Getting Stuck

2 Girls Under a Gallows - Billy Childish, 2007

I’ve always been curious about the Stuckists, but never really knew much about them. It’s interesting reading up on them now, ten years after the movement was born. In many ways now, they are not so much a breath of fresh air from a bright tomorrow, as an ominous chill blowing from a dark and uncertain future. In 1999, they were primarily concerned with a reaction against what was then seen as the increasingly commercial and dangerously vacuous kinds of conceptual art embodied by the Young British Artists. Their favourite targets were Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. As the decade moved on, Stuckism was picked up by various groups and artists who latched on to one or more points of the original manifesto and adapted its principal theoretical direction. So you had “Remodernism” – which sought to revive the modernist principles of meaning and spiritual content, claimed to be absent from much contemporary British art; you had “Anti-anti-art” – which became a call for innovation and non-conformity; and you had groups like “The Other Muswell Hill Stuckists”, who were part of a general and widespread movement to restate the primacy of painting as a technique.

I was always a little bit discomfited by the Stuckist perspective – as much as I might have agreed or sympathised with it – but I could never put my finger on exactly why. I think I know now what it is about Stuckism that bothers me. While they were very happy to trash the state support that the YBAs and conceptual artists garnered from a Labour government eager to exploit its populist credentials, there was something extremely invigorating and refreshing about the fact that such support existed. It’s rare for a state machine to support non-traditional art (pick any period in history, and this is true). I suppose I became worried that the apparent non-conformist posturing of the Stuckists was really just a sort of conservatism in disguise. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a figurative painter myself, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the notion that non-painted art couldn’t have any emotional content and had become all sound and fury, signifying nothing (but with a huge price tag).

Now, with funding being withdrawn from the arts faster than at any point in British history, there is a cold, conservative wind whistling through art galleries and museums. Painting and drawing are coming back into fashion – not just as a reaction to the previous decade’s taste for things like large-scale public and conceptual art – but because there is now a conservative ideological agenda to be pursued. I know I keep saying this, but look at the US, where the “Culture War” defined and created by social conservatives and adopted as conservative politics, has largely removed the kind of innovative, non-conformist art we are used to seeing in Europe from the public arena.

I know the Stuckists were never part of this movement, and certainly are not part of it now, but I see their manifesto as now unwittingly providing an intellectual backing to the rejection of the conceptual in art. I think this is a terrible step backwards. I think that conceptual art has had a hugely beneficial impact on all areas of the arts, from film to painting to poetry. I also think that conceptual art has done more to strengthen the connection between thinking and doing than any other movement in art history – and this is exactly the connection that Remodernism, Stuckist painters and others want to preserve.