'WHO IS HE WHO DID THIS? IS HE STILL HERE?'
By Katrina Brown, 2007
These questions offer us a useful channel into the world of David Shrigley, not just because they appear in one of his recent text drawings. For as well as seeking to identify the source (of some unknown action), they may also suggest some fear of an unhinged person on the loose and in the vicinity. They at least suggest a curiosity: both on the part of the speaker and the object of their enquiry. A not inappropriate scenario, for any consideration of Shrigley's work inevitably comes to an attempt to perceive and understand the imagination that brought it into being: to explain the unhinged, askew view of the world that it presents. And the work is full of personality: there is a distinct 'voice', from the turn of phrase in the texts that pepper his drawings and photographs, through the now instantly recognisable hand-writing to the child-like cruelty and fascination with things adults shouldn't be too keen on (dirt, animals, bodily fluids, monsters, insects, ...).
Throughout Shrigley's work there is also an inescapable wit. It is, however, not a light, bright wit, but a wit decidedly dark and drawn to the underside of life. Like the small goggle-eyed creatures who appear in his ' The Contents of the Gap between the Refrigerator and the Cooker' (1995), characters in his work tend to be figures of fantasy or perhaps more appropriately nightmare - but they always evoke an underworld that flouts social conventions and norms, that resists the usual controls and niceties, that comes about through some sort of oversight or lack of control. This is best and most extensively exemplified by Pete, the unhinged protagonist in his recent animated film made in collaboration with Chris Shepherd ' Who I Am and What I Want' (2005). Pete tells us about his life, his dreams and desires, painting a picture of how ' A life of excess has left him with no choice but to opt out of the rat race and live in the woods' . He is dysfunctional, abnormal, but in a bright and breezy way that makes him far from unlikable. In this and so many other works, Shrigley doesn't so much render visible the invisible or the familiar strange, transitions that are widespread in contemporary art practice, as force us to countenance the unsee-able, the things that may or can only happen beyond our view, where things slip in and out of the social and into the socio-pathic.
The idea of this membrane between public and private worlds is a vital strand in Shrigley's work. Much of which pinpoints moments when private whim slips into public ridicule, when the individual becomes the peculiar. There are, for example, a number of recent works that take the form of hand-painted signs and notices. Many of his photographic works feature interventions into the street, public parks - areas where the expressive, off-kilter individuality appears all the more startling and inappropriate. These include photographs that document small hand-made signs or objects placed in the landscape, a number of works made in the late 1990s, such as ' Drink Me' (1998), ' River for Sale' (1999), ' Black Snowman' (1996), ' One Day a Big Wind will come and ... ' (1998) and the ' Lost Pigeon' . ' Drink Me' offers the most explicit connection to the work of Lewis Carroll - specifically the moment when Alice finds a mysterious bottle bearing the same instruction during her adventures in Wonderland. Just like Alice, who worries that the bottle may contain poison, the viewer is no doubt suspicious of the offering and its unpleasant hue. In these works, the idea of his presence is again strong - the sense that he has just slipped out of the frame. ' The Vandal's Shadow ' (1999) explicitly plays with this - fixing the fugitive presence of someone spray-painting a roller-shutter.
The drawings for which he is undoubtedly best known are now published world -wide in diverse locations from small artist's books to national newspapers. While undeniably unique and distinctive, they nonetheless draw on (forgive the pun) a long literary tradition. They feature many an odd creature that would seem just as much at home in Edward Lear's nonsense verse and illustrations or in Lewis Carroll's imagination. While the nonsense verse of Lear, Carroll and, more recently, Spike Milligan are undoubted antecedents to his world-view, Shrigley transcends these in more ways than one, for his inventions go beyond the realm of the pleasing, humorous concoction to the troubling and provocative suggestion and, of course, often exist as objects.
' Animals v. Humans' reads one page in his book ' Drawings Done Whilst on Phone to Idiot' (1996) a tussle that seems to lie at the heart of much of his work ... with the animal(istic) tending to prevail over the human(e). Animals are the focus of much of his sculptural work - the headless cat, the squirrel holding its own head as if it were a tasty nut ready for munching - if only he had a (functional, i.e. attached) head ('Nutless', 2002). Then there's the series of pet carriers: various cages and baskets all of which have been filled with yellow expanding foam that spills out through the carriers' sides, as if a rampant, amorphous living organism had taken over both pet and its domain escaping. These are archetypal works, taking as their staring point a banal, functional object only to create a troubling, if humorous scenario that diverges from the norm.
In all his work, Shrigley seems to insist on giving place to the abnormal and plays to our fears of the dis-alike, the odd, the peculiar, the insane and irregular, the out-of-control.
So who is he who did this? Well, he's a big, tall Englishman with a great sense of humour and an odd but likable view of the world. A chronicler of the everyday with an eye for the absurd, the over-looked, the unspeakable and the small rather than the routine or the spectacular. Is he still here? I hope so.
