|
 |
Laughter in the dark
The artist David Shrigley is often imitated but never equalled. He
talks to Ellie Broughton about his latest book, his relationship with
collectors and the role of illustration in fine art.
|
David Shrigley’s artwork creates a world full of beast-like people, hand-scrawled messages and indignant surrealism. The British artist has always played around with different ways of disseminating his work, so it’s no surprise to find him at Frieze, doodling on visitors with temporary tattoo ink. It’s a publicity stunt, he explains, for his new book, but if he’d really thought about it he would never have agreed to two, eight-hour shifts crouched over people with a paintbrush. Shrigley is an enthusiastic project-starter, game for anything. He created a campaign for Pringle in early 2010, for instance, and admitted that before he started he thought a twinset was a kind of underwear.
He has also published more than 30 books, some with a print run as small as 100. ‘My last book didn’t have my name on the cover,’ Shrigley says. ‘It was commercial suicide – and I knew that to start with. But that’s the way it should have been.’ This one won’t be like earlier works: art objects in their own right, too valuable now for him to buy back. By contrast, the new anthology has an initial print-run of 40,000, followed by a paperback, and will be his most widely-available book to date.
It has taken a 19-year career, with exhibitions in London’s Tate Modern and Saatchi Gallery, New York’s MoMA, Paris and Berlin, to reach this kind of mainstream success. But when he graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1991, the mainstream was just what Shrigley had in mind. |
 |
He had fallen out of love with fine art during his degree and made ‘a panic decision’ to be a cartoonist when he left. Ironically, the only people who liked his work were his fellow art-school graduates. It was artist and flatmate Jonathan Monk who encouraged Shrigley to stick to the sketchbook-style of illustration for which he is now celebrated. Some accuse him of being little more than a cartoonist; for Shrigley, the debate is long worn-out. ‘Anything can be fine art, and the debate as to what is and isn’t becomes tedious after a point. Any idiot can be taken seriously as a fine artist. If my work functions as cartoons there’s no artifice about what it is formally, whether you call it fine art or not. There’s a precedent for everything.’ Shrigley published a handful of books and had barely finished his first solo exhibition when he made the cover of Frieze magazine. ‘It was curious,’ he says, ‘as I hadn’t really shown my work much at that point. I’d made a lot of books – that’s how the article came about.’ The journalist was impressed by the way the young artist balanced humour and despair in his work, a quality that is still present today, if in more subtle ways.
International circuit
He has always kept the financial side of his career at arms’ length. ‘Either the work’s good or it’s not,’ he says. ‘Some of it’s good enough to be presented in the gallery and if it’s not good enough, no-one sees it. That’s how I measure my work.’
|
Shrigley says that an environment such as Frieze, packed with thousands of artworks and collectors, seems alien to him. ‘I’m never exposed to the nature of how I make a living,’ he says. ‘I like the fact that the work is collected, and I’m well aware that some private collections are very worthwhile to be in.
‘But I think it’s better for artists to separate the way they make money from the way they work. I don’t want to end up making decisions affected by how things sell in case it adversely affects my work.’ When I ask him which pieces he is proud to sell, he replies baldly that he likes to sell the things that cost the most to make. While his style has not changed dramatically over the years, the tone seems to have evolved from the moral obsessions of the 1995 work in Frieze magazine. The denial of meaning in artworks such as the empty album sleeve for Worried Noodles (2006) and the untitled prints from the same time, turned to morbidity over the past few years.
His black comic sculptures, such as the taxidermied puppy, I’m Dead, and the more sinister Dead and the Dying figurines, both 2010, take the themes of religion and meaninglessness to their ultimate standpoint. Shrigley has always had the power to make his audiences laugh, but his work has become more uncomfortable than ever recently. Putting out an anthology after two decades of anticommercial publishing might seem an unusual step. But given his track record, it seems there’s no project too unusual for Shrigley, and no signs that his distinctive style is losing steam. What the Hell are You Doing? is out now, published by Canongate. WORK FOR SALE |
|||||||
|
||||||||||
