Stewart Home (born 1962) is a writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, 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. Stewart was put up for adoption soon after his birth. 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar). ... Julia Callan-Thompson was a model, designer (under the name Marstan et Bonnie) and socialite, born in South Wales, from an Irish family. ... Notting Hill Gate is one of the main thoroughfares of Notting Hill in London. ... Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi (July 30, 1925 - April 15, 1984) was a Scottish novelist. ...

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of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.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 the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history of Situationism - of which he is a severe critic - 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 of which he had been a member, and from which he derived various splinter projects. The constant characteristics of his activism in the 1980s and 1990s were: Flynns Detective Fiction from 1941. ... This article or section needs to be wikified. ... The word pastiche describes a literary or other artistic genre. ... The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979. ... James Moffat, who wrote under the pen name Richard Allen, produced a number of pulp novels for the UK publishing house New English Library during the 1970s. ... Pornographic movies Pornography (Porn) (from Greek πόρνη (porne) prostitute and γραφή (grafe) writing), more informally referred to as porn or porno, is the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity with the goal of sexual arousal. ... Agitprop is short for отдел агитации и пропаганды (otdel agitatsii i propagandy), i. ... Punk rock is an anti-establishment music movement beginning around 1976 (although precursors can be found several years earlier), exemplified and popularised by The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. ... A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Punk culture as it is seen today started in the mid 1970s as a movement or rebellion against some styles of music which existed at the time such as Prog Rock and Heavy Metal whose stars were seen as out of touch with their fans. ... This article or section is incomplete and may require expansion and/or cleanup. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999... A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Street action at the 6th Neoist Apartment Festival in Montreal, 1983 Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. ...

• The use of group identities (such as Luther Blissett) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot").
• Overt and up-front employment of plagiarism.
• Occasionally, pranks and publicity stunts.

Likeness of Luther Blissett produced by Wu Ming Luther Blissett is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ... Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ... Plagiarism (from Latin plagiare to kidnap) is the practice of claiming, or implying, original authorship or incorporating material from someone elses written or creative work, in whole or in part, into ones own without adequate acknowledgment. ...

History of activities

1980s

As a youth Home was drawn to anarchism, and was part of the editorial team of Anarchy Magazine. He later repudiated anarchism as reactionary, and professed communist political positions. From 1982 to 1983, 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. Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dadaist manifestos. Anarchism is a form of social criticism, a political movement as well as a political philosophy. ... Anarchy Magazine was an anarchist magazine published in London from the sixties. ... Communism is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production. ... A fanzine (see also: zine) is a nonprofessional publication produced by fans of a particular subject for the pleasure of others who share their interest. ... SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. ... Cover of the first edition of the publication, Dada. ...

In 1983, 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. 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 led to their alienation. Street action at the 6th Neoist Apartment Festival in Montreal, 1983 Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. ... Monty Cantsin is a multiple identity that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. ... Istvan Kantor (aka Monty Cantsin, and Amen!) (born 27 August 1949 in Budapest) is a hungarian born canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism. ...

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 on radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International, Situationism, Fluxus, Mail Art, invididuals such as Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his later novels. Many texts included in Home's SMILE issues plagiarised other, especially Situationist, writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour". Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ... The Lettrist International (LI) was the first breakaway group from Isidore Isous Lettrist Movement (LM). ... Fluxus (from to flow) is an art movement noted for the blending of different artistic disciplines, primarily visual art but also music and literature. ... Mail art is art which uses the postal system as a medium. ... Gustav Metzger was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany in 1926 and came to Britain as a refugee under the auspices of the Refugee Children movement. ... Henry Flynt was born in 1940 in Greensboro, NC. He is a philosopher, musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist, whom unsympathetic reviewers often link to Fluxus. ...

Drawing from 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 proposal like that of Gustav Metzger in the 1960s, it was not only directed against art institutions, but called upon artists to give up entirely any artistic activity in the three years of the strike. Both the plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns had little or 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. Definition To appropriate something is to take possession of it. ... Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between January 1st, 1990 and January 1st, 1993. ... Mail art is art which uses the postal system as a medium. ...

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.

1990s

In 1994 Home officially resurfaced, having meanwhile 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, Situationist International, 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 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". Peter Lamborn Wilson is a political writer, poet, and self-described anarchist ontologist. He sometimes writes under the name Hakim Bey (which may mean Mr Judge in Turkish, and which may or may not have been a name-of-convenience used by other radical writers since the 1970s). ... Kathy Acker (18 April 1947 in Manhattan—30 November 1997 in Tijuana, Mexico) was an experimental novelist, prose stylist, playwright, essayist, poète maudit and sex-positive feminist writer. ... Look up Situation, Situationism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... Hermeticism should not be confused with the concept of a hermit. ... The word occult comes from the Latin occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to knowledge of the hidden. In the medical sense it is used commonly to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e. ...

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, 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-World War II 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 Neoist) 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-history 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. Combatants Allied powers: China France Great Britain Soviet Union United States and others Axis powers: Germany Italy Japan and others Commanders Chiang Kai-shek Charles de Gaulle Winston Churchill Joseph Stalin Franklin Roosevelt Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini Hideki Tōjō Casualties Military dead: 17,000,000 Civilian dead: 33,000... The Situationist International (SI), an international political and artistic movement, originated in the Italian village of Cosio dArroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. ...

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, 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 Victoria and Albert Museum; this recently became reality 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?'. The Victoria and Albert Museum viewed from Thurloe Square. ...

Although Home staged a number of pranks and publicity stunts, such as leading a "psychic attack" on the Brighton Pavilion during a Stockhausen concert, 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. 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. Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a contemporary composer. ...

With the publication of his 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.

Repression in Russia

Alex Kervey of T-ough Press, 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. T-ough Press is a subterranean publishing house based in the southern suburbs of Moscow. ... Flag of the National Bolsheviks. ...

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). Some of the action of this novel takes place on the Samuda Estate
• Red London (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1994; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1995).
• Slow Death (Serpent's Tail, London 1996. Finnish translation Like, Helsinki 1996) ISBN-13: 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).
• Cunt (Do-Not Press, London 1999) ISBN-13: 978-1899344451
• Whips & Furs: My Life as a bon-vivant, gambler & love rat by Jesus H. Christ (Attack Books, London 2000).
• 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2002) ISBN-13: 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).

Samuda Estate is located in Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs. ... AK Press is a collectively owned and operated independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical and anarchist literature. ... This article or section needs to be wikified. ...

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 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 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 Anarchist) with Luther Blissett (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).

Samizdat operation based in East London producing leaflets, pamphlets and books. ... Punk rock is an anti-establishment music movement beginning around 1976 (although precursors can be found several years earlier), exemplified and popularised by The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. ... The magazine Green Anarchist was for a while the principle voice in the UK advocating an explicit fusion of libertarian socialist and ecological thinking (Green anarchism), although such ideas had arguably been co-sympathetic for decades if not generations beforehand. ... Likeness of Luther Blissett produced by Wu Ming Luther Blissett is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ...

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 Press 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).

AK Press is a collectively owned and operated independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical and anarchist literature. ...

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).
• The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex (2004, video)
• Numerous videos including promos for books COME BEFORE CHRIST & MURDER LOVE (1997), RED LONDON (1994) & NO PITY (1993)

Neoist Alliance

Group moniker used by Stewart Home between 1994 and 1999 as a corporate identity for his mock-occult psychogeographical activities. According to Home, the Neoist Alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. The manifesto of the Neoist Alliance called for "debasement in the arts" and parodistically plagiarized a 1930s British fascist pamphlet on cultural politics. The word occult comes from the Latin occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to knowledge of the hidden. In the medical sense it is used commonly to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e. ... Psychogeography is The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals, according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in (1958) . // Development Psychogeography was originally developed by the Lettrist International, as a hypergraphics in their system of...

Home's Neoist Alliance activities mainly consisted of the publication of a newsletter "Re-action" which appeared in ten issues between 1994 and 1999[1].

In 1993, the Neoist Alliance staged a prank against a concert of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Brighton by announcing [2] its intention to levitate the concert hall by magical means during the concert[3]. This was a plagiarist homage to the 1965 anti-art picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York through Fluxus members Henry Flynt and George Maciunas [4]. Karlheinz Stockhausen (born August 22, 1928) is a German composer, and one of the most important and controversial composers of the 20th century. ... Brighton is located on the south coast of England, and together with its immediate neighbour Hove forms the city of Brighton and Hove. ... Anti art is a work that is exhibited or delivered in a conventional context but makes fun of serious art or challenges the nature of art. ... Fluxus (from to flow) is an art movement noted for the blending of different artistic disciplines, primarily visual art but also music and literature. ... Henry Flynt was born in 1940 in Greensboro, NC. He is a philosopher, musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist, whom unsympathetic reviewers often link to Fluxus. ... George Maciunas (November 8, 1931-May 9, 1978) was a Lithuanian-American artist. ...

The Neoist Alliance activities ran parallel and were closely related to those of the revived London Psychogeographical Association and the Italian-based Luther Blissett project. In 1998, these projects founded - although more in fiction than in fact - a New Lettrist International. The London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) is a largely fictitious organisation devoted to psychogeography. ... Likeness of Luther Blissett produced by Wu Ming Luther Blissett is a multiple identity, a nom de plume that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavour. ... The Preliminary Committee for the Founding of a New Lettrist International (NLI) was organised by the Neoist Alliance and the London Psychogeographical Association. ...

Despite its name, the Neoist Alliance had no affiliation to the international Neoist network which had been active since 1980. Stewart Home had previously become a member and activist of that network in 1983, but renounced it one year later and subsequently worked under the collective monikers of "Praxis", later "plagiarism" and the Art Strike movement. Returning from the 1990-1993 Art Strike, he resumed referring to his own activities as Neoism, this time however using it for a play with the occult and hermeticism rather than with modern art avant-garde movements. The Neoist Alliance moniker thus was used to show that Neoism could be multiple unrelated movements at once, or even a practical philosophy detached from any particular network of people. Street action at the 6th Neoist Apartment Festival in Montreal, 1983 Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. ... Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between January 1st, 1990 and January 1st, 1993. ... The word occult comes from the Latin occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to knowledge of the hidden. In the medical sense it is used commonly to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e. ... Hermeticism should not be confused with the concept of a hermit. ... Dejeuner sur lHerbe by Pablo Picasso At the Moulin Rouge: Two Women Waltzing by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892 The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893 I and the Village by Marc Chagall, 1911 Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917 Campbells Soup Cans 1962 Synthetic polymer paint on thirty-two... A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock as ordered by the court. ...

See also

• Neoism
• Art manifesto

Street action at the 6th Neoist Apartment Festival in Montreal, 1983 Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. ... The Art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. ...

External links

• Stewart Home Society
• 3:AM Magazine interview (2002)
• Face feature (2000)
• Interview with ReadySteadyBook
• Review of Luther Blissett's novel Q