Interview with Tim Clark, 2004

Tim Clark; David you are a legend, thank you so much. Its a real race against time but im ready to print and bind it now but i have just left a space in my writing because of the answer to question 12-would you ever think about doing this or would it be more of a project for curators?how does it rate as a form of interactive communication within the gallery framework, putting your books straight into the gallery that is or maybe making a catalogue of work that never actaually appeaedr in the gallery?Cheers, Tim

DS. Books go in bookshops and get sold at modest prices. They get passed around. They're cheap and accessible. This is what I like about them.

I don't like showing the actual drawings from books in exhibitions. There's no point. I don't mind taking a drawing from an exhibition and reproducing it in a book, that's OK. But vice-versa, like if I showed all the drawings from HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT in a gallery, I don't think is so good. I don't kick and scream when people want to do it, but personally I like an exhibition of drawings to be conceived as such. Curators can do whatever they like.

Hope that fits...

1. Do you think that theorising is completely inappropriate to what you do?

I don't like theorizing about my work myself, but that's not to say I have no interest in theory. Other people are free to say what they want about my work.

2. Your books have become complacent by filling themselves with a string of individual drawings on adjacent pages bound together in no narrative fashion: in this sense the single Shrigley drawing conveys an event, with the logical before and after eerily missing to its short story.   When you experiment with changing for the first time in Who I am and What I Want to an organised structure where each drawing succeeds the previous one, how well do you think this works for you?

Human Achievement has a vague structure to it (at least, I edited it so it seemed to fit together in some way).

Who I Am probably appears to have more narrative to it because it has a central character and the structure kind of refers to the title, but in reality it's probably almost as vague as H.A. The new book is the same format and much the same kind of content (no central character). It's called 'Let's Wrestle'. All the drawings for these books are done over a quite intense period working (4-6 weeks), so for me they have some kind of relation to each other, they are about how I was feeling/ what I was thinking about at that time. I guess I did about 300-400 drawings for each book and edited them down. When I was working on them I kind of had a rough notion of what the books were about.

3. What are the sources of inspiration for your drawings?

Everything.

4. To what extent does the textual piece, Where is David? contain a somewhat submerged element of self-portraiture?

Perhaps a little. But it's unusual in that respect.

5. You have been quoted as saying   ÏI have no interest in childrenÌs art, na've art or art brut, or neo primitivismÓ to determine that they have no bearing on you art because your drawings are quite sophisticated graphically but nothing exits in a cultural vacuum though even though those   headings serve to homogenise work with similar means but drastically different ends and is too narrow to pin down your stuff but I feel that you fulfil PicassoÌs aim when he said   ÏAt 16 I could draw like Michelangelo but it have taken me my entire life to learn how to draw like a child. Am I barking up the wrong > tree?

I think you're on the right track. Though I have never been particularly good at objective drawing.

6. Your amazing promo video for Blur gives a picture perfect definition of what your drawing stands for: morality, death, irony, black humour, nonsense and childlike tomfoolery. Have I overlooked anything else that is important?

It was a collaboration with the animators so it's not just my work, though they were very simpatico.

7. Do you think that what a lot of your more moral drawings do is highlight that people tend to literally be pretty crude, and conveys brilliantly that there arenÌt generally that many refined people since art like morality, consist of drawing the line somewhere?

I guess so.

8. Which drawing other than Time To Choose best embodies how your morality, as a make-belief authority is only quasi-ethical at the end of the day ?

Choose one yourself

9. Could you tell me what you think of this? The Îeternal judgement on our most absurd of actsÌ is part of ShrigleyÌs hopeless recommendations to make our life better as his work is overflowing with doÌs and donÌts. This ceaseless and frenetic activity is introspective for purposeful action because all these visual gags like Poltergeist takes a shower after dip in the pool or Hairy man strangles invisible child that coincide with Orgy interrupted by earthquake or Seizure at beauty parlour do not happen for no reason, they are a hall of mirrors for the drawing process to camouflage their arbitrary beginnings.

In Quiz: TV or microwave? Shrigley heads towards an understanding of what his images may actually signify in terms of connotation versus denotation as what they intend to depict is often indistinct and ambiguous. He appears to be aware of just how inaccurate they can be when he provides the answers for number 15 which is just an elementary rectangle, labelled as a Îbox.Ì What this consequently implies is that he is conceiving a level of self-conscious interpretation about his visual literacy but phenomenally in such an incidental manner.

Lordy. You'll have to send me a copy when it's finished.

10. How symbolic is the drawing, I Lack Skill   in your strategy of knowing naivet»?

To be honest. I don't know.

11. In enlisting   this drawing (Untitled) of some fictional hierarchy or royal family tree of the male members, I feel I have identified such a relevant single metaphor of self-irony for my wider discursive analysis of your Îclumsy-in-spite-of-himself wayÌIt is the one in which ,   we suddenly move from top to bottom, from meticulously transcribed to crude rendering of their faces. I am right or wrong to ascertain these straightforward diagrammatic elements, as if drafted in a second, become the common denominator for your drawings. Is it   a ludicrously far fetched opinion to believe that this drawing refers to something other than itself. Because I reckon that how it is layed out is obviously done on purpose? These thumb-nail sketches, in suddenly descending from order to chaos shows us that you are absolutely capable of slick-finished production but choose something lacking in virtuosity so that we see the cause and effect of his resourcefulness here.

I guess I've chosen to be good at one type of thing. I don't think I'd be good at another type of thing. You've got to choose what you're best at. I don't think I have much hidden talent.

12. It is quite a fraught issue when your drawings are   framed by a different context ; a discrepancy that critics in the stranglehold of art theory seem to get so perplexed about. An American critic, James Scarborough just didnÎt get it either when your work went transatlantic: Îpages are never numbered, so there is no way of discerning the order in which they will be hung will repeat the order in which they will be published.Ì What do you think of this idea: as a solution to silence these philistines, test the limits of their hyperbolising by devising an installation alluding to Seth Siegelaub, making the books constitute the art in their own right. He was a leading exponent of the radically groundbreaking movement, Conceptual Art, who challenged traditional expectations by staging an exhibition that reversed the long established relationship between the work on display and the supplementing catalogue by not showing any physical pieces of work. Instead the real site of the exhibition was the catalogue placed atop standard white plinths, which to quote SiegelaubÌs own words now become ÎprimaryÌ instead of the customary ÎsecondaryÌ systems of information?

I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.

13. Do you consider the fact that the expression doesn't always match the intention?

I think that's what I like about what I do. I sit down and do a bunch of drawings and when I look at them later on one or two seem to mean something that I didn't intend and they become my art.