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Revision as of 06:00, 5 October 2004
Stuckism is a British Art Movement of the 1990s and 2000s, founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. The name was coined by Thomson in response to the following comment, made by artist Tracey Emin to Childish, then her boyfriend:
- Your art is stuck, stuck, stuck!
The Stuckists formed as an alternative to the Charles Saatchi-patronised Young British Artists (also known as Brit Art). The group are defined by their Stuckist Manifesto that places great importance on the values of traditional artistic skills over the popularity of "easy" installation pieces, and oppose modernism (at least as it is presently practised in art).
The Stuckists later declared that they aimed to replace postmodernism with remodernism.
The Stuckists have become more active in recent years and have broadened their ideological basis. They even put forward a Stuckist candidate, Charles Thomson, for the 2001 British General Election.
Childish later left Stuckism but remains committed to its principles
In July 2002 Thomson opened the Stuckism International Centre and Gallery in Hoxton, London. Other Stuckists have opened Centres in Australia, America and Germany. There are now 50 Stuckist groups round the world.
"Anti-Stuckism"
There have been a small number of instances of people explicitly rejecting stuckism. Probably the first was in 1999, when two artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped on Tracey Emin's installation My Bed, a work consisting of the artist's own unmade bed, at the Tate Gallery. They were arrested for this performance, which they called Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed (in fact, they kept their underwear on), but no charges were pressed. Rather improbably, as Emin was perhaps the Stuckists' chief target of criticism, Chai had written, among other things, the word "ANTISTUCKISM" on his bare back. The explanation for this was that they were performance artists improving Emin's work which they thought had not gone far enough. Because the Stuckists are anti-performance art, Chai and Xi are anti-Stuckist.
This event attracted some publicity within the United Kingdom, largely as a result of the notoriety of Emin's original work. However, no coherent anti-Stuckist movement has since emerged, despite other isolated instances of people declaring themselves to be "anti-Stuckist", such as the filmmaker Andrew Kotting who released a manifesto declaring "The work should prove anti-Stuckist, genuinely post-modern, contingent and ad hoc in its thinking."