CIRCA 111 review

Dublin: David Godbold at Kerlin Gallery

David Godbold: A career and a lifestyle (what to draw today?), 2003, ink and computer printout on tracing paper over found paper, 18.8 x 8 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

David Godbold’s has a fine facility for a certain kind of nineteenth-century academic drawing. All those neo-classical fast sketches that evoke superior thoughts of privileged powers; men and women of the classical world with the body languages to suggest blockbuster struggles and high-octane bacchanalian revels in imaginary arcadias. I love this world. I love this drawing style. Go David.

But that’s not where Godbold is going with his gift. Almost the reverse. He embroils these classical archetypes and ideals in the detritus and banality of twenty-first-century everyday life, almost smothering them in the flotsam and jetsam of nothing of much importance: shopping lists, discarded - no, he seems to discard nothing - invoices and bills, notes and doodles.

And I suppose that’s his point. That’s over, so be cool. And being cool and up to speed (he is probably the most up-to-speed artist working in Ireland at the moment) seem crucial as a survival strategy. How do you engage the things you love without looking retro at this time? It’s as difficult as saying “I love you” out loud and meaning it. Until ironic postmodernism gets over itself, that won’t be happening any time soon.

His work is elusive, diplomatic, ambitious, charming - and ‘jokey’. The thing about jokes is that ‘if you don’t buy the premise, you can’t buy the punch line’ and it’s not obvious where this artist is coming from in many of the works. Ambiguity and uncertainty are part and parcel of the complexity of visual art, but one-liner jokes are quickly tested - you laugh, well…chuckle, or you don’t. It’s up to you. Here’s a test that might serve as the litmus for how you might engage this exhibition:

The work Increase the peace has the line “The US military bombed a mosque - that’s really going to help” as an aside in a clinched drawing after Poussin’s Slaughter of the innocents. Laconic, right? The about-to-be-slaughtered infant is thinking ‘fuck’ as the slaughtering soldier is thinking ‘A-ha, a soft, defenceless but loaded target,’ as the mother of the child pleads ‘I’m just not good enough to figure this out.’

David Godbold: Increase the peace, 2004, ink and computer printout on tracing paper over found paper, 17 x 21.8 cm; courtesy Kerlin Gallery

There’s a lot going on here and whether it’s camp, political, baffled, angry, naughty, satirical or simply namby-pamby - nickname of Ambrose Philips (died 1749), if we’re into remote sources which the artist is quite a lot - or none of the above - or all, constitutes the difficulty of the premise and now I wonder has this sentence lost its way in trying to deliver too much and gotten the placement wrong. That happens.

Timing is to humour as placement is to art and Godbold gets ‘placement’ - just look at the drawing. Whether he gets more than that is up to you. But it’s worth seeing to find out. It is called Once it was a lie, now it’s the truth. For me it was the reverse. (But maybe Godbold intended that too.) Elegiac then.

Noel Sheridan is an artist working in various media.

David Godbold: Once it was a lie, now it’s the truth, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin January – February 2005

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.96–97

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