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STEWART HOME: ARTIST-PROVOCATEUR

"What I aim for in my activities is an ambiguity on a par with that achieved by Machiavelli..."
- Stewart Home (NP&P, p.91).

"Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up."
- Wyndham Lewis ('The Code of a Herdsman', 1917)

NOVELIST, satirist and psychogeographer, self-confessed self-publicist, prankster and poseur, Stewart Home is the scourge of the pretentious, the ridiculous and those with no sense of irony. Using various media, Home delivers punches and kicks in all directions. Three recent books typify his activities and output.

Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (Codex 1995) sets out to dispel notions of avant-garde influence on the development of Punk Rock and to expose such notions as attempts by an academic elite to recuperate popular culture by intellectualising it.

Billed as 'an inside account of Punk Rock', Home illustrates the shifting boundaries of the genre and rejects formal definition to feel his way into the actual material, reaching the conclusion that the generally acclaimed apotheosis of Punk Rock, The Sex Pistols, were merely the producers of "novelty records" marketed by a big record label, and, therefore, at odds with Punk's true spirit! This annoyingly awkward argument nevertheless makes a serious point.

Home provokes the academically pretentious by subverting literary boundaries, lurching from the intellectual to streetwise conversational realism. His anecdotal 'I-was-there' riposte to academic recuperation at once affirms Punk Rock's attractions and downgrades its ideological significance.

Home's own analysis concentrates on the "four stages in the dialectical unfolding of ideological Punk Rock" including the Oi! subgenre whose exaggerated masculinity climaxed in its opposite.

To some extent Punk Rock is only a peg on which Home hangs a number of his key ideas. Home's postmodernist relativism is demonstrated by his acclamation that "There are no Platonic ideals or stable meanings" (p.14) and his fondness for creative tensions: "Besides, coherence is death, whereas living cultures are generated from the tensions generated around clusters of contradiction." (p.17).

But if Home annoys ideologues, he also upsets traditionalists: "...'intelligence' is active and knows that the culture we've inherited is something to be manipulated rather than passively consumed." (p.120).

Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis (AK Press 1995) deals with the avant-garde since Fluxus and Situationism, and consists of a collection of articles, manifestos, and lectures rather than a continuous narrative. The first section concerns Home's 'Art Strike', a subject already well-covered in his Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers (AK Press).

NP&P also demonstrates Home's anxiety to escape "...the bankrupt formulas of preceding generations." (p. 89). Amongst the satirical traps and hoaxes set for the unwary, Home has some serious points to make: "The Marxist-Leninist assertion that human society consists of an economic base and a cultural and political superstructure is utter nonsense; there is a dynamic interaction between economics, culture and politics...An analogous pattern of interaction exists between production consumption...Hence my concern to emphasise the productive role played by the audience in the cultural sphere."

Although influenced by Situationism, Home often attacks the late Guy Debord whose concept of the media as a monolithic, conditioning machine leads to the very passivity he decried.

Red London (AK Press 1995) impersonates the skinhead novels of Richard Allen and the stereotypical fantasies of porno mags. These themes are exaggerated and/or developed in bizarre directions, and augmented by streetwise references to fringe politics and the occult. Besides being funny, the material is both sadistically violent and sexually explicit, and not the sort of thing Home would want his children or servants to read.

Home also blurs the division between fantasy and reality. In Cranked Up Really High he pops at pop-culture guru Greil Marcus. In Red London we have plod Marcus O'Greil...Indeed, one imagines Home writing the two books simultaneously.

There are many parallels between Home's postmodernism and the early avant-garde including rejection of introspection and characterisation in favour of classical detachment, the preference for satire and irony, the use of ambiguity and obscurity, and arresting shifts of content and style - all of which brings us closer to the chaos of reality and calls into question the illusion of form and order assumed in the conventional rituals of the literary mainstream.

Rik - 5 December 1995

• THE STEWART HOME SOCIETY http://www.stewarthomesociety.org

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (Codex 1995)

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