Even when he did manage to enroll at Saint Martins College, he remained an iconoclast. “I refused to paint inside the college,” he said. “I painted at home, and told them I did not want to be contaminated by painting in their building.” Not unpredictably, he was expelled. On the plus side, he met Mr. Doig. “We were into the same type of music, and he gave me—I’m looking at it right now on the shelf—it’s Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. Pete said, ‘Oh you’ll like this.’”
At the time, Mr. Childish was already churning out material—drawing, printing, painting, writing and cutting records at a rapid pace—not unlike Bukowksi. “He’s not my favorite writer by a long shot,” he told us. “There’s a huge amount of work, and there’s a lot of it that isn’t that good, when he’s acting like a macho idiot, but there is a hell of a lot of it that is, and that bit is still more than a lot of people do in a couple of lifetimes. I realized in retrospect that I was doing the right thing.”
In the 1980s, Mr. Childish became involved with the artist Tracey Emin, who went on to become one of the progenitors of the YBA aesthetic, becoming best known for confessional work, like a camping tent in which she sewed the names of every person she’d ever slept with. (Mr. Childish was included.) She had been studying fashion at the time and worked with him on his printing press. After they split, they remained friends. “Tracey and I did not see eye to eye on Britart,” Mr. Childish said with good humor, using another name for the YBA’s art. “I called it bankers’ Dada.”
On the phone, Mr. Childish is soft spoken and gracious, every bit the English gentleman. But he can be biting. He has a “primal, aggressive, antagonistic aesthetic,” Mr. Higgs said. He sings songs with titles like “I’ve Been Fucking Your Daughters and Pissing on Your Lawn” and “Get Out of Here Pretty Girl.” The lyrics of the latter announce, “I’m gonna put a sock in your mouth / and throw you out that door.” He often performs these songs dressed in a tweed blazer and bow tie, sometimes wearing a newsboy hat or a fedora.
He has also written acerbic diatribes about the state of contemporary art. In the mid-1990s, he wrote what he calls “very strong anti-art manifestos. They were very volatile, very contradictory, very sarcastic.” One manifesto, published in 1997, which railed against conceptual art, includes the dictums “Good taste is fascism” and “We must embrace the unacceptable in all spheres.”
Mr. Childish’s candidness, and his prolific output, which dealers frown on, did not help his art career; nor did joining with an old literary rival, Charles Thompson—“He used to try to have me banned from readings for being so outspoken and condescending about his work,” he explained—in the late 1990s to form a group called Stuckism, which devoted itself to painting and figuration, and aligned itself in opposition to the YBAs.
The name for the movement came from a poem by Mr. Childish in which he recounted Ms. Emin telling him, “Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck!”
“Charles Thompson had a big problem with Tracey at the time, because I think that she hadn’t made him a cup of tea when she went to go visit,” Mr. Childish told us. “She hadn’t been as welcoming as he thought she should have been.”
These days, the Stuckists tend to surface for half-baked protests surrounding festivities related to the Turner Prize, the annual art award that Tate bestows on one artist under 50, and which has often favored conceptual or abstract work. “I never attended any of the demonstrations, or condoned it,” Mr. Childish said. “I thought that they were overly concerned about what Britart represented, and I did not want to get into a reactionary situation of validating bankers’ Dada.”
He now says that he wanted to leave the group after its first exhibition in 1999, but stuck around for about a year and a half, formally resigning in 2001. Nevertheless, that short involvement, as well as his music background, has given him a reputation of an outsider.
“He is constantly being anachronistic,” Mr. Higgs told us. “Whatever he is doing, it seems to be wrong, and you have to have an extraordinary amount of self-confidence to believe in that.” Indeed, as cultural tastes have changed, Mr. Childish has kept working as he always has, churning out records, honing his painting and writing prodigiously.
