Stewart Home Interview, Part One

Stewart Home Interview November 2023

PART 1: SMILE, The Assault on Culture, Skinhead Novels, Art Strike

Part 1 of our exclusive full length interview with author Stewart Home, conducted in November 2023 in London. Full Transcript!

In this first part (of two) Stewart discusses the early years, producing SMILE magazine, writing his early fiction and publishing his first novel, Pure Mania, and historicising the post war Avant-garde with his 1988 book The Assault on Culture, Neoism, the 1990-1993 Art Strike and how it all lead to reading Hegel and watching Kung Fu Movies – and more! Check out the video version of this interview on our Noise & Politics YouTube channel:

datacide: In the 1980s you were involved with Punk Rock, Mail Art and Neoism. You published a magazine called SMILE. I first came across your activities through SMILE magazine, so if you don’t mind let’s start with that. Can you describe what led you to produce SMILE and what it was all about?

Stewart Home: I was just looking at a lot of recent historic kind of events around the art world because I decided when I got fed up with music that I wanted to be an artist, but I knew nothing about how to be an artist. I hadn’t been to art school, but I kind of concluded it was a matter of bureaucratic manipulation. So in 1982, I decided to become an artist and show that by manipulating the systems of the art world you could be a successful artist. I don’t know how successful an artist I’ve been, but I’ve got some kind of reputation and got work in the Arts Council of England collection, for example.

Obviously, that wasn’t the case then; it was an experiment. It started off with doing manifestos and being interested in everything from Dada through the Surrealists into the post-war material like the Situationists and Fluxus, which is now very well known. But in the 1980s, there wasn’t so much known about that, but I was very interested in those currents and also Mail Art. Within the Mail Art system coming out of General Idea, there’d been a magazine called FILE and then you’d had variations on that with titles like VILE. So I decided to do SMILE because it was very banal.

This was probably the end of ’83. I decided to do this, and the first issue was printed very early in 1984. But it was a kind of vehicle to collect together the poetry that I’d been writing, and that was again inspired by looking at what contemporary poets were doing. There was a lot of interest in poetry. Faber were publishing anthologies of young poets, and I had friends in bands who were starting to play with drum machines rather than drummers, so they could play smaller places.

I was going to a club called Sons of Dada where some of my friends were playing, and they’d have poets like Anne Clark who were quite well known at the time, and they’d be getting up and doing poems about how depressed they were and how they lived on the 29th floor of a tower block and they’d been burgled three million times in the last five minutes, and their mother had cancer and how dreadful life was. And I wanted to do something very banal in response, which were these little poems about fruit and vegetables and things.

So the poems would just be things like, “I walked past the fruit dish, smiling at the bananas. They were yellow and black.” And kind of taking up from kind of imagism and people like William Carlos Williams, pop poetry of the 60s, but also the idea of a still life – but in poetry. So I’d just get up and do five minutes of those to kind of rip the piss out the serious poets, so-called, whose work I didn’t really like.

So I had those poems and I had a lot of manifestos that I was writing which had initially been stuck out as kind of xerox leaflets and stuff, and I decided to put it together in a magazine called SMILE. At that point, I was calling the kind of movement that I was trying to create Generation Positive. But in April 1984, after I’d put out the second issue of SMILE because I had a lot of material lying around, I came across the Neoists. So I got involved with that, so the magazine evolved through these different stages.

At the same time as getting involved with the Neoists, particularly Pete Horobin who was at that time based in Dundee in Scotland but had relocated temporarily to London for six months to set up this Neoist appartment festival in 1984, and it was a kind of post-Fluxus post-Mail Art kind of thing. So I was floating around in the Mail Art world and trying to understand how you got into the London gallery world. I was continuing with the interest I had in Fluxus and the Situationists and looking at a lot of that material.

I was particularly fascinated with Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker as well, who at that time were very much forgotten. So just kind of working through that material and doing the magazine, the magazine kind of evolved into more agitational and political ways of dealing with the art world. And at the same time, I was kind of getting into the gallery world. The first show I was in that got reviewed in the national papers and the art press was a show called Ruins of Glamour, Glamour of Ruins at Chisenhale where I was using the name Karen Elliott.

So out of the Neoist thing, we’d been doing these multiple name projects with Neoism, and it was Monty Cantsin, but I was concerned about the gender bias of that, so I changed it to Karen Elliott, the name I used for my early artwork shows. So on the one hand, we were doing the work in the art world and the other hand the SMILE magazine. And when we did the show at Chisenhale with Richard Essex, who went on to found the London Psychogeographical Association, we did a catalogue for that show. So it had some kind of left communist material in it as well as the critique of the art world.

I think it was quite unusual at that point. I think we had a text translated from French against democracy kind of a lot of these curious left communist positions coming in, and SMILE evolved through that. So it got seen as kind of more situationist related by some people because some of the material I was working with, and at the same time, I was also – and this is leading into what might be the next question – thinking about writing fiction.

Also in 1984, I went on holiday to Devon with some comrades from a publication called Workers Playtime, and while I was in Devon, I hadn’t brought enough books to read. So I went in a charity shop in Kingsbridge and I saw a copy of Boot Boys by Richard Allen, which was a book I’d read at school when I was about 12 or something. This was the series of books that started with Skinhead went through Suedehead and into Boot Boys, and a lot of people don’t necessarily appreciate that Boot Boy very much was a subculture following on from Skinhead.

So we had the Brutus picture shirts which we all wore and the tank tops and Oxford bags; that was the fashion look. So when I was at secondary school in 1973, that was what everyone aspired to, and what you really wanted was a pair of cherry red Dr. Martens, but if your mum said she couldn’t afford them, you ended up with a pair of army boots like me that the Dr. Martens were too expensive.

That was a look that I later discovered getting into punk rock, The Gorillas and Jesse Hector, and he’d really perfected that kind of grown-out Mod Barnett sideburns, Boot Boy Oxford bag look, although he didn’t always have the boots, he sometimes had shoes. But for me, he’s the epitome of kind of a Boot Boy cool, Jesse Hector from the Gorillas, fantastic look that he has – what I aspired to when I was 12 years old.

Original Skinhead was maybe more associated with early reggae, Skinhead reggae. Boot Boy really didn’t have a music associated with it, like Casual; it was more associated with football violence, not a particular music association. Although people listened to a lot of glam rock because that was the big thing at the time. But anyway, so I saw this copy of Boot Boys and read it in, I don’t know, an hour, having spent my 10p on it on the beach, I read it very quickly and I thought, “Wow, this is fantastic,” and it could kind of be used to parody some of the stuff that’s going on.

So, in that time, mid-80s, Class War was one of the groups that was creating a lot of noise in the UK as an anarchist group. And I thought we could take the template of the Richard Allen books or the Hell’s Angels books, which I read at the same time, because I think it’s wrong to single out a single author like Richard Allen, and rework that into a story about Class War. Which all the people from Workers Playtime, which I was involved with, thought was a hilarious idea. And it wasn’t necessarily going to be me who wrote the story because what we did was we had editorial meetings, decided what was to be written, and then the task would be assigned to someone.

But the magazine collective broke down at that time, so I was left with this idea. So, I wrote a story called “Anarchist,” which I then put in SMILE Magazine, which parodied Class War. But the group in it were called Class Justice, because you had some quite a lot of rhetoric around Class War about gay rights, but most of the people involved were straight, although people like Steve Sudden [?], who did The Wolverine, were gay rights activists. But the overwhelming bulk of Class War people were straight. So, I had them all polymorphously perversely gay in the story and also had them kind of having a leadership rivalry going on, which I took inspiration particularly from a book called Chopper.

Because having read Boot Boys, I went back and read all the New English Library fiction that I’d read at school and even some that I’d missed when I was at school. My favorites, when I was at school and still are, the Mick Norman Hell’s Angels books where the gay Angels are even harder than the straight Angels. And the Angry Brigade have kind of failed, and so the Angels are the last chance for freedom in a repressive authoritarian Britain.

But taking that stuff, you could use a leadership rivalry in a story about Hells Angels where the president of the Hells Angels wanted to settle down with his mama and water down the original outrageous ideas of the Angels, and his lieutenant wanted to take over to keep the Angels as a kind of pristine out-to-lunch bunch of nutcases, and apply that to an anarchist group. And you immediately had a lot of satire because anarchists aren’t supposed to have leaders.

So, I’ve written this 17,000-word story that went into SMILE, which then fed on into my fiction, parodying Class War. But that met with a lot of interest from people around the London ultra-left and anarchist scene, which were kind of two distinct things, but they paid some attention to each other. And I think because I was writing some things about anarchism, and because anarchists would like to claim things that they liked, such as the Situationists, who clearly were council communists and not anarchists, but the anarchists would claim them as anarchist. I also got assumed to be an anarchist by people just because I’ve written this parodic material around Class War and some of the other anarchist groups.

So, I’ll let you ask the second question, which I may have answered already…

datacide:… not just the second one, you answered probably the first four questions! Your book The Assault on Culture is putting some of that stuff into a historical perspective. The full title is The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, and it’s an intervention into the historization of the post-war avant-garde movements from the ’40s to the ’80s. What was your objective of the book at the time, and how do you situate it now?

Stewart Home: At the time, it was difficult to find a lot of the information. So, what I found was that when I went around the political scene in London, there were people who knew about the political aspects of the Situationist International, and then if you moved around the art world and met people like René Gimpel, who was obviously running Gimpel Fils, the family gallery, and who had, you know, in storage in an old air raid shelter just off Oxford Street, an incredible number of say Niki de Saint Phalle works.

He would know about the Second Situationist International. And I was able to borrow from him, because I couldn’t access them any other way, copies of the Situationist Times, which he had. So, I was interested in getting a full picture of Fluxus and the Situationists and various other groups.

So, I was kind of looking at the two sides of it, and going to the British Library, where I’d also go to read New English Library novels of skinheads and Hells Angels, if I couldn’t find a copy in a charity shop or whatever, which you could a lot then. And I just wanted to make the information accessible to people. This is obviously pre-internet, and it was quite difficult to access a lot of that information.

I was also managing to get my hands on books like Mirella Bandini’s work in Italian on the Situationists. Not that I can read Italian, but I had friends who were native Italian speakers, so they could essentially summarize the material I wanted to know about from those kind of sources. So, it was just a question of putting a lot of information together because I thought a lot of people had a quite mythologized idea of what the Situationists were.

I know that when I was 17, I think in 1979, I was going to London Workers Group sometimes, which was a small group in London, which Workers Playtime came out of. You’d meet different people there and talk about different things, and one of the things that would come up was the Situationists, who some people were more into than others.

I remember trying to ask people about the Situationists, and basically, I’d be told, because, you know, they had a kind of expensive private education — not everyone at the group did, you also have postal workers — but I’d be told because I just had a kind of bog-standard state education, that I was too thick to understand the Situationists by these kind of people who seemed completely in awe of Debord. I don’t think it’s a great idea to hold any figure up as a kind of guru, which a lot of people were doing with Debord, also to a lesser extent Vaneigem.

So, I just wanted kind of information about the group to be able to circulate, and people to be able to see what was good about the group and what wasn’t. I mean, also at that time, there were people around in the London Workers Group who were very interested in Jacques Camatte and Jean Barrot, and a kind of project of synthesizing the best of council communism with the best of Bordiguism, different strands of left communism. So, that was a discussion that was going on, and that I was kind of involved with, although not at the center of, but I knew a lot of the people at the center of that discussion.

So I thought, what I can understand more is the relationship between the Situationists and the art world. And that’s what I wanted to demystify, make the information about available, because it just wasn’t there. I mean, obviously, I was latching on to what was becoming fashionable in certain circles. INow I wouldn’t bother to write the book because there’s just so much information available, but at the time, it was very hard to access. So, that was the point of doing the book. And I guess, you know, that book [The Assault on Culture] came out in 1988. I don’t like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, but his book came out in ’89. I have a lot of disagreements with his perspectives, obviously. And then subsequently, there’s just been a whole slew of books on the subject, and you can find out all sorts of things.

In 1989, I went to New York for the first time. This was when you could get those courier flights – you’d pay about 25 quid instead of 400 to fly to New York. The catch was you could only take carry-on baggage, and you were carrying business documents to get the cheap flight. By then, I’d found out probably as much as I wanted to know about the Situationist movement. However, I was very interested in Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. So, I went to New York, trying to locate all copies of their publications. I thought that was the best chance since that was where they were based. I went around New York, asking people about Ben Morea and the group, but drew a blank. No one had even heard of them at that time, although now they’re very well regarded.

Also, I went into the Emily Harvey gallery and spent a long time looking at a Henry Flynt exhibition. Flynt was one of the more interesting Fluxus artists, with a critique of art saying it imposed other people’s subjectivity on you. He was a Trotskyite but had some interesting cultural positions and organized Action Against Cultural Imperialism, among other things. Which was a group that mainly consisted of him in the 60s. So he was a figure I was interested in.

Because I spent so long looking at the work, the woman invigilating the show commented on my interest. When she heard my English accent and heard me talking about it, she said it was interesting how a lot people in England seemed to know a lot about Henry Flynt.

Have you read Stewart Home’s book? When I said I am Stewart Home, she said “you must meet Henry, you must meet La Monte Young”. So, I ended up meeting all these people, including Billy Name from The Factory, Carly Schlieman, Jon Hendricks from Guerrilla Art Action Group. This gave me access to a lot of New York material, but not the Black Mask stuff I was looking for. I found all that when I returned to the UK. In fact, we eventually compiled it and published it as a book with Unpopular Books through AK Press. This enabled the renewed interest in Ben Morea.

Of course, Morea subsequently turned up, and I got to meet him. He’s a great guy, probably more of an anarchist than a left communist, but I’m still quite impressed with a lot he managed to do in New York in the 60s and subsequently. He’s also a fantastic painter, which I was less aware of when I first looked into his work. Having been to his pad in Hell’s Kitchen (although he mainly lives out of New York) and seen a lot of his paintings and seen him reenact performances from the 60s with people like Aldo Tambellini, who he worked with back then, I got to appreciate another side of those things.

But, I guess I’m always just looking for interesting things that have maybe been forgotten, then trying to turn them up again, which was what I was trying to do with that book. However, my interest has waned since so much material has become available on the subject.

datacide: Then let’s get back to the fiction. You mentioned the story ‘Anarchist’ that you had in SMILE magazine, which already encapsulates a lot of the stuff that would be in your first novels. Pure Mania, which was your first full-length novel, appeared in 1989 and was recently reissued. This was followed by Defiant Pose and Red London, among others, which were – you’ve talked about that already – inspired by these Richard Allen books and other books of the New English Library.

Do you want to situate those early novels in their own right?

Stewart Home: I think the novels very much came out of the short stories. There wasn’t just “Anarchist”; there were a succession of stories. Then people were telling me I should write a novel, and I thought that’s interesting because I set out to become an artist and thought it was a matter of manipulating some bureaucratic systems. Well, it would be interesting to see how you get a novel published. So, I decided to write a novel and see if I could get a proper publisher to publish it.

The Assault on Culture was published by Unpopular Books and Aporia Press, which were not mainstream publishers. In fact, it was published by the two different presses because each said they wanted to do it but didn’t have enough money. I suggested they could get together and pool the money, which is how that one happened.

With Pure Mania, I tried sending it to obvious publishers at the time, like Fourth Estate and Serpent’s Tail. I either didn’t hear back or got very rude responses. They all liked my synopsis and asked to see the whole manuscript. Fourth Estate took a year to send the manuscript back. The editor wrote a rude letter, saying he loathed it and telling me how I couldn’t write.

The manuscript was scrawled all over, telling me I was an idiot and what was wrong with my writing and that I was repeating myself. I’d deliberately used repetition within the novel to deconstruct it. I’d read so many New English Library hack novels that I saw phrases and paragraphs, and almost whole books being repeated across different works. I thought it would be interesting to collapse that into a single novel. I also found the more repetition there was, the funnier it became.

For example, in the novel, sex and violence were always described in the same way. When someone got punched in the face, it was always “the bastard staggered backwards, spitting out gouts of blood and the occasional piece of broken tooth.” And, of course, being one of my novels, people got punched in the face all the time. And every other page would pretty much have a sex scene. I was riffing on something I’d read in a Richard Allen book.

Richard Allen was a pen name for a Canadian called James Moffat, who lived in the UK for a long time. He described sex as the characters being no longer in control of their bodies, with DNA taking over, but it would kind of trail off there… I thought that was an interesting metaphor if you extended it, so I’d talk about memories of the first star exploding or being the first amphibian to emerge from the swamps and feel the warmth of the sun on their back to extend these absolutely ridiculous metaphors.

The rude editor obviously didn’t understand that this was deliberate and thought out, and was based on the fact that – this being the 80s – as well as left communist material I’d been reading post-modern works including Baudrillard’s theories of simulation. And I was interested in how the surrealists and Nouveau Roman writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet had taken elements of pulp, particularly detective fiction, and inscribed them into their non-linear avant-garde texts. My idea was to simulate a pulp narrative but make it so repetitious that it deconstructed itself. So that was my idea, but the editors obviously thought I was just an incompetent writer who was trying to write pulp fiction and didn’t realise the kind of high-brow elements which were probably too high-brow for them to recognise…

The way Pure Mania got published was through Peter Kravitz, who was considered a hotshot literary editor in Scotland, because he’d discovered James Kelman and Tom Leonard and people. I was doing bits of work with him because he was editing the Edinburgh Review which I was writing for and I knew him as a friend and knew he liked my short stories. I gave him a copy of the manuscript, and said I got this book no one seems interested, maybe you can take a look and give me some suggestions, not knowing he’d rejoined the editorial board of Polygon Books.

He liked the book and said they’d publish it at Polygon. But Polygon had financial problems and had been bought out by Edinburgh University Press, who were an academic publisher and they absolutely hated Pure Mania. They commissioned additional readers’ reports, which concluded it had no literary value, etcetc. Peter Kravitz fought for it, threatening to resign if they didn’t publish it. So, they published it under the condition that no other book by me was to be published by Polygon (laughs). So that’s the first book came out, which was an interesting insight into the bureaucracy of the literary publishing system.

Shortly after that you became one of the main instigators of the 1990-1993 Art Strike. How did that differ from previous Art Strikes like Gustav Metzger’s, what were its aims and how did it play out?

The idea of the Art Strike came from Gustav Metzger’s proposal from the early 70s for an Art Strike. Metzger genuinely believed – and in 1974 you could see why: you had the oil crisis and a wave of workers militancy with all the strikes and the power cuts in the UK – Metzger believed artists going on strike could destroy the gallery system and gain control over the distribution of their own work.

So he made the proposal for an Art Strike, but not many people took him up on it. I came across it looking through an old ICA catalogue, it wasn’t something that people knew or talked about. When people talked about Metzger – if they knew about him – and my generation tended not to know about him, but a kind of 60s generation of art people did – they were talking about his Auto-destructive Art works and his acid paintings, which I loved, but they weren’t aware of the Art Strike.

So I saw it as an idea that could be revived, but it needed to be done as a piece of propaganda, rather than thinking that you were actually going to get artists to strike, which Metzger genuinely was trying to do. I thought it was more a way to wind up people within the art world and use it as an exercise in demoralisation. And I was involved with the Mail Art Network, so it mainly got networked through the Mail Art Network.

Mail artists not really being gallery artists or making money from their work had less of a stake in the art system. So a few people started taking it up. In San Francisco, where people like Steve Perkins and Scott McCloud and others set up an Art Strike Action Committee, I thought, oh this is great, so now I can tell people in London how there’s all this Art Strike stuff happening in San Francisco and we’re doing it in London, whereas in San Francisco they were telling people it was all happening in London, but now they were doing it in San Francisco. And there ended up being other ones in Baltimore and Cork in Ireland and various places. So we were able in the 80s to play off that international element to generate a level of interest that we probably wouldn’t have got otherwise.

I ended up doing a talk about it with Alan Sinfield at the ICA. I thought the ICA probably booked me with Sinfield because they thought we’d disagree but actually we found out we had a lot in common and being on the radio and TV about it. It was just to get people to talk about what art is and is art a good thing or is it the culture of the bourgeoisie. I’ve been very influenced by Roger Taylor’s book Art, an Enemy of the People, which had kind of helped me sort out my ideas about what art was. And it was just a way of propagandising against an uncritical attitude that art was somehow good, which it isn’t. So I guess that was the main idea.

I also thought it was a good idea to have an end to my project of being an artist. So at the time I declared I was going to do an art strike from 1990 to 1993, it was in 1985, and I’d have had a few years of trying to get into the art world but hadn’t really succeeded. I didn’t know that the next year, 1986, with this show at Chisenhale… which was also vandalised, which was quite unusual for art shows, and some cynics suggested that we vandalised it ourselves to get the insurance money.

But of course I couldn’t admit to that because that would be illegal activity and fraud. Although, interestingly, Ed Baxter from Aporia Press was involved in that show and it was actually the insurance money from that show put together with the money from Unpopular Books that paid for the printing of Assault on Culture, which was handy.

But when I declared the Art Strike I didn’t know we were going to have that success, or I was going to have that success, and get reviewed in the national papers and in the art press for that show, and kind of establish myself a notch higher in the art world. So it was good to have an end to the project. When 1st January 1990 hit, it was also good to have a break. I’d read through all my Marx and stuff when I’d been signing on the dole when I was younger, and I’d also read through a fair amount of Hegel and other philosophers, but I never read through Hegel to my satisfaction.

So come 1st January 1990 I signed back on the dole, had a bit more time because I wasn’t doing these cultural projects, and sat around reading Hegel again in English translation, because I don’t speak German. How worthwhile it is reading Hegel in English, I don’t know, I found it worthwhile. And then at night I’d wind down with a Kung Fu film on my VHS player, as I’d always been a huge fan of Kung Fu.

Part 2 will be uploaded shortly!

The Interview was filmed in November 2023 in London by CF and Linxi and edited and first published in video form in January 2024 on the Noise & Politics YouTube channel.

• Articles by Stewart Home on datacide-magazine.com
• Stewart’s Youtube channel
• Stewart Home Society
• Wikipedia

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