Joe Machine
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Joe Machine (born April 6, 1973) is an English artist, poet and writer (Machine is an adopted name). He is a founder member of the Stuckists art group.
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[edit] Life
Joe Machine was born in Chatham, Kent, and comes from a Romany background on the Isle of Sheppey. When he was six years old his teacher forbad him to draw a picture of the Incredible Hulk, so he stabbed her with a compass. Two years later he saw Diana Dors who waved to him from a window in the Ritz hotel in Piccadilly. He fell in love with her, and she has been an icon in his later work.
His early life was marked by petty crime. In 1988 he was sent to Alston House Approved School, Rochester, for the theft of scrap material, and the following year to Dover Borstal for young offenders, after burgling a greengrocers in Leysdown (Isle of Sheppey). He spent time on the dole and running the family business of an amusement arcade in Leysdown, as well as breeding Rottweiler dogs and working as a bouncer in South London night clubs.
He started painting around 1988 and has not had any formal college art training. He has described creativity as the way out of the background in which he felt trapped: "Painting and writing have been far better for me than any of the mistakes I made in stealing and fighting."
Since 1998 he has been having psychotherapy to deal with violence and sex problems. He has said, "The violence and the stealing and the aggressive manipulation in sex — these things have been done because actually I'm quite a frightened little fucker inside — it's a byproduct of my vulnerability."
In 1999 he was one of the 12 original founder members of the Stuckists, an anti-conceptual art group co-founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson. His painting Diana Dors With an Axe was used on the front cover of the first book on the group, The Stuckists, and also to promote the show The Real Turner Prize Show in Shoreditch in 2000.
Machine has exhibited widely with the Stuckists, most notably in their landmark exhibition for the Liverpool Biennial 2004 at the Walker Art Gallery, a part of the UK National Galleries group. The exhibition, titled The Stuckists Punk Victorian, was a definitive showing of the Stuckist oeuvre, and Machine was one of the "featured artists".
In 2003 he married Charlotte Gavin, who has exhibited her work in Stuckist shows.
[edit] Art
His work is strongly autobiographical and often draws on life experiences of sex and violence. He works with a limited range of mostly five colours (initially due to poverty), and has cited his grandfather, who used to paint, as a major influence.
Recurrent images are emaciated women, sailors and bloodshed. He has shown fighting dogs (one lying dead) and a sailor having his throat slit . Other images are Ute Lemper, and Diana Dors with an axe and also with a sub-machine gun. My Grandfather Will Fight You depicts a gaunt older man with clenched fists and blood-spattered shirt. It was painted on two old wooden boards which he nailed together (the join can be seen halfway up the painting). He has commented on this work:
"My grandfather was a Romany boxer, but sometimes fought bare-knuckle, which his own father did for a living. I loved my grandfather, although I was aware that other people were frightened of him. He always treated me with a great deal of love. It’s left me between two worlds – love and violence. It was definitely an emotive painting: I felt he was looking at me. In some ways he wouldn’t have been very happy about it, because he was a very private man. What I study more than anything else is the human shadow. The need to paint something until you’ve shown as much of it as you can."[1]
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Milner p.90
[edit] References
- Evans, Katherine ed.(2000), "The Stuckists" Victoria Press, ISBN 0-907165-27-3
- Milner, Frank ed. (2004), "The Stuckists Punk Victorian" National Museums Liverpool, ISBN 1-902700-27-9
