing guy sam smith but he's uh he's unearthed this story but what is interesting to me is then we talk about journeys that people on then turner as a young man is on the make i don't think he gives a sod about slavery you know he doesn't care but as he as the journey of that late victorian period happened the abolitionist movement a growing awareness about slavery and then to you know turn on the the state to stop slavery turner becomes part of that so i'm very interested in this sort of journey that he goes on he's also painting as i said he paints the um he paints the uh uh the the battlefield at waterloo he also paints a he's also obsessed with with uh with the houses of parliament that burned down during his lifetime incredible images of the houses of parliament burning so he's he's engaged absolutely with the world we look at these images now these other images that are here i mean that's what happened i mean this getting off at calais trying to get on on on at calais that's what happened yesterday you know they are images of now and and the sea the channel they are they're powerful images of humanity and our relationship with the sea our borders uh the news he's i think he's always interested in the news and and uh and trying to captivate thing the paint captivates something that's happening the painting peace burial at sea which is a painting around about this period which has this great kind of miasmic uh sunset in it is uh is him wanting to commemorate the death of david wilkie and he goes aha i'll do this and we'll exhibit it in the summer exhibition so it's seeing a story like a journalist seeing a story and going i can make art about this and we'll stick it in this context the slave chic zone painting was exhibited we think in 1841 at the royal academy well that was that was to coincide with three conferences which were all about the end of worldwide slave trade well the end of the worldwide slave trade and this is one of the things that i talk about in this sculpture the end of the worldwide slave trade of course that was a humanitarian effort but it was also gladstone thinking well how are we going to keep the prices down on the production of sugar i know we'll get people from india so after slave trade there was indentured labor so all that sugar production that was all created by people signing up in india to a better life and being shipped over to the caribbean and then working in those sugar plantations so the end of slavery in the caribbean was not the end of the pernicious you know colonization period it was it was just a shift in the dynamics of it really and so all these people from the indian subcontinent were shipped over to the caribbean to to work on sugar plantations so it's sort of it's all it's all tied up there and somehow turner he's not an agent in it but he is he's very interesting to think about art's relationship with politics and art's relationship with the world art's relationship with humanity but also also it's not just didacticism he is amazing you know and and this painting this i mean these other paintings are extraordinary they're much more easy to understand but this painting is this beginning in 18 he dies in 1851 but in 18 in the 1840s he's in this amazing period where he's absorbed all this and he's going he's going crazy with what he can do with paint to create this amazing these amazing atmospheric paintings i wanted to pick up on a few things that you said there but um but as you as everyone can tell bob is an incredible storyteller and a shaggy dog lots of different strands to this story but in a way i wanted to draw it to your own work because your own work takes the form of words of science and um you expand that to these narratives so the story of to turn a story um not just on a uh a painting on a canvas but actually three-dimensionally so you're walking around this sculpture reading this narrative as you go could you talk a little bit about how you came to that how you came to sort of communicate these stories and these narratives through signs through sign writing through words in in paintings you know yeah uh it's it it it is i mean it's it's funny to think of somebody who makes this although it's got a bit of yellow smeared across it in relationship to turner but the the uh the thing is i suppose about 30 years ago it might be uh i made a piece of work where we we made concrete boats and we took them to the serpentine it was actually with anthony wilkinson who's here now and we we took these concrete boats to the serpentine and we asked people to uh to push the to try and float these impossible concrete boats and actually in that moment although we hadn't come up with a term we were doing something which was about the relationship between me and you you know it was about it was about trying to get the audience involved i hadn't absorbed brecht at that point but that's what brecht was doing you know he wanted the audience to be engaged you know so when i get you to shout all schools should be all art schools at the there's a kind of brechtian aspect to that and so the idea so the idea of the signs came about from saying well how do you get people to do to do something a bit outside of the norm you know how do you get people to do that so you make a big big sign maybe an even bigger sign that will get more people to do it if you pay a really big sign that people really believe in what you're doing if you make an enormous sign with a great deal of authority people who do exactly what you say they do that when you do that on the side of a bus and you say that you're anyway it won't go there but but if you make a really dirty great big sign and tell people to do something daft they will do it and so it's kind of thinking about this dialogue between language and so that that took me into this world of making uh making work with lettering and previously to that i've been living in the states and i was interested in lettering and sign writing and i did a bit of sign writing in the states and so somehow this dialogue it was a kind of uh i don't want to get poncy and conceptual but it was kind of dialogical art it was a kind of trying to get people to do things make your own damn art that's one of my slogans don't expect me to do it for you make your own damn art that's why all schools should be art schools so that people can make their own damn art and that's the that's the whole point of it really it's sort of not to absent myself and from the art game but to say this is for everybody you know art well i mean one of the things that one of my mantras at the moment is that calling yourself an artist is a bit daft you know it's a bit like we all can all fall in love it's like calling yourself a lovist you know art really is very like love art is art is art depends on you know dopamine you know it depends on a certain kind of energy and relationship and uh and so art is actually very like love so in a way to call yourself an artist really is a bit daft you might as well just call yourself a human being so so the dialogue between me and the audience and between the audience and somebody else one of the things that really freaked me out at the beginning when i started doing all schools should be art schools and this was opportunistic so michael gove came into power in 2010 and uh and he he was opportunistic he thought right we're going to have this coalition government and we can we can ditch our manifesto and just say look we're gonna we're gonna have this thing called the e-back and that's going to minimize the arts in schools but it'll maximize mathematics and the study of english which we all want to do you know we actually we do want kids to study mathematics and be good at english but it minimized the arts in schools that was opportunistic and i was opportunistic i thought well this gives me an opportunity to say to him why the arts are important and ended up with me organizing a conference in scarborough which was about 10 years ago now and and it it also led to me running against him in his constituency and so i did a big painting letter to michael gove and we took it down to his constituency we took we actually marched it past parliament at one stage and when i see the slave ship song it's a different it's a much more weighty issue but i see i know what turner's doing there he's going right i'm going to nail these bastards i'm gonna and i i can do it in the only way that i know how which is by making something and then i'm going to exhibit it somewhere and it will become a bit like the it'll be a charter for activity and action which perhaps i can't do but others will be inspired to do and so it's slightly like that i want to talk about the thamesmead codex because i think this is the most sort of powerful work on view at tate modern at the moment so i encourage you all to see it but in that work you tell other people's stories particularly from their experiences um perhaps before the pandemic but also afterwards as well could you talk a little bit about that process of making that work and then uh sort of putting all these now stories together yeah so the thamesmead codex uh which is uh it's it's the longest exhibition that's ever been at tate modern it's really just the installation of some paintings but it's they call it an exhibition and it's great in a way but it's it's been extended and extended extended now it's going to be until december but it's uh it's it's it's this thing of art being it's a bit glib but if you think about art being a dialogue it's a conversation so interviews is the thing that i do so i've done paintings of interviews i did a painting of an interview with an amazing surgeon called david nott which was an amazing uh piece of radio journalism by eddie mayor and david nott and talking about his time in alapo and i made a painting of that we exhibited at the royal academy i've been able to sell it and give the money to the david nott foundation so uh this idea of the interview the dialogue between the artist and the person or you know the conversation is important thing and i so i was invited to do this to come up with an idea to collaborate between take modern which is all about modernism and this iconic piece of modernist housing utopian in its vision in thamesmead but it gets a bad rap because it's in the clockwork orange malcolm mcdowell stabs his mate in the lake as he's trying to get out you know that scene where he's stabbing his fingers it's like that so it gets a terribly bad rap because of that and it's also a bit bonkers it's got belmarsh right in the middle of it so that is where nicolas is at the moment you know it's it's totally it's it and it was conceived as housing uh but the in that period when it was built there weren't that many jobs available for people it's all based around the car there's no public transport to it there is now there's abby wood so there's there's uh there's an idea there that it's about a utopian vision that's gone a bit wrong and the idea was to just to talk to people but of course when you talk to people you realize you know i mean i don't want to say everybody's got a story but you realize everybody everybody's a person you know everybody's got something to say and everybody's got their experience so it's trying to capture something of the experience doesn't do it justice at all but it tries to capture a moment in thames mead and uh and the stories people told were absolutely amazing and then kovid happened and i had to do the interviews so if you go and see this thing the colored ones are all interviews where i met the person one-to-one the black and white interviews are interviews that i did over the phone with people but that became very powerful because they were on this estate they two of them were waiting for the made up exam results one wanted to be a brain surgeon and i was thinking you're never going to be a brain surgeon how is that going to happen you know and you know it's very moving there were i don't know it's very complicated to go into with a lot of a moving stories about it the two people who set up the first uh shop on the estate their job was really on a saturday night there was to stop people stealing steaks after they'd watched the football and it was just uh you know it's just very moving and then i made some and then that got me painting again actually in a pictorial way because i thought nobody's gonna it's gonna look like a very conceptual piece of art there's all these texts with all these interviews for people so i thought i need to tell people where this is visually so i started making some images of the thames mead estate that was exciting again because that put me back in this world this dialogue with turner my dad really you know kind of trying to make an image of something that's impossible really and uh so anyway that i mean go and see it well i recommend you uh all see it but i wanted to say that uh it's uh um it's it also represents i think the generosity that you have with your work you know i think we've all kind of heard it already today but the way that you um use signs to communicate to bring um you know an audience in to these stories into these worlds and perhaps that's also a way that we should be thinking about turner as well you know that his work as you said as artists you know you give in a way um turner was also so generous in his the way that he showed the world that the way that he marked the world with certain moments of social change or um social issues that actually needed to be out there in this in this public world in this public forum um we're gonna have to wrap it yeah we've got we haven't even talked about why turner is john coltrane oh we can talk about why turner's john coltrane but i think it's sort of self-explanatory now well well this is a this is a quote from a friend of mine a wonderful sax player called uh george cleghorn and i did an interview with him and he's talking about how he picked up the sax i won't go on a long time about it but i invited him i interviewed him in petworth house where turner painted these amazing elegiac images of the sun setting over the lakes of petworth house and he said turner was coltrane i think we end there thank you so much for joining us thank you and thank you bob that was brilliant that was amazing