“Drink
Me,” reads the hand-written label ‘on the bottle. The contents,
a dark yellow liquid with a suspicious foamy scum floating on top, might
be Tizer or Irn-Bru, but it is just as likely a meths-drinker’s
pee or a concoction of banned fertilisers and weed-killer. The bottle
stands on a step in an unkempt garden just imag-ine if some latter-day
untutored Alice found it and followed the instructions. I don’t
even want to think about it.
Who left it there, and why? Drink Me has been preserved for posterity,
or for the forensic boys, as a photo-graph. Perhaps the bottle was left
on the step by the same man the hand-written notice on the lamp-post
warns us about. This too is recorded in a photograph. The notice reads:
“While you are reading this, there is a man in lone of the windows
high above you who is taking your photograph. He will then make a wee
model of you and put it with other wee models of other people. Then,
he play’s weird games with them.
David Shrigley plays weird games. Both Drink Me and the note on the
lamp-post are records of his peculiar activities. Sometimes Shrigley’s
draw-ings and photographs make you want to burst out laughing but just
as often you want to burst into tears. Here’s a badly-drawn man
crawling along the ground. The caption reads: “Your suf-fering
will be eased by’ viewing this image of another’s suffering.”
Why didn’t Francis Bacon stick captions like this on his work
instead of witter-ing on about flesh and existential hor-ror. The point
is much the same.
Shrigley’s photographs and draw-ings, his diagrams and statements
are gruesome, abject, ridiculous and daft. They make you conjure up
a madman, at large in your brain. This personage, with his crappy penmanship
and dys-functional mindset, is Shrigley’s great-est invention.
I’m not entirely convinced (of the name Shrigley either. It looks
like a misprint.
But hang on — Shrigley says he’s an artist, and here I am
guffawing over his latest work in a leading up— market art gallery,
lie has an impres-sive international CV. Is this the world in which
Shrigley belongs?
In some respects, Shrigley is the nineties equivalent of Glen Baxter,
whose pastiche of Boy’s Own Paper and old Punch—style cartoons,
with their ambiguous, disjunctive captions (“they were just able
to make out the lonely figure of the chiropodist”) enlivened many
an hour in the lava-tory in the 1970s.
Shrigley”s books, like the recent ‘Why We Got The Sack From
The Museum’ are also destined to make the journey from the book-case
to the pile of light reading in the loo. But perhaps that was also the
short-term destiny of the political cartoons of Gilray and Rowlandson,
ending up on the floor of the coffee-shop water closet. Now we see them
as high art.
Humour in art is always trick, and actual jokes very problematic. Would
you want to hang a gag on the wall, and look at it every single day’?
And yet, artists like Richard Prince or Ed Ruscha have managed to remain
compelling even though their work often involves the use of dead-on--arrival
jokes.
The interesting thing about Shrigley’s work is not whether or
not it is art. In fact, when he actively tries to make “art”
in the form of his sculp-tures, his work is less interesting. H is editioned
sculptures - a painted polyester and fibreglass blue hand-bag, or a
hand-sewn painted-cloth cabbage leaf, replete with cigarette burns,
are a bit laboured; their craft-edness kills them. Paradoxically~ these
are Shrigley’s “well-made” things, objects that display’
indisputable technical talents.
Jake and Dinos Chapman have, once again, taken Goya’s Disasters
Of War suite of etchings as a starting point, in their debut show at
the White Cube. Instead of turning Goya’s terri-ble and terrifying
record of the Napoleonic adventure in Spain into a diorama of little
figures or a huge poly—chrome sculpture, they’ve made their
own suite of 83 etchings.
Produced in a little over a month, the Chapman’s etchings are
excellent examples of the etcher’s craft, using drypoint, aquatint,
soft ground, hard ground, foul biting and all those other arcane techniques
print-bores love to slaver over, missing the point that most contemporary
print-making is just a way’ of printing money.
Actually, the Chapman’s etchings are more complex, technically,
than Goya’s own 83 plates, and one set has been meticulously hand
coloured. Instead of “Drink Me”, their etchings have “Buy
Me” written all over them.
Some plates rework Goya’s original images, or fragments of them
– Great Deeds Against The Dead, with its mutilated, chopped—up
bodies tied to a tree, has been overdrawn with a seated swastika. Goya’s
Tampoco hanged man, has been reversed and turned into a hanged Nazi
observed by a grinning idiot.
There are (Goya-esque piles of body parts, Goya swooping birds and Goya-like
blackness, but most of the prints depict images far from anything Goya
might have imagined. And never for-get that Goya titled two prints Yo
Lo Vi (I Saw It) and Y Esto Tambien (And This To). Goya witnessed the
horrors of the Peninsula War. The Chapman’s have seen the horrors
of the world only through the eyes of television and newspaper photographs.
Their contemporary monstrosities include a fanciful Testicle Mite, a
beautiful depiction of female pubic hair, various grotesque and highly
comical views of anal sphincters, a Wols-like foetal monster, atomic
explosions and various illustrations straight out of the Antonin Artaud
Pop—Up Antholoy and the George Bataille primer.
While some of the Chapman’s prints are highly’ charged,
and others funny, in an adolescent kind of way, one or two are very
beautiful. One very dark image with a kind of eye embedded in an aquatint
gloom is particularly good, and they’ve copied from Goya well
enough; but there’s a difference between studious copying and
going beyond Goya — some-thing clearly beyond the Chapmans and
indeed any living artist I can think of.
There are plenty of jokes in Goya too, especially in his other best-known
suite of etchings, the Dis-parates, his takes on Spanish proverbs. But
Goya has something profound and dark which is entirely missing here
and almost everywhere in contemporary art. What we have instead is the
overblown, the mad, the trivial and the hysterical. This is what David
Shrigley puts his finger on in the best (or worst) of his styl-ishly
naff drawings and photo-records. The Chapmans on the other hand, deliberately
or not, show us how hollow our images are, and how limited their capacity
to move us.
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