What is the Opposite of Whimsical? 2025. Acrylic on cardboard, 11 x 14"
I published a book last August in celebration of 25 years of Stuckism, the international art movement founded in London in 1999. The following is the third and final installment of a chapter from my book, Making Friends With Wild Dogs: Reflections on Stuckism for its 25th Anniversary. I give my feedback about the Stuckist manifesto. (You can read the first installment here. I will provide the whole chapter in three posts:
My Stuckist Manifesto (Boldface is Theirs) Continued
I am reading a book about how people are killing themselves while trying to live longer. In one chapter the author writes about the movement toward “wholeness” that began in American culture in the 1970s. The holistic approach to living eventually gained ground in the scientific community, and, blending in with the new business of systems analysis, created a “holistic biology”, where all the parts of our body work together for the benefit of the whole. Oops, that is until the recent discovery that macrophages, who we once thought were big hungry cell soldiers working for the immune system, actually have freewill of their own. Some even like to visit tumors and egg on the spread of cancer, helping it build blood vessels for it to grow, metastasis, and destroy the “wholeness” of the organism.
In art, holism is bunk. It is posturing. It is artifice.
Good art is a distortion. It often, and should more often, create a dissonance that makes people squirm like macrophages, and instigate their own freewill.
Stuckism proposes a model of art which is holistic. It is a meeting of the conscious and unconscious, thought and emotion, spiritual and material, private and public. Modernism is a school of fragmentation — one aspect of art is isolated and exaggerated to detriment of the whole. This is a fundamental distortion of the human experience and perpetrates an egocentric lie.
If you are an artist, you paint. I can’t imagine a proletariat artist in any medium (writer, actor, dancer, sculptor) who has never painted, written a poem, pretended, danced, made a snowman or gave a coconut eyeballs. I stress the proletariat, the working class person as burgeoning or master artist. No one ever began painting as a rich Stuckist. Most Stuckists would say I am dead wrong; that an amateur can be rich, poor and a million incomes in-between. They might say that I am hyping the cult of modernism, being exclusive, and assume (wrongly) that I say suffering instigates art, when what I actually think is art instigates suffering. Poor people make art, and rich people buy it. It’s a fact, and don’t you go John Singer-Sargent-ing me. He was an incredibly skilled painter taking few risks and getting rich with commissioned travel and fame. The Taylor Swift of visual art, except that he was extremely gifted and rigorously trained.
But not a Stuckist.
Or an artist.
But there’s more to it than that. Much more. Read Stuckist koans. The following is no less true:
Artists who don’t write aren’t artists.
Artists who don’t act aren’t artists.
Artists who don’t dance aren’t artists.
Artists who don’t sculpt aren’t artists.
Artist who don’t make music aren’t artists.
But overall,
Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists.
A Stuckist must exhibit as often as possible. She must thicken her skin. The painter who pines for a gallery show is not a Stuckist. The contemporary Stuckist will show his or her work online, all the time. That’s only a start. Now make 20 paintings and exhibit them in your living room. After that, be brave, and oblige any wall that would accept your paintings for display. That is the honor. And the terror. And the Stuckism. Whether it’s a bar, office, library, bakery, or coffee shop, exhibit the work to deepen your experience of being an artist. When the gallery calls, accept with the caveat that its representatives cannot curate unless they buy the lot. These are not their paintings. You have something to say about your work, and the gallery is bleeding you of 30 - 50% of potential income from sales. This is no time to act humble. You tell the story. Nobody else.
Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn’t art.
Oh this one is going to upset a lot of people. But I can’t help it because it’s true. You cannot call yourself a painter unless you paint, like a doctor doctors, or a garage door installer installs garage doors. And if this breaks from the manifesto enough to ostracize me from Stuckism, then so be it. Our affair was not meant to be. I am a painter. That is what I do. I don’t dabble. I hope my doctor doesn’t dabble. Actually, I think my doctor does dabble, that’s why I avoid her religiously. I don’t want to look at paintings from people who are not painters. If I cannot discriminate, I would go insane. There is too much art-making in the world. Millions and millions of pieces of art made every single day. My neighbor installed his own garage door to save a few hundred bucks. He did a fantastic job. However, he is not a garage door installer. Soon you will read that Stuckism starts at the stopping point. Here is where I draw the line to leap over. No one is a painter unless he is a Stuckist, and
The Stuckist paints pictures because painting pictures is what matters.
My style changes often because I am hungry for originality. Here is my process of late:
In the evening after returning from a walk, I tear canvases and prep them with gesso, then begin my nightly routine — reading, blogging, and television entertainment with Rose to put us to sleep. In bed I tape my mouth shut because George Catlin, the 19th century painter of native peoples, wrote that mouth breathing will make an artist sick and die young. I sleep very well.
I wake at 5:00 a.m. to steep tea, sometimes shave, and write.
At 6:00 a.m. I put on my painter pants and shirt and descend into the basement studio. I paint until 7:00 a.m. then come back upstairs to prepare Rose’s coffee and lunch and sit with her by the front window until she leaves for work at 7:40 a.m. I return to painting until 11:30 a.m., when I break for lunch for about an hour. After lunch and social media perusing, I paint until around 2:30 p.m. However, now that I am working on this book, my afternoons are spent writing and going for long walks. After dinner I take another walk, tear two more canvases, and gesso them. On Saturday and Sunday I paint sporadically without regimen. There are other things to do in life, but not much. I have reached a milestone. I daydream and sometimes sleep dream about painting — the process, colors, composition. I am obsessed, but try to stay within my limits. I don’t want to become crazy.
The Stuckist is not mesmerised by the glittering prizes, but is wholeheartedly engaged in the process of painting. Success to the Stuckist is to get out of bed in the morning and paint.
I am an obsessive painter. That is, I work without any financial, or even positive social incentive. Is this a privilege as some would say? To deny the affordability of weekly lasagna in order to produce paintings at a rate that would need 100 buyers a month to remain sustainable? Does obsessive painting provide peace, or just intensify feelings of stress, anxiety and depression?
It depends because it wavers. Some days yes, there is peace, when the cloud cover is just right, the moon isn’t yanking my chain, I don’t have a care about money, and I’m not broken by worry or debilitating envy. That’s riding a good painting wave. But here comes the trough, and it’s a deep one. This should be expected because there is no permanent peace. And then the obsession piles up in my studio, which leads to anxiety about storage and another exhibition to plan.
Low high, high low
Every Stuckist needs to show.
Now take that neurosis and expose it at exhibition to all the relationships you have in society. Send your doctor an invitation to the opening. Hand one to your favorite cashier at the grocery store.
It is the Stuckist’s duty to explore his/her neurosis and innocence through the making of paintings and displaying them in public, thereby enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience.
I don’t know what Thomson and Childish were thinking to write that the Stuckist is not a career artist. Of course I am! This is my occupation, my practice, my life’s work. If there was a trade journal for Stuckism, I’d subscribe and devour it by lamplight. Can a careerist be an amateur? Yes, but authority must be kept at bay. For the Stuckist, authority is the public — friends, family, gallerists, art snobs, art mobs, potential buyers, and all the catty brats who judge his art. We were born from the cosmos free to be, but slaves to work. It is up to the individual to strike a balance. Careerism has garnered a bad reputation because most people make their careers out of degrading repetitions that “reward” them with a car payment, world travel, and stultifying luxury that breeds too much contempt for an artistic path to ever be born again. That type of careerist is less creator and more consumer — way out of balance, and mistrusting his own capacity to give and receive love. He cannot be an amateur of painting like the Stuckist who is a career painter. I think there are parts of the manifesto that could have used a better editor. This is one of them. The following could have been written instead: “The Stuckist is a career amateur artist”.
With my career-amateur status, I long to take risks on the canvas. I am a lover of color and its application with acrylic and oil paint, yet I couldn’t tell you much about the color-wheel. I know primary colors, but not secondary or tertiary. My favorite color comes from a memory of a vintage chewing gum wrapper, and I try mixing magenta, benzimidazolone yellow medium, maybe Indian and Mars yellow, and titanium white. But it never comes out right, and I suffer. I try to make up for this minor setback by painting expressive faces in the trees. Or any green fish. But those faces and fish aren’t as interesting as Lupo Sol’s everyday compositions. I am a failure with such a vast knowledge waiting ahead of me, that I don’t think I’ll live long enough to acquire a fraction of the learning necessary to abandon my love of paint.
I see now. The original Stuckist assumed that a careerist needs to protect her status. That could be a British thing. In the U.S. there are careerist bag ladies and panhandlers. Even my town has a building full of careerist village idiots. They’re not protecting status; just getting up everyday to do what they do best. I am an everyday painter. Before this I was a recluse house-husband. Before that I cooked rich meals for poor stomachs in a low-class restaurant. Careerist or not, I have never achieved any status to protect. I was already a well-seasoned failure. Like any good Stuckist.
The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (amare, Latin, to love) who takes risks on the canvas rather than hiding behind ready-made objects (e.g. a dead sheep). The amateur, far from being second to the professional, is at the forefront of experimentation, unencumbered by the need to be seen as infallible. Leaps of human endeavour are made by the intrepid individual, because he/she does not have to protect their status. Unlike the professional, the Stuckist is not afraid to fail.
“Ready-made art” is an oxymoron. Damien Hirst’s 1994 dead sheep in a box titled “Away From the Flock” is not art. It is a dead sheep in a box. It is a ready-made deceased sheep. If I frame my smart phone and hang it on a wall in a gallery, it is not art. It is a smart phone that I cannot access. Right now I am looking at my glass of water on the desk. If I set it on a pedestal in a museum with the title “It Wants Water”, then it is art like the hat on my head is art.
Obviously Hirst’s sheep and shark are not art at all, and should not have made it into a manifesto about painting. A Stuckist will simply ignore idiotic, propagandized notions of what art can be.
Nor is a dead sheep in a box a “polemic of materialism”. A materialist is one who would care for and conserve the stuff in his possession. Unfortunately, in a non-materialist culture (ours), “ready made art” along with artful paintings, are marketed for money, and devalued as a thing in itself. A good materialist would cherish any painting she bought, and never put a price on it again. Just add it to the list of family heirlooms for some greedy descendant to convert into a new car that rusts. Likewise a good materialist would surmise that a preserved dead sheep would leak its formaldehyde onto the museum floor and make the air sick to breathe.
We are not living in a material world. We live in a ready-made abstractionist one, abandoning fine materials for vaporous falsities like money, wealth, fame, self-importance. The reason galleries display both art and non-art is to offer it for trade, to liquefy, to commoditize it, to move it along, abstractly. Museums can represent materialism. They preserve and conserve. Sadly, some “ready-made art” is already on display, and will remain for as long as it takes the Visigoths to reconquer the cities and set all the crap ablaze.
Materialist cultures are very serious about material. Abstractionist cultures leave their boatloads of comedy to posterity.
Painting is mysterious. It creates worlds within worlds, giving access to the unseen psychological realities that we inhabit. The results are radically different from the materials employed. An existing object (e.g. a dead sheep) blocks access to the inner world and can only remain part of the physical world it inhabits, be it moorland or gallery. Ready-made art is a polemic of materialism.
What’s Post-Post-Post Modernism gonna look like? Will breathing with your shirt off become art?
Stuckism is revolutionary because everyone seems to be going out of their minds, and the painter in the drafty studio doesn’t care anymore. He’s whistling in the graveyard.
Post Modernism, in its adolescent attempt to ape the clever and witty in modern art, has shown itself to be lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy. What was once a searching and provocative process (as Dadaism) has given way to trite cleverness for commercial exploitation. The Stuckist calls for an art that is alive with all aspects of human experience; dares to communicate its ideas in primeval pigment; and possibly experiences itself as not at all clever!
It is impossible to not be an ego-artist. Even if one could break the shackles, and find enlightenment, he wouldn’t be artist-ing any more. Making art like a Stuckist is an aberration from being perfectly human, zebra or cornflower. I think it might actually be a disease. The ego is here to stay, even with satori, which is fleeting. One cannot be against an ego. Like trying to tell the night to wait a few more days. We can work to break the ego, though we cannot break the ego with work. Art process is vanity. People are fidgets, and artists are people who worry too much. Weeding the garden is nothing much really. No different than art. Both massage the ego. Both are eager ego feeders, passing time.
There can no longer be such a thing as “Brit Art” or national art of any kind. In The Gambia, kids wear Nikes®. Corporations and the Internet are rapidly killing nationalism, which could be a good thing, if it wasn’t getting done so sadistically, and making us watch.
Against the jingoism of Brit Art and the ego-artist. Stuckism is an international non-movement.
Don’t be clever, dammit!
Stuckism is anti ‘ism’. Stuckism doesn’t become an ‘ism’ because Stuckism is not Stuckism, it is stuck!
If you’re a painter, live in Britain, and sell your paintings to an influential millionaire or institution, then you are not a Stuckist. You are the establishment, and about as avant-garde as an iPhone advertisement. Though I believe congratulations are still in order. But not for Stuckist reasons. Your dream has come true. Now go make lots of money as a commodity, Mr. or Ms. organ grinding monkey. Hop-hop!
Of course Stuckism comes to the same laughable conclusions about any artist anywhere claiming to be avant-garde with enough money in the bank to buy a used car.
There is only a brief window of opportunity for art to happen. It can be extended indefinitely, depending on the many different ways you learn to prepare beans, and practice the shunning of people and money. I mean, people with money.
Brit Art, in being sponsored by Saachis, main stream conservatism and the Labour government, makes a mockery of its claim to be subversive or avant-garde.