The ineffable David Shrigley has a new book of drawings out, appropriately titled What the Hell Are You Doing?
It is useless, attempting to categorize David Shrigley as an artist. His work has a free and easy feel, a rough-draft quality reinforced by his imprecise lines and habit of marking textual errors in finished pieces. Take a page with a white background and three crocodiles, one above another, flat and inexpressive as the drawings of a child. “Crocs with Cocks,” the heading reads. The piece delivers exactly what it promises.
And so we might call him faux-naïve, or outsider-ish or genuinely naïve (he objects to all but the last of these three). The writer Will Self groups Shrigley with Edward Gorey, Edward Lear and Dr. Seuss as “graphic artists who create enclosed worlds of morphs.” He could fairly be called a cartoonist, but he is also, unquestionably, a serious artist. Shrigley is forty-three, in mid-career. His gifts are widely acknowledged. He has pieces in such prominent collections as the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a devoted public, eagerly awaiting his work’s next permutation.
No doubt they will be pleased with his latest offering, an anthology of drawings and photography entitled What the Hell Are You Doing? The Essential David Shrigley. Shrigley’s work is by turns playful, caustic, and grotesque – even, at times, incisive – but each of these distinct tones comes across as genuine. Not once does he appear guilty of taking himself too seriously. For instance, he presents a drawing of a nude man with his genitals blacked out, and a caption which reads, “Porn. Dirty, stinking, horrible porn right here, right now and you are looking at it. You will go to hell for this.”
Neither does Shrigley seem fond of others taking themselves too seriously, particularly where art is concerned. One drawing, entitled “Artists Talk About Their Work,” contains a series of figures discussing their artworks, many of which consist of assembling found or purchased items for display. The last of the four says, “I go around bars on the weekends and deliberately get into fights and get my head kicked in while a friend of mine videos it.” The coincidence with Harmony Korine’s foolish and ill-fated film project Fight Harm can hardly be accidental. In another instance, a group of people stand before a canvas covered with a tangle of overlapping circles, reminiscent of a Pollack drip painting. “How much does it cost?” the first asks. “It costs one hundred million pounds,” the figure nearby answers. Another chimes in, “It’s amazing.” The figure behind adds, “It’s very nice,” and a final individual adds, “It’s probably worth a lot more.” And in another instance, a man stares at an image of a dripping faucet. Above him, text reads, “Avant-garde films direct to your TV via cable or satellite unless you stop masturbating.”
Other drawings provoke immediate laughter, though it is unclear what prompted their creation, unless the simplest possible answer is the right one. Atop one page Shrigley offers a drawing of six opened cans. Six Cans of Cola, the title reads, and beneath that, “I drank six cans of cola one after the other and now I feel fucking great.” Maybe David Shrigley didn’t drink six cans of cola, one after the other, prior to making that drawing, but in the context of the book, it seems entirely possible that he did.
At times Shrigley’s work seems to be willfully impenetrable, as when he offers a drawing of a brick in the center of a page with the word “Brick” at the top or a drawing of an ugly man in profile with a large head and a bag slung over his shoulder labeled “Babies.” Yet even these curiosities invite repeat viewings, in part due to their visual qualities, but also due to the sense that perhaps some cue was missed on previous occasions, that this viewing will yield meaning. Eventually the viewer stretches to imagine that there’s some commentary embedded in these works on Shrigley’s side, some remark on the meaninglessness of so much in life. And then, having worked so hard to arrive at this conclusion, the viewer encounters a page which reads, “My only task is to fill the page. You have not been given a task,” and thinks, “Touché, Mr. Shrigley.”
Yet other works in this anthology evoke genuine feeling, sympathy for the unfortunate figures Shrigley presents, like the crudely drawn man in an arcade, who tells us, “I like the driving game I would play it all day if I could but it costs 2 pounds per game and I am unemployed.” Shrigley also offers three images of a bug, lying on its back. The bug’s legs are flailing in the first, and it says, “I want you to be there when I die.” In the second image, its legs are moving less, and it says, “I don’t want to die alone.” In the final image, the bug is still. The panel reads, “To die alone would be awful.” Still more affecting is a drawing of a pair of arms, holding up a bowl which reads, “Please sir may I have some more?” The response comes: “Certainly. No one else will eat it. They say it tastes of death.”
In an introductory essay, the writer Will Self ruminates on Shrigley’s singularity, the fact that, even if other artists are demonstrably influenced by his work, there is truly no one with Shrigley’s sensibility, no one who would think to draw a misshapen yellow light bulb on a gray background with the caption, “Light in the gloom, spoiling the gloom.” Indeed, David Shrigley creates memorable images in an utterly unsophisticated manner. On the book’s back cover, as a sort of final gag and in lieu of a blurb, Shrigley has written “This is a really good and interesting book. Please buy it. Thank you.” In short, he says everything I have tried to convey in the previous thousand words.
