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introduct
by Will Self
The most fundamental
- and the most difficult - task for the creative artist is to get
the audience to suspend disbelief. David Shrigley doesn't even try
to do this; rather his work are enactment of the ground of the impossibility
of our own suspension of disbelief; and the Icarus-like trajectory
which we describe when we try to elude its surely surfeit gravity
Shrigley is thus,
paradoxically, an artist who achieves that rarest of phenomena:
the capacity to make his audience view the world in his terms entirely.
After looking at five of these drawings you begin to find the world
vaguely 'Shrigleysque' (relationships are reduced to their component
banalities, bodies to less than the sum of their parts), after looking
at twenty of them you begin to find the world frighteningly Shrigley-like
(the crises in literature become a crises in orthography and spelling,
the death of affect is a result of spindly and smudged genitals),
and after looking at over a hundred there is no plane of reality
other than described by Shrigley: giant cantankerous dogs roam the
land refusing to let you use their deodorant sticks.
In Shrigley's world
view the capacity for line to express anything is imperilled, on
the one hand by naïve glossing and on the other by matt betrayal.
The Shrigley world is post-lapsarian masquerading as pre lapsarian:
these are humorous drawings done by the child murderers of child
murderers. It's no accident - I feel - that some of Shrigley's more
sexual depictions bear an uncanny resemblance to the drawings Dennis
Nilsen, the serial killer, did of his victims. Shrigley is showing
that all of artistic conception is, in a very important sense, mis-conception;
and that the misconception is implicit in the alleged antinomies:
naïve/sophisticated; whole/part; framed/unconstrained;to/scale;
in/perspective; naturalism/fantasy. Shrigley works to disrupt these
by upsetting the formal properties of his drawings, muddying borders,
frames, and even the ontological basis of depiction itself.
To call Shrigley's
drawing style anything in particular would be a mistake. despite
the apparent objectifications they deal with, these are not, in
fact, drawings of things at all; rather, they are drawings of the
shapes that things, people, ideas and emotions make in our lives.
I'm not even sure that it would be altogether accurate to call these
works drawings at all.
J. G. Ballard once
described the conceptual sculptor Damien Hirst as 'a novelist who
writes very short books', but this wouldn't grasp what Shrigley
is up to. Nor is he a cartoonist except in this particular sense:
the very best of a cartoonist achieve both a reductio ad absurdem
- ideas and captions internally undermining one another; and a reductio
ad infinitem - captions and ideas reflect each other in an endless
hall of reflexivity. Their cartoons, on this analysis, become closer
to ideogrammatic forms of written language, such as Chinese characters.
I think this perhaps captures Shrigley's work to some extent. Indeed
in some bizarre future one could imagine a vast keyboard and on
each key a Shrigley image, all ready for one to type out Shrigleyish.
There's that, and
there's the fact that this artist takes on everything: memory and
forgetting, love and hate, murder and perversion, god and godlessness.
Shrigley's quality of line is such as to - in and of itself the
universal in particular and awful reversal.
I'm convinced that
he is a very great nam. Even though I have no idea what a nam is.
First published in
"Why we got the sack from the museum" Published by Redstone Press,
London, 1998 ISBN 1 870003 77 2
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