Stuck In The Mud

Spirtuality Flavin style

I was reading the always entertaining Tim Hopkins' weblog today and found it to be a delight. I don't always agree with what Tim says, nor he with me, (such are the things that make life so interesting after all) but I always try and check out the things he finds to be of intrigue, because they most often are. He posts a link to the strangely titled Art Movement that is not a Movement called Stuckism. I think that's Stuck as in cannot move, not as in the racing driver from the '70s. At first I thought it was strange that there should be an appreciation society for the German F1 star Hans Stuck, but then I thought perhaps not because Hans had one of the best crash helmet designs of the era, being a lovely metallic blue affair festooned with white/silver stars around the face opening. He made the bottom step of the podium twice (in Germany and Austria) in 1977 driving one of the Alfa Romeo powered Brabhams but got no higher, and bowed out of F1 after spending the 1979 season with the ATS team. But no, Stuckism seems to be a loose coalition of artists out to let rip at the gallery and museum system of the UK that they bemoan as being nepotistic, self-serving and, worst of all in their eyes, ignorant of what the 'people' really want from an Art gallery/museum/experience.

It's the last idea that really grates. The first two it seems to me are so blatantly obvious it almost appears an act of incredible stupidity to have to make the point. I think it's always been thus, hasn't it? That's the way Art within the structure of a capitalist culture works, and it seems to me that by complaining about it you just add to the problem. Far better to simply get on and Do Something fantastic on your own, not as a reaction against anyone else, but because you have great ideas and want to do something fantastic. I always get the feeling that those protesting so loudly about not being noticed, not being given a voice are simply those who want not to tear away the structures themselves, but to transplant the existing structures with new ones in which they are instead in control. It's all about power, all about control, never about just being Ace.

Like I say, it's the last idea that really grates, this idea that there is some groundswell of opinion that gives a coherent, unified face of, well anything really, from What We Want Art to Be, to How Much We Want To Pay For Fuel. It's not the case, and even if you took a vote and the democratic majority voiced the opinion that Art should be pretty watercolour landscapes; pictures where there's no question about 'what it's meant to be', it wouldn't matter, because Art is not, never has been and never should be a Democratic act. It's about the self, it is always about the self, and anything that isn't, well it isn'tÉ I don't want to say 'it isn't Art', but I will anyway. It isn't Pure.

I'm not saying any more on the matter. To say more would be to run into the realms of writing manifestos, and manifestos seem like something of a dead idea to me at the moment, where the only manifesto you really need is that unspoken, unwritten but deeply thought and held knowledge that today, at the very least you will try and be Ace, you will try and do something beautiful or, at the very least, you wont do something hateful and ugly. Which is of course in the eyes of the beholder, but hey, that's life. Deal with it.

Spirtuality Judd style

It's like the twelve steps. It's just a day at a time. Today I did not take a drinkÉ today I did not take drugs (don't count those double espressos). Today I did nothing to make the world a worse place. Not knowingly anyway, and certainly not intentionally.

I'm sure the Stuckists don't do things to make the world a worse place, at least not knowingly. I just don't think they make anything that makes it considerably better either. The paintings on the website seem almost universally lacking in any kind of originality. The Stuckists appear to bemoan the notion of what Modernism has come to mean, they despair at the shallow meaningless of Po-Mo conceptuality, and yet they appear also to be churning out what for the most part seems to be a pale imitation of Figurative Expressionism, with occasional flurries into Cubism and odd Popism. There seems to be a belief not in the tearing away of the icons of Art, but of a wish that the icons of contemporary Art be, say, Munch and Beckman and not Judd and Flavin. Shift the emphasis, move the spotlight and everything will be okay seems to be their argument, which is a point of view they're entitled to of course, but just happens to be one I don't align with. And I'm an ordinary person on the street.

Well, maybe not. Maybe there is no such thing as the ordinary person on the street, and maybe there is no society left after all, and maybe there are only individuals, in which case maybe we are all artists. I'm not really sure I care either way.

Another big area of mistrust with the whole Stuckist idea is the alignment they make with the 'rural', and their notions of 'spirituality'. I have no problem with people seeking spirituality, and indeed I think that spirituality is an important aspect of Art, but I just happen to find a more relevant spirituality in Dan Flavin's light fittings than I do in the heavy handed symbolism I see in the Stuckist paintings. It all reeks of hippie nonsense, and as such it's no surprise that there's a Stuckist outpost sprung up at Dartington, stuck away here down in Devon, out on the dark and desperate moors, the home of so much hippie nonsense you'd think it was still the early '70s. Or the early '90s, depending on how you look at it I suppose.

I'm generalising of course, but no more and no less so than the Stuckists themselves, and of course that's just fine. I'm not suggesting either that I am capable of being a 'better' painter than any of the artists aligned with the non-movement either (the complete opposite is more than likely true), but I am saying that what the (Art) world needs now is a lot less looking back, a lot less reaction against contemporary traditions with an insistence on a different set of (even more dull) traditions, and more focus on the great possibilities that we are presented with. Instead of insisting that you are an artist only if you 'paint' we should be asking 'what is paint' and how can we make work that 'paints' with life, makes sense of the multitude of media we are given, and that says something fresh and wonderful about that life. The Stuckists are aptly named, and if it's a self-deprecating irony they are after, then fine, but remember irony is dead (and if not, why not?): they are stuck in their ways; stuck in a past they wish had more impact on the way the world turned out; stuck in the mud; stuck like ostriches with their heads in the sand, and their heads stuck backwards to boot.

Me, I'm looking forward, I'm looking inside and I'm searching for positive possibilities. The beauty is in there, the beauty is out there, and instead of writing manifestos for how you want to change it all, go look, go find, go show us what's already there but that we're missing, not what we can already see.

© Alistair Fitchett 2000

Read the response from Charles Thomson, co-founder of Stuckism