‘Nina Beier’s work is as unstable as a keg of dynamite, if a whole lot quieter. The Danish artist’s sparse, pared-down offerings have included fading photographs, a wall painting that was redone daily and a sculpture recreated via a game of Chinese whispers. Her Dust Painting is literally a pile of dust-coloured pigment, which gets traipsed all over the gallery on the soles of people’s shoes. As unassuming as it first appears, her art is an elusive, restless thing, with scant regard for the beautiful picture frames that often attempt to contain it.’ — The Guardian
‘I believe my father invented Google Maps. Or at least a map of what could have eventually become Google Maps. He never fully realized this project, though. The roads of his psyche, to use a fitting metaphor, were perhaps not made for opposing traffic. People say that every map is a portrait of its maker, a picture of his knowledge, perspective, and interpretation. One thing is certain: My father loves Google Maps.
‘The philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously stated that “the map is not the territory,” supposedly meaning that one should not confuse the representation of something with the actual thing. But there is a lot to be said for confusion. These are confused works, pictures that are both map and territory. What is a poster for an exhibition of posters, or what should we call a representation of dust made of dust-colored pigment dispersed over a room? Or a work that frames the clothes the framer was wearing when he made the frames? After all, isn’t the best way to describe a story to tell one?
‘I have repeatedly come across a Lewis Carroll story about a country that, after several attempts at making an accurate map, makes a map the size of the country itself. But when using it, the citizens run into a number of problems and, following complaints from the farmers who argue that using the map would harm crops, they decide to use the country itself as its own map, a solution they conclude is nearly as good. Here, the represented almost succeeds in becoming its own image, like the story, as I just told it, is almost the same as it was the first time around.
‘When one attempts to light a sculpture fully, its shadows unfold on the floor around it. The sculpture practically appears overshadowed by the repeated figures. But if one would present the shadows as the work of art on display, would we see the sculpture as the portrayed?
‘I have found pictures of body parts belonging to giant statues. These statues are constructed in fragments and will inevitably end in fragments again. They are a puzzle and we know the pieces; even when looking at the full figure, its own reality shines through. As an image torn to pieces and reassembled, it displays the scars of its own history while competing with the story it depicts.
‘The pictures argue within and among themselves, as their surfaces struggle with their content for domination. When a published representation of a work of art is framed and presented as a work again, the weight of the frame might initially outshine its content, which again, if the reflective UV filter makes it survive long enough, might gain enough importance to be appreciated on its own terms and perhaps even be freed from its frame again.
‘The viewer will see her own image mixed in with this story, and any future photographic documentation is likely to include the reflection of its maker. Appositionally, a framed poster that has been sandblasted, obscuring the image and exposing the frame, has become a thing in itself, no longer a representation, and will never again reflect anything.’ — Nina Beier
Let’s start with the basics—your work is so materially diverse. If someone asks you what you make, how do you answer?
Nina Beier: [laughing] Only in America do I get this question! I usually say that my work is conceptually based and takes any form except painting…but I guess that’s not even true anymore. I am wary of self-mediation though, because conceptually conceived work is already far too self-conscious. The art needs to work as a project: to read, to misinterpret, to reinterpret, that’s how you get closer to the idea of a show.
You’ve made some projects that have the possibility of being unfinished forever. How do you resolve to stay unresolved?
NB: My process is coming from a direct frustration—as artists we want to explore something that is alive, but normally in the art system the work is supposed to have a final destination, and it freezes. On the issue of staying unresolved, I guess I am not the first artist to struggle with fitting a living and changing practice into a framework that demands final answers.
So what is your process?
NB: All the things that are completely unbearable about the system, that’s what I want to work with. The artwork is autonomous despite the attempt to claim its rights. When I look at my existing work it is not uncommon that something has changed since it was made; it could be its context, itself or even me. I respect the authority of the [extant] work, but I like to believe that mine trumps it. I should have the freedom to change it. For example, I’ll change a title if I don’t think it’s fitting anymore.
You’ve been quoted as having read the theories of Walter Benjamin and Roger Caillois. Do you think of your work as theory-driven?
NB: I read, but not conscientiously, I have to admit. I use writing for inspiration and I rudely mix and match to make it fit my current thinking. But I would hate to think that my work would be an illustration of any theory.
Do you feel you are playing a game with the audience?
NB: No, a game would imply that I have a master perspective and I don’t want to claim that. My work tends to be built on some more or less logical premise, but it would be really sad if it ended there. I try to start something and there is nothing better than when it is taken on the route of over-interpretation, an attack of the mind, like the incredible places that these guys’ minds can go. It’s what any work of art would wish for.
___ Show
On the Uses and Disadvantages of Wet Paint (2010)
Traffic (2023) Fibreglass elephant slide, black slate
Nina Beier with Marie Lund History Makes a Young Man Old, 2008/2010 A crystal ball rolled on the ground from the place where it was purchased to its final destination
Tragedy (2012) Trained dog, Persian rug
[NO EYES DRY] (2016) Robotic Massage Chairs, Precious and Noble Metals from Electronic Waste, Dental Industry and Various Currencies
Sweat No Sweat No Sweat No Sweat No Sweat (2013)
Shelving for Unlocked Matter and Open Problems (2010)
Wallet (2014) turtle shell, woman/man and kid cotton underwear
Curly maroon fade pixie (2015) Short Crop Swoopy Bangs (2015) Layered Side-Swept Ombre (2015) Human hair wig, painted frame, framed 64.8 x 41.9 cm
Nina Beier with Marie Lund The Collection (2008)
The Blues (2012) Sun-faded posters, window glass, frames
Automobile (2018) remote control car, human hair
Nina Beier and Bob Kil Field Trip (2023) Continuous rows of flowers in identical pots arranged in grids, creating pathways for visitors to navigate, and ultimately hosting a choreography.
Untitled (2008) Woman’s wig, Persian rug, sheet of glass
Plunge (2015) Broom, coins, resin and glass head
Untitled (2014)
Untitled (2014)
Untitled (2014)
Beast (2018) two motorised rodeo bulls repeatedly perform their act of resistance
Tunnel Taken Apart (2010)
The Pockets (2012)
Women and Children (2022)
Nina Beier with Marie Lund New Novels, New Men (Jealousy, Jalousi, La Celosia, La Gelosia, Die Jalousie oder Die Eifersucht) (2009)
Liquid Assets (2013) plastic, 3D modeling
Allegory of Charity (2015) ceramic cups, coffee beans, resin, wood, metal
Nina Beier with Marie Lund The House and the Backdoor (2007)
Nina Beier with John Miller A True Mirror (2018)
*
p.s. Hey. ** Steeqhen, I don’t think there’s any question that nicotine is nice for the brain. It’s just whether you’re willing to sacrifice the lungs. Yeah, Homes’s characters in that period of his novels are just iconography basically. ** Charalampos, Hey there. I would be shocked if whoever reprints ‘Shy’ uses the original cover, both because such things almost never happen and because, for me at least, that cover is kind of blah. I personally would read ‘Jack the Modernist’ first. I’ve had many, many writing ideas that I was never able to pull off, if that helps. Some seemingly good ideas are just way stations. Hi back from clouded over, more chilly than not Paris. ** James Bennett, Cool, ‘Slow Death’ is really fun, I think. Happy that your respite is resplendent. Great about the open mic gig. The writer scene that Adem is involved in is full of very cool people, or at least the ones I know of or have met. His ex-bf Alex, who’s also involved in the press, is a good friend of mine and really great and very talented. I’m about to start Kate’s book, and I’m super looking forward to that. Your assessment of ‘Nocturnes for the King of Naples’ makes a lot of sense. Ed ‘flexing his acquired old-world sophistication to impress people’ is a problem in much of his writing, I think. I’m good, still mostly working on film stuff. Paris is hanging on to springtime, weatherise, which is a joy for a heat-hater like myself. Love back, me. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, that was really sweet. Absolutely, 100% on queer filmmakers wanting to keep reiterating identity struggles and triumphs. Same with gay fiction writers. There’s a never-ending smallish, devoted audience for that, obviously, and more power to them, but I don’t quite get why people get so stuck on that first act of self-recognition and empowerment. Life is personal and rich. I want to laugh like a dog munching in her sleep. Hmmmmm. Love wondering if he would totally freak out if he took LSD and looked in an owl’s eyes, G. ** Misanthrope, Not so entirely weird. You’re the James Joyce of the Style Guide. ** Alistair, Hi. Well, should commenting here daily provide any internal positivity whatsoever to you know it’s nothing but a pleasure for me. The Backxwash album is pretty solid. Thanks! ** scunnard, Hi, pal. Okay, excellent, let me pass that along. Everyone, The following italicised chunk of text might look dauntingly long, but don’t skimp on your reading of it because it announces something exciting that you might well be very interested in. It’s from scunnard, and here he goes: ‘Here’s the blurb for Soft Territories I’ve been putting together. If anyone here is interested in being part of it, that’d be great, maybe just have them mention they’re from here in their application text in case I don’t recognize the name. This showcase will be the first installment/show of the project. // We’re launching a new ongoing series—Soft Territories—through Pup and Tiger, a queer-run art space in Canterbury, UK. This evolving project offers a platform for interviews, showcases, and creative conversations with artists. It focuses on queer and underrepresented voices. // The term Soft Territories evokes spaces that are porous, shifting, and open to redefinition. We want to explore how artists shape or inhabit these spaces. They might do this through memory, identity, practice, resistance, care, or play. In a world that urgently needs this kind of work, these creative acts matter deeply. // Through this series, we invite you to explore the edges and overlaps—imagined geographies, creative rituals, experimental forms, and the spaces we build to survive and thrive. These are the kinds of spaces where we can reimagine the world we want to live in. How to apply: https://pupandtiger.co.uk/soft-territories/‘. Thanks, J! ** _Black_Acrylic, That era of Stewart Homes’ work where he was sort of turning Richard Allen skinhead books into transgressive blasts is very good. There are about five of them, I think. I don’t know that Kevin Sampson book, I’ll check it out. Thanks, Ben. ** Carsten, It’s been a rough year for great lit. A lustrous self-off for the great Alice there, sir. As a fan, I feel soothed. Of course I rushed out to see the ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ restoration as soon as they screened it here, and, wow, night and day after having to watch that muddy, scratchy copy for decades. Thanks! ** Sypha, Hi. I didn’t know about that substack. I certainly take issue with a bunch of the Neo-Decadent screeds, but I’m always interested. And I’ll go see what you have to say. Everyone, Sypha aka the fine fiction scribe James Champagne is interviewed over on a new substack called Neo-Passéism put together be the Neo-Decadent writer gang, and go have a gander here. ** pancakeIan, Hi. Same era as ‘Trainspotting’ but much less colloquial. The Ring Cycle seemed like one of those gigantic, important things that I thought I would be aesthetically remiss if I didn’t experience it. Like reading ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. Although I doggedly refuse to read Proust. That’s where I draw the line. Thanks for reading ‘Ugly Man’. ‘The Ash Gray Proclamation’ is the title of a great song by my great artist/musical hero Robert Pollard, best known for his band Guided by Voices. Why I chose it for that, I don’t know, it just felt intuitively right. I liked the combination of ‘ash gray’ and ‘proclamation. I’m not sure I could parse its literal relationship to the story. I hope that lack of helpfulness stops the gnawing. ** HaRpEr //, Hey. Yeah, I mean, really, there is nothing more gratifying than when an artist you admire turns out to admire your work, even second hand like that. It really is kind of the ultimate reward. It always shocks me. There’s a point with readings where you just have to get pragmatic about it and imagine that fate is a real thing and just try to be curious about how it’ll go kind of objectively. Not all that easy to do, of course. Sorry about the job rejections. I guess just try to keep in mind how subjective and impersonal those decisions almost always are. ** Steve, Yes, I still read Stewart’s books. He has a new book about the fascist yoga cult that I haven’t read yet. His son, oh, I forgot he had a son. That film didn’t exactly infiltrate me. Enjoy the Muratova films! ** julian, I think you won’t be sorry to have read ‘Autoportrait’. I feel pretty confident in guessing that. Yeah, just reserve part of your brain as a hothouse and keep imagining what you want to write and letting it evolve however it does until you have the place and wherewithal to spill it. That’s what I do, at least. The working it out mentally is almost the most important part maybe. It’s so helpful, obviously, to have writer/artist comrades around you. So that sounds great. No, the Xiu Xiu thing was our only music video. After the mess of that, I think we’re kind of wary of making something that we can’t completely control ourselves again. ‘RT’ is currently submitted to two festivals in Chicago, so, if one of them takes it, that’ll happen. If not, we want to show the film there — Zac went to university in Chicago — so we’ll figure something. We’d love to show the film in San Diego, but I don’t think we know how or where we could do that. If you know/hear of any possibly receptive venue there, let me know. And I’ll do a search. The film is still very early on its life. ** Okay. I filled my non-existent yet accessible galerie with a show by the wonderful Nina Beier today that I recommend you check out, duh. See you tomorrow.
‘[Stewart] Home masters his materials without falling foul of style slavery. This crucial distinction between the poet and the prose writer is made by Hazlitt. Immediacy, suddenness and excitement are the thing, as Hazlitt writes in his essay “The Fight”: “There was little cautious sparring, no half hits, no tapping and trifling, none of the petit maitreship of the art–they were almost all knock-down blows.’ Home aims to write with the same effect. He aims to wind up his readers, wants to imagine them reacting, gives them things that they have to grapple with. To write in a style that is punchy and unambiguous, he jumps about like a real voice, creates the urgent noise of the insolent street-wise wise-cracker, the throughput of the nabbed street blagger faced by the heavy fist of the plod.
‘His use of deceit and plagiarism is a light-hearted prank, a thrust against the fetish of originality and genius that he sees as being part of the structure of modern notions of art, especially perhaps in fiction writing that draws attention to the power of such ideas. Similarly, the use of shared names, such as Karen Elliot, Luthor Blissett, Monty Cantsin are equally prankster routines designed to reveal modern art’s need for the genius. The unsettling of these ideas–of drawing attention to the fact that ‘Art’ is structured around concepts of genius, of originality, of creativity by producing things that look like art but don’t involve them–is of course what these routines are about. But such work can have surprisingly violent effects and what is interesting about Home is the way he continues to direct his writing through the present age and its canonical authors, philosophers and artists towards a different kind of future.
‘Home’s is a prose that works against the Eliotic idea of “A people without history/Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments’ (Eliot “Little Gidding”). In a fascinating essay, Malcolm Bull writes that for Eliot “The equation of ending, apocalypse and fiction is founded on the assumption that ‘an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning’”. He goes on to assert that, contrary to Eliot, “human time is not made out of chronological time but is, as in Ecclesiastes, ‘a time for this and a time for that.’ Such times are defined by their purpose rather than their ending”. Home is not working to bring about apocalypse. Rather he is the grub-street hack, keeping to the purpose of the time, which is oppositional, disaffected and class conscious . The fertility of Home is that of overworked, pressurised thinking action, a sharp, sweet imagination without a trace of bigotry, intolerance, or exclusivity in its thrust and amplifications.
‘If Eliotic cultural critics try to keep the republican imagination restrained within the literary canon, Home denounces the relativists while stating that “saying that all positions are not equal does not necessarily entail a defence of ‘canonical literature’”. His novels are more of the same; he plays around, he pranks, takes the piss, using signs that he knows will confuse, upset and outrage anyone with an interest (usually vested) in literature. As he writes in the same essay: “My ‘novel’ Slow Death, and a number of my other ‘works’, feature ‘characters’ who adhere to the fashions of the skinhead youth cult. . . . English reviewers often experience difficulty in distinguishing a ‘novelist’ from the ‘fictional’ characters that populate his or her books. . . . The notions I utilise–which include ‘skinheads’, ‘pornographic sex’, and ‘avant-gardism’–should not be viewed as arbitrary but as self-contained signs. Everything done with these signs immediately affects what they are supposed to represent”.
‘The eighteen volume skinhead Bildungsroman written by James Moffatt under the name of Richard Allen and published by the New English Library in the seventies have long been the disreputable bastard father of Home. Clearly, the interest generated by these books for Home works through several of the concerns Home has been investigating and critiquing over the last two decades. The disreputable nature of these pulp trash volumes is clearly attractive to anyone wanting to cause maximum offence to lovers of art writing, those who would assert that they read literature. James Moffatt/Richard Allen is an example of a writer who doesn’t write literature. It’s against this kind of division that Home is warring. Writing as art, transmitting the eternal, universal load of the author’s genius to his/her adoring bourgeois public, is the kind of totalitarian ideology from which Home is dissenting.
‘The subject matter as well as the style of these books also attracts Home. Violence is a key motif in all the novels, but it isn’t just the violence of the soccer hooligan but a violence which extends into the realms of society and sex. Home writes of it as, in an interesting essay “Gender Sexuality and Control: Richard Allen Reconsidered”: “. . . a violence with a dualistic nature. It is simultaneously mechanical and mystical. It is beyond the control of those who vent it, but it is destined to be neutralised by some outside authority, usually the police, at the conclusion of the story. . . .”.
‘Home is clearly not endorsing the sexism and racism of the tropes in the Moffatt oeuvre, indeed he is explicitly rejecting them, both in the context of essays and his own novels. One way of reading Home’s novels is in relation to the Ur-texts of Moffatt. Home is weeding out in his own works those elements of Moffatt which he finds objectionable whilst holding on to and developing those elements which he finds worthy and constructive. So we find him writing that “The heterosexist manner in which Allen depicts adolescent sexuality IS objectionable, but the fact that such sexuality gets depicted at all IS worthy of note”. He also argues that because the majority of people reading these novels when they came out were aged between the ages of eleven to sixteen the books’ presentation of conflicts with parental authority were of great value. The presentation of deviant values, as a reaction to the failures of do-gooder liberal authority figures such as social workers, teachers and psychiatrists results in a violent, hetrosexualised primitivism and a counter-cultural undercurrent that gives the books their pulse. The reactionary nature of Moffatt’s ideological beliefs–his characters are always looking for an authority figure, or some totalitarian tradition to take them in hand–veers very close to being explicitly fascist. These are not the manoeuvrings of some Swiftian satirical imagination: he believed in the stupid stuff. For Home, that “belief” is the enemy. But Moffatt’s racy pulp style is undersigned by a detonated, sincere prose and vernacular eloquence. Its fast, energetic readability and the sense of closure attracts Home. They cut against the modern artist’s scandalous use of ambiguity and openness which, for Home, are signs of double-think, an inability to communicate, a fetishisation of “difficulty” designed to keep out all but the initiated middle-classes!
‘What collides in Home’s fiction is the brutal efficiency of the pulp prose of Moffatt and the class-conscious sophistication of his own dissenting imagination. The racist, homophobic, sexist, right-wing hierarchical energies of Moffatt are transformed into more socially decent tropes but the style retains its peculiarly angular, knuckly swiftness. Characterisation and the inner life are ejected. Plagiarising Moffatt’s books and others, cutting in passages of Schopenhauer, what Home produces is something jumped-up, negligent, seriously funny and funnily serious:
“’You’ll never defeat me,’ Smith spat. ‘You don’t even have a theoretical grasp of how to apply the hammer-blow of putsch, let alone the ability to attempt a practical realisation of this deadly tactic. I’m expelling the pair of you from Cockney Nation. And be warned, I’ll have you hanged on the day I lead the glorious forces of nationalism to victory. You’re just a pair of loonies. Launching an independence movement to liberate Newham is gonna make you a laughing-stock among sincere patriots.’ ‘Fuck off!’ Pat swore as he slammed down his receiver. Brian was exhilarated by this clash of wills. He was rightly proud of the ease with which he’d put down the opposition. . . .”.
‘The comedy comes from the brute jamming of the cliched, lefty prose into the mouths of the two speakers. Its deadpan anti-naturalism gives Home the chance to make fun of his character types, but also takes a pot shot at the expectations of the dedicated follower of literature. Every feature of the writing is pulled into the joke, including the imagined reader.’ — Richard Marshall
An evening with Stewart Home – featuring Anna Secret Poet
Stewart Home – Destroy the Family
Red London by Stewart Home
Reading From A Headstand – Stewart Home Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie
_____ Interview
Alexander Laurence: How did you get started?
Stewart Home: I was born in London. That is where I’ve always done things. I really got started with punk rock in the 70’s and I was in some terrible ska and punk bands. The ska band was called The Molotovs, which was a strange name, but the lead singer was in a horrendous Trotskyite party, so we had to put up with all these atrocious lyrics. I was in a few punk bands that were like The Stooges with obscene lyrics.
AL: Could you describe your book Red London?
SH: Basically what a lot of my fiction does is it draws on pulp fiction writing from Britain in the 70’s, particularly youth culture fiction about skinheads and Hells Angels. I’m also influenced by Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane, the hard-boiled detective novel, or even going back to future war novels, science fiction, and fantasy. I draw on that material and try critically to deconstruct it. I take a lot of sentences out of other people’s books and I repeat them endlessly through the work around the narrative structure. Also when you write a book, you need about 60 thousand words. Raymond Chandler says “If you run out of ideas, have someone come through the door with a gun.” All I do is have a sex scene every other page, and every sex scene is identical. That’s half the book before you’re even started.
AL: You were there during the original British punk movement. What do you think of the idea of The Sex Pistols having something to do with Situationism, and The Clash having something to do with Leftist Marxist politics?
SH: It’s rubbish. Joe Strummer would wear a “Red Army Faction” t-shirt or something. If you actually listen to The Clash’s lyrics, you can’t place them in any political ideology. It’s just vague dissatisfaction. I love those song lyrics on the first album. People took it as being left wing, but I don’t think it was anything. It’s symbolic and rhetorical. It doesn’t have any depth, but that’s what I like about it. Mick Jones was from a middle class background, but Strummer went to a private school. His father was a diplomat. As far as The Sex Pistols: they just wanted to be a rock and roll band. They didn’t have anything to do with Situationism. I know Jamie Reid who did all the artwork. When you see Rotten talk these days he’s pretty inarticulate. He’s read all this pretentious rubbish about himself and he tries to reproduce it, and he sounds absurd doing it because he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. The way they connected it back to the Situationists was Jamie Reid, and I asked him, and he said that he was never a member of King Mob. King Mob contained several members who were in the British part of the Situationist International. If you read the SI journal, it says that King Mob are not Situationists. All these people want to build up Situationism by saying it had a huge influence on punk. It’s rubbish. The real influence on punk was the harder edge of the sixties. Punk was anti-sixties and anti-flower power, and it drew on the harder edge of the sixties like the yuppies and the Black Panthers. Another influence was the free festivals in Europe and people like The Pink Fairies. They aren’t punk but they were playing songs like “City Kids” and “Waiting For The Man” with tough English accents. One of The Pink Fairies played with Cook and Jones in The Professionals. All the people who were the sound crew and the roadies for The Sex Pistols were from the free festival. That was the most obvious influence.
AL: What do you think of the several anarchist movements so far?
SH: There is an anarchist scene that doesn’t conform to a dictionary definition. It’s this idea of “Are you anti-authoritarian or what are you?” I have problems with any utopian belief. I don’t want to travel to the future that has already been mapped out for me. I want to free up the present. I have problems with post-modernism too. I don’t want to throw away the idea of progress. When I use the notion of progress, I don’t use it in a 19th century absolutist term. I use it as a heuristic device. The idea of the future should be a way to organize the present. I don’t want to know exactly what the future is going to be, but I like a more Sorelian idea. You know, Georges Sorel? I find his ideas very useful. New culture and progress comes out of miscegenation. They don’t come from nowhere.
AL: As far as your book, The Assault On Culture, your art writings and manifestos: how did you get interested in this stuff?
SH: What happened was when I was in school all I wanted to do was to be involved in music, but I wasn’t so good a guitar player. I did a punk fanzine and I was in a band. By 1980, there wasn’t that much happening that I was interested in, musically. By 1982, I got bored of doing fanzines, and I had quit the band I was in. I was bored in the music scene. So I was looking to do something interesting. What I learned from punk rock was I could play an instrument without knowing anything about it. I went to many art exhibits, and I remember one at the ICA in London. I looked at it and thought “This is really lousy. I could do better than this.”
AL: What was it?
SH: It was an exhibition of fake advertising stuff. It was parodies of advertising posters. I thought that it wasn’t a very interesting insight because you can look at Modernist paintings and say “A three year old can do it.” That might be true. That’s banal. What I was interested in was not the fact that I could do it, but how could I get something on a wall in a gallery. I wondered “How does one become an artist?” I have the opposite position of Baudrillard, who says what’s real becomes simulated. My position is what’s simulated becomes real. That’s my Hegelianism: I just want to reverse everything. Or is that Satanism? I became a musician of sorts, or a non-musician, without knowing anything beforehand; maybe I could become an artist? I started advertising myself as an artist. I started taking out classified ads. Doing leaflets saying “Now, I’m an artist.”
AL: Were you writing stories at this time too?
SH: At the same time I started writing this basically banal poetry. All these people in rock bands were getting into poetry and experimental music, which was really awful. At the same time, there was a poetry revival. All these terrible poets get up on stage and reading. People that you had never heard of to people like Ann Clark. They would read about how depressed they were living on the 29th floor of a towerblock and had been burglarized sixty times. I thought that it was dull. So I’d go up there and do these really banal poems about fruit and vegetables, and they’d all be three lines long. I was really into banality for a few years. I had this notion to do plagiarism, not coming through post-modernism because I didn’t know anything about it. It had to do with all these horrible poets talking about being original. My attitude was “Fuck you, if you’re going to be original, I’m going to be unoriginal.” I got into plagiarism, and that was reinforced by reading Lautreamont.
AL: The idea for the Art Strike came in 1985. How did you prepare for that?
SH: I had done Generation Positive, then got involved with the Neoists for a year. I broke with them and at the same time I found out that Gustav Metzger was involved with auto-destructive art in London in the sixties. He ran the “Destruction of Art Symposium” in London in 1966. He announced the original art strike in an ICA catalogue in 1974; it was to run from 1977 to 1980. I thought it was a good idea and wondered why I had never heard of it. His point was the commodification of art. He wanted to close down the galleries but it didn’t work because no one else participated. (Actually I met him for the first time a few weeks ago.) I thought it was a good idea but no one had done anything with it. I took his original text and substituted the years 1990-93. I worked on developing the idea. For years it didn’t get any reaction. By 1989, some momentum was built up, and a lot of people got interested. Through the underground press, it really took off in Britain and America, and especially in San Francisco. At the festival of plagiarism, we had a pamphlet called “Plagiarism, Marxism, Commodities, and Strategies of Its Negation” because it sounded like a good title. But the people in San Francisco took it very literally. “Yeah, I’m really pissed off with my art being commodified!” Doesn’t look like it’s being commodified very well to me. I was much more interested in the ideological function of art. Why corporations sponsor art, how they use it as justifications for their activities, how upper class people use their acquisition of art or high cultural discourse as being superior to other people who might like Oi music or punk rock. It wasn’t realistic to try and get art galleries to close down, until 1992 when art sales dropped 60%. Some people say that my timing was fortuitous, but how in the hell in 1985 would I know that in the middle of the Art Strike everything would start collapsing anyway. In actual fact, it was the psychological effect of my propaganda that did it. There was a recession as well.
AL: In Red London, your descriptions of the sex scenes are sort of a parody. What was that about?
SH: I liked creating an absurd language when it came to describing sex–when you describe their bodies, you just talk about the bulk and you get all these interchangeable words. In the 70’s pulp fiction there was a weird idea of sexuality: on the one hand, it was very natural, and on the other hand people became automatons when they were doing it. They’d lose control of their bodies. There would be odd references to genetics. So I wanted to use that and really push it. It was like taking the idea of pulp and deconstructing it. A lot of people read Red London in relation to books about 70’s youth culture and skinheads. Books by Richard Allen and H. P. Lovecraft. In Lovecraft, there’s an anarchist book and if you read it, you’re driven crazy and you kill the first rich person you see. It’s absurd. I don’t write autobiography, but I know that people will read my books as autobiography. So I lay red herrings, so they get a fucked up idea of what I’m really like. The reader always plays a productive role.
_____________ Introduction to the French edition by Stewart Home
Shortly before his death Roland Barthes complained that in a good many of the doctoral theses he was directing, ideology was denounced with a discourse that was itself ideological. Barthes understated his case, academia has always (re)produced dominant ideologies, and one does not have to call to mind the spectres of Martin Heidegger or Paul de Man to bring this banality into focus. Despite endless hot air about ‘absolute’ relativism, there are fortunately very few ‘scholars’ prepared to defend all political, theoretical and social discourses as being of equal worth. Today, it is a cliche to state that ‘textual’ critiques of the ‘novel’ are ideological. Thus while the meanings of texts are not fixed, those who make a particular reading of a ‘work’ have to live with the consequences the reading they choose to make. Likewise, saying that all positions are not equal does not necessarily entail a defence of ‘canonical literature’. Indeed, I explicitly reject nineteenth-century notions of ‘literary depth’ and ‘characterisation’.
My ‘novel’ Slow Death, and a number of my other ‘works’, feature ‘characters’ who adhere to the fashions of the skinhead youth cult. English reviewers often experience difficulty in distinguishing a ‘novelist’ from the fictional ‘characters’ that populate his or her books. I am often asked if I am a skinhead. If someone in their mid-thirties who makes their living as a writer is likely to adhere to a youth cult, then yes, I am a skinhead. If someone who drinks Laphroaig Islay Single Malt Scotch is likely to adhere to a youth cult, then yes, I am a skinhead. If someone who enjoys reading Marx and Hegel is likely to adhere to a youth cult, then yes, I am a skinhead. What I can state without equivocation is that as someone who views himself as middle-aged, I can see no reason why I would want to identify with youth culture.
As is well known, skinhead-style can be traced back through both the English mod and the Jamaican rude boy cultures of the sixties. Until at least the mid-seventies, all skinheads danced to ska, reggae and soul music. However, despite being conjured up by the promiscuous forces of multicultural becoming, skinheads have at times been associated with both racism and fascism. During the eighties, members of groups like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice regularly denounced bald-headed bigots for both their nazism and their consumption of ‘hairy’ heavy metal music. While a small minority of skinheads joined Leninist organisations such as Red Action, the vast majority had little interest or involvement in politics of any kind.
With the growth of raves and the subsequent explosion of techno music, skinhead culture isn’t of much interest to the ‘average’ British teenager of the nineteen-nineties. Instead, the skinhead look has been appropriated by gay men. If you want to see a large gathering of skinheads in London today, your best bet is to go to a gay club. In the UK, the popular perception of skinheads has undergone a series of very distinct developments, and these days the look tends to be associated with the gay subculture. Since this book, like everything else, is a self-conscious construction, there was no overarching need to chronicle the gay skinhead scene. The notions I utilise – which include ‘skinheads’, ‘pornographic sex’ and ‘avant-gardism’ – should not be viewed as arbitrary but as self-contained signs. Everything done with these signs immediately effects what they are supposed to represent. When all is said and done, nothing remains but an immense web of reading and writing, folding, unfolding and refolding indefinitely.
__ Book
Stewart Home Slow Death High Risk Books
‘In between shagging his doctor and liberating his girlfriend from the Socialist Workers Party, skinhead Johnny Aggro takes on the art establishment. As the poseurs of the art world rush to produce ever more creative piles of crap in the name of art, Johnny revels in the chaos of comic violence and sleazy sex.’ — Serpents Tail
‘Hilarious mix of art world satire and plagiarism of antique English porn and street punk fiction. Home realises that the leading characteristic of pulp fiction is repetition, and he just perfects the method, with highly amusing results. The book is populated with fictional versions of some of Home’s own ‘real-world’ avant garde provocations, although with Home one is never sure what is original and what is a copy; what is ‘real’ and what is fiction.’ — Ken Wark
‘A dreary, noisy novel that recounts with visceral over enthusiasm the adventures of a gang of British skinheads in conflict with a sex-starved woman doctor, a London art star, and one another, as they explore the vicissitudes of Art and Resistance (sic)’ in a foulmouthed frontal assault on the avant-garde art scene. Its contempt for bourgeois values produces some agreeable inventions (Neoism, the Semiotic Liberation Front, and the Journal of Immaterial Art constitute decent throwaway gags at least), but its blood- and-sperm-soaked narrative and its characters’ continual entreaties for oral sex are muted, though scarcely redeemed, by what might in another context be called elegant variation (‘liquid genetics’, indeed). This is the kind of book that gives mindless violence and sexual degradation a bad name.’ — Kirkus Reviews
‘Relentlessly cliched and driven by a slippery sense of humour, Home’s deliberately bad writing does for the novel form what Viz does for the comic strip.’ — Times Literary Supplement
_____ Excerpts
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The Lark In The Park was largely patronised by the unwashed children of the upper middle classes. Some were students, others simply lived on an allowance from their family or inherited wealth, a few had jobs, although you’d never have guessed this from the state of their clothes. The Raiders were less than impressed by the hairy scum who frothed around the main stage and an assortment of beer tents.
‘Jesus,’ Rebel swore. ‘We’d need to be tooled up with flame-throwers if we were serious about cleaning up this mess!’
Johnny Aggro led his crew to the front of the stage. They shoved their way past hairies who were idiot-dancing, stomped on couples snogging in the grass and verbally abused many of the scum who were in desperate need of a bath.
‘Get your ‘air cut, you slithering piece of shit!’ Slim spat at a particularly obnoxious example of unwashed leather and denim.
‘Don’t oppress me with your fascist views man,’ the hippie warbled. ‘You should loosen up, relax, let everybody do their own thing!’
A punch on the nose sorted the hairy out. The bastard collapsed like a bellow that had been punctured by a pin, then proceeded to writhe in the dirt, clutching his bruised beak in a futile attempt to stem the torrent of blood that was pouring from it.
‘Ha, ha, ha!’ Slim laughed as he booted the cunt in the ribs.
‘The next song is from the new album,’ lead singer Sebastian Sidgwick announced. ‘It’s called A Dialogue In Hell Between Rimbaud And John Dee.’
‘Let’s do ’em!’ Johnny Aggro shouted to his crew as the band strummed the opening bars of the number.
The Raiders leapt on to the stage and split seconds later Hodges grabbed a mike stand and slammed it into Sidgwick’s face. The singer reeled backwards into the drum kit, blood pouring from his mouth. Rebel took care of the bass player, while TK laid out the guitarist. Samson beat off two roadies who tried to rescue the band. Slim grabbed a microphone and shoved it at Rebel’s mouth. Each skinhead knew what was expected of him.
This abuse raised a few of the neanderthals from their lethargy. Some bottles were thrown at the stage, one hit Rebel, shattering against his temple. However, the skinhead didn’t so much as take a step backwards. He just stood his ground and glowered at the hairies as blood poured down his face. The rest of the gang got behind one of the PA stacks and kicked at the speakers until they toppled over, breaking the leg of a hippie whi hadn’t moved fast enough to escape injury as the sound system fell. Seconds later, Johnny caught a glimpse of the old bill running towards the stage. He shouted instructions and the Raiders split, successfully evading Met clutches.
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p.s. RIP the great poet Alice Notley. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks. And thanks for the techno + low psychedelia tip. The premise creates hunger. ** Steeqhen, I’m tempted to starve and exert myself simultaneously, but maybe not. I had the caretaker gene for a long time. Had to go into therapy ages ago to level it out into just being nice and thoughtful. As I’ve said, I’ve never seen a fraction of a second of ‘Doctor Who’ so an update is concrete poetry to me. The nicotine patch is pretty good. That’s what I use on planes without much suffering, and the two times I quit smoking lengthily and successfully the patch was what I owed that to. ** Misanthrope, Permanent damage, that’s kinky. You make me almost want to get a look at this Style Guide. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I’m so glad you like Um, Jennifer? They’re wonderful. I posted a link to the gig on Instagram, and one of Um, Jennifer? member’s mother wrote me a note thanking me, which was so sweet. Yeah, the hope is that people will be excited to see a film that isn’t about gay coming of age or the difficulties of being queer in a non-receptive context because that’s kind of what almost every other film in the festival seems to be about. Love is saving you a seat. Love pretending to feel grateful to whoever wrote this song about him, G. ** Carsten, Well, I think you know I do. I haven’t watched ‘Last Tango’ since it was released having assumed that what you just stated would be true. ** scunnard, Hi. I’ve been perfectly fine, I think. Consider this response an all-access pass. And you can even add a rider of your choice. Would I be up for an artist showcase day concocted by you? Well, naturally. Hit me up with that, and thanks, buddy. ** Sypha, Mr. Champagne! To what do I owe this rare visitation? Oh, wait, the music, of course. Or the appearance of music at least. Is that the cover with the giant lawn dwarf-y looking guy on the cover? I sat through ‘The Ring’ live once. And I wasn’t sorry whatsoever, but I’m not sure if that would have been the case if I’d closed my eyes. ** Steve, Glad there were some hits in there for you. Katzeye’s ‘Gnarly’: I’ll cue that up the second I push the launch post button. I can’t say that I remember ‘Forest Gump’ very well, but what would Chalamet play? Oh, wait, the younger Gump, right? Am I right? ** PancakeIan, Yay, I’m happy that my curation broke through your usual symphonies soundtrack. Since I think at that age I only knew Walt Disney from ‘The Wonderful World of Disney’ or whatever that TV show was called, I probably would have asked him about that. Well, I watched ‘Sailor Who Fell From Grace’ back whenever it came out precisely because someone told me about that ending, of course, haha. I remember it being a bit of a slog to get there. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns. Oh, wow, I’m so thrilled that you like ‘RT’ so much. That’s really gratifying to hear. Thank you! Yeah, I think it’s Zac’s and my best film. Ange is great. He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s been acting since he was a kid. Michel Gondry discovered him, and he was the star of the Gondry film ‘Microbe et Gasoil’ when he was 12. Yes, super excited to show the film in Stockholm and get to meet you! I hope we can set something up really soon. The Xiu Xiu song was ‘Wondering’. It’s on the album ‘Forget’. Thank you, thank you, my friend. Yes, exciting to be writing the next film. I can’t say much about it yet, but it’s going to be really good, I think. xoxo. ** HaRpEr //, Really really sad about Alice Notley. She’s an astounding poet. She lived here in Paris for the past 30 years, I think. I ran into her at readings and bookstores once in a while. Yeah, I mean, how many genius level masters and conceptual artists of the pop music form aka ABBAs are there in the world? I could probably count them on half of my hand. I was telling Dominik that Um, Jennifer? mastermind Eli’s mom wrote me a thank you message on Instagram and said Eli really likes my work, which of course blew my mind. I’ll check out that YHWH Nailgun, thanks. ** julian, ‘Autoportrait’ is kind of the blueprint for a lot of the more interesting new autofiction, I think. It is overwhelming about the infinity of books, especially new ones for me since there’s just a never ending flow of really good new adventurous fiction coming out of the US especially. ‘A mix of the things I want to happen and things I’m scared of happening’: That sounds completely ideal, no? For me at least, that pretty much describes what I’m always looking for. Your description of what you’re working on or hoping to work on is very, very interesting and intriguing. Go for it, stay confident. The Xiu Xiu song that we made the rejected mv for is ‘Wondering’ on the album ‘Forget’. ** Right. Today I restore the spotlight that was originally aimed years ago at possibly my favorite Stewart Home novel, or at least my favorite amongst his early novels. Do have at it. See you tomorrow.
Stewart Home Slow Death
Now available in North America 