David
Shrigley (17 September 1968- present) was born in Macclesfield. He did the Art
and Design Foundation course at the Leicester Polytechnic in 1987, and then
studied Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991.
David
Shrigley is usually associated to his childlike and cartoonish style. In an
interview David Shrigley said “I couldn’t change my style because I don’t think
I have a style. What people mistake for my graphic style is actually just a
desire not to have a style at all its just a default setting of making graphic
images and text that is I suppose trying to avoid any kind of craft, and
therefore any kind of style”.
Shrigley
says if his work is “a reaction to anything it’s a reaction to this banal pop
culture, it’s a reaction to come dine with me or x factor or toy story 3.” Cliff
Lausan, curator of Shrigley’s show at the Hayward, said “What makes David’s
work unique is he’s got one foot in the pop culture world, the way his drawings
circulate, and the other in fine art”.
“I
don’t think my artwork is that funny. I suppose people are very interested in
the content of my work as being humorous. But maybe the reason why they are so
interested in talking about that is the fact that there’s probably an absence of
humour in contemporary art.” Shrigley says that his art is often not really to
do with the aesthetics, as he cannot draw, and he is more of a writer than an
artist.
David
Shrigley’s show at the Hayward gallery has a room downstairs where there are
over 1000 drawings from over 10 years. They are displayed in an easy and
efficient manner, fly posted, right next to one another covering the wall
floor to ceiling. It gets rid of the frames, and adds a certain strength,
compared to just an individual drawing. Although in some way there is too much
to look at, Shrigley says maybe 5 years ago there was enough but now there’s
too much, even if you like it, you probably still get bored of looking at it.
With Shrigley’s art you are often
encouraged to get involved and create your own art alongside his. Many of
Shrigley’s pieces involve the audience’s participation in order to complete the
art. In his show at the Hayward Gallery you are able to nap on the sculptural
beds, add your life drawings of his naked humanoid figure to the wall of
others, and download a script online and act out Shrigley’s play on stage. What
I’m more interested in is that people can perform it themselves, that’s the
crucial part of it. I’ve made an exhibition that I wouldn’t have otherwise
made. So it’s been quite a nice opportunity.
“I
teach art on a fairly regular basis. You meet people who are making art about
something. You meet a student who’s gay and their making work about those
experiences. I can understand them making work about their life experiences, but
I haven’t had that. I’m not interested in the subject matter; I’m interested in
the art. You can’t just make art as a statement of something that’s happened to
you because in my view that’s just autobiography – it’s not really art.”
Shrigley
forces us to ask the big question: is it art?
At
first I thought it wasn’t art, and that they were just little doodles which you
sometimes laughed at, but the more I started to look into David Shrigley,
reading and looking at his books, I really started to like him, and his art. I
like art that can be serious but I do agree that other art does lack humour and
it is nice to have humour in fine art, as it is escapism. The fact that he
spends so much of his time doing so many drawings shows that he enjoys what he
does. And it shows. I feel as though his work is more impressive when his
drawings are displayed on mass, as although there is probably too much to look
at, I feel it what they need. Because stand-alone they are not as strong.
Back
in the 1990s a number of British artists started to bring humour and a kind of
bleak, deadpan comedy, back into art making, using the lo-fi, amateurish means
of drawing and cartooning to do so.
Shrigley
uses a lot of signage or signs, reducing communication to its bare essential
object, and text describing something that probably doesn’t need to be
described and perhaps begs the question why indeed is it being described. “So I
suppose that’s why my attitude towards making
art work is that I try and make everything as direct and quick as possible.” Shrigley
offers you art-therapy to help you cope with “an increasingly crazy and poorly
signposted world”.
Shrigley
is a child of the surrealists. “In Shrigley’s show there is a door-shaped
painting of a door with the word “door” lettered clumsily across it. And right
at the end of the show Magritte’s pipe itself makes and appearance, in a way, Shrigley’s
caption to this caricature of a pipe is entirely characteristic. “This is
Nothing” he writes, modestly acknowledging his master, while smuggling in a
bittersweet pun.”
David
Shrigley’s scratchy, naïvely drawn figures in black and white, usually with a
deadpan legend attached, attempt to deal with the hopes and fear of everyday
life. Deliberately dysfunctional, his work employs a simple technique that
combines expressionless phrases with handwritten captions, deliberate spelling
mistakes and crossings-out, emphasising the outsider viewpoint of his various
characters. This gives the feel of Tracey Emin.
We
humans are always trying to be noble and meaningful, but even in the face of
death we manage to screw up the timing.
“Art
isn’t usually much of a laugh. Humour doesn’t tend to be a major ingredient.
And contemporary art, in recent decades, has tended to take itself very
seriously indeed.” Shrigley’s work is very wrong and very bad in all sorts of
ways, yet it is compelling. There are lots of artists who, furrowing their
brows and trying to convince us of their seriousness, but they are not half as
profound or absorbing. But his work isn’t really lip pursing or ruminative. We
look, we wince or laugh, and we move on- in life as well as in art. “He has been wrongly overlooked for a long
time because his work suggested itself as being just funny and therefore
marginal, “ said Penelope Curtis, director of Tate Britain and chair of the
jury. “Just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s not good.” “Does his work
last? Is it funny the second time round, beyond the spark and the laugh?”
Shrigley’s
comment on what art is good for; art might not be able to make much difference
to the world, but it does allow us to step outside of our humdrum habits and
anxieties, and the dull constraints and official scripts of daily life, to look
back on them and laugh, however uncomfortably.
“David Shrigley’s art operates at the cross-roads
of art, absurdity and philosophy – and the result is a disconcerting, often
hilariously dark take on hubris and futility, on the comedy potential of
existentialist angst, failure and deflated ambition in a meaningless universe,
as seen through a lens of paranoid, suburban banality. It’s like Kierkegaard,
only with marker pens, poster paint and crappily-made sculpture.”
Gives the impression of having been produced by a
madman sequestered away in a locked ward, sending out messages under the door.
But unlike the kinds of slackers he often depicts Shrigley has a prodigious
work rate. Though he doesn’t usually start work until late in the afternoon,
sometimes he will create as many as 50 drawings in a single session. Shrigley will
end up doing 1000s and 1000s of drawings most of which fail his scrupulous
quality checks and Shrigley often ends up discarding 75% of his works. Shrigley
would write a long list of ideas of what he can draw/ paint. “I have a big
fancy drawing board and I sit in front of that and draw. I start off working
for the sake of working, almost randomly. I just draw and write things down
just for the sake of it, and it’s not until several hours later that these
things start to make sense… The simple thing I’ve learnt over the years is just
to have a starting point and once you have that the work seems to make itself.”
Some
of the jokes fall flat, while others repeat a trope. The wall paintings are
hopeless: tiny ideas vastly overinflated; in general, the longer Shrigley’s
films, the less they succeed. But the ratio of hit to duds is very high, and
the show is expertly installed, with a very mordant final room and an
accompanying catalogue featuring a droll dialogue between the artist and the
author Dave Eggers.
The message: I have been to art school, it says;
dismiss me at your peril.
