Completed 'Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs'

'Risk Assessment 6:  Fill Your Lungs', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 60 cm X 45 cm, 2013

Here’s the latest of my paper-based ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces, completed earlier this week.  It’s No.6 in this occasional series, begun at the start of the year, and utilises the same general format, hazard ‘candy stripe’ motifs and grungy text elements as the previous five.  As before, the text implies a potential hazard to life or wellbeing with the unwritten preamble, ‘They Will…’

I’ve already alluded to the way these visual outbursts tend to reflect my anger or frustration at human behaviour and the machinations of the powerful, as relayed to us via the news media.  Mostly, I suppose, they are a protest against the sense of powerlessness many of us habitually feel, and an attempt at some form of catharsis.  I’m sure it hardly needs spelling out that ‘Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs’ is another response to the routine atrocities being acted out in Syria of late.

Certainly, the ‘Risk Assessments’ are far more direct than anything else I do at the moment and pictorially, little more than simple carriers for text.  In that respect, I suppose they look toward the more polemical intent of an artist like Bob & Roberta Smith in his sign painting mode.  I wouldn’t want everything I do to be this politically, satirically or sociologically engaged but sometimes it is a relief to just get things off my chest, (and out of my head).  

The other thing about them is that, (by my standards), they are generally produced quite quickly.  In a frustrating year, when my artistic progress has been steady but a bit ponderous, it feels good to have just rattled out a couple of these in fairly short order.

Completed 'Risk Assessment 5' / Masters Of War

'Risk Assessment 5: Bomb Your Town', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper,
60 cm X 45 cm,  2013.

Honestly, they never cease to amaze me.  In the three weeks since I completed my recent ‘Cave Wall' paintings, our own vainglorious leaders nearly plunged us into yet another war and the twisted games of psychotic geopolitical brinkmanship, centred on The Middle East, carry on apace.  Do these maniacs never get bored of all this murderous nonsense?  Depressingly, it all just seems to justify George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a state of perpetual foreign war maintaining the position of those in power at home [1.].

It seemed an obvious time to return to my paper-based ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces.  This occasional series forms a separate stream from the ongoing ‘Belgrave Gate Project’, on which I’ve largely focused of late.  Their texts tend to be more direct, fairly rapidly produced, and mostly an expression of the frustration and anger that generally overtake me whenever I listen to the radio news.  Like those that preceded it, it reflects my attraction to Health & Safety graphics and includes a text implying an existential hazard to which anyone might be subjected and that actually would benefit from a risk assessment.  Of course, they never do, despite the plethora of H&S legislation applied to almost every other aspect of modern life.  The implication is that each sentence might begin ‘They Will…’, with ‘They’ remaining undefined.

I think 'Risk Assessment 5: Bomb Your Town', speaks for itself but, just in case there’s any confusion, here’s a list of those for whom I have zero respect just now:

• Psychopaths who use chemical weapons of any sort, (including Sarin, Napalm and White Phosphorus).

• Sickos who think it’s OK to drop incendiary devices on schools.

• Hypocritical, self appointed, ‘global policemen’ who think the appropriate response to a war atrocity is to add their own bombs and missiles to an existing UNHOLY mess.

• Fanatical religionists who gleefully exploit regional conflict to pursue their own twisted sectarian agendas. 

• ‘Free World Democrats’ who bemoan foreign conflicts whilst relying on them to sustain the arms industry on which their own Capitalist economies rely.

• Morally vacuous politicians who indulge in war-mongering to improve their electoral chances.

• Cowards who speak of ‘surgical strikes’ but shelter in safety far from the ‘theatre of war’.

• Simpletons who believe that wars have goodies and baddies, or that ‘We’ must always be the good guys and can act autonomously without serious analysis of a situation.

• The constructors of a weird hierarchy of horror in which chemical weapons are somehow less noble than terrifying ‘conventional weapons’ (or, indeed, nuclear arms), when, for the victims, the ultimate result is generally the same.

'Art Everywhere No. 47 (Bob & Roberta Smith, 'Make Art Not War'), Poster,  Nottingham,
September 2013.

Frankly, they can all go to Hell in a handcart.  It’s just a shame they always try to take the rest of us with them.

(…Just saying).

[1.]:  George Orwell, ‘1984’, London, Secker & Warburg, 1949.