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TENDENCIES
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Exploring the strange world of the Stuckists
Dead Painters’ Society
Luke Heighton
‘Anyone who is prepared
to stand up vociferously against this spate of state-sanctioned
flairlessness and effrontery is worth supporting.’
– David Lee, Editor, The Jackdaw (1)
‘A radical new art movement’
– CNN International (2)
It’s been 5 years since Charles
Thomson and Billy Childish founded the Stuckists in January 1999,
more than 20 years since its core members, Childish, Thomson and
Sexton Ming formed the Medway Poets, the Chatham-based performance
group whose theory and practice underlie so much of what today’s
Stuckists regard as their raison d’etre. There are, we are
told, more than seventy Stuckist groups and five Stuckist centres
worldwide. ‘Remodernism’, it seems, is here to stay whether
we like it or not. We know that Stuckism exists because it is defined
as one of the ‘key styles’ of Modern Art in Styles, Schools
and Movements (Amy Dempsey, Thames & Hudson, 2001). Indeed we
know that because they themselves tell us so in the Pocket Guide
to Stuckism. What better way to critically re-examine a movement
and a period in British art than to go to the Walker gallery’s
major retrospective The Stuckist Punk Victorian, part of this year’s
Liverpool Biennial? It’s been a whole half-decade since the
first Stuckist show, ‘Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’, garnered
media attention from all quarters, if not quite acclaim. ‘Stuck!
Stuck! Stuck!’ is how Childish’s once-girlfriend Tracey
Emin berated his art and painting, a designation of failure that
the group gleefully took to describe themselves. Childish is no
longer part of the group, and since being nominated for the Turner
Prize, Emin has gone on to become perhaps the most high-profile
beneficiary of the artistically and intellectually bereft, Saatchi-sponsored
bean-feast the Stuckists would have us believe the British art world
has become, as well as the object of much Stuckist bile. Perhaps
we need to remind ourselves of the alternative:
‘Stuckism is a new, radical
art movement founded to advance the cause of painting as the most
vital artistic means of addressing contemporary issues. Stuckism
is a rebuttal of Twentieth Century development of Modernism, which
has resulted in an increasingly fragmented, isolated, material-obsessed
and stultifying Academia, existing not by virtue of the work but
institutional and financial power. The Stuckists have inaugurated
the new cultural period of Remodernism to restore spiritual values
of authenticity, meaning, content and communication’(3)
Conceptualism, hedonism and the
cult of the ego artist seem to have taken hold in the minds of artists,
the public, private collectors and public institutions alike, to
say little of the unabashed complicity of critics hell-bent on denying
the revolutionary potential of Sunday-painters, gardeners, cat-lovers
and holistic. Art today is apparently dominated by lazy, talentless,
vapid post-Duchampian clones, clever-clever slaves to fad and fashion
propagating disengaged, obscurantist, ahistorical art for disaffected
postmodern neophytes.
The Stuckists Punk Victorian –
split as it is between the Walker and the Lady Lever galleries –
does give us the opportunity to see the increasingly broad range
of ‘Stuckist’ work available from a fairly huge number
of artists working across the world. Of late there has been an increasing
body of evidence to suggest something of a change within Stuckism,
a movement away from the lofty ideals of the original manifesto,
if not in meaning then at least in style. Paul Harvey’s decorative,
almost pre-Raphaelite images of celebrities such as Madonna and
Tupac Shakur may not achieve the artist’s stated aim of re-humanising
his subject matter, but they do offer interesting, sometimes even
beautiful, works suggesting a certain rapprochement between painting
and graphic design. Of equal interest will be a series of new films
by Larry Dunstan and Andy Bullock showing at the Lady Lever. Dunstan’s
Contextually Yours, which promises to feature teenagers from East
London’s Hackney in the act of juxtaposing original Shakespearean
text with modern mobile phone text language ‘played out to
an [equally] modern trip-hop style soundtrack also written by Bullock’
(4). Here, perhaps, it is best to call to mind another Stuckist
maxim: ‘Stuckism embraces all that it denounces’. The
greatest success of Contextually Yours, one suspects, may lie in
its ability to draw attention to the terminal failure of the project
itself – an allegory for Stuckism’s own inability to act
in dialogue with contemporary practice and popular culture in a
way that transcends the simply vulgar and uninformed in favour of
something critically vital, however naïve or informal. The
overall effect of this, and the implication of Stuckism more generally,
is creepily authoritarian: the inability to negotiate an nuanced
line between knowing engagement and populist peccadillo cynically,
indeed dangerously, suggests the meaninglessness of both.
For all their denial of the fact,
and in spite of all the hard-hitting manifestos, the aphoristic
declarations and mischievous daubings, the Stuckists are often as
reactionary, unfunny, dumb and just plain bad as it is possible
to be beyond the confines of the academy. Stuckism does not attempt
to revivify art, nor does it care for the individual or society
as a whole. Stuckists don’t much like art. What they do like
is the idea that the more they make of erroneously-drawn parallels
between the work of Thomson, Eamon Everall, Ella Guru, Sanchia Lewis,
Wolf Howard (a number of whose new pinhole photographs are included
in the show) or Joe Machine, with that of Hokusai, Van Gogh, Munch
or Beckmann, the wearier we might get of disagreeing. Worse still
is their suggestion that in daring to bear the painterly cross for
us their work is not just influenced by but implicit in that of
the forefathers of Modernism. Were such a suggestion to succeed
– were the Stuckists to be taken seriously – this would
have the effect of evacuating from ‘the canon’ the very
qualities of vision and affect which they purport to champion, to
say nothing of the painterly techniques which – simply for
lack of choice – they copy.
To be a Stuckist painter is to
adopt a position remarkable only for its strained adherence to a
set of petty conceits. It is to section off humanism in order that
it might be defended, proscribed, regulated through art, but never
be channelled through, or offering a challenge to it. The tacit
objective behind this attitude (and it is just an attitude) is nothing
less than the denial of the human subject as a site of open, continuing
enquiry, forcing humanism’s literal and figurative enclosure
in an ‘authenticity’ proposed as the logical endpoint
of a highly subjective and disingenuous essentialism. Of central
importance is a refusal to acknowledge anything that goes beyond
the most parochial, partial notion of the ‘everyday’,
and which sets up thinking (bad) and feeling (good) as mutually
exclusive opposites. Hence conceptualism, Postmodernism, and theory
in general are dismissed. Instead of reason or religion we are asked
to place our trust in a dwarfish ‘Spirituality’ incapable
of reconciling itself with a plurality of interpretations and experiences.
The barbarians are at the gates, we are told, and they are wearing
Helmut Lang.
Such a narrowly programmatic response
is a far cry from the inclusive ideal to which the group aspires.
This further raises the suspicion that on the relatively few occasions
where Stuckist thinking does attempt to raise itself above the merely
subjective, the result is little more than a half-arsed harangue.
Nowhere is this more true than in the pages of David Lee’s
magazine The Jackdaw, and while it would be wrong to call the magazine
a Stuckist mouthpiece, it certainly share many of the confused,
self-denying neo-traits of Stuckism. To whit, despite deciding over
a year ago not to mention Charles Saatchi again in its pages, hardly
a month goes by without at least a page dedicated him. The same
might be said for Lee’s perennial attack on the familiar monoliths
of private/state patronage: the Tate, Nicholas Serota, the Turner
prize, the BBC, the Arts Council, HM Government and the cabal of
gallery owners, collectors and influential critics who run the show.
In fact, pretty much everyone who now makes up a large part of the
contemporary art world. The sniping, juvenile, bitter and rather
hopeless tone in which such criticisms are voiced does nothing to
disabuse the public of the view that the contemporary art world
is entirely populated by the very same self-serving hacks and their
hack-hags (artists) they had always assumed it was. Yet such strategies
do little to worry an establishment confident that – one way
or another – it has all the bases covered, all the more so
since the Stuckists so desperately want to get their props from
the very same institutions they rail against. And so, as in the
case of their clown-suit protests outside the Turner Prize, we find
ourselves pleaded with to bear witness to the spectacle of a cuckold
in a clown suit trying hopelessly to get the attention of the same
ex-lover he professes to despise. The result, unsurprisingly, is
precisely the kind of public non-participation the Stuckists pretend
to deplore.
Perhaps to some degree we have Stuckism to thank for continuing
to point this out to us, however awkwardly. Yet for an artist or
group of artists to content themselves with their outsider status,
muttering something about ‘timelessness’, ‘endurance’
and ‘not selling out’, is not only unproductive, it is
boring. Moreover, lack of appreciation does not confer avant-garde
status. Widening one’s field of reference – as the Stuckists
do – to include much of what is very good about the last century’s-worth
of artistic endeavour is to capitalise on the same sensationalism
Stuckism deplores; an approach which (for all its pretensions) is
really little more than yet another bourgeois conceit. To call one’s
personal despair a movement is dire. The criticism heaped by her
former colleagues upon Stella Vine, Thomson’s ex-wife and former
Stuckist favourite labelled a ‘brainless, rotten painter’
who would do anything for publicity, reeks of petty egotism and
sour grapes.
But what really riles Thomson
about Saatchi’s seemingly sudden conversion to what has already
been termed ‘urban folk art’ in his ‘New Blood’
exhibition, and the surprising inclusion of Vine’s work, is
that their inclusion isn’t surprising at all. Saatchi has always
been a sucker for pop-cultural expressionist sentimentalism –
so hanging Vine’s mawkish Diana portrait Hi Paul, Can You Come
Over next to hip insiders such as British Liz Neal or German Jonathan
Meese seems entirely natural. Naïve, sincere, unthinking emotionalism,
rendered in an amateur expressionist hand, is no longer the Stuckists’
exclusive property. In a culture that privileges emotional authenticity
over critical reflection, the Stuckist can claim little distance
from Saatchi’s cack-handed young painterly protégés,
even if they can continue to deny that Tracey had got there years
ago. In capturing Vine, Saatchi has called Stuckism’s bluff.
Sanctioned, interred, even considered desirable by some with more
cash than sense, Stuckism is deflated, unable to take comfort in
the old routine of disavowal and disgust. And once the feeling has
gone, there’s no way of getting it back. Worse, Saatchi has
effectively raised the possibility that Stuckist art is potentially
as open to commoditisation as anything else; perhaps the greatest
irony being that painting and drawing are the media most readily
associated with the process, and – despite the popularity of
sharks in tanks – least likely to resist it. As for posterity
and tradition, (more prime concerns), it seems odd that Stuckism
should offer up its best known supplicants for inclusion in the
pantheon of great painters when some of them are not even hugely
old, and not yet very dead. Only time will tell whether Thomson,
Childish, Everall et al will be accorded the recognition they think
they might deserve. I wouldn’t bet on it. But I may be wrong,
and if I am then The Stuckist Punk Victorian will no doubt go down
in art history as the most lamentable of successes for all concerned.
‘The Stuckists Punk Victorian’
is at the Walker Art Gallery and Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool,
18 Sept 2004 – 20 Feb 2005
Notes
1 From Lee’s introduction to The Stuckists: The First Remodernist
Art Group, Katherine Evans (ed.), (Victoria Press, London, 2000),
p5.
2 Ibid., back cover.
3 Ibid.
4 www.stuckismphotography.com
Luke Heighton recently graduated from the Courtauld Institute of
Art. He is about to begin a Phd on images of and art by the insane
in early 20th century Vienna.
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