The Jokes Grow Old With Repetition

In talented hands, comic relief provides timely pauses that intensify the effect of almost any narrative. In untalented hands, this dramatic device is frequently overused, swamping the story with glib silliness.

Unfortunately for visitors to the UCLA Hammer Museum, David Shrigley falls into the latter category. A young British artist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, he shows himself to be a one-trick pony, a supercilious prankster whose jokes aren’t all that funny. When filling two galleries, more than 100 of his sculptures, drawings, collages and photographs are tedious: too trite to be memorable but too much a symptom of the art world institutions that support them to be ignored.

On a low pedestal in the center of the first gallery rests a Styrofoam brick on which Shrigley has written, “We place too much importance in objects. Objects really aren’t very interesting. Personally, I prefer sounds (and also smells).” He means it, sort of, but not really.

Thirty-five years ago, Conceptual art broke new ground by arguing that the ideas a work generates are more important than the objects that get such processes started. Shrigley’s lightweight brick doesn’t pretend to break anything (not even a comic-strip window, through which such message-laden projectiles are often hurled). Instead, it merely makes fun of museum-goers who want something more from contemporary art than a joke about dead-end fifth-generation Conceptualism.

His sculptural gag is meant to appeal to viewers who have been marching through room after room of art they don’t care about. This experience is common on the proliferating biennial circuit, where a clique of regulars is regularly commissioned to make spectacular installations that are as forgettable as they are bombastic. In such a setting, Shrigley’s sculpture would provide some welcome comic relief.

The problem is that it’s installed among more than 100 other works that make the same basic point. If his pieces could speak, the chorus would be, “The outside world is infinitely more interesting than what’s here in the gallery, but if we abandoned the security of the art world, the guy who makes us wouldn’t get any attention.”

Several of Shrigley’s photographs document his in-the-street pranks. In one, a sheet of paper, posted on a tree in a city park, informs passersby that a pigeon has been lost: “Normal size. A Bit Mangy Looking. Does Not Have a Name. Call 257-1964.” In another, a wooden sign has been stuck in a lush grassy lawn. It states, “imagine the green is red.” A third depicts an empty urban lot on which the artist has placed a refrigerator-size box. On the front of his make-believe building he has cut a door and painted “Leisure Centre.”

This oversize snapshot is an obvious critique of modern society’s refusal to give leisure its due. But as an artist, Shrigley doesn’t take leisure seriously. Rather than cultivating his talents, refining his facilities or clarifying his thinking, he acts as if he’s too exhausted (or just too cool) to do anything more than crank out slacker cliches.

At their best, his ham-fisted drawings and scrawled texts give form to an attitude of muddled detachment and self-satisfied alienation. His lists, in which he alphabetizes an afternoon’s thoughts or keeps score of the absurd relationships between workers and their tools, are his most promising pieces. Otherwise, stick figures predominate, accompanied by captions that describe a world in which bad things happen with such regularity that you’d have to be a fool to hope for anything different.

Even when nothing takes place, blase indifference washes over everything. One crudely rendered landscape announces, “There is nothing in the desert.” Another is labeled “Magnification reveals nature to be boring.” It’s no accident that Shrigley’s drawings resemble what junior high students scribble in their notebooks. Both embrace a type of knee-jerk nihilism that’s easier to forgive in adolescents than in adults who get stuck in its shallow negativity.

In terms of technique, Shrigley’s collages and acrylics are even cruder than his drawings: They mimic the work of grade school students. In terms of content, they deliver more of the same one-dimensional sentiments that fill his black-and-white works.

His well-made sculptures, which include a realistic walnut the size of a bowling ball, a big bent nail stuck in the wall and a huge leaf of lettuce covered with cigarette burns, add some production value to the installation. But Shrigley’s attempt to translate his cartoon vision into three dimensions comes off as cutesy. His sculptures have the presence of props from insufficiently developed dramas.

Organized by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Shrigley’s U.S. debut betrays the conservatism at the heart of his art. Although his down-and-out works pretend to stand apart from the art world’s institutional support structure, they are designed to fit right into its normal operations, making a joke or two without changing anything.

“David Shrigley,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through May 5. Closed Mondays. Adults $4.50; seniors, $3; children under 17, students, members, free.