Edgeworth Johnstone, curator, Stuck in Wood Green

Personally I’d hate to be stuck in Wood Green. I’d never be able to spend my Thursday evenings wandering up and down Vyner Street, drinking free beer, admiring conceptual twaddle and reading the galleries’ accompanying explanatory flim-flam. What would I do?

Well if I was stuck there on Saturday 28th February I’d go to Stuck in Wood Green, an exhibition of work by the YBA-baiting Stuckist art movement. The Stuckists are the guys who are always in the papers for campaigning against the Turner Prize, ridiculing Sir Nicholas Serota and generally piercing the pretensions of the contemporary art world.

But what the mainstream media often overlook is that they also produce art. Their philosophy is underpinned by a belief in the political power of figurative painting and their work is often characterised by a kind of faux-naive aesthetic – a far cry from conceptualism’s wilful complexity. I have to say that at present I’m ambivalent about where I stand on the YBA/Stuckism clash – I think there’s space for both in this little world.

But hey, Stuck in Wood Green looks wicked – there’s work on display by Michael Dickinson (who famously pissed off the Turkish authorities with collages of President Bush and the Turkish Prime Minister) as well as limited edition prints of the famous Serota painting by Stuckist head honcho Charles Thomson. The whole thing’s curated by Edgeworth Johnstone and Shelley Li, and it looks like a cracker!

TJ