Stewart Home
AK Press
1991
Stewart Home is a transgressive writer from the United Kingdom whose work advances the literary models developed by the Dadaists and Situationists. Home is best known for authoring a number of experimental novels and parodies of pulp fiction. He has also written a number of caustic non-fiction books on punk, avant garde art, and counterculture, in which he often harshly criticizes figures such as rock historian Greil Marcus (author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century), or Situationist thinker Guy Debord. Home appears to follow in the artistic, rather than theoretical, footsteps of the Situationist International, focusing on the low brow and deploying strategies of plagiarism to construct his works.
Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers is a book split into halves representing two of Home's projects. Each halve starts at the end and progress towards the book’s centre. The Neoist Manifestos contains sixteen texts, many of them less than a page in length, outlining the mission of Neoism as an avant-garde art movement. These writings recall the numerous manifestos of the Italian Futurists, but in their varying formats and degrees of attack on existing artistic milieus, they also recall the many Dada manifestos written by Tristan Tzara and his ilk. In many of these manifestos Home reiterates the Neoist commitment to plagiarism in addition to a number other oppositional positions regarding western culture. The Neoist Manifesto half of the book also contains an appendix featuring a number of unpublished poems by the author.
The second half of the book, The Art Strike Papers, is much more interesting in my opinion. This section documents the call and response to a strike enacted by artists to cease artistic production for three years. Home borrowed the idea for an artists’ strike from Gustav Metzger, the German-British artist of auto-destructive art, who called such an action in the 1960s. Home, himself, is possibly the only member of the art strike, but it is not important to figure out who actually participated in the strike - maybe no one did. What makes The Art Strike Papers interesting are the responses, issued by serious people, to the strike. No one honestly believed that artists were ever going to strike en masse, but many individuals took the 1990 art strike seriously enough to respond.
The caustic responses by artists to the strike, preceded by Stewart Home’s explanations of the event, make up the Art Strike Papers. The art strike appeared to provoke responses that exposed the problematic attitudes towards art held by many individuals at the time. Many of the artists whose writing appears in the Papers were insightful enough to state that the strike was, itself, a work of art, implying the impossibility of an art strike because of a view, frequently expressed in the papers, that everything is art. Home initially proposed a strike in the hopes of subverting art as a market commodity. He resulted in agitating artists into conveying their most ludicrous views on art. If everything is art, then nothing is art. Under such a regime art is a diffuse conceptual overlay of reality and everyday life and a means of keeping the world at a distance.
The American visual artist Fred Rinne, whose work looks like a cross between Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibone, demanded to know why the strike participants would not support real strikes instead. While such a demand is really the circumvention of the central issue, presented as an imposition of a political agenda, Rinne’s demand also raises questions about the efficacy of socially conscious art. What does it do? This kind of demand is repeated by many others who appear in the Papers, and it seems to suggest that artists struggled with the challenge that the strike presented to their situation as creative labourers whose work enters a marketplace as commodity.
Ultimately, many of the respondents conveyed two major themes in their critique of the art strike. The first is a repulsion over the use of the ‘strike’ tactic typically reserved for exploited labour. The pretense that art directs attitudes and attentions towards or against a cause, and that its driving creative energies are beyond the concerns of market capitalism, are well represented in the Papers. (note: see John Roberts: The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade for an interesting analysis of such concerns with regards to art). The second theme (which is related to the first) is an apprehensive repulsion to the suggestion, implicit in the basic concept of an art strike, that the fine arts in their current situation may not be a pathway towards a transcendent utopia. In effect, his strike may have been simulated, no one could possibly verify that he was not doing creative work at the time. If it was a simulated strike then Home may have been playing with the reality principle, as Jean Baudrillard (whom Home cites as a source of inspiration) put it, in order to reorient some attitudes towards art, its accompanying markets, and its place in society.
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