Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis by Stewart Home AK IUd"1#1 EDINBURGH & SAN FRANCISCO. 1995 Neoism. Plagiarism & Praxis by Stewart Home A elP catalogue for this book is available from me British Library A catalogue entry for this book is available from the Library of Congress Much of the material included in this volume has previously appeared elsewhere. Published in 1995 by AK Press Edinburgh and San Francisco AK Press, 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9PE, UK. AK Press, P. O. Box 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682, USA. ISBN 1 87317633 3 Stewart Home can be contacted directly at BM Senior, London WC 1 N 3XX, UK (full address) or via the publishers. Printed in the Gre at Britain. Contents 5 Introduction PART I From Plagiarism to Praxis I I Karen Eliot 12 Demolish Serious Culture 13 Desire in ruins 15 The art of ideology and the ideology of art 19 Beneath the cobble stones, the sewers 20 From Dada to Class War: ten minutes that shook cheque book journalism 21 From author to authority: Pepsi versus Coke 22 Artists placement and the end of art 23 Neoism 25 Art Strikes 26 Art Strike 1990-93 28 Work 29 Oppositional culture and cultural opposition 36 Language, identity and the avant-garde 40 Aesthetics and resistance: totality reconsidered PART 2 From Dialectics to Stasis 45 Ruins of glamour/glamour of ruins 47 Desire in Ruins - statement 48 The role of Sight in recent cultural history 49 Plagiarism as negation in culture 51 Plagiarism 52 Multiple names 53 Soon... 54 A short rant concerning our cultural condition PART 3 Neoist Reprise 59 Correspondence script 63 Retro-Futurism PART 4 A New Dawn 77 Assessing the art strike 86 Our tactics against Stockhausen 89 The burial rites of literary fiction 93 Programme of the Neoist Alliance 94 Our tactics against the literary establishment 96 Neoism as negation and the negation of Neoism 100 Doctorin' our culture 105 The avant-garde and fictional excess I 15 From orgasm to obliteration 117 Reflections on silence 121 Up! up! and away! levitating the Pavilion Theatre and other scams 125 Strategies of writing 132 Fluxcontinuum: the influence of Fluxus on later movements 140 The Holborn Working, 10 July 1994 145 Carlos 153 Sixty years of treason PART 5 Appendices 159 Appendix I: Stewart Home interviewed by Karen Goaman & Mo Dodson 166 Appendix 2: The Art Of Legitimation: the on-going transformation of the avant-garde from counter-cultural force to dominant institution - Stewart Home interviewed by Simon Ford 176 Appendix 3: Selected Correspondence January to December 1989 193 Appendix 4: Introduction to the Polish edition of The Assault On Culture 203 Selected Bibliography 204 Index Introduction ..True and false belongs to speech, and not to things, And from hence it is evident, that truth and falsity have no place but amongst living creatures as use speech:' Thomas Hobbes THE TEXTS COLLECTED IN THIS VO LUME are an unrepresentative selec­ tion of my writing from the mid-eighties onwards. Much of what I've writ­ ten about the avant-garde is repetitious and it would be pointless to reprint this material in its entirety. Th e Assault on Culture incorporates some of my earlier work on the subject and I refer interested readers to that book. A number of the pieces included here have been re-edited to avoid too great an overlap between them. Therefore, if this book is still found to be repeti­ tious, it will have served its purpose by proving Kierkegaard's dictum that: 'Boredom is the daemonic side of pantheism ... Boredom is partly an inborn talent, partly an acquired immediacy. The English are in general the para­ digmatic nation. A true talent for indolence is very rare; it is never met with in nature, but belongs to the world of the spirit.Occasionally, however, you will meet a travelling Englishman who is, as it were, the incarnation ofthi s talent - a heavy, immovable animal, whose entire language exhausts its riches in a single word of one syllable.' The pieces in the firstsection of this volume run more or less chronolog­ ically from 1986 to 1989 and are taken from Th e Art Strike Handbook and later issues of Smile. Two of these works, Karen Eliot and Demolish Serious Culture, were collective productions. The next section consists of articles that accompanied various exhibitions and installations. This is followed by two 'Neoist' texts. The Correspondence Script is another collaborative work, assembled from letters sent to Pete Horobin and myself, it has been 5 Neol.m, PI. ... rl.m .nd Praxl. revised since it was first published in 1985. Despite its fictional form, Retro-Futurism (originally published in 1985) is the most extensive record so far produced of the Eighth International Neoist Apartment Festival. A factual account of a more substantial poly-media manifestation of the eight­ ies avant-garde can be found in my Festival of Plagiarism pamphlet. Readers interested in Neoism should also check out my Neoist Manifestos and forthcoming novel Slow Death. The final section of this book is given over to writing produced since the end of the Art Strike. In these texts, I begin to historicise the avant-garde of the eighties, as well as writing about contemporary manifestations of anti­ institutional culture. Appended to this are conversations about my activities conducted by Karen Goaman and Simon Ford. The latter is one of the few people to understand that by openly campaigning for the Neoist, Plagiarist and Art Strike movements to be incorporated into the collections of leading museums, I'm deterring curators from touching this material. Most art administrators don't like the ways in which they operate to be openly talked about, they'd much rather I remained silent on the subject, so that my work could be shrouded in reverence. In a third appendix there is a selection of my correspondence from 1989, hopefully this gives some insight into how the Art Strike was organised. This is followed by the Introduction to the Polish Edition of The Assault on Culture, an unveiling of the occult influ­ ences upon oppositional culture. This book does not provide an exhaustive account of the eighties avant­ garde, a great deal remains to be written on the subject. For example, I am unaware of anything having been published that traces the use of the col­ lective names Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin back through the adoption of Emmett Grogan as a multiple identity by a number of the San Francisco Diggers in the 1960s. For the benefit of those not in the know, Praxis was little more than a paper organisation consisting of myself with occasional back up from John Berndt. In contrast to this, the Neoist, Plagiarist and Art Strike movements were just as substantial as the earlier Dadaist, Surrealist and Situationist groups, all of which were numerically insignificant when compared to the following for Spiritualism or top-flightNew Age gurus. As Nietzsche observed: 'the point of honesty is deception, with all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception ... they are overcome by belief in themselves ... Men believe in the truth ofthings that are plainly and strongly believed' . As 6 Introduction for the avant-garde, it is closer to Stimer's weltanschauung: 'Whether I am in the right or not there is no judge but myself. Others can judge only whether they endorse my right, and whether it exists as right for them too' . Belief is the enemy, it provides the means by which we can articulate our thoughts while simultaneously robbing them of vitality and vigour. I have always been fascinated by deceit and the texts collected here are a direct reflectionof this interest. Stewart Home, London September 1994 7 Part From Plagiarism to Praxis Karen Eliot KAREN ELIOT IS A NAME THAT REFERS to an individual human being who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren't. Smile is a name that refers to an international magazine with multiple origins. The name is fixed, the types of magazines using it aren't. The purpose of many different magazines and people using the same name is to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth. Anyone can become Karen Eliot simply by adopting the name, but they are only Karen Eliot for the period in which the name is used. Karen Eliot was materialised, rather than born, as an open context in the summer of '85. When one becomes Karen Eliot one's previous existence consists of the acts other people have undertaken using the name. When one becomes Karen Eliot one has no family, no parents, no birth. Karen Eliot was not born, s/he was materialised from social forces, constructed as a means of entering the shifting terrain that circumscribes the 'individual' and society. The name Karen Eliot can be strategically adopted for a series of actions, interventions, exhibitions, texts, etc. When replying to letters generated by an action/text in which the context has been used then it makes sense to continue using the context, i.e. by replying as Karen Eliot. However in per­ sonal relationships, where one has a personal history other than the acts undertaken by a series of people using the name Karen Eliot, it does not make sense to use the context. If one uses the context in personal life there is a danger that the name Karen Eliot will become over-identified with indi­ vidual beings.