David Shrigley: Brain Activity *****



Photo: Linda Nylind



Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery is David Shrigley’s first major UK exhibition, but it really should have come sooner. Shrigley is known for his humourous drawings (The Essential David Shrigley) however this exhibition features sculpture, photography, animations and more in what begins to feel like a never-ending showcase of talent that has been deprived of limelight for far too long. Literally hundreds of works of art are crammed into this space, separated into rooms which tackle the grand narratives of our time: relationships, death, sleep and less obviously, misshapen things.

The first room is Headlessness, the first thing you see is a headless ostrich. Baffling? This opening draws you into Shrigley’s world where he wants you to imagine the stories behind the exhibits, answering any questions you’ll inevitably have, yourself. His style is simplistic, almost childlike and you do find yourself reverting to a childlike mind-set as Shrigley toys with your worldly preconceptions. A small structure of the word ‘IT’ hides in the corner of one room, leading to the obvious question, “What is ‘it’?” Shrigley’s paintings mock art; if art is something that you feel then surely Shrigley is expressing it better than anyone by painting ‘FUCKING HELL’ angrily across a page in green paint by a screaming red stick figure. If this isn’t clear enough then the drawing captioned ‘Museums are full of crap’ should illustrate the point. The light-heartedness of Shrigley’s work counter -plays the ideas behind it so that your brain works on two unlikely levels at once using puns, contradictions, euphemisms with as much significance as the material.

I’m aware that my descriptions make Brain Activity sound somewhat trivial. The truth is that Shrigley toes the line between philosophical and nonsensical and this is what makes his work so refreshing. If anything compelled me on a more personal level, it would be arguably Shrigley’s most famous work: a taxidermy dog holding a sign which says ‘I’m dead’. As if it were fate, before I went in to this exhibition a Jack Russell terrier just like this one happened to leap into my arms for a cuddle. The lifelike quality the dead dog possesses is disturbing, horrific even considering the unsentimental irony applied to it. So that the comedic quality of Shrigley’s work is suddenly turned on its head, and life feels like nothing but ‘a prequel to extinction’.

In a literal whole other world, a section of the exhibit is populated by hundreds of insects, made from uniquely shaped pieces of metal. Thousands of little legs – the stuff of a lot of our nightmares, and yet they appear so human; working together, alone, having sex. The only way to escape the room is through an insect sized hole in the wall. Shrigley communicates with the spectator directly in every room. The relationship room in particular lent a particularly dark undertone to something close to the skin; the animation ‘New Friends’ involved a square being cut brutally into a circle by a community of his circular shaped friends. Enforcing this is ‘Swords and Daggers’, which were carved in wax with a potato peeler before being cast in bronze.

There is a skill to Shrigley’s purposefully crude art, and his ability to communicate so much with just a pencil and paper. It feels okay to live in an ugly world if we can laugh at it. The problem with reviewing this exhibition is that I cannot condense ideas like Shrigley can. Brain Activity made me feel as if my brain had suddenly woken up from the coma of only using the usual 10%. This exhibition forces you to think about the life, the universe and everything; until I thought my brain might explode – in a good way. But contemplating it makes no difference to life, the universe, and everything, which is at the taxidermy heart of this absurd exhibition which celebrates futility, not the answers to the grand questions it poses.