In talented
hands, comic relief provides timely pauses that intensify the effect
of almost any narrative. In untalented hands, this dramatic device is
frequently overused, swamping the story with glib silliness.
Unfortunately for visitors to the UCLA Hammer Museum, David Shrigley
falls into the latter category. A young British artist who lives in
Glasgow, Scotland, he shows himself to be a one-trick pony, a supercilious
prankster whose jokes aren’t all that funny. When filling two
galleries, more than 100 of his sculptures, drawings, collages and photographs
are tedious: too trite to be memorable but too much a symptom of the
art world institutions that support them to be ignored. On a low pedestal
in the center of the first gallery rests a Styrofoam brick on which
Shrigley has written, “We place too much importance in objects.
Objects really aren’t very interesting. Personally, I prefer sounds
(and also smells).” He means it, sort of, but not really.
Thirtyfive years ago, Conceptual art broke new ground by arguing that
the ideas a work generates are more important than the objects that
get such processes started. Shrigley’s lightweight brick doesn’t
pretend to break anything (not even a comic-strip window, through which
such message-laden projectiles are often hurled). Instead, it merely
makes fun of museum-goers who want something more from contemporary
art than a joke about deadend fifth-generation conceptualism.
His sculptural gag is meant to appeal to viewers who have been marching
through room after room of art they don’t care about. This experience
is common on the proliferating biennial circuit, where a clique of regulars
is regularly commissioned to make spectacular installations that are
as forgettable as they are bombastic. In such a setting, Shrigley’s
sculpture would provide some welcome comic relief. The problem is that
it’s installed among more than 100 other works that make the same
basic point. If his pieces could speak, the chorus would be, “The
outside world is infinitely more interesting than what’s here
in the gallery, but if we abandoned the security of the art world, the
guy who makes us wouldn’t get any attention.”
Several of Shrigleys photographs document his in-the-street pranks.
In one, a sheet of paper, posted on a tree in a city park, informs passersby
that a pigeon has been lost: “Normal size. A Bit Mangy Looking.
Does Not Have a Name. Call 257-1964.” In another, a wooden sign
has been stuck in a lush grassy lawn. It states, “imagine the
green is red.” A third depicts an empty urban lot on which the
artist has placed a refrigerator size box. On the front of his make-believe
building he has cut a door and painted “Leisure Centre.”
This oversize snapshot is an ob-vious critique of modern society’s
refusal to give leisure its due. But as an artist, Shrigley doesn’t
take leisure seriously. Rather than cultivating his talents, refining
his facilities or clarifying his thinking, he acts as if he’s
too exhausted (or just too cool) to do anything more than crank out
slacker cliches.
At their best, his hamfisted drawings and scrawled texts give form to
an attitude of muddled detachment and self-satisfied alienation. His
lists, in which he alphabetizes an afternoon’s thoughts or keeps
score of the absurd relationships between workers and their tools, are
his most promising pieces. Otherwise, stick figures predominate, accompanied
by captions that describe a world in which bad things happen with such
regularity that you’d have to be a fool to hope for anything different.
Even when nothing takes place, blasé indifference washes over
everything. One crudely rendered landscape announces, “There is
nothing in the desert.” Another is labeled “Magnification
reveals nature to be boring.” It’s no accident that Shrigley’s
drawings resemble what junior high students scribble in their notebooks.
Both embrace a type of kneejerk nihilism that’s easier to forgive
in adolescents than in adults who get stuck in its shallow negativity.
In terms of technique, Shrigley’s collages and, acrylics are even
cruder than his drawings: They mimic the work of grade school students.
In terms of content, they deliver more of the same one-di-mensional
sentiments that fill his black-and-white works.
His well-made sculptures, which include a realistic walnut the size
of a bowling ball, a big bent nail stuck in the wall and a huge leaf
of lettuce covered with cigarette burns, add some production value to
the installation. But Shrigley’s attempt to translate his cartoon
vision into three dimensions comes off as cutesy. His sculptures have
the presence of props from insufficiently developed dramas.
Organized by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson,
New York, Shrigley’s U.S. debut betrays the conservatism at the
heart of his art. Although his down-and-out works pretend to stand apart
from the art world’s institutional support structure, they are
designed to fit right into its normal operations, making a joke or two
without changing anything.
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