Regan Tamanui
Encyclopedia
Stuckism
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...
group to be started and the first outside of the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. The Stuckists are pro-painting and anti-conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
.
Career
In October 2000, Regan Tamanui, a jazz, ska and skank fan, discovered the London Stuckist group whilst surfing the internet. He sent an email and then founded the Melbourne Stuckists. He saw "The main (point) that really stood out was the ability to wake up and paint pictures." This was the fourth Stuckist group to be started and the first one outside the UK, thus launching an international movement that by 2006 counted 127 groups in 32 countries. On 27 October 2000 he staged the first Stuckist show outside the UK, when he mounted the Real Turner Prize Show at the Dead End Gallery in his home in Reno Road, Sandringham, concurrent with three shows of the same title (two in England and one in Germany) in protest against the Tate GalleryTate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
's Turner Prize
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
.
Besides Tamanui, the other initial members of the Melbourne group were Justin Grub, Ben Blanchette, Malcome Mmackie and Dave Freeman Rose. A subsequent line-up was Basil Kouvelis, Justin Grubb, Ben Frost, Nigel Stein, Daniel Gorzadek, Stephen Sperling and Dennis Roper. Tamanui expressed his and the group's artistic philosophy:
In May 2001, Tamanui, Stein, Grubb and Kouvelis were represented with 24 international groups in the London show Vote Stuckist, so named because Stuckist co-founder, Charles Thomson
Charles Thomson (artist)
Charles Thomson is an English artist, painter, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art...
, was standing as a candidate in the United Kingdom general election, 2001
United Kingdom general election, 2001
The United Kingdom general election, 2001 was held on Thursday 7 June 2001 to elect 659 members to the British House of Commons. It was dubbed "the quiet landslide" by the media, as the Labour Party was re-elected with another landslide result and only suffered a net loss of 6 seats...
against the then-Culture Secretary
Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport is a United Kingdom cabinet position with responsibility for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The role was created in 1992 by John Major as Secretary of State for National Heritage...
, Chris Smith
Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury
Christopher "Chris" Robert Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury PC is a British Labour Party politician, and a former Member of Parliament and Cabinet Minister...
.
In November 2001, the Melbourne Stuckists staged a show Houdini to Hofmann at the Chiara Goya Gallery, which included some UK Stuckist work for the first time.
Kaye Blum made a short documentary on the group, Art Gets Unstuck. The film is structured around the artists reading lines from the Stuckists Manifesto
Art manifesto
The art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system...
written by Charles Thomson
Charles Thomson (artist)
Charles Thomson is an English artist, painter, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art...
and Billy Childish
Billy Childish
Billy Childish is an English artist, painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist...
. It was first shown at the Jaffas Down the Aisle film festival in Melbourne in October 2001, then in 2002 at the International Film Festival of Fine Art in Hungary and the Asolo Arts Film Festival in Italy, where it was nominated for best student short.
In July 2002, Tamanui, along with other Australian Stuckists was shown at The First Stuckist International, the inaugural show of the Stuckism International Gallery, Shoreditch
Shoreditch
Shoreditch is an area of London within the London Borough of Hackney in England. It is a built-up part of the inner city immediately to the north of the City of London, located east-northeast of Charing Cross.-Etymology:...
, London. The show also included Godfrey Blow
Godfrey Blow
Godfrey Blow is an artist based in Kalamunda, Western Australia. He is the founder of the Perth Stuckists.-Life and art:Godfrey Blow was born in Lincolnshire, England on the same day as fellow Stuckist artist, Eamon Everall...
who had followed Tamanui's lead and founded a Perth Stuckists group.
In October 2002, Tamanui opened the Stuckism International Centre Australia, with an ongoing exhibition of work, as well as the first international Stuckist show in Australia, Stuck Down South, at the FAD Gallery. This included founding Stuckists, Thomson, Ella Guru
Ella Guru
Ella Guru is an American painter and musician living in London. She was a member of Mambo Taxi and the Voodoo Queens. In 1999, she became one of the founding members of the Stuckist art movement.-Life:Ella Guru was born in Ohio, USA...
and Sexton Ming
Sexton Ming
Sexton Ming is a British artist, poet and musician who was a founding member of The Medway Poets and the Stuckists art group .-Life and career:...
. (Like the London gallery it has now ceased operating.)
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Wednesbury
Wednesbury is a market town in England's Black Country, part of the Sandwell metropolitan borough in West Midlands, near the source of the River Tame. Similarly to the word Wednesday, it is pronounced .-Pre-Medieval and Medieval times:...
Museum and Art Gallery, England.
Since 2004, Tamanui has been represented by Criterion Gallery in Hobart. He has made a successful transition to the commercial gallery arena, with art collectors increasingly interested in his street inspired stencilling. Many public galleries are also considering his work, including the National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Australia
The National Gallery of Australia is the national art gallery of Australia, holding more than 120,000 works of art. It was established in 1967 by the Australian government as a national public art gallery.- Establishment :...
who purchased a number of works for their permanent collection.
Art
Tamanui takes his lead from PicassoPablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
and American pop
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
artist Shag
SHAG (Josh Agle)
Josh Agle is an American artist, better known by the nickname SHAG.-Life:Agle's nickname is derived from the last two letters of his first name, and the first two letters of his last name...
. His work is "large, vibrantly colored, pop-art style paintings", often showing several figures interacting. Since 2001 he has exhibited his work in both a solo and group capacity in Hobart
Hobart
Hobart is the state capital and most populous city of the Australian island state of Tasmania. Founded in 1804 as a penal colony,Hobart is Australia's second oldest capital city after Sydney. In 2009, the city had a greater area population of approximately 212,019. A resident of Hobart is known as...
, Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Adelaide, Sydney and London.
Media coverage
The Australian presence (Tamanui's group) was first noted in an article on the Stuckists in the UK Observer Sunday newspaper in May 2000.The participation of the Australian Stuckists in the London Vote Stuckist show in 2001 occasioned a double page spread in the leading Melbourne paper The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
. Tamanui's initiative in speaking out provoked a similar range of reactions to the ones the UK group had received in Britain. Melbourne painter David Larwill said, "It's the best thing I've heard in ages." Max Delaney, director of public gallery 200 Gertrude Street, accused the Melbourne group of "revisionism" and "publicity and marketing". Su Baker, head of the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts
Victorian College of the Arts
The Faculty of the VCA and Music is a faculty of the University of Melbourne, in Victoria . VCAM is located near the Melbourne central business district, on two campuses, one - the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne, and the other - the...
, wrote it off as "a cheap shot" (the same accusation which Sir Nicholas Serota
Nicholas Serota
Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota is a British art curator. Serota was director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, before becoming director of the Tate, the United Kingdom's national gallery of modern and British art in 1988. He was awarded a knighthood in 1999. He...
had levelled at Thomson in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. Melbourne curator, Juliana Engberg, said, "They are an aberrant version of conceptualism by default, using the same devices to promote something that's very conservative."
Four years later, in April 2005 The Age ran a reprise of Stuckism and observed:
- Stuckists have been dismissed by many as 'rebels without a cause', but their influence is, well, sticking... The Stuckists have not beaten SaatchiCharles SaatchiCharles Saatchi is the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, and led that business - the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s - until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C...
, but he may be joining them.
Stuckism
The Stuckists are a radical pro-painting group and are anti-conceptual artConceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. The movement was started by Charles Thomson
Charles Thomson (artist)
Charles Thomson is an English artist, painter, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art...
and Billy Childish
Billy Childish
Billy Childish is an English artist, painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist...
(who has since left) in the United Kingdom in 1999 with eleven other artists and is now an international movement. They are noted for their "Agitprop
Agitprop
Agitprop is derived from agitation and propaganda, and describes stage plays, pamphlets, motion pictures and other art forms with an explicitly political message....
" against the Turner Prize
Turner Prize
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
and Britart
Young British Artists
Young British Artists or YBAs is the name given to a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London, in 1988...
.
Books
- Ed. Frank Milner (2004) "The Stuckists Punk Victorian", National Museum Liverpool, ISBN 1-902700-27-9
Documentary Film
- Rash - Scratch it and it Spreads, 2006. Documentary. TV, ABC (Australia), 2006. 23 April. 14:00hrs