Cradled in caricature

Abstract

In April 2010 a visit to Manchester, the Whitworth Art Gallery to be precise, provided the unexpected kernel from which two events and the present issue blossomed. Erected there in an exhibition entitled ‘Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture’ was a piece by David Shrigley in which identikit boxes combine to form a crude shopping centre, their putative function only identifiable by a sign over the door. As I was mulling over this on a return train to the Home Counties, it occurred to me that my interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century graphic satire connected to the concerns of many other scholars through the notion of ‘caricature’. But what, you may quite reasonably ask, does a satire on repetitious hyper-functionalist architectural design have to do with caricature? Well, for me at least, Shrigley’s design was deceptively elegant. [Excerpt from Foreword]