I am a desperate man who demands to connect...
who denounces the dullness of money and status...
who will not bow down to acolayed or success -
'i am the strange hero of hunger'
Billy Childish
Billy
Childish (Stephen
John Hamper) has a large collection of hats which is very befitting
for this man who wears so many, although one suspects you would be hard pressed
to find a silk top hat in his collection; it’s just not his thing.
An Enfant terrible who has never grown up, Childish
revels in the contradictions life has to offer making a career of not having a
career. He has a laundry list of activities to his credit that includes but is
not limited to; poet, novelist, publisher, musician, producer, painter,
photographer, film maker and activist. And he is as prolific as he is varied; to
which 127 music albums, over 40 publications of collected poetry and the 600
drawings he produced in six months whilst working as an apprentice stone mason
all attest.
An individualist with an anti-establishment streak, Childish
has lived and worked all his life in the South East English town of Chatham which has seen him labeled as a provincial outsider,
a categorization he rejects. As he told the Guardian
newspaper "I never needed to
validate myself by moving to London. In my mind, it's actually a very
provincial place because it's full of people from the provinces trying not to
seem provincial. I always found it very limiting."
Whilst his
paintings are often shown in museums, Childish doesn’t have a very high opinion
of them. As he told The White
Review “A
library or a gallery should be empty to a degree. It should have elbow room. It
should have calmness. It should be a statement about who we are, not a
statement about populist culture. Real culture isn’t very popular. Real art
isn’t that popular. These would be my arguments with places like the Tate when
they say they are bringing challenging work to ordinary people. If it was
challenging the place would be empty. If you challenge people they get the hump
and clear off. The Tate is populist: it’s a day out. That’s not necessarily bad,
but we’ve already got places for a day out. You don’t have to make everything
into a fucking knees-up.”
From his expulsion from the Saint
Martin's School of Art in 1982 for obscenity and other assorted crimes to his
being awarded an honorary Doctor of Arts Degree
from the University of Kent in 2014, Childish just goes about his
business. As he says “I've got things to be
getting on with."
A selection of
his work can be seen in the exhibition The Islanders which he shares with Tom Anholt,
Ryan Mosley and Rose Wylie at Copenhagen’s Galerie
Mikael Andersen until the 21st of February.
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