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New twist and Turner to art row
By Hettie Judah Last updated at 00:00am on 26.10.00The Real Turner Prize Show, Pure Gallery, until 28 November.
There is a school of thought that the best defence of the Turner Prize is that it still manages to annoy the living hell out of certain people, whether newspaper columnists, greengrocers or Government ministers.
Previous short lists have attracted derision from, among others, the K Foundation, who handed out a cash prize to winner Rachel Whiteread, considered by them to be the worst artist of the year, and Chris Smith, who fumed impotently over Tracey Emin's unmade bed. All of which, naturally, made wonderful free publicity for Sir Nicholas Serota and the Tate Gallery. This year, the Turner Prize's promotional budget is being helped along by the Stuckists arts group, who are calling for a return to the values of modernism and an acknowledgment that painting is the only true expressive art form.
Founded 18 months ago by low-budget polymaths Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, the movement takes its name from the the drunken fumings of one Tracey Emin who accused Childish (a former lover) of producing artwork that was "stuck, stuck stuck". Thomson and Childish decided to adopt a defiant stance, and emancipate the "stuck" artists of the world by creating a new movement which championed old-fashioned values such as spiritual integrity, emotional communication and, most importantly, the medium of figurative painting.
Those wishing to experience the fruits of Stuckist endeavour at first hand should visit the Pure Gallery in Leonard Street, EC2, where the group are staging the swaggeringly named Real Turner Prize Show. Alongside works by Childish and Thomson, the all-painting exhibition features heartfelt offerings from fellow Stuck-ists including Ella Guru, Sexton Ming, Wolf Howard and Joe Machine, accompanied by canvases from art students inspired by the movement's aims.
At the risk of sounding rude, the show has considerably more in common with the ICA's current exhibition of thrift-store paintings than it does with the Turner Prize. Subject matter ranges from anal sex to cats, to whores shooting up, to a picture of Nicholas Serota contemplating a pair of Tracey Emin's knickers; some of it is expressionistic, some of it grotesque, some of it conceptual - and that's the comparatively good stuff. As even the Stuckist-promoted Joe Crompton admits: "Some of the work is so ham-fisted it's painful."
According to Stuckist philosophy, "ham-fisted" painting is fine. "It doesn't matter if you can't paint in the formalist tradition - we paint pictures that are simple, straightforward depictions that communicate on a level other artists don't touch. There is a pain of frustration in these paintings; people are not pretending to be clever - if they want to paint cats, let them paint cats," explains Crompton. "Artistic merit lies in its ability to express." This standpoint quickly becomes problematic; what if the artist is so formally inept - as is the case with much of the work here - that they manage to communicate nothing? The Stuckists argue that the simple action of placing paint on canvas is what counts.
The major problem, however, is that while ferocious debate in the art world is a lovely, healthy thing, The Stuckists are by any yardstick an unusually gobby bunch. Their manifesto production is almost as prolific as their painting (and this from artists who say that their work seldom takes them more than an hour) and their website devotes metres more space to polemical attacks on the Serota/Saatchi/White Cube arts establishment than it does to actual Stuckist art work.
In addition to holding the show, the group are also awarding an anti-Turner Prize prize for outstanding idiocy in the art world. In setting themselves in opposition to what they see as the contemporary arts establishment, and spending more time in slinging muck and shouting insults than producing thoughtful work, The Stuckists undermine the honesty of their own endeavour, and end up looking more like a bunch of clowns than the institutions they are attempting to ridicule.
The Real Turner Prize Show is at the Pure Gallery, 1-3 Leonard Street, EC2, until 28 November.
