Stuckism

Stuckism is a British art Movement of the 1990s and 2000s, founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. The name was coined by Thomson in response to the following comment, made by artist Tracey Emin to Childish, then her boyfriend:

Your paintings are stuck,

you are stuck!

Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!

The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art). The group are defined by their Stuckist Manifesto that places great importance on the values of painting as a medium and the use of it for communication and the expression of emotion and experience - as opposed to the novelty of conceptual art. They oppose modernism (at least as it is presently practised in art).

The most contentious statement in their manifesto is: "Artists who don't paint aren't artists".

The Stuckists later declared that they aimed to replace postmodernism with remodernism.

The Stuckists have become more active in recent years and have broadened their ideological basis. They even put forward a Stuckist candidate, Charles Thomson, for the 2001 British General Election.

Childish left Stuckism in 2001, but remains committed to its principles.

The Stuckists gained significant media coverage for five years of protests (2000-2004)outside Tate Britain against the Turner Prize, sometimes dressed as clowns.

From 2002 to 2005 Thomson ran the Stuckism International Centre and Gallery in Hoxton, London.

In 2003 they reported Charles Saatchi to the UK Office of Fair Trading. The complaint was not upheld.

Stella Vine, an artist promoted by Charles Saatchi in 2004, was first shown by the Stuckists in 2001. She rejected the group after a few months and is now hostile to it.

Most of the members of the first thirteen-strong Stuckist group founded in 1999 by Thomson and Childish had been in collaboration for up to two decades previously, and in 1979 had formed The Medway Poets, which included later Stuckists Bill Lewis and Sexton Ming.

Other members of the first group were Philip Absolon, Frances Castle, Sheila Clark, Eamon Everall, Ella Guru (now married to Sexton Ming), Wolf Howard, Sanchia Lewis (no relation to Bill Lewis), Joe Machine and Charles Williams. Ming and Williams left the group in 2005.

The Stuckists are arguably the first art movement to have spread via the internet. There are now over 100 affiliated, but independent, Stuckist groups worldwide.

Subsequent UK Stuckists include Paul Harvey, Peter McArdle, Elsa Dax, Naive John, John Bourne and Jane Kelly. A regular guest artist is Mandy McCartin.

Other Stuckists have opened Centres in Australia, Germany and in America, where the Stuckist principles have been carried on by artists such as Terry Marks, Jeffrey Scott Holland, Frank Kozik, and Jesse Richards.

The Stuckists Punk Victorian, a major show at the Walker Art Gallery as part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, marked a significant step to acceptance with the first exhibition in a national gallery.

"Anti-Stuckism"

There have been a small number of instances of people explicitly rejecting stuckism. Probably the first was in 1999, when two artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped on Tracey Emin's installation My Bed, a work consisting of the artist's own unmade bed, at the Tate Gallery. They were arrested for this performance, which they called Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed (in fact, they kept their underwear on), but no charges were pressed. Rather improbably, as Emin was perhaps the Stuckists' chief target of criticism, Chai had written, among other things, the word "ANTISTUCKISM" on his bare back. The explanation for this was that they were performance artists improving Emin's work which they thought had not gone far enough. Because the Stuckists are anti-performance art, Chai and Xi are anti-Stuckist.

This event attracted some publicity within the United Kingdom, largely as a result of the notoriety of Emin's original work. However, no coherent anti-Stuckist movement has since emerged, despite other isolated instances of people declaring themselves to be "anti-Stuckist", such as the filmmaker Andrew Kotting who released a manifesto declaring "The work should prove anti-Stuckist, genuinely post-modern, contingent and ad hoc in its thinking."

Reference

• The Stuckists (2004) Punk Victorian. National Museums Liverpool. ISBN 1-902700-27-9. The catalogue for the first Stuckist exhibition in a publicly-funded UK gallery.

External links

• Stuckism International (http://www.stuckism.com/) website home page
• Stuckist manifestoand (http://www.stuckism.com/stuckistmanifesto.html) the Remodernism manifesto (http://www.stuckism.com/remod.html)
• A Stuckist on Stuckismcomprehensive (http://www.stuckism.com/Walker/AStuckistOnStuckism.html) essay by Charles Thomson on origins, contemporary and art historical context, and theory of Stuckism
• List of stuckist groups around the world (http://www.stuckism.com/world.html)
• The Stuckists Punk Victorian (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/stuckists/index.asp) 2004 exhibition at the Walker gallery, Liverpool