Kevin Llewellyn Callan (born 24 March 1962), better known as Stewart Home, is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. 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). 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of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.

Life and work

Home was born in Wimbledon (then in Surrey), South London. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited art and also wrote a number of non-fiction pamphlets, magazines, and books, and edited anthologies.

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

1990s

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 at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (October 1996–January 1997, subsequently toured). In the mid-1990s, 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.

2000s

Aware of the marked decline in countercultural activities throughout the urban centres in which he operated, Home shifted gear in this area of his work in the new millennium, upping his level of Internet activities; web work had been only a minor part of his repertoire in the 1990s.

Home's novels in this period no longer incorporated subcultural elements and instead focused on issues of form and aesthetics: 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess contains capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in Down and Out in Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. At times in this period, Home's film making also became radically non-representational, and rarely required any original cinematography whatsoever; for example, his 2002 fiftieth-anniversary English-language colour re-make of Guy Debord's Screams in Favour of De Sade, and 2004's Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex, the latter consists solely of still photographs of his mother with a narration scripted by Home but delivered by Australian actress Alice Parkinson.

This tendency towards abstraction was already evident in some of Home's work of the 1990s, particularly sound pieces such as the cut-up radio play Divvy, but in the 2000s it became increasingly central to his output.

Art School Orgy

Despite having a lengthy publishing record with established publishers, Home still had difficulties, in recent years, finding publishers for his work, notably Art School Orgy, on account of the central character sharing the name with living artist David Hockney. The book depicts Hockney participating in scenes of extreme BDSM. During 2021, Home promoted the book via social media, predominantly via Facebook, and a series of YouTube videos featuring Home with an inflatable doll named David Hockney. The book was eventually published in January 2023 by Loughborough-based online record label New Reality Records and sold via their Bandcamp page.

Neoist Alliance

The Neoist Alliance was a moniker used by Home between 1994 and 1999 for his mock-occult psychogeographical activities. According to Home, the alliance was an occult order with himself as the magus and only member. The manifesto called for "debasement in the arts" and in a parodic manner plagiarized a 1930s British fascist pamphlet on cultural politics. Alliance activities mainly consisted of the publication of a newsletter called Re-action, which appeared in ten issues.

In 1993, the Neoist Alliance staged a prank against a concert by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in Brighton by announcing its intention to levitate the concert hall by magical means during the concert. This was an homage to the 1965 anti-art picketing of a Stockhausen concert in New York by Fluxus members Henry Flynt and George Maciunas.

Alliance activities ran parallel and were closely related to those of the revived London Psychogeographical Association and the Italian-based Luther Blissett project.

Despite its name, the Neoist Alliance had no affiliation with the international Neoist network which had been active since 1980. Stewart Home had previously become a member and activist of that network in 1984, but renounced it one year later and subsequently worked under the collective monikers of "Praxis", later "plagiarism" and the Art Strike movement.

Books

Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least, been under-documented. The work has, however, been highly criticised for deficiencies in its view of utopian currents, including its personal biases, by such writers as Bob Black.

Pure Mania, Home's first novel from 1989, took the recipe of the Richard Allen parodies from SMILE and turned them into a recipe for much of his subsequent novel writing of the 1990s (there are exceptions such as the non-linear "Come Before Christ & Murder Love"). The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, on its first part, abridged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike from various authors and sources, mainly Mail Art publications.

His 1995 novel Slow Death fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism (including the planting of archives at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Home's novel Cunt was rejected by several publishers before being published by Do-Not Press in 1999. Its plot, which satirises travel writing, the picaresque novel and the publishing industry, centres on David Kelso, an author attempting to write a trilogy recounting his sexual experiences. Confusion Incorporated: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes and Hidden Truths, published in the same year, is a collection of fictional interviews, reviews and essays. A third 1999 publication, the pamphlet Repetitions: A Collection of Proletarian Pleasures Ranging from Rodent Worship to Ethical Relativism Appended with a Critique of Unicursal Reason, consists of letters, prefaces and introductions.

Repression in Russia

Alex Kervey of T-ough Press, publishers of the Russian edition of Come Before Christ and Murder Love has reported repression of the book as "pornography and insulting Christian values". Kervey says this is happening in the context of a campaign run by such far-right groups as the National Bolsheviks against Home, which has included arson attacks against T-ough Press alongside state censorship.

Bibliography

Novels

  • Pure Mania (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989. Finnish translation, Helsinki: Like, 1994. German translation, Hamburg: Nautilus, 1994).
  • Defiant Pose (London: Peter Owen, 1991. Finnish translation, Helsinki: Like, 1995. German translation, Hamburg: Nautilus, 1995). Some of the action of this novel takes place on the Samuda Estate
  • Red London (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1994, ; Finnish translation, Helsinki: Like, 1995).
  • Slow Death (London: Serpent's Tail, 1996. Finnish translation, Helsinki: Like, 1996)
  • Blow Job (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997. Finnish translation, Helsinki: Like, 1996. Greek translation, Athens: Oxys Publishing, 1999. German translation, Hamburg: Nautilus, 2001).
  • Come Before Christ and Murder Love (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).
  • Cunt (London: Do-Not Press, 1999),
  • Whips & Furs: My Life as a bon-vivant, gambler & love rat by Jesus H. Christ (London: Attack! Books, 2000).
  • 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2002),
  • Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (Do-Not Press, London 2004).
  • Tainted Love (Virgin Books, London 2005).
  • Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, London 2007).
  • Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (BookWorks, London 2010).
  • Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013).
  • The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones (Test Centre, 2014).
  • She's My Witch (London Books, 2020).
  • Art School Orgy (New Reality Records, Loughborough 2023)

Stories

  • No Pity (AK Press, London & Edinburgh 1993, ; Finnish translation Like, Helsinki, 1997).

Poetry

  • SEND CA$H (Morbid Books, London 2018).

Non-fiction

  • The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) (New edition AK Press, Edinburgh 1991. Polish translation, Wydawnictwo Signum, Warsaw 1993. Italian translation AAA edizioni, Bertiolo, 1996. Portuguese translation, Brazil: Conrad Livros, 1999. Spanish translation, Virus Editorial, 2002. Russian translation, Asebeia, 2020).
  • Neoist Manifestos (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1991).
  • Cranked up Really High: Genre Theory And Punk Rock (Hove: Codex, 1995, new edition 1997. Italian translation, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1996) (an "inside account" of the history of punk rock).
  • Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Diversions: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes and Hidden Truths (London: Sabotage Editions, 1995).
  • Green Apocalypse (a critique of the magazine and organisation Green Anarchist) with Luther Blissett (London: Unpopular Books, 1995).
  • Analecta (London: Sabotage Editions, 1996).
  • Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis (AK Press, London, Edinburgh 1995. Italian translation Costa & Nolan Genoa 1997).
  • The House of Nine Squares: Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography And Epistemological Trepidation, with Florian Cramer (London: Invisible Books, 1997).
  • Disputations on Art, Anarchy and Assholism (London: Sabotage Editions, 1997).
  • Out-Takes (London: Sabotage Editions, 1998).
  • Confusion Incorporated: A Collection of Lies, Hoaxes & Hidden Truths (Hove: Codex, 1999).
  • Repetitions: A Collection of Proletarian Pleasures Ranging from Rodent Worship to Ethical Relativism Appended with a Critique of Unicursal Reason (London: Sabotage Editions, 1999).
  • Anamorphosis: Stewart Home, Searchlight and the plot to destroy civilization (London: Sabotage Editions, 2000).
  • Jean Baudrillard and the Psychogeography of Nudism (London: Sabotage Editions, 2001).
  • Fasting on SPAM and Other Non-aligned Diets for Our Electronic Age (London: Sabotage Editions, 2002).
  • The Intelligent Person's Guide to Changing a Lightbulb (London: Sabotage Editions, 2005).
  • The Correct Way to Boil Water (London: Sabotage Editions, 2005).
  • The Easy Way to Falsify Your Credit Rating (London: Sabotage Editions, 2005).
  • Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema (Melbourne: Ledatape Organisation, 2018).
  • Fascist Yoga, Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness (London: Pluto Press, 2025).

As editor

  • Festival of Plagiarism, ed. (London: Sabotage Editions, 1989).
  • Art Strike Handbook ed. (London: Sabotage Editions, 1989).
  • What is Situationism? A Reader, ed. (Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), .
  • Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage And Semiotic Terrorism, ed. (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).
  • Suspect Device: Hard-Edged Fiction (London: Serpent's Tail, 1998).
  • Denizen of the Dead: The Horrors of Clarendon Court (London: Cripplegate Books, 2020).

Spoken word and releases

  • Comes in Your Face (London: Sabotage, 1998).
  • Cyber-Sadism Live! (London: Sabotage, 1998).
  • Pure Mania (London: King Mob, 1998).
  • Marx, Christ & Satan United in Struggle (Molotov Records, 1999).
  • Proletarian Post-Modernism (Test Centre, 2013).

Funded Internet projects

  • NATURAL SELECTION (1998 organised by Graham Harwood & Matt Fuller, funded by the Arts Council).
  • TORK RADIO (1998 organised by Cambridge Junction, funded with lottery money).

Exhibitions

  • Humanity in Ruins, Central Space (London, February/March 1988).
  • Vermeer II, workfortheeyetodo (London, July to September 1996).
  • Becoming (M)other, Artspace (London, December 2004 to January 2005).
  • In Transition Russia, NCCA (Moscow, November/December 2008).
  • Hallucination Generation: High Modernism in a Tripped Out World, Arnolfini (Bristol, April to May 2006).
  • Again, A Time Machine at White Columns (New York, October/November 2011).
  • Part of Again, A Time Machine: a Book Works touring exhibition in six parts, SPACE (London, April to May 2012).
  • Tilt, Building F (London November 2013).
  • The Age of Anti-Ageing, The Function Room (London, October/November 2014).
  • Re-Enter The Dragon, Queens Park Railway Club (Glasgow, April 2016).
  • Dual Flying Kicks, 5 Years (London, June 2018).
  • Sexus Maleficarum, Darling Pearls & Co (London, September 2020 – January 2021).

Selected film and videos

  • Ut Pictura Poesis (1997, 35 mm, part of project organised by Cambridge Junction with Arts Council funding).
  • Screams in Favour of De Sade (2002, 60 mins).
  • Has The Litigation Already Started? (2002, 70 mins).
  • The Golem (2002, 84 mins).
  • Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex (2004, 41 mins).
  • Oxum: Goddess of Love (2007, 30 mins).
  • Re-Enter The Dragon (2016, 41 mins).
  • Bondage As Theme & Technique (2019, 40 minutes).

See also

  • Anti-art
  • Art manifesto
  • 3:AM Magazine

References

  • Stewart Home Society
  • 3:AM Magazine interview (2002)
  • Face feature (2000)