'J G Ballard, a novelist who had little time for novels with rounded characters, unfurling plots and discernible structures, claimed to be more interested in something he called “invisible literature”. Office memoranda, press releases, market research reports, scientific abstracts, sex manuals: all these forms of writing, which so many of us either spend our lives producing or consuming, add up to an ambient archive that, Ballard believed, conveys in elliptical and fragmented fashion the ways in which capitalism, technology and sexuality collide to shape new forms of consciousness.
'Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie is also an anti-novel that travels through the murky terrain of invisible literature. Its author, admired by fellow awkward-squad members Iain Sinclair and Tom McCarthy, has produced an exhilaratingly squalid volume.
'It is almost wholly bereft of any conventional narrative arc and is best understood as a plunder-text cannibalising and reworking the language of emails, spam and pornographic discourse in the service of a mordant satire of the contemporary art world. It’s unlikely to get its author invited on Start the Week. And yet, while it’s crude, as childish as Viz, and may very well have been slung together over the course of a long weekend, it’s also as funny and as critically incisive a work of para-fiction as I’ve read for some time.
'The story, such as it is, involves an artist/transsexual foot fetishist called The Suicide Kid who wishes to put on a show entitled “Lederhosen Kamikaze Death Squat!” at London’s Museum of Modern Art. He’s in touch with an assistant curator there – known as The Time Server – whose email account gets hacked so that it spews out messages to members of the art world in which the names of prominent artists, adverts for penis-enlargement lotions and Nigerian insurance scams are all meshed together. Spam, bumptious and intrusive, is a form of outsider literature. It seeks to penetrate, for financial gain and often through the use of fantastical stories, the private and regulated space that email users wish to create for themselves.
'Spam is parasitic, knowing, obscene. Its appeal to Stewart Home, someone with a long history of producing witty texts that fuse radical politics with a belief in the aesthetics of plagiarism and “reappropriation”, comes as no surprise. However, his prose – often using the lapel-grabbing second-person form – is less philosophical than cheerfully puerile: section headings (to quote some of the less filthy ones) include “Sam Taylor (Gives You) Wood” and “Give Hanna Wilke the Time of her Life”.
'Home is savvy to the similarities between spam and today’s art world. Both are pushy, prone to jamming random words together, full of inflated claims. Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, part of the Semina imprint brought out by Book Works, a quietly influential London publishing house, is delightfully scurrilous and as spry as a cat-burglar: it deserves to transcend the invisible literature status of the fugitive writing it so effectively exploits.'-- Sukhdev Sandhu
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Stewart Home recites from BRofB from memory while standing on his head
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Further
Stewart Home Society
SH @ goodreads
SH @ Twitter
'Stewart Home: Proletarian Post-Modernism'
'The Assault on Greil Marcus: Open Letter to Stewart Home
'A Stewart Home Retrospective'
'WHISKEY A WHORE GALORE - 69 THINGS TO DO WITH STEWART HOME'
'50 Shades of Rape'
'Stewart Home's Portal'
'Stewart Home: Communism, Nihilism, Neoism, & Decadence'
'Pranking is Anarchy'
'Stewart Home – Diffusion Residency, Nov 2008-March 2009
'A life full of social interaction: Stewart Home'
'FEUDS: A POST-MODERN ART FORM'
'Launch of Harry Potter and the Quantum Time Bomb 'By' Stewart Home'
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Extras
Trailer: 'Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie'
STEWART HOME ON JEAN LUC GODARD
STEWART HOME ON ALEXANDER TROCCHI
Stewart Home Book Shredding Action
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Interview
from Art Ukraine Magazine
You haven't held a full time job in all your life it seems. Still you manage to make a living out of your passions. I'm really interested in the financial side of things. How did your income change during all your years as Stewart Home? Do you have advice for those aspiring to make a living out of well... trying to become an underground legend?
Stewart Home: Compared to cultural engineering, I would have made a little more money by sticking at the job I had when I left school at 16, that was working in a factory making bonded cork products, things like the floors of buses. That was a steady income even if it was less than spectacular. But I didn't like the job and only did it for a few months. Culture industry incomes fluctuate…. But you get perks such as paid trips around the world. The secret of not doing other jobs if you want to write or make films is to expect to make very little money and learn to live on a really low income. That way when you do make decent money from time to time you can really have fun with it. Income from cultural engineering is just totally impossible to predict because even if you knew what your book sales etc. around the world were going to be, you wouldn't know how currency rates were going to fluctuate, and it can be changes in exchange rates that give you a good or bad year. So the most important thing if you wanna be something like an 'underground legend' is to learn never to worry about money and know how to live cheap. It also helps if you are a highly successful bank robber or conman, but obviously if you're engaged in this kind of crime you're more likely to get away with it if you hide your wealth from the world, and pretend to be poor. Thus being a notorious cultural figure like me is very good cover for a top flight crook, people look at me and see an impoverished but industrious cultural engineer, and all the bank robberies and other criminal activity I may or may not be engaged in becomes invisible behind this smokescreen.
You are really skeptical about the concept of a "genius" in art and etc? What do you think the whole "someone is a genius" thing is all about (for the elites, for the masses, middle class?)
SH: Most people can do most things, but no one can do everything well. If you work at something you'll become better at it, and if you really work at it you'll become really good at it. The idea of 'genius' is just a way for culture industry hustlers to scare off the competition. No one is good at something when they start but if you can fool them into thinking they should be then they won't even try. The fallacious notion of genius is also a way of justifying the huge amounts of money made by a few culture industry celebrities, but remember most culture industry 'creatives' make very little money.
What was the worst and the best year financially for you?
SH: Discounting my 'purely' speculative proceeds from armed robbery, my best years financially are usually when I have one or more good artist in residence post – or a big grant from an arts funder. So I'm getting a salary on top of royalties from books etc. My best years from this – rather than bank jobs - were around 2006/7 when I was writer-in-residence at both Strathclyde University in Glasgow and Tate Modern in London, and I'd got a One To One Live Art Development Grant. My worst years were during the Art Strike 1990 to 1993, because rather than doing anything creative that made money I was simply signing on the dole, reading a lot of books and watching kung fu movies. The idea of the Art Strike was that I didn't engage in cultural production – however it didn't stop me engaging in theft, but I needed to sign on as unemployed in order to show the authorities where the money I was supporting myself upon came from.
The MEDIA (and then the Mass media) how important do you think they are in reinforcing/ subverting the notions of a nation, nationalism and identities in general?
SH: The news media is most usually organized along national lines, so it tends to reinforce national identity if you rely on a news source from the 'national' territory in which you are forced to live. I try to mix and match news sources, so I balance the English BBC against Al Jazeera, and the pro-USA CNN against the hilariously anti-American Russia Today. Unfortunately none of these sources are anti-capitalist, but you can find some more reasonable news coverage online.
New avant-garde? What would you call that, at the moment?
SH: Reversing into the future! That said, some current Russian and Ukrainian anti-art collectives such as VOINA crack me up. Mostly what VOINA do looks joyous; however, the group sex action at the State Biological Museum looked a bit rushed and under stress, but was an internet hit in Russia nonetheless. It was back to basics, but I do think some of the guys should have gone down on the girls. It's all doggie-style and blow jobs. More equality next time please!
What would you suggest as "essential reading" for a modern left intellectual? On the other side of things what do you consider a must-see for the above mentioned aspiring "left intellectual"?
SH: I still think Marx is a great starting point for understanding the world. Then maybe some Hegel to help you get your head around dialectical materialism, and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer books as a counterbalance. That combination would then put you in a good position to understand what I'm doing in my novels. Intellectuals tend to need a bit of deconditioning, my books can really help with that! As for a must see, I'd say Stonehenge and similar monuments because they show what so-called primitive – and presumably also non-hierarchical – societies could achieve.
Nonetheless, it might also be worth looking at Flavio de Carvalho and his utopian proposals for an all nude city, as well as his various realised projects, blueprints and plans – with a focus on his interest in cross-dressing as 'performance art'. São Paulo based De Carvalho (1899-1973) was an artist and architect who, after completing his education in France and England, planned to build a new city that would have no gods, property, or marriages. He had a vision of an urban environment in which fun loving nudists would strip themselves of their clothes and inhibitions in order to achieve libidinal self-transformation. De Carvalho wanted a 'Laboratory of erotica', where far out sex freaks could realise their desires and even discover new ones. Sex and nudism were to become ongoing rhizomatic experiences, endlessly bifurcating on the basis of each individual's subjectivity, This was an architectural 'blueprint' which set out to dissolve all received ideas about the kind of sexuality in which consenting adults might indulge.
What aspect of art are you most interested in? Intellectual? Aesthetic?
SH: I want to go beyond capitalist canalisation, and overflow all divisions between the intellectual, emotional, physical and aesthetic. The aim is to become integrated personally within the broader horizon of real human community, since we are fundamentally social beings… So the task is to end the current social system in which people make a hierarchy of the various aspects of our species being. This will of course be accompanied as far as possible by a shedding of clothes, because hierarchies are difficult to maintain in the buff.
What's your attitude towards the classical in art?
SH: The same as my attitude towards anything classical - enough of that old rubbish, let's have something different! People tend to forget that it's not cultural objects that are important but the social relations within the communities that produce them. That's why all forms of culture die. On the whole cultural objects cease to be relevant because the social conditions that produced them no longer exist.
Who are the artists you respect?
SH: Those that quit art. Ben Morea, Henry Flynt, Laura Gemser, there aren't many. Art is dead baby, burn the museums!
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Stewart Home Film Festival
'Authentic video documenting the sex life of two UK based artists in the 1980s. Shot entirely on location at the Data Attic, Dundee, Scotland, in March 1986. This features the Neoists Stewart Home and Pete Horobin, and the voice of one of their female 'friends'..... If you have sensitivities about what someone might do with a donut then please don't watch this!'-- SH
'Religion, every bit as bad as patriotism - both stink up the planet. Never forget that the world's most dangerous fundamentalists and terrorists are to be found in the US Bible Belt. So when dealing with religious bigots lets start with those that exercise influence on the most over-armed regime in the world. And remember kids, if 'god' existed he'd have sent all the fundamentalists straight to hell years ago... which is why it is them and not us who are lucky they are so deluded.'-- SH
'Paint is slapped on a plank of wood and dries - the aesthetics of boredom are a groove sensation! This one was inspired by all the knobheads who were leaving complaints on my earlier reworkings of avant-garde film for the digital age. I'll be more than happy if this gains a reputation as the worst video on YouTube ever! For those of you that don't like aesthetic experimentation, go and join Hula.'-- SH
'"If you like work by George Maciunas such as "Flux Film 7" or "Flux Film 8", then you'll love this. Hope the punch line makes you laugh...." was the way I described this on YouTube... but Google/YouTube pulled it after 21,442 hits for "inappropriate content'. I guess they just don't have a sense of humour and took the original title "10 Erotic Movies" literally rather than checking the content and seeing it was a humorous take on 60s avant-garde film-making in the Fluxus tradition.... But no wonder YouTube has such a reputation for idiocy.... '-- SH
'This thirty minute film consists of alternating sections of colour intercut with both black and with white, and is topped and tailed with titles. The full sequence of alternating sections are shown initially with a duration of five seconds for each segment of the film, the sequence is then repeated with this duration reduced to three seconds, then one second, then five-twelfths of a second, then one-sixth of a second, then five-twelfths of a second, then one-sixth of a second. The tempo of these sequences increases dramatically in the second part of the film, since the initial slow cycle takes nearly half its running time. The soundtrack consists of repetitive trance beats.'-- SH
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Book
Book Works
'Why does the art world hypocritically promote female creative talent but simultaneously fail to accord wimmin artists the respect given to their male counterparts?
'When wimmin aged 20 to 40 make up the bulk of the audience for art in London, why are they so under-represented in top curational posts and how exactly does this glass ceiling operate?
'Just what has happened to the feminist movement now that the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga are being held up as role models for prepubescent and teenage girls?
'Can the background to these and related questions be illuminated by taking penis enlargement spam and replacing the generic 'she' and 'her' it invokes with the names of well-known artists and curators? Stewart Home believes the answer to this last question is "YES", and so he used endless extreme fantasies about famous art world wimmin as the starting point of his outrageous new cyber-novel The Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie!
'Written in the second person and in part generated from spam emails, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie is a shot in the arm for prose fiction; and a kick up the backside for the male dominated London art world. More shocking than 5000 volts of unadulterated electricity! Or, as Malcolm McLaren put it after reading the manuscript on his death bed: "FEMINISM WITH BALLS."' -- Book Works
Excerpts
Make Kara Walker Tremble with Desire for your Huge New Penis!
It occurs to you that there has been an abstract movement in art but not in fiction. You are interested in how the stratification of the arts might be overcome and decide to inaugurate the first ever exhibition of Abstract Literature. Since Abstract Literature doesn't exist you attempt to conjure it up by producing a definition of it.
'Abstract Literature implodes in a subdued fashion, like a slow motion reversal of an explosion or some other catastrophe. It absorbs all the energy generated by writing as a cultural practice and neutralises it. Abstract Literature is a billowing series of syllables followed by an eruption of colour. It is usually red with purple flashes…'
You know very little about the philosophical sources from which aesthetic theory was constructed. Instead you approach most topics from the perspective of Freud and diagnosis.You decide that Abstract Literature is a product of the subconscious and therefore can't be precisely defined…You don't know that you are already falling behind positions articulated nearly a hundred years ago by the Surrealists.
You imagine the Abstract Literature Manifesto you are attempting to write being played in the key of G major, and you attempt to visualise it as deep space; black with flashes of darker blackness.Your text is pornographic, its obscenity lies in the fact that it can't be imagined, it can only be experienced in its totality as concrete form. Blackness. The void. Too many light-years between stars.
You try to think yourself into a state of suspended animation. You worship waste and claim to be drawing on Bataille's theory of solar economics. If nature abhors a vacuum then nature itself must be a social construction, there is nothing at all in deep space.You want to add some colour to your text…Space is deep.
'An exhausted sun compacted into itself. The slow but painless death of literature…Syllables should be moved around the page like clouds passing across the moon. Dense thickets of rhetoric must grow inexorably into an impenetrable jungle of words that overrun any and all attempts to extract a coherent meaning from them.'
You've ended up mirroring the slow drift of an ice floe, the imperceptible passage of distant galaxies through hyper-space. At this point your words in their opaque nothingness literally become 'the ill-will of the people', the spongy referent that animates all post-democratic societies. The cold of interstellar space thousands of degrees below freezing. Abstract Literature: A New Movement in the Visual Arts!
Non-Euclidean geometries. Voices green, purple and red. Strange folds in the fabric of time and space. The universe buckled, bent and sent into reverse. Apocalypse postponed, time running backwards and in slow-mo.Your words have developed an intolerance to alcohol. They are overwhelmed by feelings of existential dread and can't bear to be separated from each other. They've arranged themselves into a single extended sentence from some eldritch dimension unknown to man, a slow stuttering echo of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.
*
Johnson is offended and tells you that you can’t criticise Duchamp because all his works are blue-chip classics, and simultaneously function as the foundation stones of artistic modernism. You order another double espresso and tell Johnson to chill out, because if Duchamp were around today he’d agree with you. Then you placate the critic by offering to show him some interesting sex imagery on the web. Johnson hands over his laptop, which is his first mistake, and you go to Flickr. At first Johnson isn’t impressed but when you show him Flickr groups like ‘Public Nudity’, ‘Nude Insider’ and ‘Nude Photographer, Nude Models Contacts’ he changes his tune. Of course you save the best until last, so when you introduce Johnson to the Flickr group ‘Sex Contacts UK’ he is virtually coming in his pants. This group is dominated by horny transsexuals who just love to suck cock, and is a wet dream to the Art Vibe! Critic. Whilst you’re at it, you click through to a scam site and infect Johnson’s computer with viruses that will cause his computer to spew forth penis enlargement spam. Then you make your excuses and leave ….
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p.s. Hey. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey! Ah, you're outta here. Mm, I think I get that 'rough edges smoothed off' feeling about living here, but people always tell me if that if my French was a lot better, I wouldn't feel that way. I think I would, though. Awesome that you got to PdT and liked it a lot. Going late is the best time to be there, for sure. Spooky, We'll see very soon if the replacement of the band with the electronic music guy/thing worked. I ... think it will? I had better. Mm, not as extreme as Merzbouw. More sort of melancholy and propulsive semi-buried by harsh noise? I'm very curious how the 'rape-coordination' will work too. Really no clue yet, but we start rehearsals on Monday, so ... gulp. Sending you the best vibes from my more elderly city to your relatively spry one! ** Keaton, I do? You think my cognition has a strange filter in the form of me? Don't know how or if I would know. Could well be. Hm, given that DFW was both a friend and hero of mine, and given that your Axl Rose incarnation doesn't seem to have the slightest clue about who he really was, I'm going to forget you/he ever talked that shit about him, okay? I could have sworn I saw the barest hint of braces under those lips, but they could have been pixels, it's true. Great construction/post, in any case. ** Thomas Moronic, You'll get the LB word soon after I do. I hope you headed out somewhere super swell. ** David Ehrenstein, I know, right? Of course, like most things in Dubai, it never actually happened. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, thanks for the clarification. I understand. That was a bit of a dazed thought of mine generated by a dazed brain. I haven't seen 'SbtL', but I'm sure I will. It seems to be very well liked here, and I swear there's hardly a day gone by that someone here doesn't recommend it to me. ** Bill, Really hard to believe that Napoleonland thing will ever happen, yeah. It's been on and off and on and off for decades. Glad your grumpy work week is in the rear view. How are you going to luxuriate in your weekend? ** Hyemin Kim, Hi. Ubermensch, ha ha, that'll work, yeah. Understood, but I feel like the most provocative thinkers are often those who don't see themselves that way. Sometimes the seemingly most quiet things have the greatest rumble. Thank you, of course, for your kind interest in and concentration on my work. It's very honoring. I think, if I'm remembering right (?), LA has the largest Korean population of any city in the US? I had never heard of that robot theme park until I put the post together, and I don't think I've had any association re: South Korea and robots, but that's probably just me. I don't think I have a solid, clear association with South Korea. Or with most countries, I guess, actually. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ha ha, that does sound like an omen if there ever was one. How amazing it would be if the 'yeses' win, no? The rest of the UK will freak the fuck out, won't they? ** Kier, Hi, K! I know, I hoped/assumed that Galactica Park was Battlestar-related. That's why I chose it, and then, once I found out it wasn't, I was just too lazy to delete it. I know that being covered in dirt has its drawbacks, but it sounds so nice. Or looks so nice in my mind's eye, wherever that is. What a strange saying: mind's eye. Or maybe not. It seems very hippie or something. Bob shrine! Yes! My eyes are its! The Honore film is called 'Metamorphoses'. It's a kind of a contemporization (that's not a real word?) of some of the Ovid stories/poems. It's beautiful and strange, and it's cool 'cos it's like the kind of French film that used to get made easily in, like, the 1970s, but almost never is now, so it feels super fresh and also resonant of what I've always loved about French cinema. My day was good, involving film-planning and -prep almost entirely, and then seeing the film, and then crashing in my bed. How was Friday? Did you go up to the farm? ** Sypha, Hi. Ha ha, when the producers of Zac's and my film flew into Paris to see the footage we'd shot, and we showed them the first scene, which was the only kind of roughly edited one, the first thing they said with great anxiety and a certain horror was that we were going to totally alienate and freak out gay audiences and send them rushing towards the exits, which, they being 'queer film' producers, was not a good thing at all. So, even though that wasn't our intention, I get where you're coming from, man. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh! Oh, I'm so sorry that things aren't at their kindest to you right now. Alcohol is probably, yeah, not an angel sitting on your shoulder. I was never fetishized, even at my youngest, if that makes you feel any better. Or if I was, I would never have recognized it. Man, really, I don't know, try to get your spirits up, okay? Long distance hugs and encouraging words. Love, me. ** Misanthrope, I still like that shiny futuristic future city dream thing too. The editing should be a gas. A long, laborious gas, but I'm very excited, even though I'll only be an observer and opinion-giver. You think Panchitos is still there? Every time I go to NYC, I can't believe it still exists. I hope so, jeez. ** Rewritedept, Busyness is totally my middle name these days. It might even be my first name. That potential gig at the dispensary sounds promising, yeah. An edibles cook ... You know, weirdly, I've never been in a dispensary. But then I don't smoke pot, so why would I have been, but, point is, they sell edibles? Like the usual brownies and cookies and that sort of thing? My day was pretty good. Progressive and productive. There's a ton to do for the next/last film shoot, and that's almost all of what yesterday wrote and what today and the immediately future days will write. It's good, though. Happy Friday, buster. ** Okay. Today's spotlight on Stewart Home was yet another bright suggestion from Chilly Jay Chill, so partial hats off to him. SH is totally wonderful, if you don't know his books and his many other things. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.