Thinking Pictures

Due to my regrettably poor memory, I confused Billy Childish with Charles Thomson, ignorantly putting all stuckists in one mental box, and I went with naughty glee to the ICA expecting to see some awfully bad paintings. You are wondering why I would do that: it’s because although Thomson isn’t a painter that rocks my visual world in spite of his expoundings on the value of painting, he does act with passion and purpose in his mission of trying to rid the world of conceptual art, a mission that tickles my humour glands.

Anyway, I cheerfully looked at the works of Billy Childish, and I came across a lot of unfamiliar stuff. I had never known about his musical career – much like I never bothered much with Laurie Anderson.

But other than the record covers, the visuals on display kept my interest alive through all the rooms and corridors (exhibitions at the ICA always seem small, although it’s actually a big space…). It is clear to the naked eye that he left the stuckists early one, after 2 years, in fact, in 2001. And it seems that his ideas did too. The yellow uniform with his quirky little hangman symbol suggests how funny his performances might have been – something that you’d expect to see on performance poet Steve Tasane – but with enough signs by way of concepts, that you wonder how he once felt compelled to sign a manifesto that said in bullet point four: ‘Artists that don’t paint aren’t artists’.

The hangman/teardrop symbol is then replicated in the recent poster-like poem paintings that have sweet or amusing short messages. His poems, many in dyslexic spelling that is becoming so ubiquitous you never know now when it’s put on just for ‘fun’, are poetry for sensitive souls in the age of txt messages. Last summer, the Concrete Poetry exhibition at the ICA featured young and old arrangements of text on paper. Billy Childish arranges the text like a sign painter, and it smells good.

He also sings them.

Maybe in future I will confuse him with Malcom McLaren…