Rory Macbeth

Rory Macbeth’s work is very ambitious and extremely original artist, and this sort of work I’d never really appreciated before this lecture. Despite my lack of concentration, if I feel interested by something or someone it will have my full attention, and this is what Rory did. I found his lecture captivating and extremely interesting. I also really enjoyed hearing about his art journey and how he used to do street art for 12 years! People used to throw money at him. He said he has a lot of fun, and despite the fact he spent ages copying classical paintings his practise now is pretty much everything but painting. This to me just descries Rory as a person, he’s very random and full of bonkers ideas that can be so simple yet so affective. For example doing text all over the walls inside and outside of the building, it just makes you think how has he done that and how long has it taken him to do it?

Rory also explained that there are indeed times that are difficult to make work, but instead he has looked at how it would improve his work. I love his strive and the way he speaks about his work, I found him extremely inspiring! Because of his whacky, weird ideas, this inspired me for the ‘Failure’ and ‘Success’ project. I decided to take a picture of some litter which i believe to be a failure in this world, but to turn that into a success I put it in a gold frame and priced it as £1.2million. It was such a stupid idea but it works! He has definitely enforced the idea that anything is art, and no one can tell you otherwise.

Some bizarre pieces of art he’s created are things such as performance, where he wondered about being a tour guide lying about all the history of the artwork, this is just such a funny, smart idea that worked! He also rearranged the bible in alphabetical order. A lot of his work seems like it would take him a long time, as basic as the idea sounds. I remember him mentioning that he didn’t have time to create art so instead he worked on the train commute everyday and took him I think 8 years to create this book of him translating what he thought the foreign language meant in English. Overall I found his lecture captivating ad exciting and he managed to keep my attention throughout the whole presentation. I like the fact his thinking is outside the box and this has definitely inspired me to think in a different way ad experiment with different, whacky ideas.