The full film is now available to watch online through Curzon on Demand
Category Archives: blog
Now We Can Look the East End in the Face
This is a Bob and Roberta Smith from Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
Joe Amrhein of Pierogi gave me a great interview for the film as he talked through his collection of Bob’s early works and talked about Bob’s riotous Art Amnesty show at the Gallery.
Click here for tickets to the premiere of Make Your Own Damn Art at the East End Film Festival and the Bob and Roberta Smith night featuring a performance by the Ken Ardley Playboys and a Q&A with John Rogers (Director) and Bob and Roberta Smith.
World Premiere Announced
The ‘World Premiere’ of Make Your Own Damn Art was announced yesterday at the Press Launch for the East End Film Festival. The screening will be on Saturday 7th July at the Rich Mix Cinema, Bethnal Green Road, London E1.
Before the screening Bob’s band, The Ken Ardley Playboys will be doing a gig in the bar. The Ken’s music is featured throughout the film – so it should be a bit of a special occasion.
More info about the screening and the gig here
Holy Fool or Mystical King
The two roles of the artist are as Mystical King or Holy Fool – Bob and Cedar Lewisohn discuss at Rude Britannia
Rude Britannia
Editing this conversation between Bob and Roberta Smith and Cedar Lewisohn shot in the Rude Britannia show at Tate Britain. Cedar was one of the curators of the show, which looked at the idea of a British sense of humour in art. They are discussing how Bob’s work sits alongside Hogarth and Cruikshank and the notion of the exhibition as being like a punchline to a joke.
If I include all the interesting stuff the film will be about 3 hours long. The dilemma of the edit.
Soundtrack
Went round the corner to Bob’s house yesterday to record some more music for the soundtrack. Bob plays on all the music in the film, except for one track by Flame Proof Moth.
Last October I hurriedly recorded 3 mins of piano played in Bob’s Leytonstone kitchen which I mixed and threw a load of effects at to make a sound piece to accompany that footage I’d shot that was projected onto Bob’s Gotham Golem sculpture for Pierogi’s The Boiler space in Brooklyn , New York.
This music works really well with the footage of Bob in his Leytonstone Centre of Contemporary Art at Ramsgate, so I was keen to record some more. Bob set about the task with great gusto.
I’ve become a fan of Bob’s band The Ken Ardley Playboys during shooting and have used several tracks in the film. They’re the kind of up-and-at-’em garage punk band I always wanted to be in (but my mates had aspirations of writing melodic acoustic music). Yesterday Bob picked up his Telecaster, put bells round his ankles and knocked out some homespun blues punk on the step by the back door.
The film
Since July 2009 I’ve been following around the artist Bob and Roberta Smith with a video camera. I’m now in the process of editing the documentary that justifies this peculiar behaviour.
The film will most likely be called Make Your Own Damn Art – but I didn’t want to steal that for the name of the blog as it really belongs to Bob and is the title of one of his books.
I’ll be posting some thoughts and clips as the edit progresses. Then of course I hope to be posting news of screenings.
Here’s some early footage that I cut together for Wire magazine back in 2009 from a show Bob did at Beaconsfield gallery in London.
Here are a few things I wrote when I was editing a work-in-progress cut that was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London last May.
make your own damn art 