‘David Shrigley: Signs’ at Anton Kern Gallery
You can imagine the English artist David Shrigley sitting in a dull lecture class drawing an obscene caricature of the instructor in his notebook. The drawing would be fascinatingly awkward—he uses ink like paint, with a confident line too purposeful to be bothered with exactitude—and it would be insightful, hilarious and vicious in direct proportion to his certainty that the instructor would never see it, or if he did, wouldn’t get the joke. A neon sign of red block letters, hanging in the gallery office advertising “HOT DOG REPAIR,” is one of only two pieces in “Signs” that are not, in one way or another, in Mr. Shrigley’s handwriting. Letters are cast in bronze from molded clay or sprayed insulation foam, painted in white or black on hanging signs and cat-shaped canvas dolls, or printed in lino-cut, letterset word art. The sculptures do certainly function as sculptures, in the sense that they don’t not, but really all the work, neon signs included, inhabits the hypothetical white flatland, with its total irony, material impotence and solipsistic invulnerability, of paper being doodled on. Read More
