As the political parties make their final push for the general election while already testing out arguments for who can form a government in the anticipated hung parliament, at least one candidate has the honesty to throw in the towel.
Artist Gordon Shrigley has not pulled out of the ballot in Hackney South and Shoreditch where he is (genuinely) standing for Parliament on Thursday, but he has effectively admitted defeat with the final poster of his conceptual artwork of a campaign.
“CAMPAIGN”, it reads. “IT WAS A DREAM, NEVER REALISED.”
There is a picture of a strange alpine-looking building lost in pale mist, with a multicoloured shaft of light running from the bottom left to the top right of the poster. If the streak of light suggests a glimpse of hope and energy, or an elusive “dream”, the mysterious house, hotel or spy HQ in the milky fog looks hopeless and dismal.
This is the eighth poster Shrigley has issued in his campaign to bring art into Westminster. Another has an image of a test explosion and the message: “I HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER BUT OFFER ITSELF.” Another reads, over a picture of a young man in a uniform covered in medals: “I’M FROM YOUR IMAGINATION AND I’M HERE TO HELP.”
Shrigley admitted to a local paper that he didn’t even know exactly when the election was, so his campaign to get into parliament has not exactly been ruthless. In an election that has even aroused Russell Brand to abandon his anti-voting ideology and endorse Labour, Shrigley’s ironic artistic election campaign may seem disgracefully cynical. He is surely the only candidate who is totally disengaged from the election itself. Even Al Murray, the Pub Landlord, is more engaged because he’s clearly standing to satirise the idiotic bigotry of Nigel Farage.
Has Shrigley missed the point of this election? Surely, far from an empty process with “nothing to offer but offer itself”, this is a truly dramatic choice between a Conservative party planning massive cuts and a referendum on leaving the EU, and a Labour government committed to the NHS and Europe. Not a vacuous choice at all, but a very dramatic one.
But, given the bigger picture, Shrigley is right to sneer. The reality is that both main parties are energising only their core votes, because they have retreated to their core identities – and even on that “safe” territory they are being eaten away, Labour by the SNP, the Tories by Ukip. The election is intense, yet if it fails to produce a majority government it will be because not enough people care about either big party. We’ll care even less after they have been bickering for weeks about who gets to rule.
Shrigley is right to mock the emptiness of a political system that no longer throws up convincing leaders or messages that can capture a true majority (except in Scotland, of course.) At this point in the election, it may seem incredibly rude for him to issue a poster that gives up the ghost, but if they were honest, all the main party leaders except Nicola Sturgeon would be admittng a kind of defeat now.
British democracy, rest in peace. “It was a dream, never realised.”
