A Stewart Home Retrospective

Active since the late 1970s, first as a ‘zine writer and punk musician, and later as an art theorist, novelist, filmmaker and editor of experimental fiction, Stuart Home has operated – for shits and giggles as much as for aesthetics and activism – as a conceptual indigent, quasi-occultist, propagandist for psychic warfare. Rich in japester juxtapositions, his prolific output often splices together the knuckles-and-raunch pulp fictions of early ‘70s hacks such as Richard Allen and Sven Hassel with Situationist critique and Hegelian theory, and puts the comic, caustic brutalism that ensues to keenly-observed satiric effect.

Roared on by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Jenny Turner (who, in the London Review of Books, once declared: ‘I really don’t think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home’), he’s a one-man awkward squad whose adventures in perverse outsiderdom and menacing wind-up tactics place him in the English heretical tradition of the K Foundation, David Britton and Michael Butterworth’s Savoy Books, and James (The Caretaker) Kirby’s mid-‘90s incarnation as boss of the V/VM label that spewed out crude, copyright-infringing anti-tributes to the likes of the Queen Mother and the Aphex Twin.

Presented in collaboration with London’s Book Works – the artists’ books organization for whom Home recently edited an imprint named Semina dedicated to off-piste, genre-defying texts not so dissimilar from the kind for which he’s carved out a semi-underground reputation – his first US retrospective at White Columns, New York, and at SPACE, London (also his first UK retrospective), served as a field guide to his witty, theoretically savvy and occasionally inspired adventures in autotelic avant-gardism. Part of a touring Book Works exhibition ‘Again, A Time Machine’, it also offered a tantalizing vision of an altogether wilder and more disreputable vision of British Cultural Studies than that being dutifully peddled in campus seminar rooms on either side of the Atlantic.

At White Columns, the first of the show’s three rooms was devoted to a rarely-exhibited selection of Home’s more ephemeral productions: a yellowing ‘I Love Hackney’ T-shirt (mid-1980s) in which this once-feared, now increasingly gentrified part of north-east London is indexed by an image of a pavement-splayed wino; a ‘Necrocard’ (1999) bearing the statement ‘I want to help others experiment sexually after my death’; projects for Matthew Higgs’ Imprint 93 small press such as a ‘Cunt Lickers Anonymous’ pamphlet and a ‘Will Self Is Stupid’ badge; issues of the mail art-informed Smile magazine (1984–89); various invites, flyers and handbills – most of them agit-prop in style, one of them a call to mark the fifth anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and bearing the slogan, ‘Fatwa! Smash Christianity, Smash Islam, Smash The Literary Establishment’.

A second room featured a glass cabinet collecting all of Home’s books in English – from the non-fiction likes of The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents From Lettrisme To Class War (1988) to recent novels such as Memphis Underground (2007) and Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). Almost exclusively issued as paperback, they’re characterized by grabby titles (Blow Job, 1997, Cunt, 1999), tabloid-vivid typography, and shots of the crop-haired, unsmiling author looking like a member of a no-mark skinhead band.

What’s striking is not just the sheer deluge of output – Home, as anyone who’s ever visited his website will know, produces daily word counts that would make his B-lit progenitors proud – but also, for all his obsessions and self-plagiarising tropes, its huge range. Situationism, psychogeography, anarchist history, countercultural movements, subterranean Londons, network art: not only has he participated in plenty of these scenes, he writes about them with clarity, wit and an attention to detail that would shame the broad-brush generalisers who flourish in academia today.

A case in point was an ‘action’ (entitled The Great Downtown Shredding Machine Massacre) he staged at White Columns, where, before giving a reading from his latest spam-and-porn-and-art world novel (which contains lines such as ‘Give Hanna Wilke the time of her life!’), he shredded a copy of his book Down and Out In Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004). This was, he announced, less an act of destruction as a repurposing of a mass-market paperback into a limited-edition art object. He then brought up a comparison with John Latham – who urged his students to chew Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture (1961) – only to tut-tut scholars who claim that artist was kicked out of Saint Martin’s School Of Art as a result; actually, he pointed out, Latham was only on a short-term contract of the kind that was rarely renewed.

Highlights of the show included Becoming (M)other (2004), in which Home asked Chris Dorley-Brown to take a series of photographs of him (aged 42) imitating the modeling portfolio poses of his mother Julia Callan Thompson (then 22; she died under mysterious circumstances aged 35) before morphing them together to tender, disturbing effect; Stewart Home Talks About The Art Strike (2004), a 45-minute video shot by Paula Roush in the studio of novelist Tom McCarthy, where, hiding behind shades like a wideboy-made-good chilling out in the Costa Del Sol, he perks up his theoretical excursions by abruptly taking off his top and later his trousers.
Art Strike Bed (1995), a version of the bed Home slept in during his Art Strike from 1990 to 1993, also featured in the retrospective. Tracey Emin, he claimed, later tried to recuperate this piece in My Bed (1998). Perhaps, but rather than draw up lineages of influence and possible appropriation – Gustav Metzger as well as John and Yoko are theoretical forebears – it’s more important to observe how resonant this assertion of refusal is in 2012 when the sheer profusion of cultural productions coming out of project spaces, start-up galleries and biennales appears glut-like.

Here, as in the show’s other works exploring spam, ruins, gentrification, Home emerges as less an isolationist outsider as an inspired diviner and pathfinder from whose seemingly arcane obsessions can be gleaned the traces of future art-world tropes and memes. A career look-back that could have been demystifying, embalming, persona-pickling ended up as a catalytic and blackly funny foray into Homeworld, offering plenty of reasons to look forward to where his singular anti-career takes him next.