DAVID SHRIGLEY: 'SEE ALL THIS AND MORE', DUNDEE CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Tamsin Clark, 2006 |
An advert for 'Moustache Awareness Day'; an announcement for a 'Mundane Exhibition'; an Australian themed party in which the guests peep out of a giant Kangaroo's pouch; these are some colourful moments in a poster piece covering a wall at the entrance to David Shrigley's exhibition. The spirit of this handcrafted billboard is as much church fete as contemporary art show; the posters were designed for free in response to an invitation on Shrigley's website. Shrigley's drawings, childlike in style yet often macabre, absurd and humorous in content, are commonly found in the format of small books, postcards and a weekly cartoon in The Guardian supplement. Within a gallery situation, the intimacy offered by book or newspaper is stripped away to let the cartoonist collide with the artist. Here posters, sculpture, painting and photography are shown with two short animated films. The space is interrupted by a meandering path of curiosities: a cat basket bursting at the seams with oozing yellow foam, an absurdly large bronze walnut, a headless black taxidermy cat. The combined effect of sculpture, text, cartoon, and an animation of disco-dancing circles and squares, breaks down the scale of this usually overbearing space, making it more user-friendly. While Shrigley's drawings typically appear in blotchy black and white, here splashes of colour in sculpture and painting soften the dark humour. A giant yellow and red tube of glue satisfyingly bulges from one wall, bearing the phrase 'Adhesive: Stronger than which it sticks'; a playful reminder that art is just 'stuff'. A rare photography series also demonstrates the versatility of Shrigley's practice; each photograph is paired with a simple caption: 'Fork', 'Some People', 'The Hill', 'A Blur'. While such labels take the tone of a bored school report, the simplicity of the images themselves resonate with unexpected beauty. In honest banality, a fork can just be a fork; a quiet moment can be captured and sustained amongst the cartoon frivolity. Where Fischli and Weiss display clay loaves of bread and strings of salami, in their current Tate Modern show, Shrigley gives even more attention to a piece of Black Forest Gateau fashioned from painted wood. This piece appears in the isolation of a dimly lit room, spotlit and absurdly elevated on a column. Can a wooden cake be art? Why does contemporary art have so little space for celebration? The question of making seems fundamental to Shrigley's varied practice, an adhesive binding the obscure and imaginary to the commonplace. Shrigley's 'weird and wonderful world', is more complex and elusive than the light tone might lead us to expect. The exhibition poster, bearing the title 'See All This and More' in block capitals, reminiscent of a fairground attraction or theatrical debut, entices by appearing to offer everything while essentially giving nothing away. Where Tracy Emin's similarly faux-naif drawings allow their author to indulge in a cathartic autobiography, Shrigley's presence in his work is furtive at best. 'Who is he that did this and is he still here?' reads one text, alongside a painting bearing the words 'I am a Vacant Lot'. An interview with the artist, accompanying the show, is humorous in its guarded statement of the obvious: 'My name is David Shrigley, I am an artist exhibiting at Dundee Contemporary Arts.' It is as if the role of the artist, always questionable, must be continually re-invented with each drawing; an animated character, Pete, wants to be 'flat' or 'water-soluble'; a line may as easily turn into a butterfly or a hangman. This glimpse into David Shrigley's world can be enjoyed on many levels. We can take it as lightly or literally as we choose. Philosophy is offered, if we want it: a single letter 'Y' yawns out of a yellow canvas, an existential question or just a wonderful yellow. Here is an artist who is challenged by the gallery space and who transfers the challenge to us in a series of surprises and disruptions, like the headless cat which both repels and attracts. There are moments of melancholy such as the photographed fork, or an ungainly vase on an impossibly high shelf. Continually questioning its own status, the show might as easily have been titled, "See All This And Less". A joke is an ephemeral thing, easily forgotten, but Shrigley's show is a good joke that you tell again and again, a spark for the imagination. |