In the 1961 film ‘The Rebel’, Tony Hancock plays a frustrated Sunday artist who is accidentally hailed as a genius by the Paris avant garde. The joke is that his art is so bad, intellectuals assume it has to be good. Something similar happens around David Shrigley’s art. Because it’s good, really good: it’s just hard to pinpoint why.
This show across the two spaces of the Stephen Friedman gallery totally holds it own, even though there is hardly any variation of scale, tone or apparent intent: big, colourful paintings in acrylic and oil stick, often of one subject. Officially, they’re all ‘untitled’, but sometimes words are written on them. A painting of a cupboard is adorned with the word ‘cupboard’. A man’s bum (I think it’s a man) and a tower of coloured balls both say ‘Look at this’, so we do.
The cumulative effect is of ideas floating past, snatched and stuck on the wall. Or the products of some drunken Christmas Day party game, which has somehow produced masterpieces. It’s hard to imagine an ‘artist’ having been involved at all. Which is probably the point. Because there’s another, bigger, joke in ‘The Rebel’. Hancock’s ‘bad art’ is all strikingly memorable: a wonky dismembered foot; childish birds in flight; a hideous lumpy sculpture. By comparison, the film’s ‘serious’ art is shit-boringly awful. Like David Shrigley, the rebel has the last laugh.