Stuckism
Stuckism (/ˈstʌkɪzəm/) is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art.[2][3] By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.[4]
Formation
28 January 1999[1]
- Worldwide
233 groups
Philip Absolon, Eamon Everall, Ella Guru, Bill Lewis, Joe Machine, Charles Williams, Wolf Howard, Sexton Ming, Frances Castle, Sheila Clarke, Sanchia Lewis
Elsa Dax, Guy Denning, Michael Dickinson, Robert Janás, Odysseus Yakoumakis, John Bourne, Mark D, Paul Harvey, Stephen Howarth, Alexis Hunter, Abby Jackson, Naive John, Rachel Jordan, Jane Kelly, Peter McArdle, Mandy McCartin, Peter Murphy, Rémy Noë, Udaiyan, Jeffrey Scott Holland, Frank Kozik, Terry Marks, Nicholas Watson, Godfrey Blow, Asim Butt, Mike Mayhew, Regan Tamanui, Jonathon Coudrille
Childish and Thomson have issued several manifestos. The first one was The Stuckists, consisting of 20 points starting with "Stuckism is a quest for authenticity".[5] Remodernism, the other well-known manifesto of the movement, opposes the deconstruction and irony of postmodernism in favor of what Stuckists refer to as the "spirituality" of the artist.[6] In another manifesto they define themselves as anti-anti-art[7] which is against anti-art and for what they consider conventional art.[8]
After exhibiting in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, the Stuckists' first show in a major public museum was held in 2004 at the Walker Art Gallery, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. The group has demonstrated annually at Tate Britain against the Turner Prize since 2000, sometimes dressed in clown costumes. They have also come out in opposition to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists.[9][10]
Although painting is the dominant artistic form of Stuckism, artists using other media such as photography, sculpture, film and collage have also joined, and share the Stuckist opposition to conceptualism and "ego-art."[11]
Responses and critique[edit]
A short time after the 1999 exhibition of My Bed and the Stuckists' response with Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision, a pair of performance artists named Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi performed an art intervention titled Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey's Bed at the Tate Gallery's Turner Prize. Cai had written, among other things, the words "Anti Stuckism" on his bare back as the two jumped on the bed and performed a pillow fight. Fiachra Gibbons of The Guardian wrote (in 1999) that the event "will go down in art history as the defining moment of the new and previously unheard of Anti-Stuckist Movement."[77] Writing in The Guardian ten years later, Jonathan Jones described the Stuckists as "enemies of art", and what they say as "cheap slogans" and "hysterical rants".[78]
The artist Max Podstolski wrote that the art world needed a new manifesto, as confrontational as that of Futurism or Dadaism, "written with a heart-felt passion capable of inspiring and rallying art world outsiders, dissenters, rebels, the neglected and disaffected", and suggests that "Well now we've got it, in the form of Stuckism".[79]
New York art gallery owner Edward Winkleman wrote in 2006 that he had never heard of the Stuckists, so he "looked them up on Wikipedia", and stated he was "turned off by their anti-conceptual stance, not to mention the inanity of their statement about painting, but I'm more than a bit interested in the democratization their movement represents." Thomson responded to Winkleman directly.[80]
Also in 2006, Colin Gleadell, writing in The Telegraph, noted that the Stuckists' first exhibition in central London had brought "multiple sales" for leading artists of the movement, and that this raised the question of how good they were at painting. He observed that "Whatever the critics may say, buyers from the UK, the US and Japan have already taken a punt. Six of Thomson's paintings have sold for between £4,000 and £5,000 each. Joe Machine, a former prisoner who paints for therapeutic reasons, has also sold six paintings for the same price."[81]
Paul Vallely defended Sir Nicholas Serota from Stuckist campaigns, criticizing the movement's anti-conceptualism for its association with "forces of social reaction" such as the Daily Mail and upholding Serota as the "greatest single champion of modern art in Britain".[82] Vallely stated that while "I did smile" at Acquisitions Decision, he equally admired Serota's "cool response to the Stuckist détournement", visiting the Punk Victorian show and conversing with members before rejecting an offered donation of their work as not of "sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection"[82]
The BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard wrote in 2009 that the way was paved for "cultural agitators" like the Stuckists, as well as the Vorticists, Surrealists and others, by the Futurist Manifesto of 20 February 1909.[83]
Charles Thomson. A Single Woman in London Is Never more than Six Inches from the Nearest Rat (uploaded 2008)
Some UK Stuckist artists' work: