Today’s Painting and Part I of the Stuckist Manifesto Criticized

It's a Smaller-Than-Quark Eat Smaller-Than-Quark World 2025. Oil, acrylic and pastel on paper, 22 x 30"

So, maybe you know, I published a book last August in celebration of 25 years of Stuckism, the international art movement founded in London in 1999. The following is the first installment of chapter from my book, Making Friends With Wild Dogs: Reflections on Stuckism for its 25th Anniversary. I give my feedback about the Stuckist manifesto. I will provide the whole chapter in three posts:

My Stuckist Manifesto (Boldface is Theirs)

I want to name my Stuckists. These are painter-artists whom I have “broke bread” with in some way or another, lifting the veil and eyes meeting. The only way to add layers of trust human-ly. We’re not a local affiliation, like the couple hundred international Stuckist groups that formed over the past 25 years (e.g., The Omaha Daubers), but we are in each other’s “in-group”, close enough to make meaningful exchanges. Other people have their Stuckists too. And they should advocate for them (an addendum I would add to the manifesto). I say hallowed be thy painting relationships. Keep them close for as long as you can. When it comes down to influence in the whole wide world of art, I’m mostly interested in my people. Also, we should remember that Stuckists come and go. There were 13 founding members in 1999. They know who they are, and they’ll get (and deserve) most of the historical credit, if just for doing something first that I’ve advocated for before I heard of Stuckism — that is, be alone together, painting. However, this doesn’t mean that these painters are influential at the present time. The original British Stuckists will be accounted for. If any of them desire future coffee table book greatness under the umbrella of Stuckism, then they better keep making paintings every single work day, like a plumber fixes toilets and a cashier opens and closes a drawer. Can one even be a Stuckist if alive but not making paintings? Of course not! Can one be a dead Stuckist? Yes, but only if he grabbed paper, palette and brushes to paint with on his deathbed.
So who are my Stuckists?
Edgeworth Johnstone, Olga Knaus, Lupo Sol, Andrew Makarov and Charles Thomson, who recently stopped painting to write poems. He’ll jump back to painting again, if he still wants to be a Stuckist like the other painters (including myself) are contemporary working Stuckists. For now I include him out of a deep respect for his dedication to promoting Stuckists and Stuckism. There are several more painters I would mention, who I know get up in the morning to paint. I’ve even shown some of their work, and had my work with theirs in exhibitions. Remy Noe, Eamon Everall, John Pipere, Godfrey John Blow, Emma Pugmire, John Dunne, J.X. Coudrille, Jacqueline Jones —to name a few.  Just go to Instagram to see who is painting every day. I also follow about 10 working painters who don’t identify as Stuckists, though they should, unless they desire their art expressed forever alone and arrogantly.
My Stuckists are working painters. If Dr. Jones doesn’t practice dentistry practically every single day, then he’s not a dentist. Any non-dentist can pull a tooth successfully a couple times a year. But if that’s it, if he’s not absorbed with everything teeth and gums, night and day, then dentist he ain’t. Same with painting. Dabblers have every right to play painter, but they don’t fool me if they’re not obsessed. One must think and do painting obsessively else not be a Stuckist. That culls the international painting field significantly. And please, no more founding Stuckist malarkey about amateurism. Doctors are amateurs, if they’re worthy of the title and position. They practice, don’t they? And they learn new things with practice. They practice and make money. Well, painters must practice too. Another Throop addendum to the Stuckist manifesto, which lightly contradicts part of statement #9, (and English grammar), would be: “To aspire to human is to be amateur, duh. Stuckists are poorly paid professional amateurs who can’t make a career of art because they’re stuck making paintings”.
So who are today’s Stuckists? I think this needs to be answered in both the negative and positive. They are not hobbyist painters. They are not careerists. They are not lucky. They are not rich (unless fortune inherited). They are professional amateur painters. They are obsessed with their medium. They are suffering psychologically, perhaps financially. They do aloneness very well and often, but need friends to show paintings with.

The Stuckists

The following is a piece of what I wrote about art in 1999, the year the Stuckist manifesto was born. Very pre-Stuckism. A smorgasbord of contradiction:

“I am sitting at a desk of woe, believe me, there are no beautiful human lives. I am glad about my dreams, but they are personal, and I could never successfully relate to you my feelings about the humble pilgrim who marched through old Russia with God and a moldy loaf of bread. But I will try. That is art. Or, how could you ever know the untarnished life of the self-appointed monk who lives a hermetic day chopping wood and carrying water in the forest of his dreams? You could never know, but I must make you try.
Children should not grow up without the intentions of childhood always. Children are artists. Yes, the little iddy-biddy ones. They are artists because they are naive and think freely. Obviously the problem is that children aren’t raised by children. If they were, then who would look after the taller kids?
It is important for you to see how I have decorated the inside of my cabin. I have a window above a small wooden desk, a cot kitty-corner to the desk, a dark corner for food, books, and clothes, my paintings on the wall, and bowls for breakfast and dinner. In October, leaves fall inside when the windows are open. Sometimes children stop by to visit, the young and old ones. The days are so alive. They carry their vitality into night, and I step out into the darkness to live some more. No one knows what I am up to.
Do any of you have money? How did you get it? Was it art? Probably not because I understand. I work for a living too. I have these very strong feelings about the art of life, and I suspect that you do not have the same. I believe most of you distrust your children because you’re getting a living in a way that has no use for them. But I think children are more useful than you. You don’t think so. Yet if you did, we could get together to change the world. I think that if we all stopped working stultifying jobs there would be food in abundance. We would eat well and live in the abandoned homes of people who died off rather than succumb to living the child’s life. I would choose to remain in my cabin, and I would invite you in now because we could communicate.
I just read over what I wrote and you must understand that I am not being moralistic. I do not want to change you. I want God from you. If that is a change then I am being moralistic. If I could magically turn you into one of these rabbits that nibble on my lettuce, you would see what I mean. However, that is not my intention. In the old days if someone walked into the woods to ask the master the secret of happiness, he would be sent home with a bloody nose. These days he won’t even let any of you in because you are murderous monsters.
Art never came. Creative people were born and lived. Now I have to lay art down and cover it up with leaves because it never came. What is it I am covering up then? Compost. The energy of hope for more creative people? What is the difference if they make cars or watercolors? The other night I met a painter who thought that all his friends who painted, painted junk. He stood there gesticulating the act of smashing their paintings. He should have been killing children because I hated him at that moment. What is the difference if he makes cars or watercolors? He isn’t an artist. Can you imagine a child hating another child’s drawing of a tree or a horse? Hating it enough to smash it?”

It was the end of a millennium. 1999. A good year to start a movement. Maybe like me, Thomson and Childish had a little one in their lives. They were fed up with dirty beds and dead sharks getting called art and bought up for thousands of dollars. Perhaps they understood that the best art was born cringing from the dissonance of two conflicting desires — to remain free and care for a child.

(est. 1999)

Stuckism needed a name. It is unfortunate that it was derived from a criticism by Tracey Emin, and then quoted in the manifesto, which is literally praying at the altar of the ego artist. Adding fame to a fame-drenched dystopia, especially the fame of non-artist Emin, is anathema to any well intentioned “rebirth”. Big mistake there. Now we suffer the nomenclature of an art prostitute to identify our practice with a reform document. If not a mistake, then too damn clever. Like Martin Luther quoting Beelzebub before launching into his theses. Were Thomson and Childish begging for indulgence?

“Your paintings are stuck,
you are stuck!
Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!”

Tracey Emin

I am not against conceptual art. I just don’t want it to be compared to painting in any way whatsoever. If I’m a pastry chef making a genoise cake for dessert, I won’t serve it in an invisible restaurant to pretend people fake eating it. Conceptual art is like having a tea party without tea or a stuffed rabbit. Fine, let it happen. There is always room for pretend. But it isn’t tea, and it isn’t always art, like a painting is. Don’t you dare toy with my art sense, or lack thereof. I want to see what I am looking at. There are thousands of theaters with stages and many more cluttered corners in children’s rooms to play pretend. Theater is art. Conceptual art is theater, and that’s that.
Pleasure, pain, and everything in between and outside, pass by us in breezes and waves. To pursue pleasure only is futile, but not wrong. Good cannot be without bad, but only evil in the movies admittedly pursues the bad. Art is not hedonistic. It’s just a necessary adjunct to the human ego, and the engorged self is the only power an artist will ever achieve, so leave it alone please, so we can see some great paintings. One cannot silence the ego without making life itself an art, which will involve abandoning art. The enlightened do not wish to be understood. They might as well paint for the audience of a square inch of grass with worms and insects passing by rather than a space on the wall at a juried exhibition. If Stuckists want humility, then say it. But it just creates a double-bind to “be against” the ego-artist. On the contrary, painters need to dive right into the ego. Sign that name you were given. Or make up your own. Let them spit in your face, while you call out “more, more, more!” An artist cannot be without an ego. Stuckism shouldn’t entice sensitive artists to go mad-crazy striving for the impossible. It should want them to become master amateur painters, loving the ego to death eventually.

Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist.

Sometimes I am too clever with my art, which can’t make up for its visual limitations. I use provocative titles because I don’t think the painting is strong enough to move mountains. No painting is. So I bomb the mountains with clever words describing the picture that at face value isn’t anything close to what I say it is. It can be an imaginative creature laying against a tree trunk, and I’ll juxtapose it’s visual reality with a conceptual title, having nothing to do with an imaginative creature laying against a tree trunk. Like some protest of government, or sentimental love for a friend. So phony. Still copying. I believe this stems from my youthful desire to become a writer with the inevitable discovery of poet-painter Kenneth Patchen. He made silly creature images too, and painted very serious poetic text onto them. It gave the paintings a more innocent, even saint-like appeal. Beware! Just a concept. Even Patchen couldn’t aspire to Stuckism. Clever and self-righteous in his suffering, feeling the need to add words to complete a painting. He said he was copying Klee. No way. Klee oozed Stuckism. Patchen was making poetry propaganda, promoting the immovable devil in man. God was he miserable!
I’m stuck and need to break. I will never be free if I can’t remove the mask of cleverness. Zen Buddhism uses the koan paradox to provoke satori. Logic and reason are constructs of language and language blocks the path to awakening. What are the barriers to art freedom? Is there a painting koan to meditate on? How about, “What is the color of a purple-less violet?” Or “Who is Michelangelo to the Pope’s dead cat?” See? I can’t help but be clever.
Now, how to remove the mask of cleverness. Do I just stop talking? Go paint in a cave and never show my work? That’s an impossible task — to try and not be the thing you’re desperately pretending to be. Ah yes, a koan. Thank you Stuckism.
I’ve seen and heard uncensored expression from Edgeworth Johnstone. He is a Stuckist. Not all the time of course. But often enough to notice. He gets clever too once in a while.
Jesus, we’re artists, not gods.

Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared to our own private opinion.”

—  Henry Thoreau

Painting is a medium of art-making which I define as the acting out of the self’s persistence. One cannot finish a painting and not be reminded that he sucks. A bad painting, (and you must know that you make bad paintings, just like you realize that your nose is too big for your face), will achieve in a flash what might take five sessions (and $1000) for an analyst to squeeze out of you in therapy. You, not the other guy, are the impostor. Quit now and die trying. For me, there is no mind and heart regulator quite like painting. I see my limitations in it. I see envy, pride, purposelessness, my fool’s heart, my godship — laid out bare for all to witness on a little 11 x 14" studio canvas. And I don’t care what anyone else thinks because I already want it burned to ash.
I lie. I wake in the morning and do it all over again.

Painting is the medium of self-discovery. It engages the person fully with a process of action, emotion, thought and vision, revealing all of these with intimate and unforgiving breadth and detail.