Joe Machine

"A BRITISH ORIGINAL"

Edward Lucie-Smith: writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster

The history of British art, from William Blake to Francis Bacon, is littered with artists who have followed extremely unorthodox paths to artistic achievement and maturity. Recently a particularly fascinating example of this has began to make an impact on the current art scene – just at the moment when the much-touted YBA group of the Nineties and Noughties has started to run out of steam.

Joe Machine, born Joe Stokes, owes his beginnings as an artist to the ‘re-modernist’ Stuckist Group, best known as vocal opponents of the Turner Prize, and foes of Tate Modern’s official, state-subsidized version of avant-gardism.

Stuckism has more tangled origins than may appear to be the case at first sight. Its roots are in the-as-yet little chronicled Medway arts scene of the 1990s, which was in many ways a new version of the now revered Liverpool Scene of twenty to thirty years earlier, with the same mixture of punk rock, performance poetry and art. Other well knownalumni of this are the painter, poet and novelist Billy Childish, and the Royal Academy’s current Professor of Drawing, Tracey Emin CBE. It was in fact Tracey Emin who provided the group with its name, on one occasion yelling at Childish, then her boyfriend, ‘The trouble with you, Billy is that you’re Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’

Joe Machine first came to Stuckism, not as a painter, but as a writer, a member of the Medway Poets group, and through publishing pamphlets of his verse with Billy Childish’s small guerilla imprint, Hangman Books. Through Childish, he met another poet and painter, Charles Thomson. In 1999, when Thomson told him that he was putting together a new art group, intended to counter ‘the conceptualist degeneracy of the British art world’, Joe Machine volunteered himself as a founder member.

What he brought to Stuckism was considerable personal baggage. His father ran an amusement arcade in Leysdown-on-Sea, on the Isle of Sheppey, which, in turn, is located at the mouth of the river Medway. His family origins are part Romany and part Jewish. Constantly in trouble as a child, he graduated to petty theft and then to shoplifting and burglary. He was sent to an approved school at age 15, and then to Dover Borstal in the following year. In 1998, he began a course of psychotherapy for problems of sex and violence.

Most of his early work as painter is directly autobiographical, and often extremely erotic and violent. The imagery has a fairly obvious therapeutic function – by putting images of this kind into his art, Machine was able to gain control over his own dangerous feelings and impulses. This gives what is represented the kind of memorable force that also emerges from a number of Francis Bacon’s early paintings, made for the similar reasons of self-therapy. The paintings show a particular fascination with the sailors who are part of the urban scene in the naval dockyard town of Chatham, which is also on the Medway.

More recently Joe Machine’s work has started to expand into a much greater variety of themes. The chief new series are one devoted to the Book of Genesis, one about Britannic Myths, and a series of landscape paintings inspired by Kentish woodlands.

Anyone who looks at the paintings of the ‘Genesis’ series must, I think, be struck by the way in which they often seem to echo the mood of the images in Blake’s Prophetic Books. Stylistically, the resemblance is not so close, as Joe Machine has little, if any trace of Blake’s Neo-Classicism. The drawing, in fact, is more like what one sees in Romanesque and Early Gothic book illuminations, but with none of the self-conscious aping of the medieval that one finds in the early phases of Pre-Raphaelite art. At this point, however, it is worth noting that the Pre-Raphaelites were aware of Blake, and to some minor extent were perhaps influenced by him.

It is noticeable that his interpretation of the text of Genesis is often heterodox. For example, the serpent that tempts Eve is replaced by a red robed Catholic cleric. One painting, entitled Chemical Wedding, refers to a famous Rosicrucian text, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. In it, the hero of an allegorical romance is invited to go to a castle full of miraculous happenings, in order to witness the Chymical Wedding of the King and Queen, the archetype of all husbands to the archetype of all brides. Joe Machine says that his interpretation of Genesis is essentially ‘the story of a failure’.

Another series is that of Britannic Myths.  One major interest of both these series is the fact that they are extended narratives, made at a time when narrative has become unfamiliar in painting, though it survives more successfully in artists’ video and also in photography.

The landscape series made at the same time has no narrative content. We are confronted by the stillness of nature. The style Joe Machine adopts for these paintings is deliberately stylized and formal, but they also have something about them that will remind spectators of the mystical Shoreham period paintings of Samuel Palmer. Shoreham, as it happens, is also in Kent, not on the Medway, but on the River Darent, at the other end of the county.

A striking feature of all three series, despite the disparity of their subject matter, is that they share an immediately recognizable artistic language. Once you’ve seen a Joe Machine you will have no difficulty in spotting his hand in any other, though the subject may be entirely different. As a working critic, constantly looking at new art of all varieties, I find this faintly ironic, not least because Joe Machine is an untrained artist (once again like Francis Bacon) who has never attended an art school, and who has had to find his own path, without any sort of professional formation.

We live at a time when major art schools have in fact very often been reluctant to offer technical instruction, on the grounds that students must be left to ‘find their own way’ and at the same time ‘find themselves’. Yet the work done by these young artists is often so much of one – at a given moment fashionable – kind that it is difficult to distinguish the products of one of these aspirants from those made by a contemporary trained, or deliberately left untrained by the same institution.

Joe Machine has passed his fortieth birthday, and looking at his current work it is clear, however one reacts to it in other respects, that it is the record of a quest for the self. It seems to me fascinating, and also wonderfully ironic, that he has been more successful in finding that self, and pinning it down in memorable images, than almost all of his ‘insider’ contemporaries.

Updated from an article first published by The London Magazine

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Joe Machine is an artist who has had an extraordinary life and paints his experiences to produced extraordinary art, not – as it might seem – to shock or create a public image, but as a means of personal evolution to spiritual truth.

Looking at some of his work, showing blood-spattered sailors attacking each other with broken bottles or cut-throat razors, in between soulless sexual encounters with prostitutes, one might well think that the spiritual is the one thing that is not engaged with.

However, we have to look at the wisdom of the psychologist Carl Jung: "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." Similarly the Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa, talked of the positive use of neuroses arising in meditation: "Like manure, we do not throw our neuroses away, but we spread them on our garden; they become part of our richness."

Joe Machine started his artistic journey of self expression without having to read either of these authors. He reached the same conclusion through his own innate insight, realising that in order to evolve he had to transform his inner demons by confronting and accepting them.

This was confirmed and widened by subsequent investigation of ideas by Freud and Jung, particularly the latter's definition of the human "shadow" and the advocacy of being "whole" rather than "good".

Joe has certainly had a life that has given him the experiences to do this. He was brought up in Sheerness, a naval town on the Isle of Sheppey off the east coast of southern England. Before he even reached his teens he had seen vicious fights between sailors, resulting in men with slashed faces or severed ears screaming in the street. He was also exposed to hard core pornography.

His friends as a youth were violent petty criminals and Joe fitted into this, gaining a criminal record and serving time in youth prisons, including periods of solitary confinement – which he credits with giving a great stimulus to his imagination, there being nothing much else to do in such circumstances.

He was involved in the illegal sport of dog fighting. He worked as a doorman on rough nightclubs in south London with more witnessing of, and participation in, violence. And he discovered art.

This proved to be the transformative experience of his life, without which he is convinced he would by now be serving a long sentence in jail. He knew he had to paint the truth of his life and did so via the symbolism of the sailors who had so fascinated yet also terrified him as a child. The intensity is magnified by the invariable black backgrounds he used.

It is therefore understandable that a writer such as Dr Robert Janás in his book Stuckism International should see "figures, contrasted against a blackness, which evokes bottomless and despairing depth ... capturing the depressive side of life, and the intense energy of his painting is invested in its hopelessness."

It helped that I began to know Joe well, both as a colleague and friend, and that I had the chance to own some of his work, thereby being exposed to it over a long period of time on my wall: eventually I came to the understanding that his figures were not acting in the way they did because they were the dehumanized robots of hopelessness, but because of their humanity, albeit often anguished and gross, with very little resource to evolve out of that, but nevertheless with the potential to do so.

This has proved to be the case for both the art and the artist. Starting with psychotherapy for his problems, Joe has evolved into intense meditation and prayer practices as well as a staunch ethical mindset. His work in the last six years has embodied this in what must count as one of the most striking evolutions in art history. Indeed a show in 2013 at the CNB gallery in London was titled "Machine Evolution".

With the same conviction and intensity that he portrayed the bleakness of blood in the gutter, he has portrayed spiritual intensity and archetypal mythology in series of paintings based on the biblical Book of Genesis, as well as stories from ancient Britain.

There is a confidence, clarity and unaffected directness in these works that create – or rather record – a transcendent reality, which the viewer is invited to share. It is easy to talk about spiritual matters and to paint images and symbols pertaining to them. It is a rare facility to create an image which embodies them and becomes a meditation in its own right. This is what Joe unerringly does.

The colours he uses when, for example, he depicts God talking to Enoch have a serene clarity which is not of this world, but of another "higher" world. He has, in some way, entered into this or at least touched on it, and we are able to access it likewise through his rendition of it.

There has been quite a journey in the 18 years since I first met Joe when he became one of the initial 13 artists in the Stuckists art group, which I founded in 1999 with Billy Childish (who left in 2001) to promote contemporary figurative painting with ideas and emotion. Stuckism has since become an international movement of 240 groups in 50 countries and around 2,500 artists.

Joe credits Stuckism as a significant influence on him and has remained a leading light of the movement. He has been praised and backed by world-renowned critic and curator, Edward Lucie-Smith (author of over 150 books, including Art Today), who has likened him to "many of the most remarkable artists of the Modern and Post Modern epoch", such as Francis Bacon, in being  self-taught, as well as William Blake from an earlier epoch. (It is worth pointing out that Francis Bacon too achieved a unique portrayal of suffering humanity, but, unlike Joe, did not achieve the heroic passage to redeemed humanity.) Joe has provided woodblock prints to illustrate two of Edward's books of poems.

Another key figure who has strongly backed Joe is Steve O'Brien, editor of the long-established literary and art journal, The London Magazine. Joe's Britannic Myths series of paintings is one result of their collaboration, as is the book, Britannic Myths, illustrated by Joe. Marina Warner, Laura Gascoigne and Robin Dutt are all critics of standing who have commended Joe's work.

When I look at Joe's images, particularly the more recent ones, Shelley's famous poem comes to mind, beginning:

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To most, the Abrahamic faiths are distilled down to a triumvirate (variants as they are) to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are, however, others that might be less familiar to an international audience but are nonetheless, 'Abrahamic' - Baha'i, Samaritanism, Babism, Yazidism, Druzism, Gnosticism, Shabakism and Rastafarianism - all accepting the same concept of a single god - who revealed himself to Abraham. The thrilling aspect to consider is that what is essentially a very concentrated area of the world has given that world such homogenous diversity.

Joe Machine's eloquently and deftly painted slices of aspects of characters of this tradition does indeed include (and has to) an image of Abraham with his son Isaac, about to be sacrificed as a divine command which cannot be countered if the former has true faith and obedience to this unknown but felt force of god. Other images include those of Saladin, Saint Dunstan and the Devil and even an enthroned Queen of Sheba. The artist's touch is light and informed. Purposefully 'crowded'. His characters and their settings are of course intentionally three dimensional but the way he paints them also seems to suggest a deft 'pasting' of section upon section, image upon image which results in a spectacular and magnetic flatness. We move into each painting to appreciate line, colour, architectural details, rock formations or fruits, flowing robes and vaulted skies, each element providing visual and textual contrast.

But the technique that Machine has employed, suggests immediately ancient tapestries, manuscripts on vellum or stain glass windows. Some regarding them can see the stridency of cards from the major and minor Arcana. Indeed, would it be fanciful to think of these works as remnants from an inspiration for a card game of life and destiny? Here we have the real combined with the gift of human imagination to mythologize.

These are striking works, clearly created with consistency and passion - that consistency forthright, that passion communicable.

The artist tells ancient, unlinked and yet ultimately linked stories with a most voluble verve.

These are stories of eternal retelling.

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