February 02, 2005

Sharp enough to needle and provoke
Rachel Campbell Johnston, Chief Art Critic

THE committee that selected David Godbold to become the next election artist has made a courageous choice.

This is an artist who discovers his influences in the work of the great social and political satirists; of people like Hogarth or Rowlandson or Gillray who revelled in making fun of the ruling elite, in undercutting their public posturing and pomposity.

This is an artist whose talents were nurtured in the now famously rebellious milieu of Goldsmiths College, the school that notoriously fostered the guerrilla cell of the Brit pack. Godbold is no more likely to allow himself to be meekly corralled within Establishment parameters than Tracey Emin could be tamed to sit quietly on a Turner Prize discussion panel.

Godbold’s way of working is innovative, striking and thought-provoking. He first came to attention as one half of an artistic duo who created photographic installations, but over the past decade or so he has gradually established his own distinctive style.

First he amasses a motley assemblage of scraps, anything from leaves ripped out of notebooks through printed leaflets, letters and lists to the sort of bureaucratic gobbledegook that public organisations put out.

He then uses this collage as a backdrop for his fluid and delicate drawings, which are often done on tracing paper and copied after Old Master paintings.

In political poster campaigns or advertising material, image and text are meant to slot neatly together, to team up to make a point. But Godbold is not so slick. His work, however initially seductive or beautiful it may look, makes a critical examination of the very images that it incorporates. Word and picture do not collaborate, they clash and contradict. They undermine each other’s meanings, unteasing tangential possibilities and pointing out new paths of thought.

“I am interested in the conflation of grand themes and daily minutiae,” Godbold has said. His way of working is broad enough to encompass that great baggy monster that is the British election campaign and yet sharp enough to needle and provoke.

Once it was a Lie, Now it’s the Truth, is the name of his current show at the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin (where Godbold now lives). It is a title to make a Labour Party member squirm. And his pet theme – the counter-Reformation – could become a little uncomfortable for a Prime Minister whose Roman Catholic inclinations are periodically discussed.

Yet Godbold’s political commentary is always oblique. He hints and insinuates, rather than makes direct statements. He encourages the spectator to make up his own mind. And this is exactly what party political propaganda does not do.