#remodernism

[:en]Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art. By May 2017 the initial group of 13 British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries.

Childish and Thomson have issued several manifestos. The first one was The Stuckists, consisting of 20 points starting with “Stuckism is a…

'towards a new spirituality in art'

Through the course of the 20th century Modernism has progressively lost its way, until finally toppling into the pit of Postmodern balderdash. At this appropriate time, The Stuckists, the first Remodernist Art Group, announce the birth of Remodernism.

1. Remodernism takes the original principles of Modernism and reapplies them, highlighting vision as opposed to formalism.

2. Remodernism is inclusive rather than exclusive and welcomes artists who endeavour to know themselves and find themselves through art processes that strive to connect and include, rather than alienate and exclude. Remodernism upholds the spiritual vision of the founding fathers of Modernism and respects their bravery and integrity in facing and depicting the travails of the human soul through a new art that was no longer subservient to a religious or political dogma and which sought to give voice to the gamut of the human psyche.  3. Remodernism discards and replaces Post-Modernism because of its failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being.  4. Remodernism embodies spiritual depth and meaning and brings to an end an age of scientific materialism, nihilism and spiritual bankruptcy.  5. We don't need more dull, boring, brainless destruction of convention, what we need is not new, but perennial. We need an art that integrates body and soul and recognises enduring and underlying principles which have sustained wisdom and insight throughout humanity's history. This is the proper function of tradition. 

6. Modernism has never fulfilled its potential. It is futile to be 'post' something which has not even 'been' properly something in the first place. Remodernism is the rebirth of spiritual art.

7. Spirituality is the journey of the soul on earth. Its first principle is a declaration of intent to face the truth. Truth is what it is, regardless of what we want it to be. Being a spiritual artist means addressing unflinchingly our projections, good and bad, the attractive and the grotesque, our strengths as well as our delusions, in order to know ourselves and thereby our true relationship with others and our connection to the divine.

8. Spiritual art is not about fairyland. It is about taking hold of the rough texture of life. It is about addressing the shadow and making friends with wild dogs. Spirituality is the awareness that everything in life is for a higher purpose.

9. Spiritual art is not religion. Spirituality is humanity's quest to understand itself and finds its symbology through the clarity and integrity of its artists.  10. The making of true art is man's desire to communicate with himself, his fellows and his God. Art that fails to address these issues is not art. 11. It should be noted that technique is dictated by, and only necessary to the extent to which it is commensurate with, the vision of the artist.  12. The Remodernist's job is to bring God back into art but not as God was before. Remodernism is not a religion, but we uphold that it is essential to regain enthusiasm (from the Greek, en theos to be possessed by God).  13. A true art is the visible manifestation, evidence and facilitator of the soul's journey. Spiritual art does not mean the painting of Madonnas or Buddhas. Spiritual art is the painting of things that touch the soul of the artist. Spiritual art does not often look very spiritual, it looks like everything else because spirituality includes everything. 14. Why do we need a new spirituality in art? Because connecting in a meaningful way is what makes people happy. Being understood and understanding each other makes life enjoyable and worth living.

Summary

It is quite clear to anyone of an uncluttered mental disposition that what is now put forward, quite seriously, as art by the ruling elite, is proof that a seemingly rational development of a body of ideas has gone seriously awry. The principles on which Modernism was based are sound, but the conclusions that have now been reached from it are preposterous.

We address this lack of meaning, so that a coherent art can be achieved and this imbalance redressed.

Let there be no doubt, there will be a spiritual renaissance in art because there is nowhere else for art to go. Stuckism's mandate is to initiate that spiritual renaissance now.

 Billy Childish

Charles Thomson

1.3.2000

First published by The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry

11 Boundary Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6TS

back to Stuckist homepage

In response to your criticism of my screenplay, I want to address things you rashly pointed out as being “incorrect.”  While I understand the material can always improve and one should remain open to suggestions that could actually benefit the piece, I feel that you mostly missed the very well considered intention behind what I’m doing here.

I’ve refined my approach to and stance on art for a long time.  From the beginning, my urge to expand awareness has come into conflict with a desire to entertain. I think the head work and writing I’ve done in the past five years has brought me closer to a mature style - a synthesis of two great obsessions.  I waver between a longing for a movie that is profound in its simplicity/rigid in its aesthetics versus an urge to play with “the biggest electric train set a boy could have.” I feel both can yield very great reward when done right. One can enrich the spirit and heighten consciousness and another can stimulate the imagination by putting dreams on display.

According to Pauline Kael, in cinema there is the artistry that brings the medium alive with self-conscious excitement (artifice) and there is the artistry that makes the medium disappear (realism). I have spent my time obsessing over both types and trying to reconcile them - to find a balance between the two, to find unseen connections and hybridizations that have not been done to death.  As Guy Maddin said:

"The irresolvable tension created by the gap between documentary and melodrama."

I spent about three years trying to understand how to capture realism - the unresolved quality of life, the muted poignancy of played down, naturalistic moments. I spent about five in change contemplating artifice. Ever since you’ve known me, I’ve been looking for my own unique way to marry the two. My breakthrough came when I could finally oscillate freely between feats of the imagination and the richness of life experience.  I learned how to buoy otherwise pretentious ideas with absurdism or poignancy. When I gave up trying to commit to one widely accepted style of “serious” film, I realized that my inner and outer reality did not have to exist in conflict with each other.  And so I have learned to trust my intuition; to fret less and less about aesthetic, narrative, or tonal rightness. I felt that trying to adhere to a discipline only held me back, though it did force me to become more inventive.  It forced me to reflect deeply on the things I did not want to do.  I still believe it is very important to experiment with limitations, formal and budgetary.  This creates a deeper understanding of the power of minimalism, austerity and elliptical storytelling.  But we live upon the surface of over a hundred years of movies.  There are so many tools in the toolbox now and each one has its sacredness.  Even the most common moviegoer has a subconscious understanding of the grammar of cinema, knowledge of genres and stylistic approaches.  This allows us to play.  To not be afraid to sometimes create realities that can be “Life, but better.”  To move beyond limitations of commercial or art, beyond genre and tone.  This familiarity opens us up.

Though I think biologically we are hardwired to respond to and produce myth, I strongly agree with the Remodernist guy when he said cinema shouldn’t always derive from other art forms like literature.  Because we are able to frame experiences in time through filmmaking, the medium should be able to reach a sublime, an aesthetic arrest - the purity of inexplicable moments that are best captured via the medium of film: the arrangement of shots in a sequence. To me this goes beyond myth (which pushes morality) and into a realm of pure being - post-myth, a wordless understanding where images, not plot points, rhyme with each other.  I’ve experienced these moments everywhere from Tree of Life to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (though ToL is obviously more potent). There is something that elevates certain moments in a film beyond any moral judgment or preconceived idea.  I always just call it poetry.  When something is made lyrical and profound and weird and wild and sacred and horrific and hilarious all at once in a way that isn’t moving the narrative machine forward.  These moments illuminate a vertical dimension, where linear narrative exists in a horizontal one.  I’m a vertical man through and through.

My tumblr focuses on a certain type of film because that certain type isn’t discussed as much as others are. There even seems to be a fraternity of foreign art jams that everyone must talk about and reference endlessly.  I try to avoid that in the tumblr even though I like those movies too. I like to shed light on lesser known masters and masterpieces.  Cult heroes.  The marginalized.  Minor poets.  Vertical guys.  These guys have become my favorite filmmakers. 

I appreciate classical storytelling and the hero’s arc.  I feel like the oldies like Bergman and Fellini had no choice but to first master a classical dramatic form by making their early films under this stricture.  They didn’t have film school or this contemporary splintering of niche audiences we have today through our myriad access to all different kinds of movies, which allows new directors to directly pursue their vision and have a venue for their work.  Dudes like Spielberg wanted to master the classical form because he wanted to make classical pictures. Then there’s Linklater, Jarmusch, Korine and Lynch, who came out of the barrel with unconventional art films. They had done the head work. They had watched and absorbed and catalogued their own obsessions from very early ages and followed their bliss in communicating these ideas in unique ways. They never wanted to destroy classical movies, they just knew there was room to offer something different and that if they didn’t attempt something different, then classical style films would be all we have. And we’d be missing many colors from the spectrum. I feel a kinship to them, although I think the movies I want to make are much more commercial than theirs.  But I am deeply informed by their approach to storytelling.

I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to heighten consciousness through film. I love comedies and I love movies that aren’t overt comedies yet have a great sense of levity.  I love subtlety and austerity. Local Hero is my favorite movie of all time.  It has a regular three act structure but its manner is extremely relaxed.  Character and locale begin to take precedence over the story.  At times it even ceases to become a story and becomes more like a lived experience.  It has very few belly laughs but moments accumulate and catch up to you by film’s end. The first time I saw it, I thought it was merely “Okay.” But those little details kept niggling at me and the more times I saw it, the more I realized it was a masterwork. That’s really the way I want to heighten consciousness - not through any didactic imagery or overwhelming passages of humanity and beauty - but through poignancy.  And levity.  Measured pace.  Well observed moments.  And the occasional El Topo freakfest.  The natural world contains enough beautiful vistas, creatures, faces; the world of man has enough architecture and interiors to thrill and inspire.  So I’m not interested in capturing that beauty perchance.  The beauty or the magic should arise through how the whole piece is arranged – through the cuts and the story.  A kind of pragmatism buoyed by the occasional hypnotic digression.  Not just a collection of stereotypical beautiful images.  Without a wildness, a sense of the unprecedented or something deeper to say - that shit is just a life insurance commercial.  

In that Tark Criterion piece you linked me to, he talks about making his first film, Ivan’s Childhood. I found this to be profound and it made me feel at peace with all these “seemingly” fruitless years of writing and head work, trying to solve brain puzzles and find my unique place in the history of cinema:

"The completion of IVAN’S CHILDHOOD marked the end of one cycle of my life, and of a process that I saw as a kind of self-determination. It was made up of study at the Institute of Cinematography, work on a short film for my diploma, and then eight months’ work on my first feature film. I could now assess the experience of IVAN’S CHILDHOOD, accept the need to work out clearly, albeit temporarily, my own position in the aesthetics of cinema, and set myself problems which might be solved in the course of making my next film: in all of this I saw a pledge of my advance onto new ground.