124: David Shrigley | Radio Juxtapoz

Radio Juxtapoz

There doesn't seem to be anything more 1984 than taking what was one of the most popular selling books of the 21st century and printing an alternative text upon its ashes. There is that wonderful moment in Orwell's masterwork that reads "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

Okay, David Shrigley isn't some mastermind of double-think of mind control, but he is a conceptual artist. And this was his concept: after seeing a campaign gone viral where the Oxfam charity shop in Swansea had asked people to please stop bringing their copies of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" into the shop to resell, Shrigley decided to buy every copy he could of the novel with the purpose of re-printing over it as "1984." The project is called Pulped Fiction.

As we noted earlier this week, fragments of the original novels remain on the paper, with letters and sometimes whole words of Robert Langdon’s adventures appearing on the pages. The typeface was carefully chosen to mirror the type used for The Da Vinci Code’s first edition, while the book’s cover has been repurposed from the card backing and dustjackets of more than 1,250 copies of the hardback special edition.

On this episode of the Radio Juxtapoz podcast, we sit down with David to discuss Pulped Fiction, the omnipresent shadow that 1984 continues to have on our world, the irony of erasing a text to reprint atop it, the beauty of charity shops and all things happening in the Shrigley world.

The Radio Juxtapoz podcast is hosted by FIFTH WALL TV's Doug Gillen and Juxtapoz editor, Evan Pricco. Episode 124 was recorded on October 25, 2023 in Swansea and Los Angeles. Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@radiojuxtapoz⁠⁠⁠⁠