My New Christmas Underwear is Too Tight 2025. Oil on paper, 22 x 30"
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 and second installments here and here). I will provide the whole chapter in three posts:
My Stuckist Manifesto (Boldface is Theirs) Continued
Once again, we are all ego-artists, else art isn’t getting made. But I won’t let semantics break another great statement of the manifesto. This here’s good stuff. A psychoanalytical gem. Stuckists are not free. They are trapped, while willfully and mindfully trying not to get trapped. I think Thomson and Childish were doing the gorilla banging chest thing here. Flexin’ some Buddhist muscle as ego-artists. Yes, it is futile to strive, and also a waste of spontaneity contradicting contradictions. So wake up and paint. Think of that gorgeous painting by Guston of him and his wife in bed, spooning. He’s holding his paintbrushes. He’s dreaming of painting. If he was engaged with the moment, he wouldn’t be dreaming of anything.
The ego-artist’s constant striving for public recognition results in a constant fear of failure. The Stuckist risks failure willfully and mindfully by daring to transmute his/her ideas through the realms of painting. Whereas the ego-artist’s fear of failure inevitably brings about an underlying self-loathing, the failures that the Stuckist encounters engage him/her in a deepening process which leads to the understanding of the futility of all striving. The Stuckist doesn’t strive — which is to avoid who and where you are — the Stuckist engages with the moment.
Lately I don’t draw humans, as much as imaginary creatures from some other place and time. Probably because I don’t think there is a human condition worth studying unless finding ways to stop us from killing everything. But that would be more of a concern for the rest of life, rather than human beings. All of life needs to nip us in the nuclear bud, and fast. I think that from now on I will be engaged with the study of the imaginary creature condition and pray that in the meantime the sun doesn’t gas out on earthlings in disgust.
The Stuckist gives up the laborious task of playing games of novelty, shock and gimmick. The Stuckist neither looks backwards nor forwards but is engaged with the study of the human condition. The Stuckists champion process over cleverness, realism over abstraction, content over void, humour over wittiness and painting over smugness.
If-then statements are logic-based and therefore piggy-squeak and barn muck. I’m right here; I know it. Because that’s all I have left of right.
If it is the conceptualist’s wish to always be clever, then it is the Stuckist’s duty to always be wrong.
I prefer to exhibit outside of galleries — in bars, coffee shops, my house, and other people’s homes. You must try it too if you want to succeed. People need cozy comfort to take in art. No more gallery openings with vain couples waiting their turn to view a painting on the wall. Even it shouldn’t want to be there without its painter calling the shots. Likewise I reject group shows with contemporaries I don’t know or want to like. Don’t stick me in a room with him or her. We have nothing in common! She paints pretty daisies. I want to smack down birds with a switch. There are five living people on earth that I would concede to have a show with on purpose, if we could temporarily agree to be as desperate as each other.
The Stuckist is opposed to the sterility of the white wall gallery system and calls for exhibitions to be held in homes and musty museums, with access to sofas, tables, chairs and cups of tea. The surroundings in which art is experienced (rather than viewed) should not be artificial and vacuous.
I do not accept talent. It’s a word loaded with undeserving privilege and praise. “Better suited”, “more able” — these are terms I can stomach, but barely. My wife Rose is better suited to draw a horse than I am. Give us both twenty minutes with a pencil and sheet of paper, and see the results. I can’t draw! Her horse is real like a television horse, and mine looks just awful — thought about too much and overworked. Probably has cartoon human eyes and a Rottweiler tail.
Hold on. Were we looking for a perfectly rendered horse? Is that talent? Who said so? The talent agent?
Is it art?
Of course.
Made by an artist?
No!
Rose is not an artist. She is more able to draw a horse that looks like a horse. However, there may be a million people (myself included) who don’t want another well-rendered horse to hang in the parlor. Maybe there are millions who do. Shall we duke it out to determine if “talent” stays? I think my side will win because we’re not mechanical robots. We are flawed human beings with blood circulating, and packing an awesome existential punch. We are thinkers and dreamers, with new joys and sorrows that render the perfect drawing of a horse obsolete. In the old days, a talented horse painter would be hired by the squire because the squire was a feudal brain with a mouse imagination. He got a horse portrait for the wall, and the lucky painter got a commission to help feed his family. At the time, there were many thinking Stuckists, just not any employed ones. No commission went to the artist for a horse that didn’t look like a horse. The few “more able” working painters reaped all the contemporary rewards. The would-be Stuckist, however, had no survivable path to paint his desire to draw and quarter the fat squire. His descendants had to wait several generations for improvements in agronomy and economy before a raging herd of untalented horses could trample talent on its way to lunch with the mayor and the mogul.
Of course Rose made art when she drew the perfect horse. In a past time (and if she were a man), her drawing would open doors. In those days, there weren’t many, if any, artist painters. There were skilled commercial illustrators. Today in dystopia, the “talented” and the “gifted” are not “better suited” and “more able” to move mountains in the human world. Their excellent painting of a horse will more likely take us nowhere at all.
I think it’s a travesty to contemporary art when actual artists pay lip service to talent. Rich boys and girls from all over the world should travel to the UK to paint pictures. Why not? Let the untalented overwhelm society. There is a chance they’ll become good Stuckist artists and leave realistic horses to the dead cultures of the past, where they belong.
Crimes of education: instead of promoting the advancement of personal expression through appropriate art processes and thereby enriching society, the art school system has become a slick bureaucracy, whose primary motivation is financial. The Stuckists call for an open policy of admission to all art schools based on the individual’s work regardless of his/her academic record, or so-called lack of it.
We further call for the policy of entrapping rich and untalented students from at home and abroad to be halted forthwith.
We also demand that all college buildings be available for adult education and recreational use of the indigenous population of the respective catchment area. If a school or college is unable to offer benefits to the community it is guesting in, then it has no right to be tolerated.
This year I want to be completely new. The water weight is heavy in me. I need it to boil. I can’t stand being inside of myself all day without newness. Where do I begin? Have I begun? Is it already over? Can I put it into words?
Snackle-pink-a-pon fank! Either play chicken with a Mack truck or paint a masterpiece.
Stuckism embraces all that it denounces. We only denounce that which stops at the starting point — Stuckism starts at the stopping point!
I don’t know much about Billy Childish as a creator. He grooms a mustache. I hear he’s prolific in music, writing and painting. And he stopped being a Stuckist a couple years after forming the group. Did he suddenly realize he was an ego-artist, like every other painter on earth? Or did his ship finally come in, denying Stuckism even 3rd class accommodations? Did he intuit, that by shunning Stuckism, rich Koreans would buy his work in 2024, not because they had any connection to his concepts, or that the paintings were aesthetically pleasing even, but because he would become a commodity to sell and resell, like gold and property? Can Stuckist philosophy support increased popularity and, lard forbid, fame?
Aside from Mr. Childish, whom I know practically nothing about, I often wonder what makes artists break from their youthful idealism. Is it progressivism? Is there no denying the inevitable advance of adulthood, conservatism and cold death for the openly expressive and innocent youth? Do heads really need to fall from the clouds just because gravity insists? I understand the power of the individual. It can be very beautiful and energetic, until it succumbs to the fawning sycophants (real and imagined), and turns the self into the monster it once fought. If the artist is wont to extolling the virtues of individualism, then he must admit that same joy deserving to all of humanity. Which, unfortunately for the financial success of the artist, translates to paintings made by millions of confessional poets, which are a wash — a watering down of art to the dumb influence of popularity contests. And there the cream doesn’t rise to the top as much as gimmick. Enter the gimmick-makers. Rich Koreans buying anything that will make them richer.
I want to believe Stuckism brings people together to re-teach them how to live in little art clubs. Strength in numbers. Locked together as a group. Like a well-run restaurant with employees who pool their tips, sales will be divided equally. That might make you want to pick your confessional painter-poets wisely, those with a similar philosophy, or perhaps opposites to attract a wider audience. Once the group is set, then it goes Stuckist all over town, or earth, if that’s the reach in needs. I laugh as I write this for I know it can’t work in cultures that worship celebrity. I like to dream. My head is in the clouds. Gravity keeps pressing on my head, and I need all the help I can get staying true to an art movement that’s mostly in my head, resting on a neck and a body with two feet on the ground. Stuckism is anti-gravity and gravity always wins. After this book, I think I’ll change my name and grow a mustache.
Billy Childish
Charles Thomson is the face of Stuckism. He is its greatest advocate and collector. I finally got to meet him face-to-face this year at Edgeworth Johnstone’s opening in North London. We don’t share the same taste of life, but he is greater than me in knowledge and some doing of art, and I hope to tighten my muscles over time to compare to his guts some day.
That is, if I want to make some celebrity of myself.
Charles has the rare ability to maneuver any which way he pleases, with confidence and competence. Rose and I watched him make acrobatic moves around his wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling packed painting collection, pulling out canvases to give us a little show of Stuckist painters he likes (mostly his friends and acquaintances). Like his limbs, his mind is agile, and at age 71, he comes across as a youthful 25 in spirit as well. Today there would be no international Stuckism without him.
When I think rationally about Charles and the original group of painters, I realize that for me, Stuckism must die when his heart stops beating. Or to put it another way, I will need to be the progenitor of something new. Because of Stuckism, I have been made aware of the world’s champions — the practicing ones, not the million dollar gallery mafia made, but the real working artists, unspoiled by fame and fortune. The hand-to-mouth painters in Australia, Japan, South Africa, Iran, Spain, Russia, the U.K. They get up and paint every day without incentive besides whatever can be conjured in their own heads, and maybe a few bucks earned to mail a painting across the ocean. And their effort, their art, appears in my room, right in front of my eyes! A hundred years ago, living where I live and being who I am, my life would have had no foundation in art. If, as a young man, I didn’t set off to art school right away and settle for life in a big city, painting wouldn’t even be a thought in order to make it a dream. The 20th century painters we read about today had youth and geography on their side. And penises. A village fifty miles outside Omaha did not produce and maintain a single working artist. Today one can find a significant gaggle of painters (of several genders) in the same one horse town. One of them might even be up to something worth looking at.
What a sad fate awaits the small town artist! If it wasn’t for Stuckism and its growth on the Internet, I would have exited the painting practice long ago. The damage has been done. Because of Stuckism I too have become a proud ego-artist like Philip Guston and Billy Childish. Fortunately, I won’t cast my lot in among a specific group of painters, who in 1999, decided to make a splash together on the London art scene. They deserve the credit, and it is due. They were young(er), living at the right place at the right time with the right advocate in it for the long haul.
Charles Thomson
August was a Stuckist month. And 1999 a good year for the next millennium’s signature art movement. What better way to announce major reform? Rose and I were married on the 14th. We share a silver anniversary with Childish and Thomson.
4.8.99
Stuckism should want nothing to do with painters of the past and their many biases. Likewise, I don’t think any of them would want to be Stuckist during their lifetimes. If they were living today, I seriously doubt any of them would become what they became yesterday, with one exception. Vincent van Gogh. He turned painting into Eastern mysticism and wouldn’t back away without madness. On the other hand, I think that Hokusai, if alive today, would graduate from university and climb the ranks to art director for the Toyota advertising and marketing division.
The following have been proposed to the Bureau of Inquiry for possible inclusion as Honorary Stuckists:
Katsushika Hokusai
Utagawa Hiroshige
Vincent van Gogh
Edvard Munch
Karl Schmidt-Rotluff
Max Beckman
Kurt Schwitters
I went to the Stuckism website and found Billy Childishs’ Hangman manifestos. Please read them. He is a great artist mind of the late 20th century, even if today he’s just another commercial artist with ego manias.
Summary of Hangman Communication 0006 by Billy Childish (written a year before publishing the Stuckist Manifesto:
“For too long now, the cult of the ego, and its pathetic band of stars and heroes, have been given leave to ride rough-shod over the rights of the useless. Artistic expression has been strangled by the hands of these insatiable and bombastic sycophants of success. It is in protecting the rights of the useless that we, at Group Hangman, have been forced to call into question the sheep-like devotion of society to the barren masters of accolade and success. We propose an immediate and mass devolution of all global corporations and a severing of concepts and ideas. On inspection it would appear that the hold that this noxious gang have on society is only made tenable by the adoration of the even more loathsome hoards of the aspiring famous. This adoration will have to be neutralised at the source. It will only be by destroying the hopes and dreams of this violent and malevolent undercurrent in society that a true renaissance of creativity can be brought to fruition. Our proposals for the destruction of the vile creed of success are as follows:
- The true pathetic-ness of the artist’s shabby ego must be exposed and the violence of his/her success smashed. It must be understood that failure is the only true path to understanding and growth.
- Just as devotion to success will destroy the finest poet, so too does the awarding of pathetic and demeaning prizes. We, at Group Hangman restate our call for the immediate and total disbandment of all professional bodies and organisations and the installation of a purely amateur society, where people are encouraged at all levels to express themselves regardless of their ability or so called lack of it.
- We hereby demand the installation of an art that is anti-thought, anti-language and devoid of all accountability.”
First published by The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry,
11 Boundary Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6TS