Artistica is pleased to present an interview with Charles Thomson, painter and co-founder of the Stuckists. In the interview Thomson talks about his life, his art and his position on all things Tate and Serota.

ARTISTICA - What are your influences? What movements/artists inspire you as a painter?

THOMSON - I sold a drawing of my teddy bear to my grandfather for 3p when I was five - I haven’t got a clue where I got that idea from. Then as a boy I drew loads of battle scenes, derived from comics such as Victor and a series called Classics Illustrated which included Greek myths. As I got older I was fascinated by art books in the library, especially Surrealism. When I was 14, I discovered the then-current hippy alternative culture, graphics in OZ magazine and cover pictures for albums like The Cream’s Disraeli Gears. I did psychedelic posters of Jimi Hendrix. Then I staged mixed-media ‘happenings’ (I was only 16!), which would now be called Performance Art. Dada had a look-in there.

After school I broadened my art history appreciation back to the early Renaissance, and, on a Foundation Art course, I thought I should work to the standards of Renaissance artists: I set up still lives in controlled lighting and drew them meticulously with a pencil (this was a bizarre thing to do, and no one else did - though other students did use the life room). I was also into the Pre-Raphaelites’ slightly hallucinatory intensity.

A major breakthrough in my third year at Maidstone Art College was punk and the influence of another student, Steve Maughan, who drew with a biro on bits of cardboard (and almost failed as a result). I began to draw with a kid’s black wax crayon (I still use them today) and to paint on bits of cardboard which I cut from boxes (the biggest was the box for a fridge which gave me a painting surface 5’ x 8’). This took away my previous preciousness. I couldn’t get lost in detail as the medium wouldn’t allow it. I developed a style of black outlines and flattish colour, which was derived from Van Gogh and German Expressionism, particularly Die Brücke and Max Beckmann, not from Lichtenstein, although most people assume it must be, because it’s the obvious thing that they know. I wanted something organic and expressive, not mechanical and commercial.

What I do today is a direct development of that, though I don’t paint on cardboard any more. Recent influences have been more subtle, such as Joe Machine’s Diana Dors with an Axe painting, which gave me the idea of a person with an object. This lead on to my painting of a woman with a rat on her shoulder. Stuckist ideas have been a great help (even though I co-wrote them), but nowadays, it’s not so much influence from others, as my own life experience which informs what I do in my work.

ARTISTICA - How did you get into art, when did you know you were going to be a painter? A brief history please.

THOMSON - As I said above, I’ve done art from childhood (and then poetry from teenage years also). I’ve always been creative: nothing else has interested me enough. I still don’t know I’m going to be a painter though. For fifteen years I didn’t paint - I was a full-time poet. I took up painting again in 1997. I don’t think of myself as a painter. I just like or need to paint pictures, but I also take photos (5000 in a couple of years) and have made videos. At the moment I feel more like a lawyer, wading through clauses of the Freedom of Information Act and related regulations. I’m also a webmaster, and PR agent for that matter. I was a gallery director in Shoreditch for a while. You might as well add on curator, critic, art historian, designer, art agent, teacher (unpaid) and researcher - that’s just in the professional creative sphere.

ARTISTICA - What are you doing at the moment?

THOMSON - Answering emails, communicating with Fraser Kee Scott on myspace.com about a rock group called Planet of Women, putting stuff on the Stuckist web site, planning group shows and submitting an appeal under the Freedom of Information Act to the Tate to state why they should disclose their acquisitions prices. The latter is not my ideal occupation but I feel it’s the right thing to do at the moment. I am also painting pictures, which makes sense of the rest of it. I am trying some different avenues in painting in case one of them opens up something new, but usually I find a dead-end, so I carry on with the direction I was already in. I am in a situation now where I can spend all day (and sometimes all night) working on things.

ARTISTICA - You seem to like only painting and sculpture, isn’t this rather a limiting/naive viewpoint?

THOMSON - I like lots of things actually - films, music, TV - but I presume you’re talking about the ‘visual arts’. I’m not a great fan of sculpture and I don’t like most (contemporary) painting either. I found very little to enjoy in Saatchi’s Triumph of Painting show (unfortunately). I can’t see that my viewpoint’s naive, as it comes out of being involved with art all my life, not just talking about it and not just going down one track. I was doing performance art in 1969 and my degree show (well, lack of degree show actually as I was the only person in 10 years to fail) in 1979 was an installation, labelled Postmodern by one of the tutors. When Britart came along it seemed very passé. I have not limited myself at all. I’ve done things whole-heartedly and tried whatever came along. That approach inevitably leads to the creation of a set of values about what I want to be bothered with.

Some things are better than other things. That is something people don’t normally have a problem with in other areas of life - entertainment, food, friends, music, clothes etc. People make value judgements all the time, and it is considered not only acceptable but desirable, except in the field of visual art. It is very liberating to be able to jettison junk from ones life and not have to pander to dominant fashionable notions in order to gain success. The bottom line for a lot of people in the art world is that they are not true to themselves, but are imprisoned by a tremendous insecurity that they will be failed by other people’s standards. That is a severe limitation and I got over that one at college, when I realised what I was doing and needed to do for myself was not worth sacrificing so that someone would tell me they had given me a degree. I could validate myself. I didn’t need someone else to do it for me.

I find the critics of my position to be naive. The term Stuckism was obviously pre-emptive and humorous (with a serious point), but it certainly wasn’t saying we were stuck. It was saying we knew people would criticise us for being stuck. It was saying that we knew their side of the story already. What amazed me was the lack of sophistication of critics of Stuckism. They are very easy to bait and seem to have no objectivity about their own position. They don’t cotton on to the deliberate ploy of challenging taboos and seem to think everything we do is from some kind of wide-eyed innocence. You are allowed to say “painting is dead� (or as Tate Chairman Paul Myners would put it “painting is the medium of yesterday�), but not “conceptual art is crap� (not even “tat� for that matter, as Ivan Massow discovered). That is the dominance of transience and fashion, which is both naive and limiting.

ARTISTICA - Tell us about the Stuckists and how the movement came about.

THOMSON - A group of people with varying degrees of connectedness with each other have been working and evolving since the late seventies in art, poetry, writing and music. In 1979 six of us formed The Medway Poets (including Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and Sexton Ming). It was an incredibly pressured and creative time and established the basis on which we are still working. Tracey Emin came along as an 18 year old fashion student, and what she learned then still permeates her work. People went their different ways, and in 1999 I had the idea to re-form the group with a new name and a specific art agenda in the Britart environment. It didn’t change what was going on with the artists, but it did present us to a wider audience through a bigger public platform. Billy Childish and I then co-founded it officially (he left after a couple of years, because he doesn’t like groups).

ARTISTICA - Some people say that you are taking this confrontation with Sir Nicholas Serota et al too far - who is being hurt in this situation?

THOMSON - Some people think any confrontation with anything is going too far - which is odd as the most complimentary thing you can say to anyone in the art world is that what they are doing is “challenging� - Serota certainly says so. It seems however that there is a prohibition on challenging the challengers. As far as I am concerned the “confrontation� should go a lot further, and is at a very early stage. Whether I use my time for it to go further or not is a different matter.

There is no intention to hurt anyone. In fact, John Bourne, the founder of Stuckism Wales, wrote to Serota after our last demo (when we had a conversation with him) to make precisely that point. John pointed out that we have a right to express our point of view, and Serota fully acknowledged that in his reply (though he obviously wasn’t very pleased with how the press was dealing with us expressing our point of view). Sometimes the truth hurts, but it’s the best thing in the long term. The people who are really being hurt are not even born yet. They will experience what we leave them. Art feeds people’s souls and the only way most of us can gain that is from public collections.

The Tate is seriously deficient in areas of early to mid twentieth century art because of the narrow collecting policy of its directors and trustees of the time. Anybody that confronted that narrowness at the time would now be vindicated and praised, though they would not have been then. The Tate’s collecting policy is equally narrow today. Serota doubtless thinks he’s avoiding the mistakes of the past and is backing the right horse this time, but the mistake is in backing any one horse in the field. That is to gamble that one’s own hunch is the correct one, which is the prerogative of the private collector, not the public administrator.

The only sound policy for a public institution is what the Director of Tate Britain, Stephen Deuchar, promised in 2000 and has since lamentably failed to deliver, namely a “comprehensive overview�. I have my own judgement and think conceptual art is over-rated and pretentious. That is my right as an individual. However, if I were in charge of the national collection, I would include it, because it is an area of current artistic practice and of historic interest. In fact, at the Stuckism International gallery I had a cabinet of conceptualism with examples like a Mike Dawson brick painted gold and marked £200, so that people could make a direct comparison.

That is the sort of thing that the Tate should be doing, but Serota doesn’t have that breadth. He is actually very parsimonious. It has to be what he considers “difficult� or “challenging�, but that kind of work is now done mindlessly because it has become the convention. It is a very safe route in the contemporary art world, because it guarantees acceptance. It is the only value he can engage with. It is presented as the most valuable attribute and I have no doubt he is perfectly sincere about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s right and it doesn’t mean the future will think it’s right. Values that were considered obvious and unassailable in Victorian times are certainly not considered to be so nowadays.

It is clear to anyone that has bothered to study any history and think about it, that the unforeseen can easily invalidate a contemporary consensus. There are plenty of precedents for fashionable work being considerably downgraded later. The French nineteenth-century academic painter Bouguereau is a classic example. The reverse is of course also true - work dismissed by the establishment at the time can later seen as the really worthwhile art. Other values that were not anticipated turn out to be the important ones. The only sound policy is to represent properly the diversity of contemporary creativity. It is the curator’s job to find out what’s going on and include it - not ignore it because it doesn’t fit in with his/her personal vision. It is, one might say, a question of experience, not interpretation.

ARTISTICA - If conceptual art is a load of nonsense, why do people pay so much for it? Are you saying that the world is full of rich fools?

THOMSON - People buy art for all sorts of reasons. A lot of people see it now as an investment and a lot of people have made good profits out of it, so they’re not rich fools (just richer). Art is also a status symbol. I have a friend with experience of American multi-millionaires, who have this approach to art. You can buy expensive cars off a production line, but an artwork is a one-off and exclusive. It bestows some of the celebrity glamour of media personalities on the owner of a well-known artist’s work. There are a lot of reasons why people buy art which may not have anything to do with the inherent quality of the work itself. In fact many of the people buying it know so little about it, and have such little trust in their own feeling for it, that they have art consultants to tell them what to buy. If something is fashionable (which is a mild form of collective mental imbalance) people give it a disproportionate value and it becomes “must have�. What they’re actually paying for is the feeling of belonging to something which gives the illusion of validating them. But certainly, if they are paying a huge amount and thinking that they are buying great art, then I would say they are mistaken.

ARTISTICA - Considering the way he brought the Tate to life - and the excellent work he is still doing, shouldn’t Serota be forgiven the odd failing in his head because his heart is in the right place?

THOMSON - Unfortunately, it’s not an odd failing (I presume you mean ‘occasional’ rather than ‘peculiar’, although I’d agree with the latter). It’s just a failing and it’s pervasive. He is an outstanding organiser, promoter and administrator, albeit by common report a control freak - but then you have to be if you are a person of unusual ability. He can create a space that people love (Tate Modern) but he can’t fill it with art that people love. That’s because he doesn’t operate from the heart as far as art is concerned. He operates from the head, and that doesn’t work with art.

There is something distinctly anal about the combination of theoretical exactitude and vulgar decay that permeates the Tate. It is exemplified by past Turner Prize choices such as Hirst’s cut-up rotting cow’s innards all neatly placed in pristine vitrines, or Starling’s abandoned musty shed cleanly labelled in the middle of a spotless white room. The result of walking round Tate Modern is not an experience of the marvel of creative profundity which gives meaning to life, but more akin to the detritus of a dryly analytical bureaucrat reverting to an infantile stage during an extended breakdown.

I find Serota much more agreeable on a personal level. He seems a caring and compassionate person as far as artists themselves are concerned, and even gives my colleagues and me the time of day, which most people in his position wouldn’t. The issue is not about personalities. It’s about a cultural heritage for the future and he is creating a disaster zone from all the best intentions. It is astonishing that someone who tries so hard to be broad-minded can end up with such an exclusive vision.

ARTISTICA - What do you think of the current crop of critics and art journos - how do they fit in with your philosophies?

THOMSON - I do not have a very high opinion of the current standards of the critical profession. This was not helped when a critic explained to me some years ago that it is not done to step out of line with the power bloc, as the freebies and exclusive invitations will suddenly not be forthcoming. There are of course exceptions, Brian Sewell being the most notable, but he has complained that he has often been frustrated trying to get even basic PR material such as images of work, normally widely supplied. A few years ago there was a petition signed by leading figures in the art world demanding that he should be sacked as the Evening Standard critic for his views. Obviously a critic isn’t allowed to have his own views. Louisa Buck in her book Moving Targets (published by the Tate) details individuals approved by the establishment. She describes Richard Cork’s replacement by Sewell at the Standard as “a black day for contemporary art�. Jay Jopling has revealed that the petition to sack Sewell originated at a secret meeting at the Tate to counter negative publicity. Jopling didn’t sign the petition, as he saw Sewell’s opposition was actually excellent publicity.

Critics are generally spoon-fed and end up not providing analysis, insight, evaluation and exploration of the wider field, but merely describing what is approved of. David Lee in Jackdaw magazine has done a statistical analysis, which shows coverage is only given to a handful of galleries such as the White Cube. My own experience with the Stuckists has been most illuminating. Stuckism has got a national profile. It’s studied in colleges; people write dissertations about it. There have been numerous shows in the last seven years, including a major five-month exhibition in a national museum, but if you had relied on most critics during that time, you wouldn’t even know it existed.

Art journalists are an entirely different breed, because they work for the news editor, not the arts editor, so their agenda is just what makes a good story. This leads to a neutral and objective position as far as the issues and warring parties are concerned. The journalists are not on the art world gravy train.

ARTISTICA - Finally, who are the up and coming new artists that you like - where do see art going in the short to medium term future.

THOMSON - I’ve seen a lot of artists’ work and, if I like something, I’ve often exhibited it in a show. That’s the point of Stuckism - promoting art. Some people ‘join’ the group(s) and some don’t. There are many strong artists I have worked with in the Stuckists. These include Paul Harvey (who creates unfailingly beautiful images), Peter McArdle, Ella Guru, Bill Lewis (a profound inventive man of mythology), Philip Absolon, Eamon Everall and Joe Machine (whose My Grandfather Will Fight You is a classic). Sexton Ming and Wolf Howard have left. I’ve just acquired my third Wolf Howard painting - of a couple in the snow. It’s magical, mysterious and insightful, but achieved through what appears to be a very simple and exuberant technique.

Mandy McCartin has always been a guest exhibitor who doesn’t like belonging to groups. Her work is an intense visual confection of urban life. Gina Bold started with the Stuckists. She is unusually inventive and psychologically explorative with a rare aesthetic sense, and I think she will get wider success. I thought that too about Stella Vine, who was also first shown by the Stuckists. There is no excuse for her work not being in the Tate - she has created icons for our age. Cathy Lomax and her Transition Gallery artists merit more attention: it was where Saatchi found Stella Vine, but he took the limelight and the gallery didn’t get the credit they deserved (nor did the Stuckists for that matter). I should also mention Billy Childish, who has certainly been marginalised because he doesn’t kow-tow.

Recent graduates are always problematic, because it takes time for them to establish whether they’re even going to bother carry on doing art or find a job that actually pays. I exhibited Katherine Gardner, Susan Finlay and Daniel Pasteiner a few years ago. Susan and Daniel ended up in the Royal College of Art, and Katherine was working at the White Cube when I last spoke to her. I have seen work I like by Lisa Freeman and Henry Hudson (who were both in shows at La Viande gallery in Shoreditch - my old place. Henry has also exhibited recently with Stella Vine). Abby Jackson, who has showed at La Viande too, has an amazingly sensual and intuitive way of painting and remarkable ideas that fuse with strong emotion.

The environment surrounding artists and the ideas they are exposed to exert a subtle but pervasive influence on their work. A lot of artists I have met and spoken to have had to fight against opposition to do what they want to. That takes energy which should be directed to creativity and inevitably imposes inhibitions. That’s human nature. Stuckism has provided a supportive context for a lot of artists, myself included, and artists have told me how much it has helped to give them confidence to go further with what they are doing.

I think Stuckism has had a far greater effect on art in this country than is acknowledged. Certainly the critic Edward Lucie-Smith has seen Charles Saatchi’s new direction as following our lead. There is, however, a strongly-entrenched multi-million pound establishment which has no interest in changing the status quo. Charles Saatchi has cleverly dumped Britart while the going was good. He has wanted for some years to be there with a new movement to pave the way like he managed with Britart in the nineties, but the only thing that’s emerged since then with a distinct character has been Stuckism. He’s seen the potential and obviously noticed that advancing painting over conceptualism generates controversy. Now he’s trying to do his own version of it, but he can’t because he’s making a copy and not the real thing.

Saatchi has adopted the position that we took in 1999 in direct opposition to him. He has become a Stuckist, even using our phraseology to say painting is the “most vital� (i.e. not just equal but superior) artistic means. That is going to have a big knock-on effect as those artists waiting for Saatchi to buy up their installations now realise he’s looking for paint on canvas. It is very viable commercially too, as (despite your previous question about “rich fools�) most money has always been spent on paintings - that’s why Hirst did a production line of them. Even the Turner Prize is hopping on the bandwagon, and the new Tate Modern re-hang has a room proclaiming that Britart was really about painting (talk about revisionism).

Stuckism’s aim was to replace Britart in this country and to change art worldwide. The Remodernism manifesto that Billy Childish and I wrote in 2000 ended: “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.â€? I would not like to speculate how widely and how quickly that might occur, and it’s not really my concern, as it’s out of my hands. I am going to carry on with what I am doing anyway.

Ends

Charles, I would like to thank you for taking the time to do this interview and for answering the questions in such depth.

Charles Thomson pictures here

Stuckists website here

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