Billy Childish

My favorite shot of Billy Childish (he's the one on the left).

Billy Childish, woodcut self-portrait.

If ever there was a difficult artist upon whom to "get a handle," it would be Billy Childish. The reason is simple, he's an artist in the broadest sense of the word. Born Steven John Hamper in 1959 (making him 53 at the moment), Billy Childish is a product of Chatham, Kent, England, where he still lives today. I suppose we should start by looking at Billy Childish as a painter, but first we need to look at Childish the child. His father was a commercial artist, also a drug-smuggling drunk. He was emotionally abused by his father, mother, and brother, while being sexual abused at the age of nine by another family member. He survived by sheer force of personality and will. As a teenager, he took up painting. He quit high school at the age of sixteen, an undiagnosed dyslexic. He had the talent to get into art school, but not the temperament to endure it. He spent a year learning the basics at Medway College of Design. On the basis of an outstanding portfolio, he was accepted at Saint Martin's School of Art. He lasted there exactly one month. Two years later, he was back, older and wiser. Two years later he was expelled for refusing to paint in their college studio (and other unspecified offenses). In short, Billy Childish was a malcontent, seemingly at war with all the rest of the world around him. The next fifteen years he spent "on the dole" (welfare, to American readers), during which time he wrote poetry, composed music, and painted paintings no one but he, himself, understood.

One of Billy's more recent musical groups.

Billy Childish may be better known in Britain for his music than his painting. Like his painting, his music runs against the grain. Generically you would term it hard rock. He writes it, performs it (he's an excellent guitarist) and produces it having organized, then disorganized a string of what we Yanks would call "garage bands." Perhaps more than anything else, he seems to enjoy naming them with groups like TV21 (later renamed the Pop Rivets), The Milkshakes, Thee Mighty Caesars, The Del Monas, then Thee Headcoats, and later the outrageous Wild Billy Childish & The Friends of the Buff Medways Fanciers Association. One critic pointed out that as soon as a Childish band threatens to become famous, Billy promptly disbands it. It's not that Billy dislikes fame, he's simply apathetic to it. That tends to make him an anomaly in both the music and the art worlds.


Man Seated (Oyster Catchers, Thames Estuary 1932)2012, Billy Childish, from his show,
"Paintings that Changed the World Like Digging in the Gutter with a Broken Lolly Stick."

Paedophile album cover, 1992

The adult life story of Billy Childish is as bumpy, twisting, and disheveled as his childhood. In the 1990s, Billy went public with his sexual abuse as a child through his instrumental album Paedophile along with Thee Headcoats (his band at the time). On the front cover he placed a photo of his abuser. Later he probed still deeper into his early life with three novels, My Fault (1996), Notebooks of a Naked Youth (1997), and Sex Crimes of the Futcher (2004). Reading down the list of more than 150 Billy Childish albums is as much fun as perusing the list of the bands which performed them. I especially like his title for a 1987 album, Don't Give Any Dinner to Henry Chinaski, though his next two albums, Which Dead Donkey, Daddy? and Laughing Gravy seem equally intriguing. All three were done with different bands he organized that one year alone. His more than fifty books of poetry bear equally creative titles.

The Real Turner Prize Show, 2000, the only photo of the entire Stuckist group.
(Billy Childish is at far right).

In 1999 Billy Childish joined with Charles Thomson to form the Stuckist movement, a reactionary group of approximately a dozen artist whose primary uniting manifesto involved their outrage over the direction taken by the committee overseeing the Turner Prize (awarded each year by the Tate Gallery), in its embracing conceptual art. The move cost him his girlfriend at the time, artist Tracy Emin, who happened to be a leadinig conceptual artist. Two years later Childish unjoined the group when he decided to take up conceptual art himself. Tracy, meanwhile, had found someone new. Since then, while still painting, Childish has added short film making (Super 8mm) to his resume, as well as forever lenghtening his discography and starting his own poetry publishing house--Hangman Books. (Love these names.)




 

Stuckism

Sir Isaac Newton, in one of his famous laws decreed that, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." He was speaking in terms of physics, of course, but social scientists have long noted that what he had to say often, if not always, applies to the affairs of man as well. They might have to modify the statement slightly to say that "For every action there is, eventually, an equal and opposite reaction." And it seems to me, that the same law could also be applied to art. A movement develops, thrives, dominates, and in so doing angers a significant bloc of individuals who formulate their own pendulum swing back in the opposite direction. And so it goes, from Academicism to Impressionism, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Dada, from WPA art to Abstract Expressionism then to Pop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The pendulum swings, the clock keeps ticking.

The first Stuckist show, 1999, Shoreditch,
(east end of London)

Postmodernism is about a generation old now, and it's not surprising that "eventually" has finally come upon it. The opposite reaction, though not equal by any means, seems to be a sort of anti-movement art movement which  developed in Britain as the result of some of the worst excesses of Postmodernism as identified mostly in conceptual art. In some ways it's not too unlike Dada movement of a century ago. Like the Impressionists, they take their name from an intended insult--Stuckist--though in fact they hate the term. They claim not to be an "ism." The "stuck" part they seem not to mind. The co-founders of the non-movement were Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. The group got their name when Tracey Emin (remember, her unmade bed at the Tate) screamed at her then boyfriend, Billy Childish, that his art was stuck, stuck, stuck! Along with Emin's work, Stuckists also hold in extremely low regard that of Damien Hirst (embalmed sheep), whom they also accuse of plagiarism, and Chris Ofili (no need to elaborate on him).

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an
Acquisitions Decision, 2000,
Charles Thomson

Personalities aside, I don't intend to discuss the art on either side of the fence. However, the most interesting aspects of Stuckism is its manifesto. A few lines are especially compelling. "Artists who don't paint aren't artists." That leaves out a lot of artists. "Art that has to be in a gallery to be art isn't art." That leaves out a lot of art as well. The Stuckists believe art should be displayed in homes with tables and chairs and sofas and tea, not in sterile, all-white surroundings. I can see the logic in that. "Success is getting out of bed in the morning and painting." I rather like that one. "A Stuckist is not a career artist but...an amateur." The point this one makes is that professionals fear failure; amateurs don't, because they have nothing to lose. There may be some truth to that but I've known a lot of amateurs who were also inhibited by a fear of failure. Stuckists abhor novelty, shock, and gimmicks. Postmodernism tries to ape the past and foresee the future. Stuckists try to ignore both. Stuckists champion process over cleverness, realism over abstraction, content over void, humor over wittiness, and painting over everything else.

The Stuckists are perennially critical of the Tate's Turner Prize purchases.

Notwithstanding their blacklisting of many of their British counterparts, the Stuckists hold in greatest contempt not so much the Hirsts and Ofilis of their generation (and especially Britain's annual Turner Prize) but the educational establishment which fostered them; not to mention the Saachis (a London art gallery) and government subsidies which have isolated such artists from the "real" world of human artistic expression. The Stuckists deem commercial success as the death of personal expression in painting. And they see the educational institutions that gave birth to the iconoclastic aura of conceptual art as nothing more than bureaucratic money machines trapping untalented students and milking their wealthy parents in the name of "success" in the art world rat race. A valid observation. Stuckists call for all art education institutions to make their facilities and faculties available during off-hours for the enrichment of the community at large. Sounds like a good idea to me. Like all art manifestos, there is much in the Stuckist's document that is pure B.S. (not bachelor of sciences). But there is also a fair amount of C.S. (common sense) as well. Stuckists take as their motto, "We only denounce that which stops at the starting point--Stuckism starts at the stopping point." As a self-confessed Postmodernist, I make no claim to being a Stuckist, but I do get stuck sometimes. And sometimes, stuck ain't bad.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s Exhibition – "Love Is What You Want," 2011, London's Hayward Gallery

Tracey Emin with her friend, Docket.

Even if you like conceptual art, Tracey Emin is hard to take. That's especially so, if you don't. For instance, London's Stuckists are not fond of either her or her art, even though she's reputed to have given their non-movement its name. The Tate Gallery in London likes her, though, which means the conservative Stuckists don't much care for the Tate, either. Tracey is considered a member of the Young British Artists movement (YBA), sort of a left wing as applied to the London art world.

For Tracey Emin, art is totally personal. Virtually all of her installations, her sculptures, her obscenely nude drawings, her neon light quotations, are autobiographical. She displays her bed; she proclaims her sexual relationships (in a tent, no less), she sketches herself spread-eagle nude naked; she quotes herself in neon. Her large-scale applique texts on blankets (above) are virtual autobiographies. Just about the only form of art she has created which is not about Tracey Emin are her paintings from her student days at the Royal College of Art, most of which she has destroyed. Egotistical? Perhaps. Certainly an egoist. However, if artists are at their best when they create what they know best, then Tracey Emin has been at her best for some thirty years.

My Bed, 1999, Tracey Emin--airing her dirty linens and laundry.

Friendship, 1987, Tracey Emin, from her
university days when she created with a
brush rather than a needle.

Tracey Emin was born in the Croydon section of South London, though she was raised in Margate the far easternmost suburb of the city along the coast. Born in 1963, her mother was a domestic, her father owned a hotel along with his wife, who was not Tracey's mother. When the hotel went broke, so did his family--both of them. Tracey was raped at the age of thirteen. All of these early struggles from her youth are blatantly reflected in her work. She went on to study fashion at Medway, printing at Maidstone, Philosophy at Birkbeck, and finally painting a the Royal College of Art where she obtained a M.A. It was at Medway where she took up with Stuckist co-founder Billy Childish. They lived together for several years until 1999 when Tracey's My Bed (above) was chosen as a finalist in the Turner Prize Competition. She didn't win the prize but the controversy arising from her unmade bed far overshadowed the video art of Steve McQueen, who did.

Every Part of Me's Bleeding, 1999, Tracey Emin, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

I Do Not Expect to Be a Mother,
1999, Tracey Emin--blanket graffiti

Much of Tracey Emin's art today involves letters forming words sewn on blankets. In the finest post-modern tradition of Jeff Koons, she hires others to do the actual sewing. In summing up her work, Tracey Emin might be considered sort of a slutty version of America's Jenny Holzer, though her words are far more personal and spelling is not her strong suit. When not proclaiming her past using fabric, Tracey "enlightens" us to her personal life using bright neon tubes made (by others) to replicate her own, highly stylized handwriting. Emin's more recent work involves self-portraiture, though far from anything ever visualized by experts from the past such as Rembrandt of van Gogh. Hers are highly expressive brush and ink drawings not unlike images scratched on the walls of toilet cubicles in the men's room of the grimiest bars in London (but about twenty times larger). Such images (those not so obscene as to be unseemly in this venue) can be seen in her show, "She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea" (below) at the Turner Contemporary located in her  old hometown of Margate.

"She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea," 2012, Tracey Emin, Turner Margate show.
The "floor show" seems to suggest a sculptural version of her wall art.

Meet Tracey Emin:




 

 

Joe Machine

2-2, 2014, Joe Machine

Torch the Tate It's Not Too Late,
Alice in the Art World Series,
2014, Joe Machine

Throughout the history of mankind, when a group or a movement goes too far, there always seems to be a contractive reaction. Some (myself included) have likened it to pendulum swing. Isaac Newton enacted the entire phenomena into law: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Some time ago, I invented the analogy of society breathing, especially with regard to art. The definition of art expands, then it contracts, taking in life-giving oxygen, expelling life-giving carbon dioxide for which the plant world owes us an immense debt of gratitude. Nowhere is this more evident than during the past fifteen years or so in England. The art world there took a deep, (some would say pretentious) breath, expanding its art definition to include all manner of conceptual art. In 1999, a group of twelve deeply disturbed painters (disturbed by the onslaught of unmade beds and dead animals showing up in art galleries and museums, if nothing else), aimed their pointy paint brushes at this "inflationary" trend and pricked it, not bursting it by any means, but letting some of the hot air out, causing the conceptual art movement to exhale. British artists Charles Thomson, inspired by the outrageous outraged anger of Tracey Emin, labeled the group he co-founded with fellow artist, Billy Childish, "Stuckists." The name stuck.

 

Joe Machine in his studio. (Is that a prison uniform?)

I Used To Be a Thief and
Murderer, Joe Machine.

Among the dozen or so co-founders of the Stuckist group was Joe Machine. Many of the founders and subsequent members espousing Stuckism are highly trained artists with impressive academic credentials. Joe Machine is not one of them. As you may have guessed by now, that's not even his real name. Joe was born in 1973, named by his parents Joseph Stokes. He grew up in Chatham, Kent, on the Isle of Sheppey, (near the mouth of the Thames). His family is of Romany background, an ethnicity arriving in Europe from India some one-thousand years ago, (sometimes referred to a Gypsies). Joe's background may not include formal art training, but it's certainly one of the most colorful among the Stuckist group. As a boy, he was sent to what we Americans used to call "reform school" for theft of scrap metal, and again later for burglarizing a greengrocer. He once stabbed his teacher in the hand with the business end of a drawing compass. Violence runs in his family. His grandfather, with whom he was quite close, was a bare-knuckle boxer.

 

My Grandfather Will Fight
You, 2001, Joe Machine

Joe Machine's art is not easy to take. Roughly half of it is so obscene as to be out of bounds for a blog like this. This art resides in a category of it's own. It's way too violent and crudely drawn to be traditionally erotic, yet it bears the redeeming qualities of personal creative communication lifting it out of the quagmire of pornography. Machine's work has been called by critics raw and autobiographical, as if that's a bad thing (below, left). Both comments are valid. Machine grew up in a rough part of town on the "wrong side of the tracks." Before taking up art, he made ends meet running the family amusement arcade and breeding Rottweilers. His world was rife with naval uniforms, loose women, coarse, violent, homicidal men, and low-life ugliness of the most disgusting genre. It's who he was...perhaps still is. In any case, he's married now with five kids. He's represented by reputable art galleries and participates regularly with the other Stuckists in their periodic shows.

Mother's Last Cigarette, Joe Machine

Joe Machine is prolific, though his paintings are far from any British "best seller" list. His work is important because he's a charter member of the Stuckist group and the Stuckist group is important because it's the first totally 21st-century painters' group having a major impact on the world of art. Along with it's counterparts in countries all around the world, Stuckism is also a vital counterbalance to Tracey Emin and the other conceptual artists of the YBA (Young British Artists). Moreover it's a much-needed prickly thorn in the side of the Tate. It's evidence that British art today is very much alive and well and breathing regularly.

Painting of Joe Machine, by fellow Stuckist, Bill Lewis.

 

 

Charles Thomson



Charles Thomson's recent work.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how little practicing artist know about art history. Perhaps I should modify that a bit by saying how little they understand about the subject. Moreover, their lack of understanding is primarily an inability to see the BIG PICTURE having to do with that from which their art has grown. For instance, an artist who paints impressionist works may know a good deal about, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, etc. but know next to nothing about Sisley, Morisot, Bazille, Hassam, Sickert, or Liebermann. On top of that, they have little or no concept as to where Impressionism fits in with those styles and movements which surround it in the vast, past parade of human creative endeavors (other than to be fairly sure that Impressionism was followed by Post-Impressionism).

Co-founder of Stuckism.

Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions
Decision, 2000, Charles Thomson,
the Stuckist iconic masterpiece.

All of this may seem to be of little consequence to most painters today until they come face to face with "outrageous" art--that is to say, that which outrages and challenges their often limited definition of art. Manet challenged the 19th century art definition with "art for art's sake" and his Luncheon on the Grass. During the early 20th century, Duchamp did the same with his Fountain (a urinal laid on its back). Tracey Emin's My Bed and the entire conceptual art movement challenged the 21st century definition of art. In each case there were whole groups of artists who reacted to these definitional challenges by simply retorting, "that's not art." That's the easy way out. The hard way in each century was to broaden and/or modify their definition of art. The problem with this reaction is that if the definition of art becomes infinitely broad art, then anything can become art. Defining art becomes meaningless if virtually any object or tableau, isolated to the antiseptic environment of a whitewashed art gallery, constitutes fine art. Minimalism proved to be the dying breath of Modern Art. It could easily be claimed that Conceptual Art represents the same death knell for Postmodern Art. Around 1999, two painters in England were among the first to foresee this dead end. Rather than make plans to attend the funeral, they began a crusade to, in effect, cure what ailed Postmodern art. Their names were Billy Childish  and Charles Thomson. Someone called this crusade "Stuckism." The name stuck.

An Artist and His Model, (a tribute to
Picasso), Charles Thomson

Having dealt with the Stuckists in some detail before, I don't propose to do so again here except to say that Charles Thomson is a very nice man and he has been one of the few I've ever written about who has taken the time to comment personally on my comments. He's also one of the few working artists I know who truly understands the history of art in the broadest sense as he discusses in the video above. He understands that for an artist to carve out a position at the highest levels in the art world, he or she must also carve out their place in art history. Stuckism allowed Thomson to do that, by fostering a group of other artists sympathetic to his ideals, then to take on some of the biggest names and strongest powers in the London art world, including gallery magnate Charles Saatchi, the Tate Museum, and its Turner Prize competition. The crusade he and Machine began allowed Thomson to combat the poisonous rise of Conceptual Art to mainstream status while proposing an alternative, a rediscovery of figural art, not as a style, but as a broad, rich, area of content aimed at preventing the premature death of Postmodern Art. In the process, almost as a byproduct, he has made a name for himself and his art, not for a place in any museum, but on the blank walls of those, like himself, wishing to save art from itself. An Artist and His Model (above, right) is typical of Thomson's black-outline period marking his style up through about 2013 when he began to paint in a more abstract, more colorful, more painterly manner (top).

Thomson curated the Stuckists Punk Victorian Show, Walker Gallery, Liverpool, 2004.

Thomson, born in 1953, is no longer a young man on the make. He often finds himself torn between promoting Stuckism and pursuing his own work--painting and promoting Charles Thomson. He does not paint in a Stuckist style. The fact that he paints mostly figures (people and animals), combined with his leadership of those artists, not just in England, but around the world, who paint similar content for similar reasons, is what makes Charles Thomson a Stuckist. In today's art world, how and what he paints, is largely secondary. Art history embraces leaders. The same is true of art galleries, art collectors, and eventually, art museums (perhaps, one day, even the Tate).

Thomson at work in his studio, ca. 2003.

An ironic, iconic motto to live by.