Essay
by John Slyce |
David
Shrigley’s art exists on and incorporates the margins of worlds
at once arcane and everyday. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art, he studied
on a non-media based programme with a focus on public projects and the
role of context in the making and positioning of art. To follow a concern
for audience end access is evident in his practice. This is not to say
that the meanings and messages in his work are transparent A complex mixture
of absurdist humour and amateur strategies serve as a conduit—and
on occasion, a shroud—for the gentle wisdom contained in his art. At times, it can seem Shrigley aims to be an amateur with all the determination of a professional. His aesthetic is both domestic and urban. Telephone doodles stand alongside the wonder of everyday objects and the vernaculars of vandalism and graffiti in the community. His production is spread across sculpture, public works documented in photos, photo-drawings, texts and what are more conventionally recognised as drawings. Irrespective of the shape of the output, Shrigley relates to the core of his practice as drawing. Equally, each activity is the product of an intervention in an environment: be it a vacant lot, the gallery, a newspaper, or one of his own works on paper. Shrigley is most closely identified with his drawings in black ink. These works engage in the act of representing not so much things as the twisted shape and distorted scale fears, hopes, sufferings, and stupid preoccupations take in our damaged, yet resolute psyches. The sources of his art are observational and experiential. At the same time, there is an on-going, if somewhat submerged, act of self-portraiture in much of the work. THE RAIN follows a familiar exchange between an inquisitive child and an adult taxed for answers. At crucial points, the tone of the child slips into that of an adult, while the adult adopts that of a child. This slippage rises to the violent retorts of confused equals only to culminate in a complete reversal of roles. Text, invariably in block capitals, is the most contrived aspect of drawings that emerge from layers of intervention which cover their arbitrary beginnings. As signs, his drawings retain the marks of their making with a deliberate indifference: spelling mistakes and crossings-out serve as their construction lines. IMAGINE DIFFERENT WAYS OF EXPRESSING THIS IDEA is a model of Shrigley's resourceful methods of using images to relate to ideas and construct a cosmology. Recently, colour has injected itself into a series of haphazardly beautiful images; three aliens share a packet of fags in the acrylic recesses of a cave, or sheets of rain assert forces of nature in a landscape a buttressed dam cannot contain. Faux-naive is a term often employed in writing on Shrigley's work. But this wrongly suggests that he pretends to be something other than he is. With or without text, his art invites the viewer to enter into a game of charades not without moral or political implications. Like our world, the outcome of which is still unwritten. David Shrigley feels he gets his best work done when he tells himself he’s not working, but just killing time with a little experiment to amuse himself, maybe while he waits for the immersion to heat up the water for a bath. These acts of self-deception allow him to amass a prolific amount of work under the guise of displacement activity. Shrigley’s rare talents offer us the ability to slip, lubricated by laughter, between states of innocence and experience, and thus, not only help get us through, but better appreciate our own everyday displacements.
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