STUCKISM, PUNK ATTITUDE AND FINE ART PRACTICE: PARALLELS AND SIMILARITIES
Website Paul Harvey
Year of birth: 1960
Place of birth: Burton upon Tent
Nationality: British
Star sign: Taurus
Chinese sign: Rat
Father's occupation: Printer
Mother's occupation: Care assistant
Place of residence: Whitley Bay
Secondary school: Burton Grammar school
Higher Education: North Staffordshire Polytechnic: BA Hons. in Design
University of Northumbria: MA in Fine Art practice with Distinction, PhD. in Arts & Social Sciences
Place of Work: Lecturer at Tyne Metropolitan College
Hobbies: Attempting to create a cabinet of curiosities
Music: I like good music, The Adverts for example
Books: Art books, history books, how to take a good photograph books from the 50s and 60s
Poems: I don't think I know any poems well enough
Newspapers: Independent
TV programmes: Match of the day, old episodes of Top of the Pops, Great British Bake Off, BBC 4 documentaries
Films: Radio On, Valerie's Week of Wonders, The Double Man
Shops: Book shops, charity shops
Clothes: Bohemian Punk
Restaurants: The Kismet in Whitley Bay
Food: Indian, seafood, pasta dishes
Drink: Absinthe, dry martini with a good gin/vodka
Clubs: 76 Club
Charity: Amnesty International
Football team: Manchester City
First car: Vauxhall Chevanne
First job: Pop round delivering Corona to bored housewives in the 1970s
Worst job: Working at my Dads factory cutting board for beer mats
Best job: Delivering things in my old Astramax
Teenage crush: Suzi Quatro
Sporting achievement: Second in the National Schools Rowing Championships
Romantic act: First class overnight from Paris to Venice by train
Charitable act: Donated £500 and a painting to the Bobby Robson cancer ward
Embarrassing moment: Forgetting to put Charles Shaar Murray on a guest list
Extravagance: Oysters and champagne, sable brushes, guitars
Achievement: Following in the footsteps of Alphonse Mucha
Failure: never appearing on Top of the Pops
Things that need to be thrown out: Most of what I own
Things put off that shouldn't be: archiving my work
Response to telesales calls: I'm just cooking the tea
Ambitions: to paint a masterpiece
Hates: artists using the term Punk to give the work validity
Passions: paint, vinyl
Guilty pleasures: Cigarettes, cookery programmes, Pot Noodles
Relaxation: watching football on TV
Perfect Sunday: watching football on TV
Memorable holiday: Switzerland in 1973 and 2007, North Devon in 2013 with my parents when we went to visit Henry Williamson’s writing hut
Best places: Interlaken, Venice, North Devon, Whitley Bay, Blue Anchor Bay, Blackpool
Childhood memories: My cousin falling off a wall, seeing the sea for the first time
Abstract
My doctoral project, researched between 2006 And 2011, asks if the rapidly expanding art movement known as Stuckism has an approach that can be related to Punk ‘attitude’ in the late 1970s. Theorists of youth-based subcultures have extensively explored the notion of generational attitude (Hebdige 1979, Sabin, 1999) and the ambition of this PhD has been, from the start, to describe the development of Stuckism in terms associated with the rise of Punk within my own generation. As an active member of the original Stuckist group I have had to engage with the same sense of iconoclastic hostility that played such an important role during my time as a Punk musician from 1977 to the present. Thus the research I discuss in this thesis has been shaped by a set of aims and objectives that, firstly, address the similarities and parallels between two distinct historical moments and, secondly, embrace the fact that I am undertaking my research from within the subject group as it coheres into a viable force in the international arts scene.
The parallel between Punk and Stuckism may not be immediately obvious for historians or critics. Both are separated in time as distinct episodes in our current cultural story (Bech Poulson, 2005; Evans, 2000) and both are associated with different art forms that address contrasting socio-cultural audiences. Whilst Punk operated, first and foremost, in the context of popular music, Stuckism is a creature of the visual arts, a response to dominant trends amongst gallery and museum directors rather than an appeal to radicalized, media-oriented youth. However, I am not able to examine this contrast from a retrospective point of view and so have built my methodological approach on the hope that the ‘narrative turn’ in contemporary social studies and cultural anthropology (Marcus & Fischer, 1984) offers me a persuasive mechanism for capturing the ongoing development of my practice as a painter with Stuckist and Punk affiliations. As my creative activities have contributed to the idea of Stuckism I have explored how the narratives of identity I associate with Punk attitude have helped form the identity of the group. Here my initial model was research on the narrative construction of identity in professional or social domains described by Czarniawska (2004). However, as I accumulated and published accounts of Stuckism using my growing archive of interviews with other artists in the group (Lynn, 2006) I began to use methodological procedures suggested by Ochs & Capps (2001) to develop a system of interpretation that drew out, I felt, many commonalities with the Punk movement.
As a result, my thesis both describes and debates the relevance of Stuckist practice within contemporary art. At the time of writing, the movement, although prominent within media circles, is barely represented in terms of serious and considered debate, whereas Punk is, in many ways, over represented. My ultimate ambition has been to address this situation.
Year of birth: 1960
Place of birth: Burton upon Tent
Nationality: British
Star sign: Taurus
Chinese sign: Rat
Father's occupation: Printer
Mother's occupation: Care assistant
Place of residence: Whitley Bay
Secondary school: Burton Grammar school
Higher Education: North Staffordshire Polytechnic: BA Hons. in Design
University of Northumbria: MA in Fine Art practice with Distinction, PhD. in Arts & Social Sciences
Place of Work: Lecturer at Tyne Metropolitan College
Hobbies: Attempting to create a cabinet of curiosities
Music: I like good music, The Adverts for example
Books: Art books, history books, how to take a good photograph books from the 50s and 60s
Poems: I don't think I know any poems well enough
Newspapers: Independent
TV programmes: Match of the day, old episodes of Top of the Pops, Great British Bake Off, BBC 4 documentaries
Films: Radio On, Valerie's Week of Wonders, The Double Man
Shops: Book shops, charity shops
Clothes: Bohemian Punk
Restaurants: The Kismet in Whitley Bay
Food: Indian, seafood, pasta dishes
Drink: Absinthe, dry martini with a good gin/vodka
Clubs: 76 Club
Charity: Amnesty International
Football team: Manchester City
First car: Vauxhall Chevanne
First job: Pop round delivering Corona to bored housewives in the 1970s
Worst job: Working at my Dads factory cutting board for beer mats
Best job: Delivering things in my old Astramax
Teenage crush: Suzi Quatro
Sporting achievement: Second in the National Schools Rowing Championships
Romantic act: First class overnight from Paris to Venice by train
Charitable act: Donated £500 and a painting to the Bobby Robson cancer ward
Embarrassing moment: Forgetting to put Charles Shaar Murray on a guest list
Extravagance: Oysters and champagne, sable brushes, guitars
Achievement: Following in the footsteps of Alphonse Mucha
Failure: never appearing on Top of the Pops
Things that need to be thrown out: Most of what I own
Things put off that shouldn't be: archiving my work
Response to telesales calls: I'm just cooking the tea
Ambitions: to paint a masterpiece
Hates: artists using the term Punk to give the work validity
Passions: paint, vinyl
Guilty pleasures: Cigarettes, cookery programmes, Pot Noodles
Relaxation: watching football on TV
Perfect Sunday: watching football on TV
Memorable holiday: Switzerland in 1973 and 2007, North Devon in 2013 with my parents when we went to visit Henry Williamson’s writing hut
Best places: Interlaken, Venice, North Devon, Whitley Bay, Blue Anchor Bay, Blackpool
Childhood memories: My cousin falling off a wall, seeing the sea for the first time
Abstract
My doctoral project, researched between 2006 And 2011, asks if the rapidly expanding art movement known as Stuckism has an approach that can be related to Punk ‘attitude’ in the late 1970s. Theorists of youth-based subcultures have extensively explored the notion of generational attitude (Hebdige 1979, Sabin, 1999) and the ambition of this PhD has been, from the start, to describe the development of Stuckism in terms associated with the rise of Punk within my own generation. As an active member of the original Stuckist group I have had to engage with the same sense of iconoclastic hostility that played such an important role during my time as a Punk musician from 1977 to the present. Thus the research I discuss in this thesis has been shaped by a set of aims and objectives that, firstly, address the similarities and parallels between two distinct historical moments and, secondly, embrace the fact that I am undertaking my research from within the subject group as it coheres into a viable force in the international arts scene.
The parallel between Punk and Stuckism may not be immediately obvious for historians or critics. Both are separated in time as distinct episodes in our current cultural story (Bech Poulson, 2005; Evans, 2000) and both are associated with different art forms that address contrasting socio-cultural audiences. Whilst Punk operated, first and foremost, in the context of popular music, Stuckism is a creature of the visual arts, a response to dominant trends amongst gallery and museum directors rather than an appeal to radicalized, media-oriented youth. However, I am not able to examine this contrast from a retrospective point of view and so have built my methodological approach on the hope that the ‘narrative turn’ in contemporary social studies and cultural anthropology (Marcus & Fischer, 1984) offers me a persuasive mechanism for capturing the ongoing development of my practice as a painter with Stuckist and Punk affiliations. As my creative activities have contributed to the idea of Stuckism I have explored how the narratives of identity I associate with Punk attitude have helped form the identity of the group. Here my initial model was research on the narrative construction of identity in professional or social domains described by Czarniawska (2004). However, as I accumulated and published accounts of Stuckism using my growing archive of interviews with other artists in the group (Lynn, 2006) I began to use methodological procedures suggested by Ochs & Capps (2001) to develop a system of interpretation that drew out, I felt, many commonalities with the Punk movement.
As a result, my thesis both describes and debates the relevance of Stuckist practice within contemporary art. At the time of writing, the movement, although prominent within media circles, is barely represented in terms of serious and considered debate, whereas Punk is, in many ways, over represented. My ultimate ambition has been to address this situation.
