NOT YOUR
BROTHER’S COMICS

ARTIST DAVID SHRIGLEY WANTS YOU TO KNOW
HIS FUNNY ART
IS ACTUALLY QUITE SERIOUS

Written by Joseph Akel

David Shrigley Untitled, 2014
Synthetic polymer paint on paper — 153 x 111 cm (60 1/4 x 43 3/4 in)
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Artist David Shrigley’s subversive, wildly sardonic illustrations have been called many things. “Crude” is a popular appellation among critics attempting to label his works. “Warped” also ranks up there. Shrigley, for his part, has been vocal about his lack of regard for detractors. However, one description he’s less inclined to ignore are the claims that his work cannot be taken seriously on account of their tragicomic humor. “The opposite of seriousness,” he frequently notes in interviews, “is not humor, it’s incompetence.” And, judging by the forty-plus publications to his name, a long list of exhibitions with marquee galleries, and a CV including both a 2013 Turner Prize nomination and, more recently, the highly prestigious Fourth Plinth Commission for London’s Trafalgar Square, Shrigley is anything but incompetent.

To be sure, Shrigley plays up his status as a bit of an outsider on the inside of the art world. His work frequently mocks the high-profile, insular community of gallerists, artists, and jet-set hangers-on to whom Shrigley paradoxically sells his work. For the 2015 Frieze Art Fair New York, over a dozen watercolors and illustrations exhibited by Shrigley at the Anton Kern Gallery booth taunted collectors with phrases such as “YOU ARE IRRELEVANT” paired with a roughly drawn image of an accusatively pointed finger. But Shrigley is also the first to point out that, in many ways, his works are highly critical of himself. In a 2013 interview following his Turner nomination, Shrigley remarked, “I’m less critiquing the art business than critiquing myself, as in, Isn’t it kind of weird to be an artist when not that many people in society get to make a living farting about in the studio all day?”

That willingness on Shrigley’s behalf to embrace a degree of self-assessment and translate it into irreverent, often withering criticism links him to a long tradition of artists who also sought to arouse a sense of cultural reflection through text-based works embracing parody and acerbic wit. Shrigley himself acknowledges artists associated with the early twentieth-century Dada movement, as well as Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists, as being highly influential to his own practice. Indeed, the purposeful juxtaposition of incongruous images and text—think of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La trahison des images, depicting a pipe with the inscription in French below, “This is not a pipe”—is certainly a visual conceit not uncommon to contemporary art.

David Shrigley Untitled, 2012
Acrylic on paper — 75 x 56 cm (29 1/2 x 22 in)
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

For Shrigley, though, the interest in creating such visual discordances between text and image lies in what he identifies as the “slippages” that occur when they are placed together. The failure of language—or its incompatibility with what is being observed—leads the viewer to form new meanings while also questioning existing ones. And, as with his illustration of Mount Rushmore, above which loom the words “MEN ARE FOOLS,” Shrigley is interested in playing with cultural assumptions and long-held ideologies. Those assumptions extend to questions about what art is and how it should “look.” Many of Shrigley’s detractors lament the facile nature of his draughtsmanship, linking his work with the graphic novel genre or outsider art, as opposed to a more mainstream conception of “fine art.” For Shrigley, in many ways, such objections are the exact reactions desired. “Art,” he noted in a 2006 interview, “can be many things.” With his own work, he continued in the same interview, “I want to make art that people like and will not just see as comedy but as some kind of comment as well.”

On that front, to be sure, Shrigley has the last word.

David Shrigley Untitled (be nice), 2012
Acrylic on paper — 29 3/4 x 22 1/6 in
Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York