#stuckists

(via Between the Mystic and the Mundane: Charles Thomson Defends Stuckism)

LONDON — Eighteen short months ago, Charles Thomson, the world’s most vocal champion of figurative painting, nearly hung up his brush. After some 30 years painting thick black lines and flat planes of color (“I called it Cloisonism, which was a 19th century practice which Van Gogh was involved with for a time”) the artist considered himself stuck. But this was only what the art world elite had always said about him.

  Did you know that there is an art movement called the Stuckists, who describe themselves as anti-anti-art, which is against anti-art and pro-art? Anti-art rejects conventional ideas of art, so anti-anti-art Stuckists embrace the original idea of art, but in a new way, by rejecting the post-conventional art movement and forging ahead with a new one that keeps much of the ideas of the old one. Progress and anti-progress all in one. People sure do love to get upset about things. Soon we will be post-post-post-modernists, or maybe even post-pre-modernists, or pre-post-modernists. Maybe we’ll be a new generation of artists, linear thinkers and associative thinkers, who have shucked the things that took us here and embraced the past. We’re already doing that aren’t we? Mason jars and old clothes and hand-crafted cocktails and food, arrived at by our modern cars and hand-made in the comfort of modern air-conditioning? Oh, shit. I am Stuckist. You Are Stuckists. We are Stuck. 

Graham Short, an English artist rounding his 70s, recently created the world’s smallest work of art when he engraved a Bible passage onto a fleck of gold in lettering smaller than a single blood cell. He took beta blockers and potassium to slow his heart before he went to work with his Victorian needles, engraving at night to avoid avoid traffic sounds because trucks two blocks away would cause vibrations that ruined 30 pieces of gold before he finally finished the perfect one. You need a magnifying class in order to see his work of art, you need an ultrasound, a gel stick held up to the belly of creationism. He is slowing his heart for minimalism of form while across the ocean, another man, a generally mal-respected yet celebrated “journalist” rounding his 70s takes his clothes off and posts a naked mirror portrait to his Twitter followers, not stunning anyone, because we are a post-post-whatever that is both numb and eager, a dangerous alchemy.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” That was the Bible verse Mr. Graham Short posted on the fleck of gold. A big idea encased in an embryo. When Jesus told this to the disciples, they, the astonished ones, asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” The idea is that you have to shuck off what you own in order to enter salvation. The ones rich with materials were unwilling.

My aunt taught me how to drive in a cemetery, because, as she said to me with a wry glee specific to my family when they know they are saying something very clever, “Everything you hit is already dead.” I didn’t hit anything, dead or alive. It was very important to me that my aunt take back the message to my parents that I was a good driver. I didn’t have a chance with them thinking this on their own, since they watched me knock around the world since I was a bold, foolhardy toddler and so they already saw me as reckless, a habit of an idea unmitigated by new information. When my dad submitted himself to the 20 driving hours legally required by the state of Illinois with adult supervision, he would prick me with a toothpick whenever I would come to too hard of a stop. If his body jutted forward abruptly, majorly or minorly, he would take his toothpick out of his mouth and prick my arm with it. Men and their tools.

In Portugal, I found myself spotting plantlife growing out of the oddest places. There would be two large cracks in a faded, painted wall, and out of one crack, greenery spreading its hopeful leaves. One crack and not the other. In another wall, two holes existed, presumably for some type of plumbing, I don’t know or understand anything about architecture and that is my fault, and so now you, the reader, must suffer my ignorance too, but the point is that out of two of those anachronistic holes, one of them would inevitably sprout a chlorphyll bouquet, unassuming, asking nothing, high up, away out of reach, totally unnecessary and oddly juxtaposed against suntanned cement and paint. The improbable places in which we grow.