Stewart Home
Encyclopedia
Stewart Home is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp
fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt
, and Defiant Pose that pastiche
the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen
and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock
and avant-garde
art.
, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate
. She knew such people as the writer and Situationist Alexander Trocchi
. Home was put up for adoption soon after his birth.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited widely and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books.
They chiefly reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history and influence of the Situationists – of whom he is a severe critic – and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde
movements. In Home's earlier work, the focux of these reflections was often Neoism
, a subcultural network of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. Typical characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s included use of group identities (such as Monty Cantsin
) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot
"); overt employment of plagiarism
; pranks and publicity stunts.
. He refused to join any of these organisations and later repudiated them as reactionary, instead professing autonomous communist
political positions after going to London Workers Group. In the late seventies Home produced his first punk (music) fanzines including early issues of "Down In The Street" which had run to seven numbers by the time he stopped publishing it in 1980. At the end of the seventies Home also made his first public appearances as a musician most notably as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs. The latter group mixed covers of classic reggae numbers like 'Johnny Too Bad' with original tunes such as "Notting Hill Carnival" (about rioting) and 'Don't Envy The Boss' (the juvenile irony of the chorus ran to: "don't envy the boss, I know he's got a lot, but he really really earned the money to pay for his yacht”).
From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours (named after an experimental novel by R. D. Reeve) in 1980, he started a new group with the same name in 1982. He also published an art fanzine
SMILE
, the name of which was a play on the Mail Art zines FILE and VILE (which in turn parodied the graphic design of LIFE magazine). The concept was that many other bands in the world should call themselves White Colours, and many other underground periodicals should call themselves SMILE, too. Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dada
ist manifestos.
In April 1984, Home got in touch with the originally American subcultural artistic network of Neoism
, and participated in the eighth Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism operated with multiple identities, too, and called upon all its participants to adopt the name Monty Cantsin
, Home decided to give up the "Generation Positive" in favor of Neoism, and make SMILE and White Colours part of Neoism as well. According to Florian Cramer (who didn't come into contact with Neoism until the late eighties) one year later, Home took a sleep-deprivation prank played with him at a Neoist Festival in Italy as the reason to declare his split from Neoism; Home insists he decided to break with Neosim before going to Italy. Shortly before, a conflict between him and Neoism founder Istvan Kantor
had escalated and led to their alienation.
Home's SMILE no 8, which appeared in 1985, reflected the split with Neoism by proposing a "Praxis" movement to replace Neoism, with Karen Eliot
as its new multiple name. This and the following three SMILE issues otherwise featured an eclectic mixture of manifesto-style writing, political reflections on radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International
, the Situationists, Fluxus
, Mail Art
, invididuals such as Gustav Metzger
and Henry Flynt
, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his then unwritten early novels. One of these stories, 'Straight' (later included in Home's 'No Pity' anthology) introduced and immediately killed off a character called Michael K, a 'situationist artist'. That 'character' would subsequently slowly evolve into a plagiaristic and enigmatic project and persona persisting into the present and carrying much of the signature of Home's eighties concepts into the nineties and beyond, even when he himself appeared to move on to subsequent interests and concerns. Many texts included in Home's SMILE (and Michael K's later 'KATHEDRAL-MAGAZINE OF MULTIPLE ORIGINS') issues plagiarised other, especially Situationist, writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour". At the same time Home was involved in a series of collective installations including "Ruins of Glamour" (Chisenhale Studios, London 1986), "Desire In Ruins" (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 1987), "Refuse" (Galleriet Läderfabriken, Malmö 1988) and "Anon" (33 Arts Centre, Luton 1989) which generated serious art world interest and art publication reviews and even coverage in British newspapers such as "The Observer" and "Independent". Those Home worked closely with on these shows included Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks (collectively known as Art In Ruins
), Ed Baxter and Stefan Szczelkun.
Following on from this and drawing on 1980s American appropriation art, Home's concept of plagiarism
soon developed into a proposed movement and a series of "Festivals of Plagiarism" in 1988 and 1989, which themselves plagiarised the Neoist apartment festivals and 1960s Fluxus festivals. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike
between 1990 and 1993. Unlike earlier art-strike proposals such as that of Gustav Metzger in the 1970s, it was not intended as an opportunity for artists to seize control of the means of distributing their own work, but rather as an exercise in propaganda and psychic warfare aimed at smashing the entire art world rather than just the gallery system. The Art Strike campaign caused something of a rumpus in the contemporary London art world (Home got to talk about the Art Strike at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as on national BBC Radio arts programmes and London area television arts programmes), but was more seriously discussed in subcultural art networks, especially in Mail Art
. Consequently, mail artists made up a reasonable proportion of the participants at the Festivals of Plagiarism, and Mail Art publications disseminated the Art Strike campaign.
To what extent Home actually participated in the Art Strike remains disputed, since two of his books, completed allegedly before 1990, appeared during the period of the strike.
In the 1980s Home was also a regular contributor to the anarcho-punk/cultural magazine VAGUE.
. Aside from reassessments of his earlier engagement with Neoism, the Situationists, punk
, and the plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns, and, as his source of income, the continued parodistic pulp-novel writing, Home's style had undergone some significant changes. While his late 1980s pamphleteering could be viewed as an, albeit subtly humorous, project to collect and fuse radical energies from aesthetically uncompromising extreme left-wing fringes of art and politics, Home reinvented himself in the 1990s as a cynical satirist and jester. In the post-Art Strike years, he had for the first time publicly occupied himself with hermeticism
and the occult
. The Neoist Alliance, his third one-person-movement after The Generation Positive and Praxis, served simultaneously as a tactical reappropriation of the Neoism label for self-promotional purposes, and as a corporate identity for pamphlets that satirically advocated a combination of artistic avant-garde, the occult, and politics into an "avant-bard". Meanwhile Home continued to be courted by the London art world, and in the mid-nineties in particular he was championed by the young and very fashionable artist-curator Matthew Higgs
(who at that time was also playing a significant role in propelling future Turner Prize winners Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed into the public eye). Higgs included Home in group shows he curated – such as "Imprint 93" at City Racing (London June–July 95), "Multiple Choice" at Cubitt Gallery (London March–April 96) and "A to Z" at Approach Gallery (London 1998) – as well issuing a pamphlet and later a badge by Home as part of his prestigious edition of Imprint 93 multiples. At this time uber curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also included Home in his survey of young British art "Life/Live" Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 96- January 97, subsequently toured). In the mid-nineties Home was also appearing regularly as a live artist at "Disobey" events organised by Paul Smith and featuring music from the likes of techno acts Panasonic
and Aphex Twin
.
Home also continued to appear as a public speaker on art including his appearance on 24 September 2008 at the ICA
lecture 'Violence to Endurance: Extreme Curating' as one of four panelists including Stuart Brisley
, Dorothee Brill and Mark McGowan
. While at the event, shock artists Alexander Brener
and Barbara Schurz
launched a public demonstration and protest. Brener defecated in front of the audience and panelists, placing his excrement in one of the panelist's drinking water while Schurz threw peanuts at Home.
psychogeographical
activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. The manifesto called for "debasement in the arts" and in a parodic manner plagiarized a 1930s British fascist pamphlet on cultural politics. Alliance activities mainly consisted of the publication of a newsletter "Re-action" which appeared in ten issues.
In 1993, the Neoist Alliance staged a prank against a concert by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
in Brighton
by announcing its intention to levitate the concert hall by magical means during the concert. This was an homage to the 1965 anti-art
picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York by Fluxus
members Henry Flynt
and George Maciunas
.
Alliance activities ran parallel and were closely related to those of the revived London Psychogeographical Association
and the Italian-based Luther Blissett
project.
Despite its name, the Neoist Alliance had no affiliation with the international Neoist network
which had been active since 1980. Stewart Home had previously become a member and activist of that network in 1984, but renounced it one year later and subsequently worked under the collective monikers of "Praxis", later "plagiarism" and the Art Strike
movement.
, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, aluthet that time at least, been under-documented.
Like Home's other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International.
Pure Mania, Home's first novel from 1989, took the recipe of the Richard Allen parodies from SMILE and turned them into a recipe for much of his subsequent novel writing of the 1990s (there are exceptions such as the non-linear "Come Before Christ & Murder Love"). The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, on its first part, abridged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike from various authors and sources, mainly Mail Art publications.
His 1995 novel Slow Death fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism (including the planting of archives at the National Art Library
in the Victoria and Albert Museum
; this recently became reality when Home sold the V&A his own archive documenting twenty years of his art and underground activities including those involving Neoism) as if to give his own game away but, typically with Home, as soon as one agenda has, apparently, been exposed, whether Home's own or one at large, the game moves on so that he constantly forces readers into a position of 'Should I believe any of this?'.
With the publication of his novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), Home finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking serious notice of him, ironically for a book which carries his most acidic condemnations of the literary establishment. Home's skinhead looks and attitude on official photographs of the mid-nineties are merely publicity poses, and recently he has been much more inclined to appear nude in publicity material (this started after Home consented to appear in a nude celebrity feature for a Finnish newspaper in 2004); and this nudity is something that offends just as much as Home's earlier faked 'hard man' looks.
, publishers of the Russian edition of Come Before Christ and Murder Love has reported repression of the book as "pornography and insulting Christian values". Kervey says this is happening in the context of a campaign run by such far-right groups as the National Bolsheviks
against Home, which has included arson attacks against Tough Press alongside state censorship.
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt
Cunt (novel)
Cunt is a novel by Stewart Home written in the form of a journal kept by a novelist from Aldeburgh called David Kelso .-Plot summary:...
, and Defiant Pose that pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
the work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen
James Moffat
James Moffat , was an author who wrote under several pen names.He produced many pulp novels for the United Kingdom publishing house New English Library during the 1970s. Moffat's pen names included Richard Allen, Etienne Aubin and Trudi Maxwell...
and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
and avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art.
Life and work
Home's mother, Julia Callan-ThompsonJulia Callan-Thompson
Julia Callan-Thompson was a model, designer and socialite, born in South Wales, from an Irish family....
, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate
Notting Hill Gate
Notting Hill Gate is one of the main thoroughfares of Notting Hill, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically the street was a location for toll gates, from which it derives its modern name.- Location :...
. She knew such people as the writer and Situationist Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.-Early career:Trocchi was born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Italian father. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he attended University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a traveling grant that enabled him to...
. Home was put up for adoption soon after his birth.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited widely and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books.
They chiefly reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history and influence of the Situationists – of whom he is a severe critic – and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
movements. In Home's earlier work, the focux of these reflections was often Neoism
Neoism
Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...
, a subcultural network of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. Typical characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s included use of group identities (such as Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot
Karen Eliot
Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a nom de plume, or multiple-use name that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavours. It is especially popular within the Neoist movement...
"); overt employment of plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
; pranks and publicity stunts.
1970s
As a youth Home was drawn first to music and bohemianism, and then to radicalism. He attended meetings of many different leftist groups including several organised by the Trotskyist Socialist Youth League and even two editorial meetings of Anarchy MagazineAnarchy Magazine
Anarchy was an anarchist monthly magazine produced in London from the early 1960s until the early 1970s. It was published by Freedom Press and edited by its founder, Colin Ward.- External links :...
. He refused to join any of these organisations and later repudiated them as reactionary, instead professing autonomous communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
political positions after going to London Workers Group. In the late seventies Home produced his first punk (music) fanzines including early issues of "Down In The Street" which had run to seven numbers by the time he stopped publishing it in 1980. At the end of the seventies Home also made his first public appearances as a musician most notably as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs. The latter group mixed covers of classic reggae numbers like 'Johnny Too Bad' with original tunes such as "Notting Hill Carnival" (about rioting) and 'Don't Envy The Boss' (the juvenile irony of the chorus ran to: "don't envy the boss, I know he's got a lot, but he really really earned the money to pay for his yacht”).
1980s
In early 1982 Home became involved with the free arts nightclub (in Holborn in the basement of the Slightly Oliver wine bar), "Sun's of Dada"/"Evening Fall's" run by Steev B. As an alternative venue to Richard Strange's Cabaret, the performers were poets and bands with various artists working at the back. Although not a performer, he constantly attended each Friday gig, turning up with sheafs of his latest writings.From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours (named after an experimental novel by R. D. Reeve) in 1980, he started a new group with the same name in 1982. He also published an art fanzine
Fanzine
A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...
SMILE
SMILE (magazine)
SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. Since 1984, an estimated 100 different issues of SMILE have been published by different people in different countries of the world.-History:...
, the name of which was a play on the Mail Art zines FILE and VILE (which in turn parodied the graphic design of LIFE magazine). The concept was that many other bands in the world should call themselves White Colours, and many other underground periodicals should call themselves SMILE, too. Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
ist manifestos.
In April 1984, Home got in touch with the originally American subcultural artistic network of Neoism
Neoism
Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...
, and participated in the eighth Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism operated with multiple identities, too, and called upon all its participants to adopt the name Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
, Home decided to give up the "Generation Positive" in favor of Neoism, and make SMILE and White Colours part of Neoism as well. According to Florian Cramer (who didn't come into contact with Neoism until the late eighties) one year later, Home took a sleep-deprivation prank played with him at a Neoist Festival in Italy as the reason to declare his split from Neoism; Home insists he decided to break with Neosim before going to Italy. Shortly before, a conflict between him and Neoism founder Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
had escalated and led to their alienation.
Home's SMILE no 8, which appeared in 1985, reflected the split with Neoism by proposing a "Praxis" movement to replace Neoism, with Karen Eliot
Karen Eliot
Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a nom de plume, or multiple-use name that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavours. It is especially popular within the Neoist movement...
as its new multiple name. This and the following three SMILE issues otherwise featured an eclectic mixture of manifesto-style writing, political reflections on radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International
Lettrist International
The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group...
, the Situationists, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, Mail Art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
, invididuals such as Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966...
and Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his then unwritten early novels. One of these stories, 'Straight' (later included in Home's 'No Pity' anthology) introduced and immediately killed off a character called Michael K, a 'situationist artist'. That 'character' would subsequently slowly evolve into a plagiaristic and enigmatic project and persona persisting into the present and carrying much of the signature of Home's eighties concepts into the nineties and beyond, even when he himself appeared to move on to subsequent interests and concerns. Many texts included in Home's SMILE (and Michael K's later 'KATHEDRAL-MAGAZINE OF MULTIPLE ORIGINS') issues plagiarised other, especially Situationist, writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour". At the same time Home was involved in a series of collective installations including "Ruins of Glamour" (Chisenhale Studios, London 1986), "Desire In Ruins" (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 1987), "Refuse" (Galleriet Läderfabriken, Malmö 1988) and "Anon" (33 Arts Centre, Luton 1989) which generated serious art world interest and art publication reviews and even coverage in British newspapers such as "The Observer" and "Independent". Those Home worked closely with on these shows included Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks (collectively known as Art In Ruins
Art in Ruins
Art in Ruins was formed in 1984 as a collaborative interventionist practice in art and architecture, staging exhibitions, and publishing texts, by artists Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks.-History and practice:...
), Ed Baxter and Stefan Szczelkun.
Following on from this and drawing on 1980s American appropriation art, Home's concept of plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
soon developed into a proposed movement and a series of "Festivals of Plagiarism" in 1988 and 1989, which themselves plagiarised the Neoist apartment festivals and 1960s Fluxus festivals. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike
Art Strike 1990-1993
Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between January 1, 1990 and January 1, 1993. Unlike the art strikes proposed by Gustav Metzger and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through...
between 1990 and 1993. Unlike earlier art-strike proposals such as that of Gustav Metzger in the 1970s, it was not intended as an opportunity for artists to seize control of the means of distributing their own work, but rather as an exercise in propaganda and psychic warfare aimed at smashing the entire art world rather than just the gallery system. The Art Strike campaign caused something of a rumpus in the contemporary London art world (Home got to talk about the Art Strike at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as on national BBC Radio arts programmes and London area television arts programmes), but was more seriously discussed in subcultural art networks, especially in Mail Art
Mail art
Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...
. Consequently, mail artists made up a reasonable proportion of the participants at the Festivals of Plagiarism, and Mail Art publications disseminated the Art Strike campaign.
To what extent Home actually participated in the Art Strike remains disputed, since two of his books, completed allegedly before 1990, appeared during the period of the strike.
In the 1980s Home was also a regular contributor to the anarcho-punk/cultural magazine VAGUE.
1990s
In 1993 Home officially resurfaced, having meanwhile gained an influence and reputation in American counter-culture comparable to writers like Hakim Bey and Kathy AckerKathy Acker
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer. She was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain School, William S...
. Aside from reassessments of his earlier engagement with Neoism, the Situationists, punk
Punk ideology
Punk ideologies are a group of varied social and political beliefs associated with the punk subculture. In its original incarnation, the punk subculture was primarily concerned with concepts such as rebellion, anti-authoritarianism, individualism, free thought and discontent...
, and the plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns, and, as his source of income, the continued parodistic pulp-novel writing, Home's style had undergone some significant changes. While his late 1980s pamphleteering could be viewed as an, albeit subtly humorous, project to collect and fuse radical energies from aesthetically uncompromising extreme left-wing fringes of art and politics, Home reinvented himself in the 1990s as a cynical satirist and jester. In the post-Art Strike years, he had for the first time publicly occupied himself with hermeticism
Hermeticism
Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus...
and the occult
Occult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
. The Neoist Alliance, his third one-person-movement after The Generation Positive and Praxis, served simultaneously as a tactical reappropriation of the Neoism label for self-promotional purposes, and as a corporate identity for pamphlets that satirically advocated a combination of artistic avant-garde, the occult, and politics into an "avant-bard". Meanwhile Home continued to be courted by the London art world, and in the mid-nineties in particular he was championed by the young and very fashionable artist-curator Matthew Higgs
Matthew Higgs
Matthew Higgs is a British artist, curator, writer and publisher. His contribution to UK contemporary art has included the creation of Imprint 93, a series of artists’ editions featuring the work of artists such as Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller...
(who at that time was also playing a significant role in propelling future Turner Prize winners Jeremy Deller and Martin Creed into the public eye). Higgs included Home in group shows he curated – such as "Imprint 93" at City Racing (London June–July 95), "Multiple Choice" at Cubitt Gallery (London March–April 96) and "A to Z" at Approach Gallery (London 1998) – as well issuing a pamphlet and later a badge by Home as part of his prestigious edition of Imprint 93 multiples. At this time uber curator Hans Ulrich Obrist also included Home in his survey of young British art "Life/Live" Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 96- January 97, subsequently toured). In the mid-nineties Home was also appearing regularly as a live artist at "Disobey" events organised by Paul Smith and featuring music from the likes of techno acts Panasonic
Pan sonic
Pan Sonic was a Finnish experimental electronic music duo consisting of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen.-Music:...
and Aphex Twin
Aphex Twin
Richard David James , best known under the pseudonym Aphex Twin, is an Irish-born electronic musician and composer described as "the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music"...
.
2000s
Aware of the marked decline in countercultural activities throughout the urban centres in which he operated, Home shifted gear in this area of his work in the new millennium, upping his level of Internet activities; web work had been only a minor part of his repertoire in the 1990s. Aside from running his own website, Home is a dedicated blogger and has six separate MySpace profiles (as well as having active accounts with other social networking sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook). However, given Home's extrovert personality, he maintains a taste for live appearances and recently (2007) began performing ventriloquism in public. This activity was preceded by Internet ventriloquism using two MySpace profiles as Mister Trippy and a ventriloquist doll called Tessie (who often claimed to be pregnant and became very angry when Home suggested dolls can't become pregnant). Home's novels in this period no longer incorporated subcultural elements and instead focused on issues of form and aesthetics: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess contains capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. At times in this period Home's film making also became radically non-representational, and rarely required any original cinematography whatsoever; for example his 2002 fiftieth anniversary English language colour re-make of "Screams In Favour of De Sade", and 2004 "Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex", the latter consists solely of still photographs of his mother with a narration scripted by Home but delivered by Australian actress Alice Parkinson. This tendency towards abstraction was already evident in some of Home's work of the 1990s, particularly sound pieces such as the cut up radio play "Divvy", but in the 2000s it became increasingly central to his output. This ran parallel to Home's increasing acceptance by various sections of the high brow art world, evidenced for example by the fact that in 2006 he produced an exhibition entitled "Hallucination Generation" at the prestigious Arnolfini in Bristol, won a major Arts Council/BBC commission "London Art Tripping" and he is currently editor of the Semina series for art book publisher Book Works in London (2007–2010); as well as currently being writer-in-residence at the Tate Modern in London (2007/08). However, Home combines these activities with a critique of the institution of art.Home also continued to appear as a public speaker on art including his appearance on 24 September 2008 at the ICA
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. It is located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch...
lecture 'Violence to Endurance: Extreme Curating' as one of four panelists including Stuart Brisley
Stuart Brisley
Stuart Brisley is widely regarded as the seminal figure of British performance art. Over a career of half a century Stuart Brisley has come to the conclusion, as stated in his recent novel "" that 'what goes down comes up'...
, Dorothee Brill and Mark McGowan
Mark McGowan
Mark McGowan is a UK-based performance artist currently working at the Camberwell College of Arts, who has entered the news a number of times for his unconventional approach to public protest and demonstration...
. While at the event, shock artists Alexander Brener
Alexander Brener
Alexander Davidovič Brener born 1957 in Alma-Ata, is a Russian-Jewish performance artist. His performances of note include defecating in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets, and vandalizing art work.He was jailed in 1997 for...
and Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz was born 1973 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia. She is an artist and self-described "revolutionary activist" from Austria....
launched a public demonstration and protest. Brener defecated in front of the audience and panelists, placing his excrement in one of the panelist's drinking water while Schurz threw peanuts at Home.
Neoist Alliance
The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occultOccult
The word occult comes from the Latin word occultus , referring to "knowledge of the hidden". In the medical sense it is used to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e.g...
psychogeographical
Psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for...
activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. The manifesto called for "debasement in the arts" and in a parodic manner plagiarized a 1930s British fascist pamphlet on cultural politics. Alliance activities mainly consisted of the publication of a newsletter "Re-action" which appeared in ten issues.
In 1993, the Neoist Alliance staged a prank against a concert by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
in Brighton
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
by announcing its intention to levitate the concert hall by magical means during the concert. This was an homage to the 1965 anti-art
Anti-art
Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York by Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
members Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt
Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism.-Background:...
and George Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
.
Alliance activities ran parallel and were closely related to those of the revived London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
and the Italian-based Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
project.
Despite its name, the Neoist Alliance had no affiliation with the international Neoist network
Neoism
Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...
which had been active since 1980. Stewart Home had previously become a member and activist of that network in 1984, but renounced it one year later and subsequently worked under the collective monikers of "Praxis", later "plagiarism" and the Art Strike
Art Strike 1990-1993
Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between January 1, 1990 and January 1, 1993. Unlike the art strikes proposed by Gustav Metzger and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through...
movement.
Books
Home's first books, which appeared between 1988 and 1995, are essentially an outgrowth and elaboration of his earlier SMILE writings, though without their fragmentary-aphoristic character and eclectic mix of genres. The Assault on Culture, written when Home was twenty-five, is an underground art history sketching Home's ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of post-war culture to make it conclude with Neoism (and which it is sometimes claimed includes character assassinations of individual Neoists) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis. Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular BooksUnpopular Books
Unpopular Books is a publisher in London's East End, producing leaflets, pamphlets and books.- Leaflets, pamphlets and booklets :* Jean Barrot - What is Communism * Jean Barrot - Fascism/Antifascism...
, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, aluthet that time at least, been under-documented.
Like Home's other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International.
Pure Mania, Home's first novel from 1989, took the recipe of the Richard Allen parodies from SMILE and turned them into a recipe for much of his subsequent novel writing of the 1990s (there are exceptions such as the non-linear "Come Before Christ & Murder Love"). The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, on its first part, abridged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike from various authors and sources, mainly Mail Art publications.
His 1995 novel Slow Death fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism (including the planting of archives at the National Art Library
National Art Library
The National Art Library is a major reference library, situated in Kensington, West london. It is freely accessible to the public Tuesday-Saturdays, and specialises in material about the fine and decorative arts of many countries and periods. It also contains substantial sources for information...
in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
; this recently became reality when Home sold the V&A his own archive documenting twenty years of his art and underground activities including those involving Neoism) as if to give his own game away but, typically with Home, as soon as one agenda has, apparently, been exposed, whether Home's own or one at large, the game moves on so that he constantly forces readers into a position of 'Should I believe any of this?'.
With the publication of his novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), Home finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking serious notice of him, ironically for a book which carries his most acidic condemnations of the literary establishment. Home's skinhead looks and attitude on official photographs of the mid-nineties are merely publicity poses, and recently he has been much more inclined to appear nude in publicity material (this started after Home consented to appear in a nude celebrity feature for a Finnish newspaper in 2004); and this nudity is something that offends just as much as Home's earlier faked 'hard man' looks.
Repression in Russia
Alex Kervey of T-ough PressT-ough Press
T-ough Press is a "subterranean" publishing house based in the southern suburbs of Moscow. It was established by Alex Kervey.Kervey started the business when he found he could not get his own translations published. Existing publishers had either never heard of such writers as Hunter S Thompson, or...
, publishers of the Russian edition of Come Before Christ and Murder Love has reported repression of the book as "pornography and insulting Christian values". Kervey says this is happening in the context of a campaign run by such far-right groups as the National Bolsheviks
National Bolshevism
National Bolshevism is a political movement that claims to combine elements of nationalism and Bolshevism. It is often anti-capitalist in tone, and sympathetic towards certain nationalist forms of communism and socialism...
against Home, which has included arson attacks against Tough Press alongside state censorship.
Novels
- Pure Mania (Polygon, Edinburgh 1989. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1994. German translation Nautilus, Hamburg 1994).
- Defiant Pose (Peter Owen, London 1991. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995. German translation, Nautilus, Hamburg 1995). Some of the action of this novel takes place on the Samuda EstateSamuda EstateThe Samuda Estate is on the east side of Manchester Road, in Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs. With 505 dwellings it is home to about 1,500 people and covers .-Historical background:...
- Red London (AK PressAK PressAK Press is a worker-managed independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. It is collectively owned and operated.-History:...
, London & Edinburgh 1994, ISBN 1873176120; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995). - Slow Death (Serpent's Tail, London 1996. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1996) ISBN 978-1852425197
- Blow Job (Serpent's Tail, London 1997. Finnish translation, Like, Helsinki 1996. Greek translation Oxys Publishing, Athens 1999. German translation, Nautilus, Hamburg, 2001).
- Come Before Christ and Murder Love (Serpent's Tail, London 1997).
- CuntCunt (novel)Cunt is a novel by Stewart Home written in the form of a journal kept by a novelist from Aldeburgh called David Kelso .-Plot summary:...
(Do-Not Press, London 1999) ISBN 978-1899344451 - Whips & Furs: My Life as a bon-vivant, gambler & love rat by Jesus H. Christ (Attack! BooksAttack! BooksATTACK! Books was an avant-pulp imprint of Creation Books founded in 1999. Partly a homage to the raw pulp writing of Richard Allen and the world of British action comics, part surrealism and part ultraviolence, the titles were overseen by former NME journalist Steven Wells, with the following...
, London 2000). - 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2002) ISBN 978-1841953533
- Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Do-Not Press, London 2004).
- Tainted Love (Virgin Books, London 2005).
- Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, London 2007).
- Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, London 2010).
Stories
- No Pity (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1993, ISBN 1-873176-46-5; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1997).
Non-fiction
- The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular BooksUnpopular BooksUnpopular Books is a publisher in London's East End, producing leaflets, pamphlets and books.- Leaflets, pamphlets and booklets :* Jean Barrot - What is Communism * Jean Barrot - Fascism/Antifascism...
, London, 1988) ISBN 0-948518-88-X (New edition AK Press, Edinburgh 1991. Polish translation, Wydawnictwo Signum, Warsaw 1993. Italian translation AAA edizioni, Bertiolo 1996. Portuguese translation, Conrad Livros, Brazil 1999. Spanish translation, Virus Editorial, 2002). - Neoist Manifestos (AK Press, Edinburgh 1991).
- Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory And Punk Rock (Codex, Hove 1995, new edition 1997. Italian translation Castelvecchi, Rome 1996) (an 'inside account' of the history of punk rockPunk rockPunk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
). - Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Diversions: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes and Hidden Truths (Sabotage Editions, London 1995).
- Green Apocalypse (a critique of the magazine and organisation Green AnarchistGreen AnarchistThe magazine Green Anarchist was for a while the principal voice in the UK advocating green anarchism, an explicit fusion of libertarian socialist and ecological thinking.-Early years:...
) with Luther BlissettLuther Blissett (nom de plume)Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
(Unpopular Books, London 1995). - Analecta (Sabotage Editions, London 1996).
- Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis (AK Press, London, Edinburgh 1995. Italian translation Costa & Nolan Genoa 1997).
- The House of Nine Squares: Letters On Neoism, Psychogeography And Epistemological Trepidation, with Florian Cramer (Invisible Books London 1997).
- Disputations on Art, Anarchy and Assholism (Sabotage Editions, London 1997).
- Out-Takes (Sabotage Editions, London 1998).
- Confusion Incorporated: A Collection Of Lies, Hoaxes & Hidden Truths (Codex, Hove 1999).
- Repetitions: A Collection of Proletarian Pleasures Ranging from Rodent Worship to Ethical Relativism Appended with a Critique of Unicursal Reason (Sabotage Editions, London 1999).
- Anamorphosis: Stewart Home, Searchlight and the plot to destroy civilization (Sabotage Editions, London 2000).
- Jean Baudrillard and the Psychogeography of Nudism (Sabotage Editions, London 2001).
- Fasting on SPAM and Other Non-aligned Diets for Our Electronic Age (Sabotage Editions, London 2002).
- The Intelligent Person's Guide to Changing a Lightbulb (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).
- The Correct Way to Boil Water (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).
- The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating (Sabotage Editions, London 2005).
As editor
- Festival of Plagiarism Ed., (Sabotage Editions, London, 1989)
- Art Strike Handbook Ed., (Sabotage Editions, London, 1989)
- What is Situationism? A Reader Ed., (AK PressAK PressAK Press is a worker-managed independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. It is collectively owned and operated.-History:...
Edinburgh and San Francisco, 1996) ISBN 978-1-873176-13-9 . - Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage And Semiotic Terrorism Ed. (Serpent's Tail London, 1997).
- Suspect Device: Hard-Edged Fiction (Serpent's Tail, London 1998).
Spoken word and music CDs
- Comes in Your Face (Sabotage, London 1998).
- Cyber-Sadism Live! (Sabotage, London 1998).
- Pure Mania (King Mob, London 1998).
- Marx, Christ & Satan United in Struggle (Molotov Records 1999).
Funded Internet projects
- MONGREL (1998 organised by Graham Harwood & Matt Fuller, funded by the Arts Council).
- TORK RADIO (1998 organised by Cambridge Junction, funded with lottery money).
Exhibitions
- Humanity in Ruins, Central Space (London, February/March 1988).
- Vermeer II, workfortheeyetodo (London July to September 1996).
- Becoming (M)other, Artspace (London December 2004 to January 2005).
- In Transition Russia, NCCA (Moscow, November/December 2008).
- Hallucination Generation: High Modernism in a Tripped Out World, Arnolfini (Bristol April to May 2006).
Selected film and videos
- 'Oxum: Goddess of Love' (2007 30 mins).
- 'Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Compex' (2004 41 mins).
- 'Screams In Favour of De Sade' (2002 60 mins).
- 'Has The Litigation Already Started?' (2002 70 mins).
- 'The Golem' (2002 84 mins).
- Ut Pictura Poesis (1997, 35 mm, part of project organised by Cambridge Junction with Arts Council funding).
- Numerous videos including promos for books COME BEFORE CHRIST & MURDER LOVE (1997), RED LONDON (1994) & NO PITY (1993)