Micheal Krejewski Interview with David Shrigley

MK: Your drawings are mostly known; less known are your sculptures, public interventions and photographs. Can you tell me about the very beginning of your drawing, in relation to your studies at the Glasgow Art School 1991?

DS: I studied Fine Art in the department of Environmental Art at GSA from 1988-91. The course was designed to promote the creation of art outside the gallery space. The mantra of the department at that time was "The context is half the work". It was then that I started to make public interventions which I documented as photographs. When I left art school these works became more transient and the photographs I took to document them started to become more important than their subject.

The photographs I make now are not really anything to do with documentation. I just want to make interesting photographs. I also made sculpture at art school. I guess the sculptures I made at that time were quite crafted. I think I was trying to justify my art practice by displaying craft skills. Craft in sculpture has always been a bit of a problem for me. I have to keep reminding myself that it is just a means to an end. I didn't present any of my drawings as artwork until a few years after art school. I have always kept a notebook to make drawings in ever since I was a child. I never really thought of it as art, it was more like keeping a diary.

When I left art school I decided I had to invent a career for myself and since I didn't think it was possible for me to be an proper artist, I decided I would become a cartoonist. I re-drew some drawings from my notebook into a cartoon format and made them into a book which I used as a tool of self-promotion. After making a second book of this type I realised nobody was interested and I stopped trying. I continued drawing in my notebook as I had always done and eventually decided to publish one of my notebooks without any re-drawing, which proved a lot more satisfying. It was not until 1996 that I started to make drawings out with my notebook, when I had the opportunity to exhibit them. From that point I started to use colour and collage. I still keep a notebook and draw in it in the same way I have always done.

MK: You wrote that nobody was interested in your early attempts to create a sort of cartoon-book for self promotion. This means that you were obviously looking for a resonance. I guess that your first public was the artist circle in Glasgow. Am I right? You are still living there. Is it important for you to stay in Glasgow and to be in exchange to this special "local" art scene?

DS: Leaving art school is quite a daunting experience and at the time when I graduated the art community in Glasgow was a very important part of my becoming an artist. If you have a lot of artists working around you, as I did, it is a great inspiration. Working as an artist in isolation is very difficult. The first books I published received a positive response from my artist peers at a time when nobody else was interested. The first exhibition in which I was involved (in 1992) was at Transmission gallery, an artist-run space in Glasgow, which became a focal point for the young artist community during the 1990's. Also I think the most important advice I have had about about my work has come from my fellow artists in Glasgow, rather than from teachers or commentators. I still really enjoy working in Glasgow. The Glasgow art world has changed in the last 12 years in that there are many more artists and many more artist-led projects which make it an exciting place to be.

MK: Your drawings are of an astonishing variety. How do you get the ideas? These seemingly simple sketches, are they spontaneously found or are they the result of a development and several reworks? There are several works dealing with the clichés and special attitudes reflecting the art scene. Do you develop this ironical view by yourself or is it maybe important to discuss this with your social context?

DS: Most of the drawing that I do is intuitive. Occasionally I make notes which I then use as a starting point for a drawing, but mostly I just sit down and draw. I never re-draw anything unless I spill coffee on it. I don't discuss the content of what I do with anyone. I don't really know where the content comes from. Everywhere I guess.

MK: You show your drawings in two different ways: In the context of your numerous printed books, they seem to approach cartoons which amuse and astonish; shown at a gallery, understood as autonomous art works, they address the traditional collector. What is your feeling about these not totally separated ways of reception?

DS: The decision to exhibit my drawings in the gallery space came a while after I had been publishing them in books. I suppose it was a career-driven decision to some extent, since it is hard to show books in a gallery space. The drawings I published in books were all small, black and white works because they were easy to reproduce that way. Once I started exhibiting drawings I was able to experiment with size and colour and collage. I see exhibited drawings and published drawings as being the same (they are often the same works) in terms of their intended audience.

I think collectors read my books and look at my exhibitions the same as everyone else. However I think the book and the gallery offer very different possibilities in terms of the way that people experience the work. Books provide a narrative structure whereas in the gallery one can use the material qualities of drawings and spatial relationships between them and the sculptural objects and photographs that I exhibit. I like making books because they are democratic and accessible in a way in which art galleries often are not.

MK: It is a really quite new phenomenon that artists, who formerly worked in the comic genre – like Robert Crumb or Raymond Pettibon – are represented now by galleries and became successful in the art world. When you started your career: Have you been more influenced by comic book drawers, cartoonists or by “so called” fine artists? And currently? Did this influence change?

DS: I have always been influenced by Fine Art in terms of the sculptural works and photographs I make. I've never really had any interest in comics, although I acknowledge that the drawings I make have relationship to them. As I said, I didn't think of my drawings as Fine Art until quite a long time after art school, but I didn't really think of them as cartoons either until I decided to become a cartoonist. I changed them to look like cartoons (or what I thought cartoons should look like), but it didn't really work so reverted back to my original way of drawing. In graphic terms my influences come from 'found' artwork; graffiti, shopping lists, telephone doodles, hand-drawn maps and diagrams, etc. I have a growing collection of these kinds of things. I also like outsider art but I think my real interest lies in that which is 'accidental' rather than untutored.

MK: You still make sculptures which are often full of humorous and absurd elements. Do you develop them in close connection to your drawings, means: are they in a way carried out by sketches, or do you produce the sculptures more absolved from the other medias you use, in this case, for example, primarily experimenting with the material?

DS: I have always seen my sculptural work as being closely related to my drawings and photographs. I almost never make preparatory drawings for the objects I make (maybe it shows). About two years ago I decided that every sculpture I made would be completed within a day. Prior to that the sculpture that I made was often quite laboriously crafted and time-consuming to produce.

Whilst I still like these heavily crafted works I have realised that that way of working was not in keeping with the drawings and photographs I make. I make a great many drawings and photographs so I never feel any problem with discarding anything I don't think is good enough. This way I feel no obligation to what I am making and am able to constantly experiment. When I made sculptures which took several weeks of time and effort I felt that I was not able to be ruthlessly critical of them once they were finished. I also felt that I was 'hiding behind' the craft (as I mentioned before) so that the craft was getting in the way of the art.

Earlier this year when I was thinking about my show at Kunsthaus Zurich I decided that I would spend a month making some new sculpture. The task I set for myself was to make one sculpture for every day of the month. At the end I had 31 sculptures to choose from. Many of them were thrown away but I have chosen to show a few of them in the exhibition along with some older works.

MK: Your drawings contain both, elements of comics and literature. Did you ever think about writing a comic story or making an animated film?

DS: I have thought a lot about trying to introduce narrative into my work. I have found it difficult because the nature of what I do is intuitive and tends to lend itself to very short pieces rather than longer 'stories'. I have tried to address this in the most recent book I have produced which is called 'Who I Am and What I Want' and is published in the Autumn. In order to try to create some kind of structure to the book I used the same character in all the drawings which form a kind of autobiographical rant.

I suppose it's quite a crude tactic but it works in the sense that it is certainly the most narrative book I have produced. With the help of my girlfriend I have also been producing some web-based animations which I suppose are also a small step into narrative. I'd like to make some longer animation / film pieces but I'm trying to work towards it gradually. You can see my animations at; www.mudam.lu/shrigley, www.zenomap.org. And you can find details of my new book at; www.redstonepress.co.uk.

Interview with Micheal Krejewski, 2003