Anthony Burrill works with words. Typically screen-printed and frequently placard-sized, he fashions phrases with the best of intentions.
Joy! Pure Joy! – the title of a small selection of his work hosted by Liverpool’s Dorothy – is one such example of his practice in print form. A presumably unintended echo of an LP track by the city’s own Teardrop Explodes, its exclamation marks are no accident, punching the point home like a tabloid headline, a line of Jack Kirby’s comic book dialogue or a t-shirt mass-produced to sell Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
In fact, t-shirts carrying the phrase are available, printed white on black, like the inverse of Frankie’s borrowed references to Czech Surrealism. Burrill‘s phraseology, by contrast, requires no art school key to decipher it. Although it’s instructive to be aware that Burrill uses typefaces dating back to the Suffragette protests, such knowledge is merely icing to the cake of his intentions.
Less disruptive than the more insurrectionary texts of Jenny Holzer, Burrill‘s works nonetheless politely propose a better tomorrow through a kind of genteel sloganeering. Carefully considered, and not averse to the elegant conjoining of an ampersand, Burrill’s phrases are neatly composed.
Photo credit: Matt Bell
It could be argued, however, that the best slogans are not coined, but – rather – they erupt. In doing so, they tend to outlast the life cycle of their more polished contemporaries, which frequently fall away from a fashionable ubiquity into the emptiness or risibility of platitude. With its rhythmic echo of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, its somewhat presumptuous first clause Work Hard & Be Nice To People is, for me, already close to that particular abyss. Working hard is all very well when you’re working for yourself, but, to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the phrase feels like an exhortation, using the master’s tools to build the master’s penthouse. Never mind the pavement you’re bedding down on yourself.
Other slogans are easier to live with. Question Everything, here printed along the vertical and artfully cropped, is – ironically – a less questionable sentiment, whereas the rectangular circularity of Be Yourself Be Different has a perennial teenage appeal.
Photo credit: Matt Bell
Moreover, the hanging of the prints does them the favour of presenting them less like fridge-magnet poetry on a larger scale, and more like dialogue. The nine-panel grid shuffling Yesterday, Tomorrow and Today in vivid orange and white saturates the eye like modernist psychedelia, while a vertical arrangement of I Am Here, You Are Here and We Are Here renders the present tense strange by blowing it up out of all proportion.
It is working at a still greater scale, however, which affords the space in which Burrill’s working methods can detonate to their greatest effect. A mural in the Baltic Triangle’s Botanical Garden in Liverpool, designed by Burrill although not executed by him, is like a brass arrangement trumpeting gloriously through the prosaic chords of the everyday. Supplanted from the safe space of the gallery wall, Pure Joy! has an almost revolutionary spirit. In moving beyond the page, it suggests a page as yet unturned in Burrill’s artistic development.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Main image: photo credit Matt Bell
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