Robert Montgomery (born 7th of July 1972) is a Scottish-born, London-based poet, artist and sculptor known for his site-specific installations created from light and text, as well as his 'fire poems'. Montgomery works in a "melancholic post-Situationist" tradition, primarily in public spaces. He is regarded as a leading figure in the conceptual art world.
Some of his most famous public forms of poetry have involved white text on a black background pasted onto billboards or bus shelters around London, showing his belief that art and poetry should be taken out of the gallery and into the wider, everyday world. When asked by Dr. James Fox in BBC Four's Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art? about what it was about the medium of words, rather than pictures, that appealed to him, Montgomery replied "I think there's a certain slowness to words. I think we probably live in an age of accelerated image and we're bombarded with hundreds of images a day and in that context words can be a moment of quiet or pause."
Montgomery also said, "The point of art, is to touch the hearts of strangers, without the trouble of ever having to meet them. But, if you can touch their hearts from a distance and help a little bit from your quiet studio then it's very nice."
Early career and education
Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in the village of Chapelhall, Scotland, to David and Janette Montgomery.
Alongside his parents, Montgomery credits his secondary school art teacher John McKerrell for his interest in art. In an interview he said that "John McKerrell was a proper Dead Poets Society inspiring, amazing teacher who is kind of a genius...he taught me about art from top to bottom. He comes to my parents' house for Christmas dinner. He's still my best mate in Prestwick."
Another teacher was Enoch Currie, who introduced him to poets such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Montgomery recalls reading Philip Larkin's High Windows "when I was in third year and I still think a lot about the way Larkin writes when I write my billboards and text pieces."
Aged 16, Montgomery was accepted to study fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art.
Montgomery left with a first undergraduate degree in painting and later obtained a Master of Fine Arts. While still students he and John Ayscough applied for a grant from the Scottish Arts Council for their project, Aerial '94. They were awarded £40,000, but the grant was not intended for students, and was nearly withdrawn. Andrew Nairne (then Visual Director at the Scottish Arts Council) supported the aspiring artists, and as a result the project went forward with the help of the grant.
From 1995 to 1997, Montgomery was the Core Program Artist in Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston Texas.
In his early career, Montgomery experimented with creating minimalist sculptures with elaborate poetic titles. Eventually, Montgomery dropped the sculptures all together and began to focus on the combination of verbal and visual presentation. In his initial works, Montgomery wrote poems on the sides of buses and on walls with spray paint, wanting to follow closely in the footsteps of graffiti artists who made the city a "free space of diverse voices."
In 1999, Montgomery moved to London, where he wrote for the magazine Dazed & Confused.
Work
Often installed unauthorised amid industrial and urban sites, Montgomery's installations address themes such as power, love, and human kindness with sparse language and dramatic visuals. These text-based conceptual pieces categorised as recycled sunlight pieces, billboard pieces, fire poems, woodcut panels, and watercolors. Montgomery's cryptic and emotionally resonant poetry comments on contemporary life and affirms his personal and philosophical beliefs, which he describes as "melancholic post-Situationist", a 20th-century antiauthoritarian Marxist movement.
Montgomery's black and white poems pasted on London billboards have, occasionally, provoked run-ins with the police. He was once put into the back of a police van after he pasted his poem for William Blake on a billboard in Bethnal Green. Montgomery recalled; "But I got into a conversation about literature and one of the police officers really engaged with it. I guess it was a lucky experience. I think most people wouldn't be averse to having a poem at the end of street instead of another Diet Coke ad."