Research Blog: Entry 8

 There are some other essays that I would like to quote in my thesis to add different perspectives of Stuckism for variety. The founder, Charles Thomson, has written three essays and one of them “A Stuckist on Stuckism (2004)” offers a ‘comprehensive personal statement on the origins of Stuckism’. Alongside a detailed history of the movement, Thomson offers his insightful perspective on many other topics that influenced the group and the thought processes behind the creation of their manifestos promoting Remodernism. Two of the topics covered in the essay are spirituality and formalism, which I will be referencing to aid in my analysis of Stuckist artworks and investigate how successfully these aspects of Modernism have been revived by the artists:

Spirituality:

• One of them Remodernism inaugurates a renewal of spiritual values for art, culture and society to replace the emptiness of current Postmodernism.
• To my surprise, the intervening years had brought a convergence, especially through the overlap of our spiritual interests - his via Buddhism and mine from Kabbalah - including research into astrology and 'past lives', as well as an overlap in cinematic entertainment.
• We have everything on our side - a collection of ramshackle artists and a shoestring budget - against the spiritual and creative poverty of an entrenched self-replicating multi-million pound art establishment.
• Both these spiritual disciplines have fed into the manifestos, which were always intended as catalysts and not a creed. Artists were attracted to Stuckism because they identified with the spirit of it.
• The Medieval period provided means for a partial expression of wholeness - the spiritual element.
• His spiritual commitment to God and humanity, his personal striving and the impact of nature all fused with an equivalent innovatory technical vehicle in a holistic art.
• Kandinsky introduced the spiritual in art with an appropriate form of abstraction, but negated the importance of material experience.

Formalism:

• The flat forms and decorative gold of icons reflect this non-material reality.
• The Impressionists did not move from the drawing of externally observed form, but the career of Claude Monet took him from exquisitely observed light (pre-Impressionism) to a vision of the soul in his later work, where observation becomes a catalyst not an aim.
• A new art was created where form was the conduit of honesty, depth and intensity of consciousness.
• Kandinsky introduced the spiritual in art with an appropriate form of abstraction, but negated the importance of material experience.
• Postmodernism's response to this is to play their forms off against each other in a superficial exercise, often to demonstrate the negation of any intrinsic worth in them.
• The end is to address life, and to condense it to a symbolic form that enables us to relive and/or broaden experience and understanding through a 'magical' process.

 There is a short essay on Stuckism by the respected British art critic, Edward Lucie-Smith. Despite its brevity, the essay "Stuckism (2005)" offers a concise analysis of ‘the Stuckists' relationship with the art world and the philosophy of their work’. Lucie-Smith discusses the popular designation of avant-garde artworks, and summarises how the introduction of new media has affected perceptions of traditional working techniques. As an unbiased yet knowledgeable third party, I will use quotes from this essay to provide the reader with a straightforward explanation of Stuckism. This will allow them a greater understanding of the artworks being discussed by providing a contextual background for the movement:

Stuckism:

• Basically what the Stuckists want is recognition as individual creative artists, who have chosen to make art by methods that are, to the layman’s eye at least, traditional – hence their collective name, which acknowledges the fact that their opponents see them as being ‘stuck’ in the past.
• In other words, the tables have been turned – what is designated for convenience sake as ‘radical’ is at the same time official, and art using traditional means is seen as the work of outsiders.
• The fact that an artist uses traditional techniques does not mean that he or she takes a traditional approach to actual subject-matter.
• They aim to go very directly to the point, without making concession to any preconceptions the audience may have about what is ‘pretty’ or even, in a more complex sense, beautiful.
• This also surfaces in Stuckist painting, which has a terror of seeming pretentious. One useful comparison is to look from Stuckism to Pop Art, as both often seem to use the same primary material – things seen in the street, things taken from advertising and popular entertainment. Despite this, the final result is very different – Stuckism does not distance itself from its subject-matter, in the way that Pop so often does. It has none of Pop’s cool analysis of commercial media, or the mechanisms of stardom.
• In this sense, Stuckism reverts psychologically to certain pre-Modern attitudes. Its conviction that anyone can make viable art, if their need to express themselves is both strong enough and sincere enough, is a conviction inherited from Romanticism, but modified by Marxist and Anarchist ideas.
• The strong card of the artists linked to Stuckism is not, in the end, their embrace of a particular set of techniques, but their pursuit of emotional authenticity, and their conviction that what they do has to be an authentic expression of themselves as individuals, inhabiting a particular sort of modern society.

References

Lucie-Smith, E. (2005). Stuckism. [online] Spectrum London. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20061221064418/http://www.spectrumlondon.co.uk/new/stuckists.htm [Accessed 03 Jan. 2019].

Thomson, C. (2004). A Stuckist on Stuckism. [online] National Museums Liverpool. Available at: https://www.stuckism.com/Walker/AStuckistOnStuckism.html [Accessed 03 Jan. 2019].