ART & IMAGE: INTERVIEW
Salvage Paradise: Robert Montgomery
Interventionist Art And Finding The Sacred In The Everyday
For over two decades the Scottish artist Robert Montgomery has forwarded a practice that has quietly inscribed itself into the public realm, drawing unsuspecting viewers into a space of quiet reflection. Placed in city squares, on building facades, and along riversides, his visual poems interrupt the habitual economy of looking and ask the casual passerby to pause, to notice the way light lays itself against stone and glass, and to find, within that pause, a private encounter.
The legendary John Berger taught us that seeing is never neutral; it is shaped by social relations and the histories we carry, and Montgomery’s interventions stage a meeting between language and environment that seem to underpin that assertion, providing an invitation to reverie in which the ordinary is rendered strange.
By choosing public spaces, and by working with illuminated poetry, Montgomery removes his work from the realm of the art market and returns it, briefly, to everyday life. The light of the work dissolves at dawn, or is switched off at midnight, and what remains is a trace of a moment in which the world’s given meanings were gently unsettled. The power of the work then lies not in spectacle but in the small, private recalibrations it occasions in its brief life. The text presented often points to loss or desire, and demands tenderness of thought, transforming urban and remote spaces with statements that invite profound reflection.
HIs often heartfelt messages such as THE PEOPLE WE LOVE BECOME GHOSTS INSIDE US AND IN THIS WAY WE KEEP THEM ALIVE straddle a paradox of melancholy and joy, deep-diving into a Jungian notion of collective consciousness, while inviting radical contemplation of temporality and one’s place in the world. In this candid interview with FUTURISTIC DRAGON, the outspoken artist discusses his creative drive and explains his desires weave the ‘ghost of poetry’ into the architecture of the city.
“If you look at what all the major religions are trying to get at, I think they are basically trying to communicate the fact that the whole of humanity has a shared soul”
Do you recall what first turned you on to art as a child?
I can remember that I really wanted to paint light when I was a teenager. I loved watercolour painting and I always wanted to paint the luminosity of the sky, and I suppose that's still what I wanted to paint, really. In a way, all the light pieces I create on beaches or in a mountain landscape are contemporary reworkings of a 19th century landscape paintings – once I had begun making the lightworks I realised they were in some way contemporary re-workings of seascapes or sunset paintings in the tradition of Turner or Caspar David Friedrich. I'm always innately thinking of how to make that kind of image and activate that sensation or feeling where the luminosity of the sky carries you off into the heavens, or transmits a sense of eternity. There is a sense of the transcendence of nature in those paintings by Friedrich, or the god in nature. I think that's why I put so many of my light poem works in those kinds of landscapes and make them look the way they look.
There is an undefined spirituality in the work, where does that stem from – what would you say are your core spiritual beliefs?
Well, I believe in universal freedom and kindness, really. I don't believe in nation states. I don't actually believe in any of the things that separate us – including the identities that supposedly separate us. I know this might sound like a rather idealistic thing to say, but I believe that human beings have one shared soul. If you look at what all the major religions are trying to get at, I think they are basically trying to communicate the fact that the whole of humanity has a shared soul, and that when we sit together in peace that soul the human soul glows and grows and becomes an incredibly powerful entity. I think that's what they're talking about when they speak about God. I believe it’s far more likely that we have one human soul than it is that there's a separate God outside of us, and discovering a sense of that is what's important to me in my work. It’s about discovering the magic in the mundane, and the sacred that lives in the everyday because we tend to forget that to be living on this blue-skied planet as it spins through space and hurtles into a fragile future is intensely thrilling and frightening and even slightly supernatural.
“It’s about discovering the magic in the mundane, and the sacred that lives in the everyday”
Have you always made work for the public realm?
Yes. I’ve been making work in the streets since I was young. Even if I I look way back to when I was a student at Edinburgh College of Art, in my post grad year I was making interventionist work in the streets of Edinburgh on billboards. And that is probably when I first realised I was interested in working anonymously, and having people encounter the work without knowing its art. I like the fact that people do not need an art history degree to read it, or be touched by it. One thing that has been wonderful for me is the amount of people who now have the work tattooed. I'm trying to engage the collective unconscious in public space and write about what it feels like on the inside to live in late-capitalism, so when it connects with people so deeply that is wonderful.
IS the activation of that sense of phenomenological wonder key to why you create these works?
I do think it is about trying to recover the sensation of realising how magically frightening it is to be alive. I think the purpose of art and writing is really to keep you awake to the phenomenal and to try to remind us all that the magic of the universe is here in the now – and that we live in an innately magical world. That's my mission to myself in the work that I make, and I’ve tried really hard to put my work in public situations for those people who can’t take their kids to museums on a Saturday because they've got far more pressing things to do. It’s about presenting the work in a way that's non-hierarchical, in the sense that the viewer doesn't have to go to the museum or to know it's art. They can just read it and take it for what it is. I want my work to communicate with people who are standing at bus stops on the street or walking through the city at night.
Introduction & Interview: John-Paul Pryor
Find out more about the artist here
Image Credits: Portrait of the artist by Phillip Volkers; Love is the Revolutionary Energy, light poem, 2022; When We Are Gone The Trees Will Riot, acrylic on canvas. 2019
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