THE STUCKISTS

(est. 1999)

 

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

 

1. Stuckism doesn’t go in for fads. We do not feel the pressure to make art for the sake of selling it; we create what WE want to create.
2. Painting is the medium of self-discovery. It engages the person fully with a process of action, emotion, thought and vision.
3. Stuckism proposes a model of art which is healthy. It is a meeting of the conscious and unconscious, thought and emotion, spiritual and material, private and public.
4. Artists who don’t paint aren’t artists.
5. The Stuckist paints pictures because painting pictures is what matters.
6. The Stuckist is not mesmerised by the glittering prizes, but is wholeheartedly engaged in the process of painting. Success to the Stuckist is to be able to get out of bed in the morning and paint.
7. It is the Stuckist’s duty to explore his/her neurosis and innocence through the making of paintings and displaying them in public, thereby enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience.
8. The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (Latin – amare; to love) who can take risks on the canvas without fear of ruin.
9. Painting is expressive.
10. The Stuckist is opposed to the sterility of the white wall gallery system and calls for exhibitions to be held in homes and musty museums, with access to sofas, tables, chairs and cups of tea. The surroundings in which art is experienced (rather than viewed) should not be artificial and vacuous.
11. Crimes of education: instead of promoting the advancement of personal expression through appropriate art processes and thereby enriching society, the art school system has become a slick bureaucracy, whose prime motivation is financial. The Stuckists call for an open policy of admission to all art schools based on the individual’s work regardless of his/her academic record, or so-called lack of it.

 

We further call for the policy of entrapping rich and untalented students from at home and abroad to be halted forthwith.

 

We also demand that all college buildings be available for adult education and recreational use of the indigenous population of the respective catchment area.

 

     12. Manifestos are not the be-all and end-all, but they are sometimes a necessary evil.

Stuckist Manifesto adapted by Georgina Hall