David Shrigley: humour, intelligence and moral conundrums

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Rosalind Ormiston is entertained by ‘David Shrigley: Brain Activity’ at London’s Hayward Gallery

If you, like many art lovers, are pounding the streets of London, racing from gallery to gallery, desperate to catch your time slot at the National Portrait Gallery for Lucien Freud, Turner at the National Gallery, and Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern, there is an easier way to view cerebral art and in a calmer location. ‘David Shrigley: Brain Activity’, at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank, is the perfect antidote to media-led blockbusters.

David Shrigley is perhaps best known for his distinctive cartoon drawings with handwritten texts, which reveal dry observations and dark humour. In this exhibition, curated by Dr Cliff Lausen, Shrigley shows 175 works dating from the early 1990s to 2012: sculpture, animated films and photography, cartoons, neon signs, music and a bit of taxidermy. Shrigley states that his inspiration comes from ‘art, music, literature, certain people, sunshine, coffee, etc.’ The list includes Philip Guston and René Magritte, Joseph Conrad, Eric Hobsbawm and Donald Barthelme amongst others. Here one can see the results in a diverse display of work. When was the last time an artist intentionally made you laugh?

From the moment one steps into the Hayward’s upper gallery (the lower gallery exhibits the work of the artist Jeremy Deller), Shrigley’s installations bring a laugh-out-loud quality to the works, the surface jokiness hiding deeper layers of pathos, indignation and moral codes. Shrigley says he has a passion for found objects such as shopping lists, hand-drawn maps, charity shop pocket finds. So, step forward into Shrigley’s brain activity to take a sideways look at everyday life with the artist as guide. A photographic series, created when Shrigley was still a student at Glasgow School of Art, reveals Lost, 1991, with handwritten notice stuck on a tree: ‘Lost: Grey + White Pidgeon with Black Bits. Normal Size. A Bit Mangy Looking. Does not Have a Name. Call 257 1964’. In the ‘headless’ group of animals is the decapitated Ostrich, 2009, a visual reference to a timeless cliché?

Shrigley comments that he creates moral conundrums: ‘It’s a matter of making fun of the things you could get depressed about’. In a room of objects relating to death, we find a taxidermied dog on its hind legs, the sign held in its front paws says ‘I’m Dead’ (I’m Dead, 2009). Shrigley says ‘when it comes to death I prefer to see the humorous side of it as you can’t change anything about it anyway’. The granite and gold leaf Gravestone, 2008, lists what might be written on his own headstone: ‘Bread, Milk, Cornflakes, Baked Beans, Tomatoes, Aspirin, and Biscuits’. Nearby, a display case with Bell, 2010, reveals a large brass hand bell, and includes a handwritten note, ’Not to be rung until Jesus returns’. The possible scenarios underlying those words are endless.

Shrigley began film animation in 2000, with commercial pop promos for the band Blur, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy created in 2004. Here, gallery space works include New Friends, 2006, which I watched more than once, Light Switch, 2007 – a nod to Martin Creed’s Turner Prize winning work No. 227: the lights going on and off – plus Sleep, 2008 and Shrigley’s latest animation Headless Drummer, 2012. What stands out here is the diversity of the works. Just when you think you have grasped Shrigley’s oeuvre, another piece changes that assumption. The designated area for Insects, 2007, displays steel sculptures of large and smaller insects, the many-legged creatures all created from Shrigley’s imagination. Some are sociable with each other; some prefer a solitary space. They assemble, daring the visitor to come closer; but there is no room here for human life; the insects are to be observed; and the line drawn on the floor not crossed.

These are just a few of the inspired works that David Shrigley has chosen to showcase at the Hayward; the exhibition reveals much about the artist’s capacity to capture modern life in contemporary art through beautifully crafted pieces of sculpture, photography, drawings and animation. And he goes further; to coincide with the exhibition, on 5 and 6 May, Southbank Centre will hold the London premiere of ‘Pass the Spoon’, a ‘sort of opera’ about cookery by David Shrigley, composer David Fennessy and director Nicholas Bone, featuring singing vegetables, panic-stricken celebrity chefs, an ambitious banana and a giant butcher.

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