| In my experience, telling a person that he isn’t fun doesn’t do too much damage to his ego. Although it is, of course, totally uncool to be un-fun, it’s not exactly the most pointed of insults. The feeling is vague, the critique general, and the whole thing begs the return, “Is that really the best you could come up with?” When British artist(s) Bob & Roberta Smith take to doling out insults, though, not being fun ranks as a condemnable flaw. In a series of ink on paper drawings, Bob & Roberta take to attacking a canon of 11 highly regarded modern and contemporary artists with caricatures and libelous slogans. | 
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Jill Steinhauer on Bob and Roberta Smith
Bob and Roberta Smith, Henry Moore, 2002; ink on paper.In my experience, telling a person that he isn’t fun doesn’t do too much damage to his ego. Although it is, of course, totally uncool to be un-fun, it’s not exactly the most pointed of insults. The feeling is vague, the critique general, and the whole thing begs the return, “Is that really the best you could come up with?”When British artist(s) Bob & Roberta Smith take to doling out insults, though, not being fun ranks as a condemnable flaw—along with being a scrubber, a misery, an old fart, or an asshole. In a series of ink on paper drawings, Bob & Roberta take to attacking a canon of 11 highly regarded modern and contemporary artists with caricatures and libelous slogans. (Going after Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Dan Graham, Paul McCarthy, and Picasso, in the order of the character defamations listed above.) Sometimes, Bob & Roberta hit the nail on the head (Picasso, as far as everything I’ve read, really was an asshole). Sometimes, the insults are just specific and just dark enough to turn amused laughter into a nervous chuckle (try “Valerie Solanas had the right idea”). Always, the drawings and accompanying lines of ad hominem critique make you wonder exactly what the Smiths are after.
At first glance, these exaggerated drawings and the texts that accompany them read like a systemic attack—a critique of the way the art world canonizes its figures and makes heroes of its artists. And in a certain sense, the attack is there. At the same time, it’s hard to take any critique seriously that bases itself around such tenets as, “L.S. Lowry is a tight fisted old git.” Ultimately, the absurdity of the works is a ridicule of the entire notion of self-important criticism as wholly as of their literal subjects.
This kind of situation, where the artists somehow manage to subvert their own intentions, fits in perfectly with Bob & Roberta Smith’s oeuvre. The Smiths work within a paradigm of paradox, always exerting a clear effort toward comic anarchy. In their 2002 Art Amnesty at Pierogi, Brooklyn, for instance, they called for artists to “GET A F***CKING PROPER JOB,” setting up a dumpster outside the gallery where artists could trash their work and handing out badges that read, “I AM NO LONGER AN ARTIST” for anyone who brought in some bad work and signed a pledge to no longer create art. The catch was, of course, that the exhibition was the Smiths’ work, and therefore a contradiction in itself.
In a sense, the Smiths’ work calls to mind the Dadaists, who made art even as they dismissed the idea of art itself. But if they are to be linked to the Dadaists, the Smiths must be recognized as a resolutely postmodern incarnation of the interwar movement. The earnestness with which the Dadaists labeled their art “anti-art” would never translate in a world as self-obsessed and self-conscious as today’s, and the Smiths know that. Accordingly, an acute self-awareness emanates from every nonsensical phrase and every hand-painted sign that the duo displays.
We follow the chain of contradictions in a sometimes maddeningly circular path, until we finally step back from the work and consider it more simply. Consider its basic existence. Is this perhaps where the Smiths are pointing us—toward the value of art’s existence, rather than its details? Maybe the point is just to make art, because if you genuinely want to, you should. Maybe the point is that we should be able to say anything and everything we want. Maybe the point is simply to laugh. Maybe the point is that there is no point.
