Stewart Home
Kevin Llewellyn Callan, better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. His novels include the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess, and the re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love. Earlier parodistic pulp fictions work includes Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose, which 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of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.
Life and work
Home was born in Wimbledon, South London. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate.In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited art and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books, and edited anthologies. 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 focus 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 and collective monikers ; overt employment of plagiarism; 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 Magazine. He did not join these organisations and later repudiated them as reactionary, instead professing autonomous communist political positions after going to the London Workers Group. In the late 1970s, Home produced his first punk 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 1970s, Home also made his first public appearances as a musician as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs.1980s
In the 1980s, Home attended Kingston University. From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours 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. 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.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 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 Neoism 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, individuals such as Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his then unwritten early novels.
Many texts included in Home's SMILE 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", "Desire in Ruins", "Refuse" and "Anon" 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, 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, 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.
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 Acker. 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 pulp-novel writing.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".
Higgs included Home in group shows he curated – such as "Imprint 93" at City Racing, "Multiple Choice" at Cubitt Gallery and "A to Z" at Approach Gallery – 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 at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In the mid-1990s, 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.
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.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 Guy Debord's Screams in Favour of De Sade, and 2004's 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.
Art School Orgy
Despite having a lengthy publishing record with established publishers, Home still had difficulties, in recent years, finding publishers for his work, notably Art School Orgy, on account of the central character sharing the name with living artist David Hockney. The book depicts Hockney participating in scenes of extreme BDSM. During 2021, Home promoted the book via social media, predominantly via Facebook, and a series of YouTube videos featuring Home with an inflatable doll named David Hockney. The book was eventually published in January 2023 by Loughborough-based online record label New Reality Records and sold via their Bandcamp page.
Neoist Alliance
The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occult 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 called 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.