DAVID SHRIGLEY
Interview: 5.1
Art / Music
LIMERICKS OF THE FUTURE: THE BLEAK HUMOR OF DAVID SHRIGLEY
wordsby saelan twerdy
In a drawing from a David Shrigley book entitled Human Achievement, a crudely drawn man stands proudly upright and walks across a white page, surrounded by text inked by Shrigley’s immediately-recognizable pen, with its misspellings and scratched-out phrases. The words read: “Music has lost its power. So has visual art. So has prose. Now it is the sole responsibility of the writers of limericks to describe the human condition.” What with Shrigley being a frequent collaborator with musicians and a successful visual artist, we don’t need to take his narrator literally, but those few lines sum up Shrigley’s approach to art in a nutshell.He gave up trying to be a cartoonist many years ago, but Shrigley’s absurd and abject little drawings are probably the funniest thing in contemporary art…
