Musician, author, agitator, Neoist,
plagiarist and art- terrorist - Stewart Home is probably all of that.
Or just name him a punk. That is if you define punk as cultural anarchy.By the age of 14 he played in a punk band and published a fanzine. After turning his back on punk, he got involved with the Neoists for a year. He gained notoriety for being the creator of The Art Strike 1990-93, where he denounced the commodification of art. Home emerged from a high culture oppositional tradition. He wrote about the art avant-garde and developed a fast fiction style mixing ferocious over-the-top story lines of sex and violence with esoteric explorations on culture and politics. Cranked Up Really High, published in 1995, is an "inside account on punk rock". It is also a critique of academic discussions and an academic approach on the subject. At the Punk! Kongress he will talk about punk as a subversive art. Born in 1962 in South London, Home has lived in the East End for much of his adult life. 1976 at the age of 14 he got interested in punk and became part of the British punk rock movement, where he played guitar for the first time in a punk band and did a fanzine called Down In The Streets. Stewart Home played in some other ska and punk bands. The ska band was called The Molotovs, but they never had a record released. Later in they nineties Sabotage Records brings out a compilation called Steward Home Comes In Your Face with pieces from 1976 to 1986. By 1982, Stewart Home got bored of doing fanzines, and he quit the band he was in. He was bored with the English punk scene in general. So Home was looking to do something interesting. What he learned from punk rock was that one could play an instrument without knowing anything about it. Plagiarism becomes his thing. He uses elements and ideas of other artists, plays around with them and reverses them. "My attitude was "Fuck you, if you're going to be original, I'm going to be unoriginal." I got into plagiarism." In 1984 Home published Smile, an underground magazine, promoting the Neoist anti art group. He caused many art pranks during the eighties that where highly recognized by the British media. He handed out invitations to The Booker Prize to the poor, and picketed a Stockhausen concert in Brighton, where he threatened to levitate the building with occult practices. During that period Stewart Home organizes the Festival Of Plagiarism. Influenced by J.P. Lovecraft and pulp fiction writing from Britain in the 70's, particularly youth culture fiction about skinheads and Hells Angels and by Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane he writes his first novels Pure Mania (1988) and Defiant Pose (1991). His main theme is "sex, violence and anarcho-sadism". But this belongs to the past. Today his work more about "eating, fucking and occultism." Homes writing style is also what he calls plagiarism. He is drawing on existing material and tries to critically deconstruct it. In protest against the growing commodification of art, Home announces an Art Strike that lasted for three years. During the strike he does not produce anything, gives no interviews and calls for closing of all galleries. He uses the time to read and watches hundred of Kung-Fu-films. Home is quite satisfied with the Art Strike, although it does not make any big waves: "by framing an inactivity as an Art Strike, I became more famous than many those who chase after publicity and by this means, expanded my audience for my books." Cranked Up Really High, published in 1995, is Stewart Home's analysis of punk. It is a complex, provocative book that covers areas previously untapped (Oi, Crisis, neo-nazi bands like Skrewdriver). Homes is also crashing the realm of pop scholarship by criticizing Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces (which linked the Sex Pistols with the situationists) as being too academic. Home argues that, far from any academic discussions, punk is still a living, dynamic mutant with an unbroken tradition. |
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ALTERNATIVE TV IGOR BASIN MICHAEL "PANKOW" BOEHLKE BOONARAAAS! BOY FROM BRAZIL SEZGIN BOYNIK BUZZCOCKS CHEETAH CHROME CZD DEAN DIRG RONALD GALENZA HENRYK GERICKE THOMAS GROETZ DICK HEBDIGE ALFRED HILSBERG STEWART HOME SIEGFRIED KALUS THE KIDS THOMAS LAU MARLENE MARDER MALCOLM MCLAREN LEGS MCNEIL PADELUUN BERT PAPENFUSS MARK PERRY HARRY RAG ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS SEDLMEIR ANDY SHERNOFF MARTY THAU TOKYO SEX DESTRUCTION VIVA L'AMERICAN DEATH RAY MUSIC |