Anti-anti-art (The Spirit of what needs to be done)
A
Stuckist document
The first Remodernist art group (est. 1999)
1.
The Stuckists are anti-anti-art.
2. Conceptual art (and its parochial
manifestation as Brit Art) is based on and justified by the art of Marcel Duchamp.
3. The art of Marcel Duchamp is not art. It is anti-art by intent and effect.
4.To justify anti-art there must be the existence of art.
5. Duchamp's
work was a protest against the stale, unthinking artistic establishment of his day.
6. Today's art is anti-art.
7. Today's art is not art. Its working
methodology is to think of something which is not art and to call it art. This is exactly
Duchamp's ideology.
8. (Conceptualism is so called not because it generates a
plethora of concepts, but because it never manages to progress beyond one single concept,
namely Duchamp's original thought.)
9. The great (but wholly unintentional)
irony of Post Modernism is that it is a direct equivalent of the conformist, unoriginal
establishment that Duchamp attacked in the first place.
10. The principle of
anti-art is meaningless in the absence of art to be anti.
11. The only viable
innovation today is the true Duchampian path of anti-pretentious, self-congratulatory,
claustrophobic, talentless artistic conformism, e.g. the Saatchi Gallery.
12. The
Stuckists are the true inheritors of the spirit of what needs to be done.
13. Anti-
anti-art is for art.
Billy Childish
Charles Thomson
11.4.2000
Published by The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry
11 Boundary Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6TS
