Melbourne is awash with tennis balls and not just because of the Australian Open. Across the Yarra, inside the National Gallery of Victoria, there are precisely 8,510 tennis balls – neat rows of fluoro yellow lining a pristine white room. It looks like a sneaker shop but it smells oddly like a new car. This is the Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange, an artwork by British artist David Shrigley, where you can take a new tennis ball and leave behind an old manky one. Especially if it is an old manky ball – and not an apple, which one person in London tried to leave behind when Shrigley first staged the Exchange in 2021.
“That’s just pretentious,” the artist scoffs. “And someone else brought in a really big tennis ball. Everybody wants to do something different, don’t they? Mainly, people just wrote swear words on them.”
Melbourne is also awash with Shrigley and not just because of the Tennis Ball Exchange. Really Good, his giant bronze sculpture of a distended thumb, is outside the gallery as part of the NGV Triennial, while his weird, meme-y drawings can be found on greetings cards, tea towels and even pool inflatables in gift shops across the country – you may recognise his swan thing or his painting of an ice-cream titled Life is fantastic.
The Tennis Ball Exchange is part of Shrigley’s move towards interactive, public art; last year he pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code and printed a new edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Like much of Shrigley’s work, it had meaning (a reminder of the value of democracy that also raised money for charity) while also being deeply funny (his Orwell book was sold by a charity shop in Swansea that had pleaded for people to stop donating copies of The Da Vinci Code).
Shrigley describes the Tennis Ball Exchange as a sort of dadaist comment on commerce: exchanging something for the exact same thing being inherently silly. “And I thought, ‘Everybody has a room full of dirty tennis balls, like I do, and will want to exchange them for a nice new one’, so I think that’s quite generous on my part,” he says loftily. “I thought it was just one of many stupid artworks I have made over the years. What I didn’t anticipate was people using it to make art work. It goes to show that you can’t anticipate the behaviour of the general public – though I did anticipate some people would swear on them.”
The Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange opened on Friday. Some people have already left opulently decorated tennis balls. One has a message of support for Alex de Minaur. (That the Exchange is in Melbourne at the same time as the Australian Open is purely coincidental, the NGV says, though a couple of players plan to visit.) One ball looks suspiciously blood-stained. As for me, I have brought in a grubby one covered in slobber from my dog, Maple Syrup; she has been mostly indifferent to this ball so I do not feel guilty about leaving it in a gallery. An antendee hands me a crisp little branded bag to house my new ball in, which strikes me as a neat touch; later, Shrigley informs me that this is secretly a measure to stop people punting them at art.
You will be able to bring balls to the NGV until 28 January, when the Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange becomes part of the gallery’s permanent collection. The NGV is allowed to lend it to other galleries, but with one rule: they can’t replace the new balls once they are gone. “Which means it will continue to change wherever it shows,” Shrigley says. “Eventually, there will be no more nice, clean balls so people will have to make a really critical decision about which of the old ones to take. At the end, it’ll only be the most suspicious looking ones with saliva and dirt on them left.”
While a lot of Shrigley’s work has a message, some of it means more to him than us. He tells me about the time he used a toilet in a bronze foundry he frequents, which had a wheezy old extractor fan. “So I made a new working extractor fan that was completely silent, except I recorded myself doing an impression of the sound the old one made and a sound guy hooked it up so it plays the noise when you turn it on.” Why? “Why?” he says incredulously. “It’s art, that’s why. And I get to do whatever I like because I have made lots of money and I can piss that money away making stupid art.”
Beyond a bunch of old tennis balls, the Exchange has given Shrigley something entirely unexpected: professional clarity. “I still make drawings and they get made into merchandise and it shown on social media, whatever – that’s what I’m famous for,” he says.
“But I have become ambivalent about the idea of exhibitions – they can’t just be about me demonstrating my clever ideas. They need to be something that are constantly changing, that require other people to give them meaning. It’s the fact that I’ve been so successful that means that I can make this strange, unwanted rubbish. But some of it, like the Tennis Ball Exchange, weirdly works.
“I joked earlier about being generous, but really, people are giving me something. I had been floundering a little bit and didn’t really know why I was making things. This has given me a reason to be really excited again.”
• The Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange is on at the NGV until 28 January
