2001-12-12 - 6:28 a.m.
PROFILE IN THE HERALD
Leading Scottish paper The Herald (11.12.01)prints a profile of the group:
Briefing: The Stuckists
They protested outside the Tate Gallery on Sunday night against the award of this year's (pounds) 20,000 Turner Prize to Martin Creed.
Q: How?
A: A group of Stuckists flashed torches on and off, mimicking Creed's winning work, Lights Going On and Off (an empty room in which the lights do just that).
Q: Why don't they like Creed?
A: It's not so much Creed as the minimalist, conceptualist art behind his work that sticks in the craw of the Stuckists. They believe painters have been consistently ignored for the Turner Prize; or the Turnip Prize, as they call it.
Q: Have painters been shunned?
A: The Stuckists do seem to have a point. Think of the Turner Prize and you think of Creed and lightbulbs, Tracey Emin and unmade beds, and Damien Hirst and sheep in formaldehyde. Stuckists oppose Brit Art, performance art, installation art, conceptual art, and minimal art; ''anything which incorporates dead animals and beds, because they are boring''.
Q: What do they stand for?
A: Painting, the most
vital artistic means of addressing issues.
Q: Examples of their art?
A: Ella Guru's portraits of men in beehive wigs; an axe-wielding Jayne Mansfield by Joe Machine, a self-taught artist; and Home from the Abbatoir, by Charles Williams (the Royal Academy).
Q: Where did they get their name?
A: After Tracey Emin had been nominated for the Turner, she told Billy Childish, her former boyfriend: ''Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!''
Q: What did Childish do?
A: He wrote a poem incorporating the insult. Charles Thomson, a fellow artist, read it, coined the term Stuckism, and formed the pro-painting group with Childish. Thomson stood for the Stuckist Party in the general election.
Q: Against whom?
A: Chris Smith. The former culture secretary had, paradoxically, suggested there should be more painting in the Turner. But he wasn't the real enemy.
Q: Who was?
A: Two powerful men. First, Charles Saatchi. Stuckists say the country's serious artists, and culture generally, have suffered because the past decade has been dominated by the buying power, media manipulation, and tastes of the arts patron and collector. Second, Sir Nicholas Serota. Stuckists accuse the Tate supremo of ''narrow taste'' in promoting the YBA (young British artists) such as Hirst and Creed, to the detriment of others.
Found on:
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=011211003638&query=Stuckists
