The Scribble Aesthetic

There’s something going on in Glasgow. Flimsy scraps of paper flutter on gallery walls, adorned with cautious little felt-pen doodles and angry biro scrawls. It’s as if they’d escaped from the margins of a private notebook and were pinned down on their way to freedom.

These unprepossessing drawings are everywhere. The scribbled musings of last year’s Beck’s Futures nominee, Dave Sherry, match the hobbyist quality of his video works, while this year’s Beck’s star Hayley Tompkins fills galleries with sheets of lightly doodled foolscap paper. Katy Dove imports hand-coloured shapes into animation software to create a tension between high-tech sophistication and low-tech naïvety, while Dan Norton deliberately inserts basic hand-drawn gestures into his virtual environments, like human viruses worming their way into the electronic world.

Almost all of the artists who share this style have come through Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art (MFA) course in recent years, and although their work spans a broad spectrum of meaning, they share a sensibility for the inexpensive, hand-made, intuitive look. I call it the Scribble Aesthetic. Felt pens, coloured pencils and biros are the favoured tools, on basic materials such as foolscap and graph paper, pinned or taped casually to the wall. Traditional draughtsmanship is replaced by faux-naïvety, but the content is often far from innocent.

Cue David Shrigley. Although he won’t admit it, there’s a good chance that the Glasgow artist’s international success over the last decade has led directly to the current explosion of scribbling. His absurd cartoons are all first drafts, complete with spelling mistakes and messy corrections, in a drawing style which Adrian Searle once winningly described as “crappy penmanship”. I asked the artist why he is so scribbly. “It's the easiest way for me to express my ideas”, Shrigley told me. “It is an attempt to get rid of all the things that are unimportant in saying what I have to say.”

These unimportant things – craftsmanship, finish, beauty – are highly loaded values, which students on Glasgow’s MFA are taught to question. Indeed, for adherents to the Scribble Aesthetic, they are probably dirty words. “I think the artists are saying that things are work in progress,” says Francis McKee, tutor on the MFA. “Part of what they’re trying to do is emphasize the unfinished quality of things, which has come up quite a few times in the 20th century: Duchamp said that one of his works was definitively ‘unfinished’. That was the start of it all really.”

While some would label these doodles as ugly and false, others find charm in their directness. There is no forced loveliness here: like children’s drawings, they penetrate the smog of pragmatism which suffocates the adult world. Some – like Dove and Tompkins – aim for a fundamental aesthetic purity which antecedes prescribed ways of seeing, while others – like Sherry and Shrigley – use their scribbles as a form of attack.

In a world whose markets, governments and even wars are run by PR teams, it seems probable that the Scribble Aesthetic has emerged in direct response to the impersonal corporate spin machine. Take the National Cultural Strategy for instance – a glossy publication full of finely honed words and pictures, but very little actual content. If the document was stripped naked of its corporate terminology and high-res images, and reduced to its first draft, then there might be some real communication.

Fiona Robertson, artist and tutor at Glasgow, agrees. “It’s more about the individual rather than the corporate identity, or branding”, she says. “It’s a return to the handmade, especially in installation work . . . It’s pointing to the intimate, or to another world that isn’t this corporate world, in quite an extreme way.”

This intimacy is one of the defining features of the Scribble Aesthetic. The drawing is so intuitive that sometimes it appears to be automatic. Automatic drawing – where your subconscious does the thinking – was a favourite of Surrealists like André Breton at the height of Freud’s popularity. In fact, Breton’s early definition of Surrealism in 1922 might equally apply to the Scribble Aesthetic: “It is the dictation of thought, free from the exercise of reason, and every aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” The Surrealists’ original aims have long been sunk in the mire of popular confusion, but perhaps in some small way they have resurfaced in Glasgow.

Despite the positive ramifications of this new style, there is also a more negative possibility. Could the Scribble Aesthetic be a sort of existential acceptance that virtuosity has been achieved – by Leonardo, Rothko, et al – and there’s no point trying to surpass it any more? Could we be floundering in the mire of aesthetic inadequacy and searching for a new way forward? I should have known what kind of response that question would provoke in David Shrigley: “Or maybe,” he teased, “I'm not very good at drawing.”

Catrìona Black, Product April-July 2004