“In Memory of Godzilla: Reading Material for Jim Shaw” by Charlie Fox

 “In Memory of Godzilla: Reading Material for Jim Shaw” is a creative writing piece by London-based writer and artist Charlie Fox which was specially commissioned to be included in the 2021 Gallery Publication "Jim Shaw: Paperback Covers". 

Edited by Marc Jancou, and introduced by Lionel Bovier and Samuel Gross, the publication gathers together all of Shaw's inventoried “Paperback Covers”. Below we include a selection of excerpts from Fox's text. 

‘And when I woke up, the dream disintegrated. I discovered all my new friends, even that bloodthirsty raven, had vanished. I was back in the same room in the same old strange house with the same crack of spooky light peeping under the door. There were no furry beasts eager for him to tell my big black secrets and there was no green sunshine to illuminate the evil night. I touched the bedroom window and it trembled like jelly. Beyond lay nothing but the dark, its thousand eyes all pinned on me. If only I was a big velvet bat, Ithought, I could flutter out of this garbage dump and into the sky. And then a funny thing happened—an awful thought crept up on me like a gas, beginning in his stomach and sneaking all the way up to my head. I was as lonely as Pluto.’ 

Little Michael Went Mad by David Bowie

‘That scene in the episode, where drooling Homer Simpson sneaks a gummy Venus de Milo off the rump of the babysitter is a cute joke about modern art. In the context of a refrigerator, the gummy Venus wouldn’t seem too insane but isolated within the field of Homer’s trusty sedan, it transforms. An Emerald City green version of a classical sculpturefastidiously rendered in gelatinon a Toys ‘R’ Us scaleseems like the kind of lurid and adorable object that might have exploded from the head of Jeff Koons. Devouring the beautiful girl is a very old desire, as old as Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. The Grandmother hanging inside the beautiful wolf’s belly is sculpture, a perversion of the Russian doll. Perhaps a wolfcub nestles sweetly within her stomach. Buried in the correct substance (fake blood) with the radio blasting R & B, Homer’s car would be sculpture, too.’

The Dummy’s Guide to Sculpture by Klaus Nomi