What the Hell Are You Doing? The Essential David Shrigley, a compendium of his
drawings published in 2010, has sold more than 20,000 copies. In 2003 he
animated the music video for Good Song by Blur. Between 2005 and 2009 he
produced a weekly cartoon for The Guardian; more recently he was the
political cartoonist for the New Statesman.
You can buy Shrigley T-shirts, badges, guitar plectrums, duvet covers and
greetings cards (though it is hard to imagine sending one without causing
offence). Next month, a retrospective, David Shrigley: Brain Activity, opens
at the Hayward Gallery in London. The organisers are expecting substantial
crowds.
The intriguing thing about Shrigleys work, though, is that unlike much
popular art, it is rarely easy on the eye. His reputation rests upon a
corpus of more than 7,000 works on paper: deranged, abortive little drawings
often accompanied by wobbly text full of spelling mistakes and
crossings-out. Crude, scratchy and instantly recognisable, they appear
animated by ferocious mental distress, like the outpourings of a madman with
no formal art training whatsoever. (In reality, Shrigley graduated from
Glasgow School of Art in 1991.)
Shrigleys pictorial world is a strange, benighted realm. Death and despair
loom large. Decapitated heads, swords, flies, ants and mangy, misshapen
creatures defying every known biological category are recurrent motifs. The
atmosphere is supremely nightmarish, nihilistic and bleak. The novelist Will
Self once compared Shrigleys drawings to the scribblings of a serial killer.
Why then is he so popular? The answer is simple: because he is an exuberantly
gifted humorist. His message may be pessimistic, harping on about the
pointless absurdity of existence, but the manner in which he conveys it is
gloriously funny; there is always laughter in the darkness. As Shrigley puts
it, If you start talking about death, mayhem and misery and it isnt funny,
then it would be quite a hard pill to swallow.
Judging by his drawings, it would be unsurprising to discover that Shrigley,
43, lives in a hovel down some alleyway in the back of beyond. The reality
is somewhat different.
It is a sharp December morning when I arrive at his 19th-century flat in
Glasgows well-to-do West End (he has lived in the city since he was a
student). His wife, Kim, lets me in, because he is still showering after a
morning session of yoga.
When Shrigley, who is 6ft 5in tall, comes downstairs, he is clean-shaven and
dressed in a cosy cable-knit sweater. He wears sandals over white socks,
like a right-on Christian preacher an impression reinforced by his soft
voice and meek manner. There is no flicker of the anarchy I assume must lurk
within.
Im just an actor, he jokes, pointing to the ceiling of his sitting-room.
Theres a dribbling, paranoid wreck who lives up there. He pours us both a
coffee. I dont think Im clinically depressed, he continues with a wry
smile. So I dont know where the darkness comes from.
Born in Macclesfield in 1968, Shrigley grew up in a redbrick suburb of
Leicester after his family moved there in 1970. His father was an
electronics engineer, his mother a computer programmer. Both were practising
Christians.
My dad is a Christian fundamentalist, Shrigley says. He didnt get into it
until I was a teenager, but it really freaked me out. During his teens
Shrigley decided he no longer wanted to go to church. There are so many
contradictions within Christianity. Why is the Church so interested in the
congregations sexual behaviour? Why do they give homosexuals a hard time?
There are a number of things that I have never been able to reconcile with
organised religion.
Despite this, he is reluctant to call himself an atheist. Im definitely not
a practising Christian, he says. But I have sympathy with religious
belief. People who need to disprove that there is a spiritual life somehow
it spoils the magic of being alive. Richard Dawkins is like an annoying
sixth-former saying, Yes, but I think youll findhellip; All right, Richard,
whatever. You win. There is no God. Religion is bad. Except I dont think
that religion is necessarily a negative thing. I think that humanity is
endemically predisposed to do bad things, and religion is sometimes used to
justify those bad things. Ultimately, though, religion is a positive thing.
There are other forces in the world that arent positive like capitalism.
Interviewers often emphasise Shrigleys religious upbringing, as though it
offers a key to unlock the meaning of his work. Shrigley, though, is less
sure that it had such a strong impact on his imagination.
It wasnt some crazy Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit-type scenario where I was
brutalised by my parents, he says. There were things we werent supposed
to do when I was a little kid like I wasnt allowed violent comic books.
Obviously, though, I was obsessed with violence and death and mayhem. I was
really keen on making torture chambers and places of execution for Action
Man out of cardboard boxes from Tesco. Its just what little boys do, isnt
it?
Shrigley also spent a lot of time drawing. I was the kid who could draw
dinosaurs better than anyone else in my class, he says. Even when I was
four years old, I was making peculiar little drawings with speech bubbles.
In a sense, Ive been doing the same thing my entire life.
After completing his art and design foundation year at Leicester Polytechnic,
he enrolled on the influential environmental art course at Glasgow School of
Art in 1988. Angry with his teachers after he was awarded a 2:2 in finals,
though, he decided that he no longer wanted to become an artist. I was
always being given a hard time for making art that was a bit stupid and
funny, so I decided to become a cartoonist even though I had no
interest in cartoons or comic books.
To catch the eye of prospective editors, he carefully reworked his initially
scruffy sketches to imitate a professional finish. He did sell one
cartoon, to Punch but it wasnt printed before the magazine closed in
1992. At the suggestion of the conceptual artist Jonathan Monk, his friend
and former flatmate, Shrigley reconsidered becoming an artist, and began
presenting his drawings as they first appeared, instead of polishing them
up.
In 1994 he produced a book called Blanket of Filth which were just the
drawings as they came out. He made about 100 copies, which he sold to
people at art openings or in the pub. From that point on, I was making a
book every few months. In the years that followed, he didnt feel any
urgency about his career. He was content to be known as the guy who made
these interesting, funny, oblique drawings.
The breakthrough came in 1995, when his work was featured in and on the cover
of the art magazine Frieze. It was like going from being nobody to somebody
in the art world overnight, he says. Suddenly you are stamped official
artist. Before long he was offered solo exhibitions in Britain and across
Europe. I remember feeling slightly guilty because I hadnt worked as hard
as everybody else. It wasnt my intention to become the kind of artist who
would be on the cover of Frieze.
Shrigley may have started out as a slacker, but over the past decade and a
half he has fashioned a sustained career for himself as a successful fine
artist. Both the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York now own
examples of his work. The new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery will
demonstrate the extent of his oeuvre. As well as paintings and drawings, it
will feature several deadpan sculptures, including a stuffed Jack Russell
holding a placard that states, Im dead (a Surrealistic joke that would
surely have pleased Magritte). There will also be a selection of
photographs, and some short animated films such as Sleep (2008), a burlesque
of Andy Warhols 1963 experimental film of the same name, and Light Switch
(2007), which alludes to the Turner Prize-winning work of the conceptual
artist Martin Creed.
Does Shrigley hope that the Hayward exhibition will remind his audience that
he is a proper artist as well as a cartoonist? I dont mind how people
perceive me. I am very resistant to being defined as an illustrator, but I
am a cartoonist of sorts. I call myself an artist because the term
encompasses everything I do. Also I make a living as a fine artist, I dont
make a living as a cartoonist.
Shrigley does not sell work for as much as some of his contemporaries (from
what he tells me, I get the impression that his own prices have yet to reach
tens of thousands of pounds). At the core of what I do are drawings, and
because there are so many of them, they only acquire a certain price, he
explains. I drive a Honda, put it that way. But I have nothing to complain
about. We have a very nice flat, and Kim doesnt have to have a job.
Sitting serenely on his sofa, a neatly folded green mohair rug beside him,
Shrigley seems pleased with his comfortable existence. Most days, he works
for eight hours in one of his two studios making sculptures or drawings (he
discards three out of every four of the latter). He and Kim, a former
graphic designer whom he met in the late 1990s and married in 2010, are
thinking about moving to Brighton: Ive always loved the sea. He seems
relaxed about the fact that they are unlikely to have children. Were
getting a bit old for it. Were going to get a dog. Were thinking
about a miniature schnauzer. All my friends have kids, but if you want to be
really environmentally friendly, dont have any.
It is easy to be charmed by Shrigleys gentleness, as well as his witty line
in self-deprecation easy, in fact, to forget that he has published almost 30
madcap books with titles such as Ants Have Sex in Your Beer and Kill Your
Pets (I worry for his future miniature schnauzer). Even Pass the Spoon, the
sort-of opera that Shrigley wrote last year with the Irish composer David
Fennessy, has a sinister quality. Like a deranged version of the BBCs
cooking competition MasterChef, the production, which ran at Glasgows
Tramway Theatre in November, features two celebrity chefs, a cast of singing
vegetables that eventually get chopped up, and a banana hell-bent on
escaping its fate of becoming banana custard. (It will have its London
premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in May.)
Does Shrigley concede that his work is dark? I am aware that theres quite a
mordant world view, he says. Sometimes I feel the work is a bit
relentlessly dark and nasty, and I try to pull back a little, but Im not
really in control of the content it just comes out in a very intuitive
fashion. Being an artist gives you a voice and that voice is cathartic.
Youre purging yourself. He smiles. Im a pretty happy, well-balanced
person, really.
But if he is so happy, then isnt his unruly vision inauthentic? Isnt he
cheating his audience? After all, he draws like a sociopathic amateur, but
operates as a balanced professional. His work has the stamp of outsider art,
yet hes an art-world insider friends, for instance, with Richard Wright
and Martin Boyce, who have both won the Turner Prize. For the first time,
Shrigley slightly bristles. You say all these things and, to be honest, I
dont care. My work is not autobiography, thats for sure. But that doesnt
mean its not authentic. Graphically, theres no artifice. All the mistakes
I make are real mistakes. I never draw anything twice. Im not interested in
making aesthetic, beautiful drawings.
He draws breath. Look, Im not a lunatic, whereas the voice in my work is
pretty lunatic, Ill readily admit that. But I want it to be because you
cant be a lunatic in real life. Whats the alternative? Does anybody make
happy art? He sips his coffee. Maybe there is something endemic within
humour that has to be cruel in some way. But at least my work is funny. I do
laugh at my own work. It does amuse me. That means its sort of happy.
David Shrigley: Brain Activity is at the Hayward Gallery, London, from
February 1 to May 13 (southbankcentre.co.uk)