David Shrigley 'Brain Activity'

‘Brain Activity’ couldn’t have been better timed. With 2012 promising little but a gloomy economy and even more uncertainly ahead, we could really all do with a bit of laughter. Shrigley’s aim behind ‘Brain Activity’ was just this: to make people laugh, and he does it very, and somewhat surprisingly, successfully.

As visitors walk around the upper rooms of the Hayward Gallery, they really are laughing out loud and it doesn’t take too long to understand why. Shirgley has a skill of observing life and it’s banality from an absurdist point of view, taking familiar items and transforming them into obscure objects of comedy. Take the taxidermy squirrel, which holds it’s own decapitated head as it would a nut, or the stuffed dog that bears a sign simply stating, ‘I’m dead’. Perhaps you’ll glance upon the photographs on the wall, one of which depicts a tiny container in the middle of a building site labelled ‘leisure centre’. Another is the image of a note stuck to a tree with the words: ‘Missing pigeon. Normal size. A bit mangy-looking. Does not have a name’.

Shrigley’s works are doused in irony and there are definite influences of the surreal amongst the 240 pieces on display. A gigantic cup filled with real tea sits in the middle of one floor, whilst the animation of a headless drummer is projected onto the back wall. Filling a quarter of one of the rooms is an unnerving sculpture in which hundreds of black, metallic, ant-like forms appear to be crawling hurriedly to and fro carrying weapons and disturbing objects on their backs. This is the kind of work that makes your skin crawl and is reminiscent of nightmares of a dark underworld.

Shrigley’s simplistic black and white drawings are also very funny. His depiction of ‘career’ is an endless tunnel with a bemused stick man at the beginning of it, whilst on another we see a cat shaking hands with a mouse after it agreed not to kill it, to which the mouse replies “thanks”.

Unlike some contemporary art exhibitions ‘Brain Activity’ has no ego and absolutely no pretence. There is a ’matter of fact’ air about the exhibition, conveyed even through its very title, yet he juxtaposes this objectivity with a sense of fantastic hilarity and we become transported into another world.

Perhaps this is the point. Shrigley asks us to forget the doom and gloom of our own reality by inviting us into a world where imagination runs rife and laughter is irrepressible.

‘Brain Activity’ currently runs at The Hayward Gallery until 13th May.