David Shrigley’s
sculpture and drawings, like Thomas Pynchon’s early fiction or
the illustrations to some contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress’,
describe an arcane and dangerous world in which the smallest of inci-dents
present moral crises and the best intentions of sanity or innocence
are challenged by the forces of evil. With the acuity of a moral philoso-pher,
Shrigley externalises the doubts and fears of the human condition in
comic scenes and objects, the sincerity of which is reinforced by the
seemingly painful amateurism of their author’s style.
Unlike the professionalism and apparent erudition of much contemporary
art, Shrigley’s dominant aesthetic is the crude vernacular of
graffiti, doggerel doodles and vandalism. The humour in his work conceals
a vision of humanity, which is derived from religious allegory and the
deep absurdities which accompany notions of moral edification or social
conditioning. To say that Shrigley is a religious artist would not be
strictly true, but to suggest that the comedy within his work is a comment
upon the workings of religion does much to distinguish him from satirical
cartoonists such as Gary Larson or his precursor Kiblan, with whom he
could be compared. These are the desperate notes, projects and observations
of an untrained outsider whose conflict with moral legislation lends
a kind of semi-formed authority to his pronouncements. Like a person
who sends officious or incomprehensible letters to the editor of a local
newspaper, expecting engagement or dialogue on their own terms, Shrigley’s
drawings exist in the singular world of their own sealed vision.
Shrigley studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art, having
taken his Foundation year at Leicester, collecting materials for his
sculptures in a small pizza delivery van. The course at Glasgow had
an emphasis on community outreach projects and civic sculpture, but
it was the urban context that informed Shrigley’s work more than
its subject or audience. His unlocked studio, situated near a struggling
Job Club, was often raided by vandals who amused themselves by making
additions to his paintings. Acknowledging the comedy within the discrepancy
between the miscreants’ anti-art attitude and the claims of fine
art to instruct or enlighten, he developed a graphic style in which
the banal or the absurd could be used to make statements about the capriciousness
of fate, producing anecdotal drawings and sculptures in which the punch
lines described the irony of moralising in situations which made no
moral sense.
There is a dialogue between Shrigley’s drawings and his sculpture
in which the notion of reconsidering banal, daily situations and objects
as tests of our moral sense is sustained. In a piece entitled Charity
(1994), Shrigley took an archaic charity box in the form of a crippled
child and gave it an extra head, matching pathos with absurdity and
questioning the nature of casual good deeds. In The Contents of the
Gap Between the Refrigerator and the Cooker (1995) he extended Rachel
Whiteread’s concretisation of negative space in domestic interiors
by making a small isthmus of brightly coloured, cartoon-like creatures
and objects modeled out of ‘Fimo’ clay. The result is a
mesmeric loaf of stratified, fantastic detritus, the tiny elements of
which blink up at the viewer with round, complacent eyes. This piece
extends the old comedy routines of decaying items in shared fridges,
and reinforces Shrigley’s interest in describing the evidence
of what Shakespeare called ‘deeds that hath no name’ —
the abandoned scenes of seemingly illogical events.
Shrigley’s books, Merry Eczema (1992), Blanket of Filth (1994)
and Enquire Within (1995), trace a gradual move away from traditional
cartooning and a honing of style towards narrative sequences and confessional
fragments. The landscape of the later drawings is the towns and provincial
cities of Britain, weighed down by the apparatus of retail culture and
democratic consumerism, and filled with the nervous energy and boredom
of high streets, precincts and sinister suburbs. Superficially, there
is a similarity between Shrigley’s vision of Britain and that
described by Viz comic’s ubiquitous town of Fulchester, but where
Fuichester is the cleverly observed venue for various comedies of recognition,
Shrigley’s annotated maps and empty horizons are a mixture of
abstraction and emblems, articulating modern life by the reduction of
a community to a series of quasi-journalistic ciphers. In Burn Out (1995),
we read: ‘Experimental rock music came and went. Girlfriends picked
up their clothes and left. There was no milk and no bread. I noticed
people coughing and vomiting by the bins. The pox had come to town and
it was having a good time. We all took a bus to the centre of town,
bought some petrol and burned down the hotel, the hospital and the orphanage.
Nothing is or ever was sacred.’ This is the Britain of small town
riots and local atrocities; it is a realistic description of the social
and moral collapse often reported as ‘senseless’, confounding
mediation and some how rendered mute by its very familiarity.
Many of Shrigley’s drawings and sculptures are concerned with
the unreported tragedies of everyday life, or with the confines of daily
routine which breed a kind of autism. Time and again Shrigley will conclude
his pieces with a pessimism, which must be taken as thinly-coded despair:
‘They eventually found him hanging beneath the bridge.’
(Small Town Blues, 1995); ‘Failure to complete what one has started’
(Failure, 1995); ‘The hopes and dreams of worthless losers’
(Things in Bits, 1995). And yet there is a morbid fascination in following
the narrative logic of Shrigley’s drawings, partly because the
despair is delivered with unique comedy, and partly because the blatancy
of his tragic pronouncements is wholly recognisable as an articulation
of our darkest moods or fears. Shrigley’s notion of the brute
indifference of fate towards the frailty of lives and communities provides
a paradoxical frisson of pleasure when it is described with neither
saving clauses nor intellectual qualification: we seem to experience
the enjoyment of having our worst fears justified.
The Devil makes several appearances in Shrigley’s drawings, usually
causing pain and disruption for his own casual amusement, but his pres-ence
is always suggestive of the reduction of life to a constant battle between
good and evil. The final drawing in Enquire Within, Result, shows Good
versus Evil as a football match, with a nil-nil draw but Evil winning
5-4 on penalties after extra time. Shrigley’s art, alternately
despairing and hilarious, reveals the evidence of failed endeavours
as the ultimate proof that we live in a hostile world because of the
varying degrees of laziness and evil within ourselves and within the
doctrines of organised religion. This does not necessarily mean that
there is no chance of redemption, and Shrigley’s comedy appears
to confirm the belief of great humourists (from Laurence Sterne to Woody
Allen) that laughter is synonymous with hope. In the arena of contemporary
art, Shrigley’s work maintains a dualism, which is rare, rewarding
and ultimately generous.
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