The Stuckists Punk Victorian
The Stuckists Punk Victorian was the first national gallery exhibition of Stuckist art. It was held at the Walker Art Gallery and Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool from September 18 2004 to February 20 2005, and was part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. It consisted of over 250 paintings by 37 artists, mostly from the UK but also with a representation of international Stuckist artists from the US, Germany and Australia.
Catalogue
A 144 page catalogue was published by National Museums Liverpool to accompany the show with 150 colour illustrations, including work by all the artists, as well photos showing the history of the group. An early photo from 1987 shows some of the group members in an earlier form as The Medway Poets, at which time Tracey Emin was associated with them. The book also includes two Stuckist manifestos, a short section on Stuckist photographers, and two essays, "A Stuckist on Stuckism" by group co-founder, Charles Thomson and "Manifestos From the Edge and Beyond" by art historian Paul O'Keefe.
Thomson's essay starts with an account of a confrontation with Sir Nicholas Serota in Trafalgar Square in 2001 on the occasion of a Stuckist demonstration against the installation of Rachel Whiteread's sculpture Monument. It then traces the history of the group from origins in 1979 to its foundation in 1999, reviews "A Dysfunctional Decade of Saatchi Art", describes Stuckist demonstrations at the Turner Prize and gives background on artists who have left the Stuckists—co-founder Billy Childish, Stella Vine and Gina Bold. A final section puts the group in context in a wider historical view with a proposition that the development of Modernism has been a "story of fragmentation" and that it is necessary to provide a holistic approach. A passage by Eamon Everall is quoted to explain Stuckist art:
The Stuckists as a group are not wedded to some formulaic and often stultifying notion of what a painting should look like, as in past movements. For them the unifying element is not visual: it is their overriding and enduring search for emotional veracity and their concern with the authenticity and honesty of the creative impetus.
Paul O'Keefe's essay is in three sections. The first treats the history of Modernism in Britain and the scorn that greeted the 1910 Post-impressionist exhibition. He describes the emergence of the homegrown radical movement, the Vorticists and how they clashed on one occasion, using brass knuckledusters, with rival avant-garde group the Italian Futurists. He includes Royal Academy President, Alfred Munnings', notorious 1949 speech, wanting to kick Picasso. He traces the evolution of radicalism into the new establishment, setting the scene for the Stuckist challenge to it.
The second section is an analysis of a BBC2 Newsnight programme on October 19, 1999 hosted by Jeremy Paxman with Charles Thomson attacking that year's Turner Prize and artist Brad Lochore defending it. Thomson was displaying Stuckist paintings, while Lochore had brought along a plastic detergent bottle on a cardboard plinth. At one stage Lochore states, "if people say it's art, it's art". Paxman asks, "So you can say anything is art?" and Lochore replies, "You could say everything is art..." At this point Thomson, off-screen, can be heard to say, "Is my shoe art?" while at the same time his shoe appears in front of Lochore, who observes, "If you say it is. I have to judge it on those terms." Thomson's response is, "I've never heard anything so ludicrous in my life before."
Part three describes the Stuckists' line of argument as "devastating in its capacity to demolish the pretensions of Conceptualism" and cites Damien Hirst's observation that "The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel" (one of Hirst's assistants). O'Keefe's conclusion remains undecided as to "whether the Momart warehouse blaze indeed represents the funeral pyre of BritArt" and as to the future of Stuckism's role "from its outpost on the edge".
Controversy
Daily Mail feature writer Jane Kelly, who is also a Stuckist artist, was sacked from the paper after exhibiting her painting If We Could Undo Psychosis II in the show. The painting shows a family group of mother and two children with child-killer Myra Hindley substituted for the father and holding a teddy bear. The incident was reported on the front page of The Guardian newspaper, who commented, "Stuckism, the art movement founded by Tracey Emin's former boyfriend to oppose the pretensions of Britart, claims to advocate 'honest, uncensored expression'. Unfortunately, the Daily Mail does not appear to share those values". It described how the paper welcomed a previous work by Kelly showing London Mayor Ken Livingstone in the context of the 1944 Stauffenberg plot against Hitler. The Daily Mail's managing editor, Lawrence Sear, who dismissed Kelly, described as "absolute rubbish" the claim that the loss of her job was related to her artwork.[1]
Tate donation
175 paintings from the show with a value of £500,000 were offered as a donation to the Tate Gallery gallery in 2005. This offer was rejected by Tate Director, Sir Nicholas Serota, who wrote, "the works in question have been reviewed by our curators and presented to the Board of Trustees ... 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." The Times reported a page lead on the rejection, stating,
- "The Tate was accused yesterday of snubbing one of Britain’s foremost collections after it rejected a gift of 160 paintings that had been given pride of place at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said that the works did not deserve to be in a national collection, even though their five-month exhibition last autumn drew thousands of people to the Walker, one of the outstanding collections of fine art in Europe and part of National Museums Liverpool." [2]
Artists
The artists in the exhibition were: Philip Absolon, Frances Castle,Elsa Dax, Eamon Everall, Paul Harvey, Ella Guru, Wolf Howard, Bill Lewis, Joe Machine, Peter McArdle, Mandy McCartin, Sexton Ming, Charles Thomson, Charles Williams, Stephen Coots, David John Beesley, Dan Belton, Godfrey Blow, John Bourne, Jonathan Coudrille, J Todd Dockery, Michelle England, Brett Hamil, Stephen Howarth, Rachel Jordan, Tony Juliano, Jane Kelly, ZF Lively, Emily Mann, Terry Marks, Daniel Pincham-Phipps, Jesse Richards, Matthew Robinson and Mary von Stockhausen.
Sources
- Ed. Frank Milner (2004), "The Stuckists Punk Victorian" National Museums Liverpool, ISBN 1-902700-27-9