Stewart Home
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Stewart Home (born 1962) is a British fiction writer, subcultural pamphletist, underground art historian and activist. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a prostitute who was associated with the radical and arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and situationist Alexander Trocchi. Stewart was put out for adoption soon after his birth.
Home is probably best known for his 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work of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography political agit-prop and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art. In the 1980s and 1990s, he also wrote a large number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines and books. They chiefly reflected politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history of Situationism and other radical left-wing 20th century anti-art avant-garde movements. Often at the focal point of these reflections was Neoism, a subcultural network he had been a member of and derived various splinter projects from. A constant characteristic of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s has been the use of group identities and collective monikers in his work, overt and up-front employment of plagiarism and, occasionally, pranks and publicity stunts.
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History of Activities
1980s
From 1982 to 1983, Stewart Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", founded a punk band called White Colours and 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. Stewart Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive" which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dadaist manifestos.
In 1983, Home got in touch with the originally American, subcultural artistic network of Neoism and participated in the 8th Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism operated with multiple identities, too, and called upon all its participants to adopt the name Monty Cantsin, Stewart Home decided to give up the "Generation Positive" in favor of Neoism and make SMILE and White Colours part of Neoism as well. 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; shortly before, a conflict between him and Neoism founder Istvan Kantor had escalated and let to alienation.
Home's SMILE no.8, which appeared in 1984, 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 of radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International, Situationism, Fluxus, Mail Art and invididuals like Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his later novels. Many texts included in Stewart Home's SMILE issues plagiarized other, especially Situationist writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour".
Drawing at once from Lautréamont, the latter's appropriation through the Situationists and 1980s American appropriation art, Home's concept of plagiarism soon developed into a proposed movement and a series of "Festivals of Plagiarism", which themselves plagiarized the Neoist apartment festivals and 1960s Fluxus festivals, in 1988 and 1989. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike between 1990 and 1993. Unlike earlier art strike proposal like that of Gustav Metzger in the 1960s, it was not only directed against art institutions, but called upon artists to entirely give up any artistic activity in the three years of the strike. Both the plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns had little to no resonance in the contemporary art world and happened largely outside its debates and institutions. They were, however, strongly discussed in subcultural art networks, especially in Mail Art. Consequently, mail artists made up the participants of the Festivals of Plagiarism, and Mail Art publications disseminated the Art Strike campaign.
1990s
To which extent Home actually participated in the Art Strike 1990-1993 remains disputed since two of his books, completed allegedly before the 1990, appeared in its period. In 1994, Home officially resurfaced, meanwhile having gained an influence and reputation in European and American counter-culture comparable to writers like Hakim Bey and Kathy Acker. Aside from reassessments of his earlier engagement with Neoism, Situationism, punk culture and the plagiarism and Art Strike 1990-1993 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 pamphletism 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 Art Strike years, he had for the first time 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".
Books
Stewart Home's first books that appeared between 1988 and 1995 are essentially an outgrowth and elaboration of his earlier SMILE writings, however without the former's fragmentary-aphoristic character and eclectic mix of genres. The Assault on Culture, originally written, but rejected as a B.A. thesis, is an underground art history sketching Home's ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-WWII fringe radical art and political currents, and including - for the first time in a book - a tactically manipulated history of Neoism (including 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 Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art historical work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at 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 his subsequent novel writing. The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, in its first part, abriged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike 1990-1993 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 Victoria and Albert Museum which recently occurred in actuality when Home sold the V&A his own archive on 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?'.
Although Home staged a number of pranks and publicity stunts, such as public burning of the Qur'an on account of the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and occasionally also played punk rock and exhibited visual art work, he has been chiefly a writer, and a performer only to a lesser degree. His skinhead looks and attitude on official photographs are much more publicity poses than apt images of Home's rather soft-spoken and introverted personality. Stewart Home's influence on Western subcultures remains closely tied to his books and the authority of the printed word, and has decreased ever since counterculture has moved to the Internet as its primary medium.
With his most recent published novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), Home has finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking notice, ironically, of a book which carries his most acidic condemnations of the literary and cultural establishment.
Bibliography
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).
- Red London (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1994; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995).
- Slow Death (Serpent's Tail, London 1996. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1996)
- 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).
- Cunt (Do-Not Press, London 1999).
- 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princes (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2002).
- Down And Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Do-Not Press, London 2004).
Stories
- No Pity (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1993. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1997).
Non-fiction
- The Assault on Culture : Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 094851888X (New edition AK Press, Edinburgh 1991. Polish translation, Wydawnictwo Signum, Warsaw 1993, Italian translation AAA edizioni, Bertiolo 1996. Portugeuse translation, Conrad Livros, Brazil 1999).
- 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 rock).
- 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)
- Confusion Incorporated: A Collection Of Lies, Hoaxes & Hidden Truths (Codex, Hove 1999).
- Green Apocalypse (a critique of the magazine and organisation Green Anarchist) with Luther Blissett.
As editor
- What is Situationism? A Reader Ed., (AK Press Edinburgh and San Francisco, 1996) ISBN 9781873176139.
- 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).
- Whips And Furs: My Life As A Bon Vivant, Gambler Love Rat by Jesus H. Christ (ATTACK! books, 2000)
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).
One man art shows
- HUMANITY IN RUINS, Central Space (London February/March 1988).
- VERMEER II, workfortheeyetodo (London July to September 1996).
Short film and videos
- 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)
External link
- Stewart Home Society (http://www.stewarthomesociety.org)
- 3:AM Magazine interview (2002) (http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2002_jan/interview_stewart_home.html)