What the Hell are You Doing? by David Shrigley

Author:David Shrigley [David Shrigley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847679604
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

These rarefied speculations sustained me so long as I was walking, but when I reached home I slumped, dejected. How could anyone be sanguine about a universe the ordering principle of which appeared to be such useless profligacy?

I thought of all this as I took up the proofs of the book you now hold in your hands. Was I simply confirming Shrigley’s unique fitness to be Shrigley – for surely, he must be that by virtue of his survival alone? Or did I simply want to give myself a bit of a laugh?

A pattern of wonky hexagons, a blot, a scribble – all inky black: ‘Unfinished plan for a new and better society’, the legend read. Then it struck me: the man in the bookshop’s work may have borne a strong resemblance to Shrigley’s, but it just wasn’t the actualité. There were none of these luridly dull photographs with scrawled-upon signs in the foregrounds, which undermine the basis of not just any society, but precisely this one. Shrigley’s photographic works suggest the refined eye of someone sent back from the future beyond the looming apocalypse, charged with assembling images that, while ostensibly of the mundane, nonetheless explain how it came to pass that humanity destroyed itself.

Humans. Humans entire or pared down to heads, or heads equipped with legs: uglified anime you hope won’t move. In Shrigley’s drawings – and Shrigley’s alone – the human body is undifferentiated, as imagined by a child, with sausage limbs and a hammy torso … and yet … and yet, it is also as acutely visceral as a freshly killed cadaver plastinated by Gunther von Hagens. No wonder the animals depicted in Shrigley’s work – and there are a lot of them – have such troubled expressions and pithy thoughts: crouched in their garish colour fields they retain their integrity, while compelled to witness the bewildering juxtapositions of hubris and false humility evinced by the twiggy men and women.

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