REVIEWS DAVID SHERRY
DAVID SHERRY:
REGUL ATIONS
FOR
IRRATIONAL
PROCEDURES
MOTHER’S TANKSTATION, DUBLIN
4 APRIL - 12 MAY
David Sherry’s art is at home on the high street, out there among
the Kevlar waistcoats and the cardboard bivouacs, the traf_f_i c-
calming bulges and the automatic tellers. Sometimes his actions,
his little épats, see him theatrically avoiding all eye contact, or
acting ‘confrontationally polite’ towards shopkeepers, sometimes
just sitting and eating biscuits in a shop window, spoofi ng the
bloody excesses of macho performance art.
This time around Sherry is indoors, installing a large
number of drawings, alongside a shovel-headed humanoid in
black tape and polystyrene, some sound- and videowork, all
indicating that the artist is busy expanding the fi eld of his actions.
Whereas manners, habit and sociability have always been central
preoccupations, now the comedy of commodity exchange
is apparently taking more of Sherry’s attention – even if his
interventions remain non-tendentious, agile, even to the point of
evasion.
The drawing are on pages pulled from notebooks and
trapped in slightly too heavy frames, awkward, lax cartoons grazing
uncomfortably against texts and titles that explain everything and
nothing, ideas that get stuck shy of a payof_f , like half-remembered
PINs. The sketches maintain a density of activity that is impressive
given the economy of Sherry’s lines, but framed on the wall
always seem slightly less satisfactory than when encountered via
the artist’s various publications, his lo-fi chapbooks of oddity, his
comics suf_f used with a humour of simmering hysteria.
Sometimes, however, the quiet of a frame is just what is
required. In the sketch Two for One Explained (all works 2007) a simple diagram unpicks, as though for a bright High pitched screaming ahead, 2007, papier mâché, black paint, wire mesh,
four-year-old, how a manufacturer of Jaf_f a Cakes might make a profi t on a buy-one-get-one-free deal. It polystyrene and 23 drawings. Courtesy the
works, of course, because the food corporations engineer their product at a cost of around a hundredth of what artist and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin
the consumer pays. It’s a business fable that of_f ers an indictment of the circulatory system of commodities and
the overconsumption that powers it – but at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, an image of the
simple maths behind a global force, one that retains an impressive, resonant Jack and the Beanstalk magic.
No Rolo, its title, presumably, a grinning nod to Naomi Klein’s anti-globalisation polemic, chronicles
(via three small degraded photo-images framed along with an explanatory text) a high street ‘action’
suggesting symbiosis between the critiqued and the critic. In the piece, Sherry describes how he visited a shop
and purchased all the Rolos for sale there. As soon as he leaves with the sweets, the text elaborates, Sherry’s
accomplice enters the shop and attempts to buy some Rolos. But there are now, of course, no Rolos.
The roof lifts even further of_f Sherry’s practice in a sound piece, Levitational Masters, which forms a
politely deranged soundtrack to a viewing of the drawings. In the piece seven voices testify to the role levitation
has played in their lives, from ‘Eggy’, who used levitation to play his guitar, to Zoë, a woman diagnosed with
‘levitation issues’ – something which, like the abundant imaginative impulses they seem to stand in for, might
be best left un-pathologised. Luke Clancy
one.linthree.linfive.lin ARTREVIEW
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