British Artist David Shrigley: Life Is Hard Enough, So of Course Everything Deserves to Be Challenged

These days, griping really is easy — and it sells~

In September 2016, a 7-meter bronze "hand" went up in London's Trafalgar Square, its long, skinny thumb raised. This was Really Good, a work by the artist David Shrigley.

The square is named after the Battle of Trafalgar, which in the early 19th century secured Britain's mastery of the seas. Four plinths stand at its corners; three of them carry statues of King George IV, General Sir Charles Napier and Sir Henry Havelock. The money ran out before the fourth could be filled, and it sat empty for 150 years.

Only in 1999 did the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce start commissioning artists to put work on the Fourth Plinth, with an open call every year. Before Really Good, the plinth had held a boy on a rocking horse (2013), a blue cockerel (2014) and the skeleton of a horse (2015). Trafalgar Square, once a symbol of imperial glory, had become an experimental art space that pulled in the public's attention.

When David Shrigley first entered the competition he wrote a short statement, which later became the bronze hand's "official description": "People today worry that a lot of things are getting worse — the economy, the climate, society. I hope it [the hand] can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: if you suggest things are going to be good… then everything will be good."

Clearly, not everyone accepted that cheerful line. The Guardian questioned whether he meant it, noting that his earlier work was full of political satire. Like most sculptures in public squares, this one carries on the tradition of fertility worship. The "like" button on Facebook and other social media has been attacked as the beginning of taking sides, or the end of thinking for yourself. Either way, the gesture is a symbol of the age that works everywhere in the world.

Really Good arrived at a delicate moment. In the referendum of June 2016, 51.9% of voters backed Brexit. London's newly installed mayor, Sadiq Khan, came to the unveiling; The Guardian, a little sourly, said he looked like a circus ringmaster as he pulled the black cloth away with a flourish. "This sculpture tells everyone that London is open," he said — plainly taking David's sunny account at face value.

It was a high point for the artist, the moment that carried him out of the art world and into a much larger public.

On September 8, David Shrigley's first exhibition in China opened at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. In the galleries you can see a full-scale copy of Really Good, the bronze swapped for an inflatable "hand." The hall's ceiling is too low for a 7-meter inflatable hand to stand up, so it lies on its side instead.

"I'm curious what new readings Chinese audiences will bring to it," David said, sounding genuinely excited in an interview with QDaily. "Of course, it's also possible I'm overthinking it."

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"An artist who is 1.97 meters tall" — that is how his website describes him.

"Winning with Really Good was a complete accident," said David, who had landed in Shanghai two days earlier and was still off the clock with jet lag. "At first I was only in it for the entry fee. Under the rules, anyone who submitted a proposal got about a thousand pounds." Really Good took roughly an afternoon to go from idea to sketch: one sheet of A4, drawn in black pen, with a few lines beside it about what it meant.

"At the time I thought it was just silly nonsense — though there was a satirical side to it," he said, explaining why the thumb is so out of proportion. "Maybe the longer it is, the more it says I approve of you. Or maybe it's telling you to shut up already." Anyone who has watched "haha" lose its value in Chinese online speech over the past few years will get the idea.

Only after he made the second round did he start thinking about it seriously. "I think I was being sincere. When you look at it again, you find it's a contradiction — ironic and sincere at once."

On opening day, some visitors predicted that the show, called Lose Your Mind, would become Shanghai's next "internet-famous exhibition."

The reclining inflatable thumbs-up; a headless taxidermied ostrich; a robot vacuum dressed up as a human head, a paintbrush jammed in its nostril, dragging disordered lines across paper (that one is called The Artist); a whole wall of satirical drawings — nearly every piece is good for a knowing laugh. That is what makes an "internet-famous exhibition": it travels easily on social media.

The Untitled Drawings series is one long complaint about daily life. Almost every front desk has met the customer who keeps slamming the bell; David's caption reads "Stop ringing the bell," and you can practically hear yourself shouting it.

A man reading a newspaper drifts off mid-sentence: "This is all bullshit, why do I sit here every morning reading it." In another drawing a naked figure swings a sword at several severed heads; the heads are called "dissenting opinions."

The Untitled Drawings look deliberately childish — A4 paper, black marker, and David leaves his crossings-out on the page on purpose. "People often frown and think, this counts as art? I can see the speech bubble next to their heads: how is this any different from a kid scribbling."

For a long time David's parents had no clear idea what their son did, until a British television station made a program about him. "Overnight they understood. Or at least they looked like they did."

Some pieces are so plain you think he is being lazy, or just being clever — a drawing called Life is nothing but range after range of mountains. Others use British humor on serious subjects: a grown man "speeding" along on an absurdly small bicycle, with the artist's message, "be the best that you can be," a common brand of toxic positivity that preaches individual effort and ignores the actual circumstances and social class a person is born into.

There are enormous numbers of these "doodles" — "most of them go in the bin, of course." They travel a completely different route from the "serious art" that has occupied museum galleries for decades.

Uniqlo once made a T-shirt with him: below the collar, the silhouette of a headless office worker with a briefcase, captioned "I have no head and I still have to go to work." Among the merchandise the Power Station of Art made for this show is an ordinary notebook with a headless drummer in the bottom right corner of every page; flip fast and the headless drummer starts playing. It is also a sequence from one of David's animations of the same name.

You can find his work on tote bags, mugs, tableware, umbrellas and much else. There is no question it is easy to consume. His booklets turn up in cafés and bars — in his early years he really did sell homemade booklets in bars for £3.50, and they reportedly sold well.

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"What is the difference between you and a designer?"

"A designer probably cares more about form. For me, what matters for an artist is having ideas."

To keep the ideas coming, David Shrigley once carried a notebook everywhere and wrote down whatever he saw or thought of. Taking apart an artist's working day may disappoint people, since it strips the halo off the job. In fact David is disciplined: he sets aside time to work, and sorts and lists his ideas before he starts drawing.

"Have you ever sat there all day and not been able to draw anything?"

"No. I've sat there all day and drawn nothing but rubbish — that happens a lot — but something always turns out well. What matters is that you keep going, keep drawing."

Really Good was how he turned a two-dimensional idea on paper into a three-dimensional sculpture. His taxidermy series had already tried the same thing.

A cat stands upright like the placard-bearer leading a national team into an Olympic stadium, except the sign reads "I am dead." "For a long time Europeans liked to decorate their houses with animal corpses, skinned and boned. One standard people used for judging a piece of taxidermy was whether it looked lifelike, which is a little frightening when you think about it."

"People also make calculations about which animals get stuffed." The rare ones, or the ones considered "superior," are chosen; the "inferior" animals mostly never reach an aristocrat's trophy wall. David once made a taxidermied rat. "Even while I was making it I had a feeling someone would mistake it for a real dead rat and clear it away." Later that is exactly what happened.

Dead Rat first appeared at Art Basel, shown by a gallery.

"I thought showing this piece at an art fair would be very funny — that crowd is mostly grand, elegant and free with money. But it must be hard for them to actually buy a dead rat, even though it is a real work of art."

Later a gallery in Copenhagen closed a sale: a collector who likes collecting his family trees reserved it by phone from a distance. The gallery owner put down the receiver and left the now-sold dead rat on the office desk. The next morning the rat was gone.

The cleaner had thrown it out. "Whatever you do, don't let the boss find out there's a rat dead on his desk" — David imagined the cleaner's train of thought. Once they had worked out what happened, the gallery staff went running to the dump.

In the catalogue the Power Station of Art published for this exhibition, David talks about that strange episode. "I suppose this is what I wanted to happen! It is a funny story now, but it wasn't funny at the time, because that dead rat mattered a great deal and it had been lost. While they were searching they did find some 'dead rats' — just not the one they were looking for."

"If I didn't make sculptures, I probably couldn't be sitting here face to face with you today." David meant the way art gets shown: a show made of nothing but a pile of paper can only carry so far.

This exhibition also owes something to Really Good's moment in Trafalgar Square. The British Council picked David Shrigley as a sample through which Chinese audiences could get to know British art.

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Besides the drawings that have swarmed onto every kind of merchandise, David Shrigley also worked with the graffiti artist Banksy on an interesting project.

In 2015 Banksy rented a derelict amusement park in the English seaside town of Weston-super-Mare and invited 60 artists to build a Disneyland in reverse. It was called Dismaland, and on opening day it hung out a sign: Disney employees not welcome.

David drew "I am an Imbecile" on balloons, and they sold out at once — young art fans walked around taking photos holding their "imbecile" balloons. Was this rebellion? Perhaps it was no different in essence from the tourists at the real Disneyland holding Mickey Mouse balloons.

Banksy himself, besides the graffiti, installed a boat packed with migrants — his own political statement, a reply to how Europe has treated migrants in recent years.

Unlike Disney, Dismaland's staff were the exact opposite of welcoming. When visitors asked the way to a work of art (an "attraction"), the usual answer was a shrug. The security guards at the entrance were fairly rough too.

"They must be very good actors," a visitor named King told The New York Times, "or else they're really just rude."

Another of David's pieces there was a throwing game. He explained the rules: in a normal throwing game you hurl a ball at a board, and whatever falls off is your prize. His board had no prizes on it at all — the point of throwing was to knock the board down.

"But the board is made of iron, about a ton of it. Trust me, nobody has ever knocked it over." Like the other fifty-odd artists, what he wanted to show was exactly this kind of meaninglessness: the amusement park, the fun and the service are the false face of consumerism.

"What art can do is find some questions and set some questions. How to answer them is each person's own business."

David Shrigley brought new work to the Shanghai show as well: a neon sign spelling out the Chinese word for "exhibition," with the middle character deliberately written wrong.

He had tried the same thing in Melbourne — a neon sign of the English word "exhibition" with the "h" taken out. Plenty of people spotted the mistake. "One man got very worked up, banged the table and asked me, how could you do this?!"

"Why not? It's my exhibition!" David says the misspelling is an Easter egg he plants on purpose. "Watching how people react is interesting. And of course there is no right or wrong in it."

At the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, hardly anyone noticed the wrong character.

"No reaction is an interesting kind of feedback too."

After all, who doesn't love a joker these days? And who really cares how serious he is?

(Unless otherwise credited, images in this article are courtesy of the Power Station of Art.)