Stewart Home

Home's early Smile magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dadaist manifestos.

Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962), better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist.

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of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.

Home was born in South London.

His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate.

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 (Home got to talk about the Art Strike at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as on national BBC Radio arts programmes and London area television arts programmes), 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 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 (such as Monty Cantsin) and collective monikers (e.g. "Karen Eliot"); overt employment of plagiarism; pranks and publicity stunts.

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 seventies Home produced his first punk (music) 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 seventies Home also made his first public appearances as a musician as bassist with revolutionary ska band The Molotovs.

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.

In the 1980s Home was also a regular contributor to the anarcho-punk/cultural magazine VAGUE.

From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours (named after an experimental novel by R. D. Reeve) 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 (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.

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 (who didn't come into contact with Neoism until the late eighties) 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" (Chisenhale Studios, London 1986), "Desire in Ruins" (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 1987), "Refuse" (Galleriet Läderfabriken, Malmö 1988) and "Anon" (33 Arts Centre, Luton 1989) 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 (collectively known as Art in Ruins), Ed Baxter and Stefan Szczelkun.

Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike between 1990 and 1993.

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 (London June–July 95), "Multiple Choice" at Cubitt Gallery (London March–April 96) and "A to Z" at Approach Gallery (London 1998) – 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" Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 96- January 97, subsequently toured).

In the mid-nineties 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.

His novels include the non-narrative 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (2002), and the re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005).