David Shrigley – Brain Activity – We Make Money Not Art

To fully appreciate David Shrigley‘s Brain Activity show at the Hayward Gallery, you need to suspend all expectations that contemporary art is not allowed to be light, funny and somewhat perfunctory.

Shrigley used to work as a newspaper cartoonist but he leads a parallel life as a successful fine artist and Hayward is showing his drawings but also his photographs, sculptures, paintings, animations, installations and plenty of taxidermy. Sometimes the humour is dark, sometimes absurd, sometimes plain idiotic. In fact, the journalists and critics who reviewed the show are either almost in a state of rapturous delight or they question whether what he does is art or not.

Reading the mini catalogue of the show i realize that during my visit i missed ‘the artist’s hoard of personal toenail clippings’. I’m glad i did. But i did smile when i saw the big LOOK AT THIS sign on the terrace, the corpse of a rat left on the floor that you might never see if you don’t happen to look down, the taxidermy dog standing on its rear legs to brandish a message that confirms that its is indeed dead, the row of boots that seem to come straight out of a cartoon, the carelessly sketched silhouettes, etc. It was rough, direct and cheerful. Brain Activity brought a brief and distracting parenthesis in my day and i hope that the images below will entertain you for a moment too:

David Shrigley, Lost, 1996  Image © the artist and courtesy of the artist