David Shrigley
Until January 21; Dundee Contemporary Arts

“Welcome to the wickedly wonderful world of Shrigley!” enthuses a little sign at the entrance of DCA’s new exhibition. “It contains some bad words and rude pictures.” Whether that is intended as a threat or a promise depends on your point of view.

It was only in September that David Shrigley’s last Scottish exhibition, at Edinburgh Printmakers, came down off the walls. That show was packed with over 40 recent prints by the Glasgow-based master of dry humour and absurdity. Surprisingly light on words, it served up a great deal of food for thought, without skimping on Shrigley’s trademark punch in the metaphorical guts.

Two months later, Dundee’s show, billed as a “major exhibition”, comes as something of a disappointment. In a space much bigger than Edinburgh Printmakers, there is scope for hundreds of the artist’s scribbled drawings, prints, films and sculptures, plastered across the galleries in a celebration of Shrigley’s prodigious output.
Imagine the curatorial equivalent of the artist’s cartoons, the workings of his wandering mind poured out uncensored onto paper. Where Shrigley fills whole books with random thoughts and fantasies, the walls could become a riot of unconnectedness.

Instead, a small selection of works is sprinkled across the vast bare walls and floors as if they are precious modernist treasures. Treated with great reverence, each picture and sculpture is placed with utmost care, given space to breathe even from its discretely distanced caption.

If this arrangement – in which Shrigley was involved – is in itself a satire, then it misses its mark. Shrigley’s work is the antithesis of art-world airs and graces, but in this holy, white-cube hang, the art loses its immediacy, and seems to stick its nose in the air.

One exception is the Poster Project, made over the summer months of this year. Shrigley, through his website, offered a free poster design service, inviting people everywhere to submit their events for the Shrigley treatment. Three hundred of the resulting inkjet print-outs are pasted all over one gallery wall, leaving barely any gaps.

Some posters stand out, such as the bare line-drawing of blank walls, and a door marked EXIT. “Lee Barber is leaving” say the words along the top, and “Goodbye Lee Barber” say those at the bottom. But not as free as usual to express his love of the absurd, Shrigley appears to have dashed off a good few of the posters, many of which advertise birthday parties.

It would be interesting to know whether people dared to distribute these more hasty scrawls. Shrigley’s name appears nowhere, leaving the cursory scribbles to venture into the real world naked of their high art pedigree. Anti-art was born in a gallery, but what happens when it is so successfully reintegrated into the real world that no-one knows it is supposed to be anti-art? It cancels itself out too completely.

Maybe that’s why the hang is so precious at DCA. Perhaps Shrigley wants that heavy art atmosphere in order that he has a bubble to prick. Certainly in the case of Black Forest Gateau, made in 2001, it works in his favour. A small, black room contains one central plinth, spot-lit like some ancient museum artefact. But the object of worship is a cartoon-style slice of cake, a plastic wedge which utterly refuses to be taken seriously.

It’s harder for Shrigley’s other sculptures, such as the headless stuffed cat (which will surely provoke a riot in Dundee), and the cute but slightly disturbing foam-filled cat basket, to survive the seriousness of the gallery floor. But one series of photographs, more akin to post-modern art as we know it, fits in quite comfortably.

The 20 black and white photographs are all described by their captions. The words and pictures dodge and swerve around each other, opening up voids between what we see and what we are told we are seeing. At times Shrigley appears to be taking up the standpoint of a martian not understanding what he is recording. At others, he is cleverly switching between modes of representation. There is a lot to unpick, and to enjoy, in this work.

Adding to the multimedia feast, the exhibition boasts two of Shrigley’s latest animations, both depicting society’s pariahs struggling to come to terms with their unacceptable identities. Though celebrated for his one-liners, the artist proves he can stretch to a life story in the seven minute film, Who I Am And What I Want. The lunatic central character, outcast for cruelty to bunnies and babies, dreams of becoming water soluble, being fried, and digging up his own corpse. At the film’s core is a great deal of empathy. That is, of course, if one assumes that it’s not auto-biographical.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.11.06