Stewart Home

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Stewart Home (* 1962 in London as Kevin Llewellyn Callan) is a British writer , underground artist , musician and activist .

Life

His mother Julia Callan-Thompsen, model and hostess, was associated with the radical artist scene in Notting Hill Gate . She knew people like the writer and situationist Alexander Trocchi .

As a teenager, Home was drawn to anarchism and was a member of the editorial team at Anarchy . He later rejected anarchism as reactionary and held communist political positions. From 1982 to 1983, Home operated as the one-man movement Generation Positive , formed a punk band called White Colors , and published the art magazine SMILE , the name of which is a nod to the art magazines FILE and VILE . The concept was that many other bands in the world would call themselves White Colors, and many other underground magazines would call themselves SMILE. Home's early issues of SMILE magazine mainly contained art manifestos for the Positive Generation, rhetoric similar to those of the 1920s Berlin Dadaism manifestos.

In 1983 Home made contact with the American subcultural artistic network of Neoism and took part in the eighth Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism also worked with different identities and required its members to take the name Monty Cantsin , Home decided to abandon the Generation Positive in favor of Neoism and make SMILE and White Colors part of Neoism. A year later, Home took a neoist performance art - Prank , for whose sleepwalking participation the “one-man artist group” Stiletto Studio, s involuntarily hypnotized him out of deep sleep at the Neoist Festival in Italy , as a reactionary occasion to explain the separation from Neoism . Shortly thereafter, a dispute between him and the founder of Neoism, Istvan Kantor , escalated , leading to their enmity.

Home reappeared in public in 1994. His influence and reputation in the European and American counterculture were meanwhile comparable to that of writers like Hakim Bey and Kathy Acker . In addition to deepening his earlier commitment to neoism, situationism , punk culture, the plagiarism and art strike campaigns, and his source of income, the writing of parodic junk novels, Home's style has changed significantly during this time. While his brochures of the late 1980s can be viewed as a subtly humorous project to collect and ignite radical energies from left-wing extremist art and politics, Home reinvented himself as a cynical satirist in the 1990s. Although Home took some public actions, such as burning the Quran for legal advice against Salman Rushdie , and occasionally playing punk rock and exhibiting works of art, he was mostly a writer and less of a performer. His skinhead appearance and demeanor on official recordings is more of a representation for publicity than an apt representation of Home's sensitive and introverted personality.

plant

Home is probably best known for its paradoxical pulp novels Pure Mania , Red London , No Pity , Cunt, and Defiant Pose . He also wrote a variety of factual magazines, brochures, and books in the 1980s and 1990s. They reflected the politics of the radical left, punk culture, the occult, the history of situationism and other radical left anti-art avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Neoism was often at the center of his considerations. The formation of group identities was characteristic of his activism.

Homes SMILE No. 8, published in 1984, explained the secession from neoism by claiming that a practice movement, with Karen Eliot as its new multiple name, would replace neoism. This and the following three SMILE editions also contained a mixture of manifesto-like writings, political reflections from radical, left-wing anti-art movements of Situationism, Fluxus , Mail Art and individuals like Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt , and short parodic skinhead trash texts in the Style of his later novels. Many texts from Homes SMILE magazines plagiarized other, especially situationist, writings by simply replacing expressions like “spectacle” with “glamor”.

Seeing America's Appropriation Art (a postmodern art movement in which artists deliberately copy the work of other artists) in 1980, Home's concept of plagiarism evolved into a movement of its own and a series of Festivals of Plagiarism between 1988 and 1989, which in turn Neoist Apartment Festivals and the Fluxus Festivals of the 1960s plagiarized. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an art strike between 1990 and 1993. Unlike previous art strikes, such as that of Gustav Metzger in the 1960s, it was not only directed against art institutions, but also called on artists to stop their artistic activities during the to stop three years of the strike completely. Both the plagiarism and the art strike received little response in the contemporary art world, and largely took place outside of the debates and institutions. However, they were heavily discussed in subcultural art networks. How far Home was actually involved in the art strike remains controversial, as two of his books were supposedly completed in 1990, during the time of the strike.

Home's influence on Western subcultures, which remains closely linked to his books and other writings, has waned since the counterculture used the Internet as its primary medium.

Works (in German)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/rhhm.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/horobin_apt_9_lemon.html#@1503-1511
  3. ↑ https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/ninesq.htm
  4. ↑ https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/features/festplag2.htm
  5. ↑ Oliver Marchart (1997): "Neo-Dadaistischer Retro-Futurismus" or: How Stewart Home invented the avant-garde on collecting point. Electronically archived theory , Internet Archive -Memento of January 14, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Home, Stewart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer, underground artist and musician
DATE OF BIRTH 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH London