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QUOTES
ABOUT STUCKISM
1999 The
Stuckists don't strike me as a well-organised, cohesive group the
mention of Stuckism provokes amused giggles at such Brit Art temples
as the Tate, the Saatchi Gallery and White Cube It
was a revolution waiting to happen. The latest daring group of artists
has decried the "fatuous manifestations" of modern art such
as pickled animals, and says that paintings is the best thing after
all. the
bizarre emergence of the Stuckist movement But
there is a serious point to all this: Chidish and the other like-minded
artists who form the Stuckists - most notably Charles Thomson - are
fundamentally opposed to the way that Brit Art favours the conceptual
over all aesthetic considerations. "Brit Shit", as they refer to the
work of Emin and her cohorts, has become all shock and no value. It's
a good, healthy thing Just
explain what Stuckism is, please? Are
you so strict in this that you say art can only be painting, it can
only be this sort of thing, which frankly strikes me as rather taking
the p..., er, taking the mickey? Paxman:
If we're to take your movement at face value, which you're inviting
us to do... I
think all those artists at the Tate are being very sincere, in the same
way that you're being sincere as well. The
Battle of the Bed may have been all over in a few minutes but it will
go down in art history as the defining moment of the new and previously
unheard of Anti-Stuckist Movement. You
will not be surprised to learn that I have no comment to make on your
letter, or your manifesto "Remodernism". Unless
of course Stuckism becomes the new Impressionism. Blatantly
ignored by critics, black-balled by Time Out, without dealers, collectors
or any major fan base, the Stuckists have nevertheless got remarkable
sticking power. What
they lack in critical status the Stuckists certainly make up for in
verve. They
are just another media creation. Their work is such a pile of crap.
They just want to rant and draw attention to themselves, too. There
is this notion that there is the avante-garde and there are the fuddy
duddies and if you are not with the avant-garde you are either a fuddy
duddy or a Stuckist. Do us a favour! And the avant-garde is the establishment
anyway. Where is the dissent? Where are the mavericks? I am generally
just filled with dismay at the whole situation. Guilt-free
art lovers crossed picket lines put up by envious artist-outsiders.
They didn't know who was protesting out there. Maybe it was the Stuckists. If
you're an art-world outsider who wants to protest, only one theme makes
sense - outsiders against the art world. And one of the most successful
of the outsider groups - but only in terms of getting noticed - is the
Stuckists. There
may be a lot of boring conceptual work but to have a grumpy reactionary
movement against it is just daft. The
latest to join the pre-Raphaelites, the Futurists, the Vorticists, the
Surrealists and the rest, are the Stuckists Stuckism
is fundamentally silly. No Stuckist is worth a second glance or even
a first. I despise the whole business of Tracey Emin and her peers.
There should be some real opposition to them, but the Stuckists cannot
provide it. Be
careful about expressing sympathy for Stuckism, though, as insider art
world people find it hopelessly naive. Neo-conservative
movement I've
never heard of them Sounds
as though it will be good for business The
Stuckists set out a very rigid manifesto, however, which may be the
right way to go about creating a passionate movement. It's
a red herring. Restrictive and Luddite. I
don't like it at all. I don't really want to talk about it. I
don't find it funny, I find it a bit sick, and I find it very cruel,
and I just wish people would get on with their own lives and let me
get on with mine. The
Stuckists are the most strident critics of the contemporary arts scene
as dominated by conceptual artists like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst
and encouraged by the likes of Sir Nicholas Serota of the Tate and the
collector Charles Saatchi. Stephen
Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, says that if you want a comprehensive
overview of art made in Britain, then the Tate is the place to go. Stuckism,
the anticonceptualist art movement that champions new figurative painting,
is now celebrating its fifth birthday, has outposts worldwide and is
officially listed in Thames & Hudsons Styles, Schools and Movements.
So why isnt it represented at the Tate? it
was rumoured that the Tate, which was itself founded by a philanthropist
but now holds the national collection, might have to stoop to purchase
a work by the Stuckists, a burgeoning group it has long refused to acknowledge. The
Stuckists have been a thorn in the side of the Saatchi-Serota axis since
their inception in 1999. the
new-fogey Stuckist painters I
met The Fascists (sorry The Stuckists!) and I learnt about art by default.
It made me look in the opposite direction to what they were advocating.
They said I didn't have to agree with them, just to like painting and
want to put on shows. As
long as this terrible attitude continues Stuckists have no place on
the contemporary art scene. Even
now the home page of the interestingly obsessive Stuckist website carries
a huge headline, "THE STUCKIST STELLA VINE", a tag that she
furiously resents and regards as a form of harassment. We're
going to stick our neck out and predict that the next big thing in art
will be ... The Stuckists I'm
not against the Stuckist thing. I find the whole thing quite interesting,
because it's a counter cultural movement, which was set up to try to
discuss the idea that the way British art was moving was incorrect,
and they wanted to try and bring British art back to something that
dealt with more vernacular issues more carefully. I don't actually think
that the Stuckists do deal with vernacular issues carefully, but it's
very interesting to find an art collective, if it can be called that. Although
their actions might suggest they dont take themselves very seriously,
and their forthright talking will make them plenty of enemies, the Stuckists
have a strong philosophical base. Contrary
to popular belief, not all Stuckists are outsiders, undesirables and
art college throw-outs. one
of the largest, most international and most active art sites on the
internet The
drift in the art world for years has been to come up with pseudo-popular
forms for formerly (that is, in the 1970s) genuinely elitist or obscure
conceptual art contents. But you can't get it wrong - wrong popular
is punished with sneers. (Grayson) Perry is right popular like Tracey
Emin; both are victims of abuse, use text, do multi-styles and are willing
to be embarrassing in a controlled context where the codes of the conceptual
academy are confirmed. (The Stuckists are of course wrong popular: they
do the fourth thing but only the first half of it.) that
coterie of neo-traditional artists hammer
of the YBAs and thorn in the side of both Charles Saatchi and Nicholas
Serota Unimportant,
mediocre opportunists the
movement, whose fame has spread far and wide: in Colombia, for example,
they are known as Los Stuckistas. He
is also, apparently, the lover of Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey, Kraftwerk's
English teacher and the broker of a meeting between the Wu-Tang Clan
and Britain's Turner prize-baiting Stuckist art movement. I
have no comment. I've had my dealings with them over the past couple
of years and I don't want to say anything more. The
Stuckists are one of the more provocative art movements. They exist
to fight for the return of painting to the centre of artistic endeavour
and debate, and to expose the alleged stranglehold on the art world
by a group of powerful champions of conceptualism led by the Tate chief
Sir Nicholas Serota. combative
challenges from Stuckist interests making a hullabaloo about standards
and emperor's new clothes I
always mention the Stuckists. a
Stuckist, one of those people who go around wrecking conceptual art I
feel - or maybe hope - that there will eventually be a return to painting
and draughtsmanship. We have already seen signs of this in the Turner
Prize, and in new art movements such as The Stuckists. But
we're helping them, we hope. I mean, we do get a lot of people who like
... paintings, so maybe they'll all join the Stuckists and there'll
be a huge movement. I
dont know if youve heard of the Stuckists? In the art world, they
are the possessors of a shrill and tiny reputation as a bunch of schoolboy
activists who make a point of complaining noisily about conceptual art.
Nobody
in the art world takes them too seriously, not even, I suspect, the
Stuckists themselves. But they can be noisy. And hurtful. The
Stuckists have admitted that they based themselves a little bit on the
Ruralists, but their anger is different. They're a different kind of
group, but there was a link between the Stuckists and the Ruralists.
a
clamorous cult of resentful artistic also-rans who, convinced that their
talents have been by-passed by a Tate-led fad for conceptualism, protest
publicly each year at the Turner Prize award dinner. 21st-century
group of British painters who champion the cause of figurative art against
the modern trend of conceptual art. THE
RESIGNATION OF SIR NICHOLAS SEROTA Naming
an exhibition The Resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota may not be the
best way to endear the Tate director to your cause, but the Stuckist
group of painters, whose touring show of expressive figurative work
is about to open at the Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone, are unperturbed.
THE
REAL TURNER PRIZE SHOW (2000) The
Stuckists believe in getting their retaliation in first, and their bribes
upfront: the invitations for their exhibition opening gave the lunch
menu, running from champagne to bitter chocolate tarts, more prominence
than the artists. I
saw the last Stuckists exhibition and some of the work was just plain
cack. I
flick through the Remodernism catalogue. It's like thrift store art.
Weird women with black eyes, smoking, or holding string puppets. Dogs.
Skeletons. Quasi-Munch women. That's Stuckism. THE
STUCKISTS: THE FIRST REMODERNIST ART GROUP The
sheer ineptitude of what almost everything the Stuckists so defiantly
show and publicise is staggering THE
FIRST STUCKIST INTERNATIONALj These
vociferous opportunists are revealed to be nothing more than a bunch
of Bayswater Road-style daubers, without an original idea between them.
This
show, from Thomson's work to that of Pittsburgh, Melbourne and Ivory
Coast Stuckists, re-affirms the original manifesto endorsement of painting
as the most viable contemporary art form. Furthermore, it underlines
a commitment to content, meaning and communication. Critics
who dismiss them as reactionary are playing straight into the Stuckists'
hands: the group wants to be dismissed by what they see as an entrenched
art establishment. They're also missing the main point - from the cheap,
plastic water features on the desk to the wayward hanging, the gallery
deliberately and splendidly celebrates the idea of the artist as amateur
gentleman. In an age where even off-site project spaces are run with
ruthless professionalism, it's
as refreshing as as glass of cold, fizzy pop on a sticky afternoon. THE
REAL TURNER PRIZE SHOW (2002) This
exhibition won't hit as many headlines as its counterpart, but the works
on show try to convey the world in terms that a lot more people will
understand. STUCKIST
CLASSICS Work
presented here is always a wonder to behold, if
you can side step the Stuckist manifesto lecture/conversion attempt!
The best painted
space in town - the coloured walls are themselves better than some galleries'
shows. Art
with attitude, whatever style you happen to enjoy. And there are more
styles here than you'd be led to believe. THE
STUCKISTS PUNK VICTORIAN Theyve
spent years fighting the establishment. Now, for the first time, the
Stuckists have been invited to join it. No. Lively. Come
next door and look at the John Moores show and I'll show you some real
painting. Once
in a lifetime is too often for the Stuckists. So dreadful are they that
one might be forgiven for thinking there must be something to them.
There isn't, except a lot of ranting. Stella
Vine threatened suicide if her work was included I
think there are some interesting paintings in there. I would definitely
say that people, if they're in Liverpool, should try and go and see
the Stuckist exhibition as well.
Although
they set themselves against conceptual art, they're certainly not standing
up for conventional painting. These are very bold and explicit images,
particularly a painting over to my left in which a sailor is taking
another sailor from behind - is probably about as far as we can go in
describing it. And that is an image, which is very bold, very explicit,
and could lead to protests and complaints. Its
also remarkably difficult to pigeonhole. Stuckist work is often far
from traditional or conservative. A few paintings in Punk Victorian
are as shocking as anything Jake and Dinos Chapman could produce. the
Stuckists and their wilfully amateurish, neo-primitive art, seem to
be with but not of the biennial. No doubt they would hold themselves
aloof as a matter of principle, since elsewhere the standards of Turner-Prizedom
seem to reign supreme. a mishmash
of modern art movements, chewed up, spat out and spiked with a dash
of psychosis Iconographically
the movement is a broad church, with work ranging in style from the
primitive to the pop-arty and in quality from the good to the bad. One
of the worst exhibitions ever shown in a national museum I've
seen your show at Liverpool. It's a travesty. Painting
is the medium of yesterday. A
really, really popular show and very successful. GO
WEST Stuckism
has gained so much fame from it demonstrations and media campaigns that
its real purpose is in some danger of being overshadowed. That purpose
is perfectly obvious - to make art, and to have it seen and discussed
without preconceptions, in a perfectly normal and rational fashion. One
of the characteristics of punk, agreed by supporters and opponents alike,
is its rawness, its distaste both for artificiality and for artifice.
That is a characteristic shared by many of the paintings shown in this
exhibition. They aim to go very directly to the point, without making
concessions to any preconceptions the audience may have about what is
"pretty" or even, in a more complex sense, beautiful. Punk
rock also tends to be rooted in populist ideas. It has a suspicion,
some people might even call it a paranoia, about high culture. This
also surfaces in Stuckist painting, which has a terror of seeming pretentious. The
strong card of the artists linked to Stuckism is not, in the end, their
embrace of a particular set of techniques, but their pursuit of emotional
authenticity, and their conviction that what they do has to be an authentic
expression of themselves as individuals, inhabiting a particular sort
of modern society. These
artists are good, and are part of art history. Get past the art politics
and look at the work. How
seriously, though, can we take a movement of artists, which offers in
a flagship exhibition one of its leaders trying to humiliate publicly,
and in a depressingly sexist fashion, his ex-wife? I suspect the Stuckists
may have been dealt a death blow. The
work is formulaic. Each picks on a painter - Egon Schiele or Toulouse
Lautrec, for instance -and restyles his aesthetic in a brash cartoon
format. The Stuckists are indeed stuck - even worse, they are stuck
being Stuckists. Advance
publicity for the first "stuckists" exhibition in central London has
resulted in multiple sales for some of the group's main protagonists I
WON'T HAVE SEX WITH YOU AS LONG AS WE'RE MARRIED I
don't know why you're so critical of the Tate when the work here is
quite similar to what's in it. CHARLES
SAATCHI The
Stuckists were once derided by Time Out's art critic Sarah Kent, who
said, "These vociferous opportunists are... a bunch of Bayswater Road-style
daubers." Now that Saatchi is following their every move, she might
have to revise her opinion. Now
he has begun to rely on the intuitions of those who are officially his
enemies... the Stuckism movement. Saatchi
... by planning a three-part painting show in 2005, was appropriating
the Stuckists' advocacy for this art form THE
TURNER PRIZE Well
done, Stuckists Collings:
Some guys outside protesting against the Turner Prize, dressed up as
clowns, and they call themselves the Stuckists. Meantime everyone inside
the Turner Prize didn't care what the Stuckists said. Indeed,
if scandal equated directly to success then this year's winners should
probably be the Stuckists, the ragged band of artist malcontents who've
turned their annual placard-waving anti-Turner protest outside the Tate
into a kind of art event of their own that now generates press attention
from around the world. There
was no escaping the bile, in fact, with a now traditional picket by
Stuckists outside the gallery, protesting at the still more traditional
absence of painters on the shortlist The
Stuckists are certainly not the first to openly speak out against the
Turner Prize, but unlike many of its critics they offer a viable alternative
to it. Fucking
Stuckists ... yes, you can quote me Thank
you very much Nick. I'm quite surprised to be here tonight, because
two days ago I had a phone call asking if I would be a judge for the
Not the Turner Prize. And two years ago I was asked by the Stuckists
to dress as a clown and come and be on the steps outside, so I am thrilled
and slightly surprised to be here. Up
the Stuckists. I really like the Stuckists. Say
what you will about the Stuckists, they certainly know what they dont
like. In the eccentric British groups latest show the most explicit
target is clearly the Turner Prize. their
annual demonstrations outside the Turner Prize are now as much of an
institution as the event itself I
should say, it has been suggested that we should ensure that the Tate
Archive, as the national record of art in Britain, properly represents
the contribution of the Stuckist movement to debates about contemporary
art in recent years. I have asked our Archivist to check what material
we have recording your various events and demonstrations, particularly
relating to Tate and the Turner Prize. Being
critical of the Turner Prize, one is in danger of finding oneself lumped
in with the fuddy-duddies or, heaven forbid, the Stuckists, and I have
no wish to identify with reactionaries of any description, so let me
make that clear. London's
wealthy contemporary arts elite is expected to have to run a gauntlet
of placard-waving protesters from the Stuckist movement wearing monkey
and elephant masks. Every
year, the Turner Prize makes contemporary art the talk of the airwaves
... Stuckists threaten never to paint again. When
they picketed us, the Stuckists seemed to me affable and intelligent
people. Critics
of the prize, such as the tedious Stuckists, say that it is an inside
job. Well you wouldn't ask someone who knows nothing about dogs to judge
Crufts, would you? Every
time a new list of nominees is announced for the Turner Prize, it elicts
a feeble knee-jerk reaction from an embittered group of artists known
as the "Stuckists". Who cares what this completely and utterly irrelevant
small coterie of self-publicists think? They seem to spend their time
getting publicity by denouncing conceptual art as the devil's work.
The Turner Prize and Becks Futures both entice thousands of young people
into art galleries for the first time every year. They fulfil a valuable
role and the Stuckists should put up or shut up. The
Stuckists seem disingenuous. What they want is what everyone else wants
- which is fame. That is why they turn up every year to the Turner to
stand like rabbits in the TV lights. The
Stuckist protestors outside Tate Britain lend a festive air to the queue
to get in To
be a woman artist is no longer a story, to be a foreign artist winning
Britain's top art prize is not news, and to be abstract hasn't been
shocking for a century. But to be a painter... well, knock me down with
a squirrel-hair brush! The Stuckists have won! I
am stuck with being a hero of the Stuckist tendency. We're
grateful for the extra publicity the Stuckists have given the Tate.
TATE
DONATION The
Stuckist movement has offered the Tate 100 paintings by its members
for their collection. If the Tate accepts these ridiculous daubs the
Jackdaw will dance naked - except for his favourite swastika armband
- down Whitehall singing Mamma Mia. Mr
Debbaut explained that the Stuckists had offered a large number of works
to Tate (some, but it was not clear all, as gifts) following an exhibition
held at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool. Curators and the Collection
Committee had recommended against accepting the gift. The Trustees were
advised that there may be some media coverage of the Stuckists likely
negative reaction to this decision. We
do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment,
innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity
in the national collection.
OFILI TRUSTEE SCANDAL The
Charity Commission's verdict that Tate broke the law when it bought
The Upper Room from its trustee Chris Ofili is a catastrophe for art
in Britain. For one, it is absurd that the Tate management has played
into the hands of idiotic know-nothings like the Stuckists, who drew
attention to the anomaly. Formerly
dismissed as cranks, the Stuckists (so known because Tracey Emin once
accused her then boyfriend, former Stuckist Billy Childish, of being
"stuck") this year precipitated a Charity Commission report into conflict
of interest on the Tate board of trustees. It
has been a concerted campaign. Without the Stuckists, the Ofili affair
would never have happened. For
years they have been the scourge of Brit art and the Turner prize, mounting
"clown protests" outside the Tate Gallery. But the art world
has never seen the Stuckists - a motley crew of ageing punks who rail
against what they call "conceptual art" - as a serious threat
to the establishment. But over the past few weeks the group has become
rather more than simply an irritating thorn in the side of the Tate's
director, Sir Nicholas Serota. They, and in particular their media-savvy
spokesman Charles Thomson, are responsible for orchestrating a highly
effective media campaign to publicly shame Serota and expose what they
claim is the unhealthy favouritism being practised by the gallery. the
group, which has been much maligned for its attention-grabbing antics,
is commanding a new respect They
obviously regard themselves, and indeed have acted in the public interest
in this instance, and they don't irritate me. I think that as a public
servant I should be here at the service of the public, including the
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