A BIT LESS STUCK (May 18, 2000)

Billy Childish and Charles Thomson, the co-founders of Stuckism—an art movement named by Charles after one of Billy’s poems quoting Tracey Emin, his most famous ex-girlfriend, who had once written to him that he was stuck, stuck, stuck!—reach the world through their colorful website (www.stuckism.com), which is designed and maintained by Ella Guru, one of the odd dozen Stuckist artists presented on the site. I met Charles at the last salon organized by the LM Magazine, which was about the growing commercialization of art, and there we cemented our budding friendship, which started when he and Billy responded to my survey about the Last Art Show via the Culture Wars website (www.culturewars.org.uk). Since then, I have sent him a load of postcards bearing short pieces from my Residua, and he has offered me a place for them on the Stuckist website. Ella has already posted one of my postcards and a few words about me in a section entitled “Others,” which is reserved for those who sympathize with the Stuckists but are not among them. By implication, I am a bit less stuck than a full-blown Stuckist would be. Perhaps not surprisingly, for the first time in my life I wished to be thoroughly stuck, or, as Tracey would put it, stuck, stuck, stuck!