David
Shrigley, a Vandal and a Moralist or:
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| For a while, David Shrigley thought of becoming a cartoonist after his studies at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991 but, after publishing his first books, he changed his mind, fortunately without losing his sense of humour or giving up drawing! Humour is actually one of the main ingredients of his work, and drawing remains his most spontaneous means of expression. So when he intervened in the Sunday edition of The Independent in the year 2000, it was more as an invited artist than as a seasoned satirist. To this platform the artist brought an amateur’s singular view on the world. The caricaturist, on the other hand, acts as a journalist and often as an editorialist. He is answerable to the current affairs of the world where the artist is answerable to nothing but his own current interests. Above all, what distinguishes Shrigley’s work from that of a professional illustrator is the instability of his style, of both his drawing and handwriting. While the professional would set out to develop an immediately recognizable “script,” Shrigley insists on clumsily sputtering from one drawing to another, as if every drawing were the first and progress impermissible. And yet, if he adheres to such (an absence of) discipline, it is not because he is seeking an original naivety—for him, children’s drawings are of absolutely no interest; nor does he have a taste for challenge; neither is it because he is afflicted with a serious case of schizophrenia—his degree of mental disorder does not surpass the average, or else he conceals it well!; nor does he try to analyze that strange symptom in which almost all adults suddenly become severely handicapped as soon as we ask them to draw from memory a sheep or any other animal . . . (There are undoubtedly many differences between a mole and a kangaroo!) Rather, Shrigley adopts the profile of an incurable amateur in order to escape the boredom stowed by every specialization. And, above all, he does so to establish a more direct relationship with his audience who, in the seeming absence of any clear style, can receive these drawings—which are sometimes appear in the form of pages of handwritten text—as if they were addressed to him personally, like a message left for a close friend or relative on the dining room table or on the fridge. I might add that I have no reply to give on his behalf. But I can see that, by proceeding in this way, he puts us in a situation similar to the way an unexpected event can unfold before our very eyes and thus monopolize our attention, whether it be a traffic accident or the untied shoelace of the pedestrian in front of us . . . Drawing, like the street, must be a spectacle—for both the drawer and ourselves, who are even less well-disposed with a pencil. We must not be mistaken; the amateur I am talking about does everything in his power and does not act nonchalantly. The amateur can be a dilettante but he can also be relentless about the task, and Shrigley fits more into the latter category, when he actually works. Crossed-out text always betrays both confusion and a concern for an enriched, more precise way of expressing oneself. Born in
1968 in central England, in an average-sized and uneventful city, David
Shrigley chose to stay in Glasgow after finishing his studies. And it
was there that he exercised his keen sense for shortcuts. Among the
numerous artists issued from this Scottish city’s stimulating
art scene (such as Claire Barclay, Roderick Buchanan, Douglas Gordon,
Jim Lambie, Jonathan Monk, Ross Sinclair, and Richard Wright, amongst
others), Shrigley is without a doubt, the greatest . . . in height!
Almost six and a half feet tall, his build offers him a privileged observation
post, a magnificent view of the society he lives in, with all its metamorphoses
and disorders—big or small, comical, deplorable, or simply sordid—just
like the major industrial city constantly tossed between recession and
promise of newfound prosperity, where, to use the usual expression,
he chose to “live and work.” For David Shrigley is not only an amateur cartoonist but also a sociologist and psychoanalyst in his spare time . . . and yet his analyses and diagnostics are irrefutable. Confession is his preferred tone and, since it cannot be free of religious connotations—the priest is first psychoanalyst and his consultations are free—it is often related to fault, crime, feelings of guilt, envy, injustice, failure, death, etc. From Saint Augustin to Rousseau and from Coleridge to de Quincey (both
Lake poets and consumers of opium), confession acquired its illustrious
history, and one of Shrigley’s effective comic impulses is to
adopt it as a literary genre receptive to absorbing everything, from
the most intimate to the most universal, from the most mundane to the
most exceptional, from the most self-indulgent to the most subtle, oscillating
between depravity and the metaphysical, and to take us on a stroll between
reality and fiction as if through the aisles of a labyrinthine bazaar.
Hence the difficulty in applying the rules of a rigorous taxonomy when
faced with works that will stop at nothing and that therefore accrue
many different themes. No matter that Rousseau provided an example of
one of the most fluent and refined syntaxes of the Francophone literary
corpus, the “absence of style” Shrigley seems to adhere
to and his shaky drawing (by feigned awkwardness and not by demonstration
of virtuosity) are fully justified by the choice of confession. If the
artist’s aim is indeed to “whisper into our ear,”
it is because he is fond of creating the illusion of a relationship
of proximity with his audience. And if he prefers to maintain his alleged
“amateurism”—if he prefers the sound of a lisp to
a polished voice that carries well and can be heard clearly—it
is because he finally sees an obstacle to the fluidity of style, an
inconvenience in the infallibility with which the professional drawer
hits his target from a distance. He does not believe in the transparency
of signs and representation so he stays away from it and goes by the
virtue of a colloquial mediocrity, an absence of style within anyone’s
reach, which thus favours the “reader” identifying with
himself better, especially when it comes to portraying subjects as prosaic
as the planet Mars, pole tax, or the shortage of tomatoes during winter
. . . SHOULD
THIS BE “poll tax” ? The principle of confession is not exactly the same as that of dialogue; however, it is founded on a one-way trip transmission. Thus it postulates a speaker (in this case, the author) and a listener (an imaginary one), whom David Shrigley would desperately like to make his interlocutor. Whence the excessively considerate “nice chap” role taken on by the author in drawings and photographs—always ready to strike up a conversation, always spurred by a deadly boring desire to communicate with the other, therefore always prompt to welcome, question, take an interest in, take care, approach, help, reassure, tell, explain, thank, etc. and almost always situated in front of a wall of incomprehension (indeed, we must distinguish between the imaginary listener and the real audience, placed before the drawing in a position to eavesdrop and who can perceive this incomprehension) or in front of an abyss of banalities, like in the embarrassed beginnings of a conversation between two strangers seated face to face at a stiff dinner party wherein the most enterprising of the two will do everything he can and draw from anywhere the means to break the ice. For the clumsiness that afflicts the author constrains him as much as it constrains his imaginary interlocutor and ourselves, witnesses to this parody of dialogue. Under other circumstances, the author could insult the fictitious receiver of his messages. In the most of desperate cases, he churns out his observations or arbitrary questionings as if they were of interest (practical or philosophical?) to everyone: “This kind of star is rare,” “How tall does grass have to be in order to be considered as ‘long grass’?” He will stop at nothing to maintain a phatic predominance in his speech, and therefore ensure that language falls short of its informational function.
David Shrigley
pleads in favour of a kind of clumsiness. He does not hesitate to overdo
it when necessary. Nevertheless, he is endowed with an exceptional aptitude
for producing images and turning our attention to trivial things: “Which
record is the best? A. B. Answer: Personally I prefer B” or for
transforming the slightest observation into a pseudo-declaration of
public interest. He has the gift to speak on irrelevant details but
he rarely monopolizes his audience for a very long time. Driven by an
innate conciseness, he is fond of the short and sententious form of
the aphorism. A few seconds suffice to understand his intentions, except
when he decides to put our patience to the test with inventories, stories,
instructions, summary tables, and forms manifesting pathological meticulousness.
A few seconds in front of each drawing or photograph, that’s all—whence
the success of his few interventions in advertising and the interest
he aroused among adventurous advertising professionals. That does not
mean that one drawing or photograph dispels another. The corpus of works
bears the appearance of disorder, yet it is organized and the books
published by the artist, twelve to date, participate in this ordering
. . . and simultaneously foster confusion regarding their own status
since they could be taken for comic books. (Organization is also subtractive.
When he sorts his drawings, the artist is sometimes swept up in a self-destructive
frenzy: first eliminating the bad ones, then the less bad, then the
average and, overwhelmed by excitement, he must sometimes restrain himself
from throwing away the good ones.) Sculpture,
on the other hand, requires a little more time. But is it because its
execution takes longer? Is it (prosaically) because it takes more time
to go around it? Shrigley’s objects conjure up more than any of
his non-realist drawings employing the schematized aesthetic of cartoons,
and they draw part of their strangeness from the fact they give the
impression of an artificial passage into the third dimension. As a child,
the first time I held in my hands a plastic figurine representing Tintin,
Astérix, or any of those other characters, I turned it every
which way; I looked at it frontally, in profile, but above all diagonally,
from behind, from above, and from below, realizing that the multitude
of still images that brought them to life in the comic books of their
adventures only presented them through a very limited number of angles.
It had never dawned on me to go around Tintin or Astérix. And
it is an extraordinary thing, I realize, to be able to render an object
with good likeness, and make it familiar even, in a side we do not know
it in. The amazing feat of the sculptor of figurines is his capacity
to stay in the continuity, to make continuum with the fragmentary, and
that is how he gives the illusion of showing us the hidden side of a
picture. By discretion,
simple provocation, or by a reflex of healthy self-derision (since he
knows that he has today gained a certain amount of recognition as an
artist), David Shrigley readily dons the image of a man at a loose end.
The issue of lacking anything to do, which is particularly well served
by drawing (a discredited, minor, and elementary means of expression),
also returns frequently in his work, notably in the abstract form of
arabesques, spirals, scrolls, superpositions, cross-ruling, and doodling.
“Thursday 5th. This is what I did today. What did you do?”
1998, “I design fancy things for roofs—will you marry me?”
1998, “When weak lines end new pens are bought,” 1998. The
lack of anything to do expresses either an anxious temperament (idleness
through impotence) or an offhand temperament (idleness through opulence,
of assets or talents). When I asked him one day what his everyday schedule
was like and if he had one, Shrigley very seriously replied that he
gets up at around nine in the morning, goes to bed at midnight, and
in between he stays awake. This statement is as pithy as it is efficient.
For is an artist who sleeps still an artist? In spite of the surrealists
and unless the artist decided on it when awake, it is doubtful. A dead
artist, by the way, is no longer really an artist! What do you think? The absurd
humour, the caustic nonsense is often served by tautology, repetition,
and laboured meticulousness, which the artist implements to describe
the non-events or the real ones that affect life in the suburbs. The
suburbs, as we know, all began in the countryside and Shrigley does
not pass up an occasion to remind us of the bucolic past, like in the
drawing pathetically captioned: “Tree without roots found growing
in the suburbs.” Today, the trees in this hostile environment
are artificial implants but, despite every indication to the contrary,
in the seedy landscapes that form the background of his work, there
are nevertheless rivers to sell, fantastic animals, and isles of savage
life, like the ones dreamed up by children who stray into wastelands.
It takes a particular kind of imaginary world to transform a garbage
dump into treasure, and Shrigley is a little bit that Robinson of wastelands
who builds his hut at the foot of cliffs of big housing complexes. From
a certain point of view, broken fences are signs of insufferable carelessness;
from another viewpoint, they are promises of liberty. From a certain
point of view, rifts are openings! |