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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jan/20/david-shrigley-wants-your-balls-just-one-of-many-stupid-artworks-i-have-made-over-the-years>
"Melbourne is awash with tennis balls and not just because of the Australian
Open. Across the Yarra, inside the National Gallery of Victoria, there are
precisely 8,510 tennis balls – neat rows of fluoro yellow lining a pristine
white room. It looks like a sneaker shop but it smells oddly like a new car.
This is the
Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange, an artwork by British artist
David Shrigley, where you can take a new tennis ball and leave behind an old
manky one. Especially if it is an old manky ball – and not an apple, which one
person in London tried to leave behind when Shrigley first staged the Exchange
in 2021.
“That’s just pretentious,” the artist scoffs. “And someone else brought in a
really big tennis ball. Everybody wants to do something different, don’t they?
Mainly, people just wrote swear words on them.”
Melbourne is also awash with Shrigley and not just because of the
Tennis Ball
Exchange.
Really Good, his giant bronze sculpture of a distended thumb, is
outside the gallery as part of the NGV Triennial, while his weird, meme-y
drawings can be found on greetings cards, tea towels and even pool inflatables
in gift shops across the country – you may recognise his swan thing or his
painting of an ice-cream titled
Life is fantastic.
The
Tennis Ball Exchange is part of Shrigley’s move towards interactive,
public art; last year he pulped 6,000 copies of
The Da Vinci Code and printed
a new edition of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like much of
Shrigley’s work, it had meaning (a reminder of the value of democracy that also
raised money for charity) while also being deeply funny (his Orwell book was
sold by a charity shop in Swansea that had pleaded for people to stop donating
copies of
The Da Vinci Code)."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
