Bob & Roberta Smith: Help Build the Ruins of Democracy
Until April 3; Baltic, Gateshead

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that Bob and Roberta Smith are imaginary. Well, sort of. Roberta Smith has been art critic for the New York Times since 1986, and is well known for her eloquent writings on conceptual art. She is not – by any stretch of the imagination – the same Roberta Smith whose work is currently on show at Baltic.

The Roberta Smith whose work is currently on show at Baltic is the imaginary sister of an artist who calls himself Bob Smith. But you shouldn’t put too much trust in his identity either. Bob Smith is not known for his sincerity, or for his love of the art world in general. “I want to stick pins in Art,” he said in an interview, recently. Then again, he also said that a lot of his statements were “totally disingenuous”. Of course he might have been lying.

Bob Smith loves to play games with the establishment, in a series of bluffs and double bluffs which are designed to leave the art critics cursing. His work always looks half-baked, a ploy which he insists is deliberate. It might have been thrown together by a crowd of uninvited amateurs with views which range from the knee-jerk to the unintelligible. Sometimes it is.

At Baltic the artist has created a forest of signs – ad-hoc placards bearing a range of statements from the offensive to the absurd. Supermarkets come in for a great deal of stick, while inexplicably, one concrete plaque says “thank you god for wheatabix” (sic). Visitors are invited to add their own scrawls, but a month after the opening, there’s not much evidence of public enthusiasm.

Among the most vitriolic of Smith’s signs are those aimed at government figures, from David Blunkett to Gordon Brown. The artist risks revealing real emotion in a board devoted to The Labour Party, which condemns them as “forked tongued turncoats who have spattered British people’s faces with blood”. Newspaper images of mutilated children are glued inexpertly on top.

Even more startlingly sincere is the new work, Eileen, which is made up of 58 concrete plaques arranged around the walls of a shed. In sequence, the panels tell the true story of an adopted woman from Belfast whose life is peppered with sectarian abuse and tragedy. Having extracted herself from the Catholic-Protestant divide, she finds her birth-mother, a Christian Scientist who objects to the fact that Eileen is married to a black man.

Smith loves to puncture belief systems with crude playground tactics. Up until now, it was the self-important grandees and sycophants of the art world who bore the brunt of his wrath. Now he has turned his bile on the savage absurdity which is represented by Eileen’s story – the ability of society to perpetuate the most brutal acts of hostility. The ruling classes pontificate, while the ordinary people suffer.

This is indeed an occasion; it appears that Bob Smith is finally emerging from behind his protective shield of puerility, and expressing sincere feelings on serious subjects. Perhaps, in time, he might even tell us his real name.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 16.01.05