Discusses Art Strike of 1990-1993 and reproduces Neoist manifestos. tewart Home (born 1962, London) is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love (2005), and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red London, No Pity, Cunt, and Defiant Pose that 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of 1970s British skinhead pulp novel writer Richard Allen and combine it with pornography, political agit-prop, and historical references to punk rock and avant-garde art.Wikipedia: "From 1982 to 1984, Home operated as a one-person-movement "Generation Positive", and having already founded a punk band called White Colours (named after an experimental novel by R. D. Reeve) in 1980, he started a new group with the same name in 1982. He also published an art fanzine SMILE, the name of which was a play on the Mail Art zines FILE and VILE (which in turn parodied the graphic design of LIFE magazine). The concept was that many other bands in the world should call themselves White Colours, and many other underground periodicals should call themselves SMILE, too. Home's early SMILE magazines mostly contained art manifestos for the "Generation Positive", which in their rhetoric resembled those of 1920s Berlin Dadaist manifestos.In April 1984, Home got in touch with the originally American subcultural artistic network of Neoism, and participated in the eighth Neoist Apartment Festival in London. Since Neoism operated with multiple identities, too, and called upon all its participants to adopt the name Monty Cantsin, Home decided to give up the "Generation Positive" in favor of Neoism, and make SMILE and White Colours part of Neoism as well. According to Florian Cramer (who didn't come into contact with Neoism until the late eighties) one year later, Home took a sleep-deprivation prank played with him at a Neoist Festival in Italy as the reason to declare his split from Neoism; Home insists he decided to break with Neosim before going to Italy. Shortly before, a conflict between him and Neoism founder Istvan Kantor had escalated and led to their alienation.Home's SMILE no 8, which appeared in 1985, reflected the split with Neoism by proposing a "Praxis" movement to replace Neoism, with Karen Eliot as its new multiple name. This and the following three SMILE issues otherwise featured an eclectic mixture of manifesto-style writing, political reflections on radical left-wing anti-art movements from the Lettrist International, the Situationists, Fluxus, Mail Art, invididuals such as Gustav Metzger and Henry Flynt, and short parodistic skinhead pulp prose in the style of his then unwritten early novels. One of these stories, 'Straight' (later included in Home's 'No Pity' anthology) introduced and immediately killed off a character called Michael K, a 'situationist artist'. That 'character' would subsequently slowly evolve into a plagiaristic and enigmatic project and persona persisting into the present and carrying much of the signature of Home's eighties concepts into the nineties and beyond, even when he himself appeared to move on to subsequent interests and concerns. Many texts included in Home's SMILE (and Michael K's later 'KATHEDRAL-MAGAZINE OF MULTIPLE ORIGINS') issues plagiarised other, especially Situationist, writing, simply replacing terms like "spectacle" with "glamour". At the same time Home was involved in a series of collective installations including "Ruins of Glamour" (Chisenhale Studios, London 1986), "Desire In Ruins" (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow 1987), "Refuse" (Galleriet Laderfabriken, Malmo 1988) and "Anon" (33 Arts Centre, Luton 1989) which generated serious art world interest and art publication reviews and even coverage in British newspapers such as "The Observer" and "Independent". Those Home worked closely with on these shows included Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks (collectively known as Art In Ruins), Ed Baxter and Stefan Szczelkun.Following on from this and drawing on 1980s American appropriation art, Home's concept of plagiarism soon developed into a proposed movement and a series of "Festivals of Plagiarism" in 1988 and 1989, which themselves plagiarised the Neoist apartment festivals and 1960s Fluxus festivals. Home combined the plagiarism campaign with a call for an Art Strike between 1990 and 1993. Unlike earlier art-strike proposals such as that of Gustav Metzger in the 1970s, it was not intended as an opportunity for artists to seize control of the means of distributing their own work, but rather as an exercise in propaganda and psychic warfare aimed at smashing the entire art world rather than just the gallery system. The Art Strike campaign caused something of a rumpus in the contemporary London art world (Home got to talk about the Art Strike at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art and Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as on national BBC Radio arts programmes and London area television arts programmes), but was more seriously discussed in subcultural art networks, especially in Mail Art. Consequently, mail artists made up a reasonable proportion of the participants at the Festivals of Plagiarism, and Mail Art publications disseminated the Art Strike campaign." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.