DAVID SHRIGLEY (ENG)

There is a point in Valle-Inclán’s play Bohemian Lights when the author speaks through the mouth of his protagonist, Max Estrella: ‘Classical heroes reflected in those concave mirrors manifest Esperpento. The tragic sense of life can occur only with a systematically deformed aesthetics.’

The drawings of David Shrigley touch on the dark side of everyday existence. They are direct, they make no concessions and depict the more absurd aspects of our society. For Shrigley, ‘humour is only the sugar with which the message is coated to make it sweeter’. With an absolutely personal, low-tech do-it-yourself aesthetic, Shrigley uses a wide range of formats—drawings, animations, sculptures, posters, installations, websites, photographs, multiples, postcards, record covers, books and T-shirts—to make his work more accessible. An artist, musician and filmmaker, Shrigley uses text—complete with crossings-out—to enrich the meaning to his drawings.

The universe Shrigley (a good introduction to which is his website, http://www.davidshrigley.com) is governed by an almost infantile cruelty and a fascination with things quite unrelated to the adult world with its rigid regard for norms and conventions. Dirt, fluids, animals, insects, monsters and completely asocial characters abound in his work. As Katrina M. Brown remarks in a catalogue text on the artist: ‘Though there is an undeniable humour in Shrigley’s work, it is not light, bright and witty but markedly sinister, with an inclination toward what is inferior in life.’ Insects, fluids, dirt, hidden things are brought into the foreground, like the curled-up bug-eyed creatures in his sculpture The Contents of the Gap between the Refrigerator and the Cooker—or to put it another way, all the germs, creepy-crawlies, grime, scraps of food and other imaginable and unimaginable items that accumulate in unswept, unthought-of spaces over the years. All of them are products of our fantasies, or our nightmares, and conjure up a world far removed from norms and conventions, where control and appearances mean nothing.

The protagonists of Shrigley’s works tend to be strange characters: sociopaths, at once vicious and lovable, they experience situations that reveal strange logics, in which fear, phobias, love, cruelty and tenderness are constant presences. This is true of Pete, for example, the unbalanced protagonist of the animation Who I Am and What I Want, made with Chris Shepherd. Pete talks about his life, his desires and his dreams. He tells the story of a life of excess that has led him to turn away from the ferocious competitiveness of the city and take refuge in the woods, where he lives with animals. The strange becomes commonplace, the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary.

There is a tender and subtle David Shrigley, the Shrigley who can take a photograph of a balloon with a smiley face in the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed. But there is also a more acid and bitter Shrigley, the Shrigley who offers us a decapitated stuffed cat, a stuffed squirrel holding its head in its hands as if it were a nut, or a tooth riddled with cavities in front of a mirror (What Decay Looks Like).

The two works that David Shrigley is presenting at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica are not typical instances of the language usually associates with this artist. In neither the animation Sleep nor the installation Insects is humour the most apparent feature. This time round Shrigley has chosen to dispense with the sugar that would make the message sweeter. Sleep has no clear beginning or end. For the whole of its eight minutes, the action of the animation is reduced to a man (not too physically attractive) sprawled on a bed, sleeping, breathing deeply, sometimes moving his hands a little, shifting the position of his head, his facial expression changing with his dreams. Perhaps his dreams are taking place in a strange univers, the one we find in the installation at the second floor, with armies of very homemade-looking insects and other elements whose metal bodies come in a thousand different shapes.

Again, then, sleep and insects, outside of the rules, outside of control and conventions, moving in a territory beyond consciousness, in the realm of the latent, the secret, an asocial area rife with all manner of fears, doubts and anxieties. They are reflected and reflect us in concave mirrors that hold up to our eyes tremendously human traits.

Montse Badia
September 2008