Opinion
David Shrigley’s 11th Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Forget the Bananas
THE DAILY PIC: David Shrigley's 'Memorial' in Central Park – a grocery list graven in stone.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1659): New York is having a golden fall moment for outdoor art.
Yesterday, I raved about Martin Puryear’s industrial mammoth in Madison Square Park – a traditional public sculpture that escaped the limits of that tradition. It so happens that within a few days of seeing that piece, I came across this memorial by the British artist David Shrigley, appropriately titled MEMORIAL. It was commissioned by the Public Art Fund for its usual site at the southeast corner of Central Park in New York.
When I first approached, I honestly thought that the Fund must be between projects, and I strolled up instead to the strange war memorial I had never noticed before, to read the names of its dead. In place of that, I found myself reading a graven shopping list: crackers, bananas, tampons etc.
If memorials are supposed to be about remembering stuff, what better memorial than a list of goods that must not be forgotten? What a pleasure to be reminded of quotidian needs when you expect to be reminded of the toll that war takes.
If war can ever have a purpose, it is to allow shopping lists to go on being made. How wonderful to carve that in stone. (Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern gallery, photo by Jason Wyche)
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