Posts Tagged ‘Dada’

Let’s Kill The Novel & Remake The World! Stewart Home interviewed by Raül De Tena

Monday, April 30th, 2012

This is an interview I did recently with H Magazine around the publication in Spain of my novel Memphis Underground. They will have run a Spanish translation but here it is with my original answers in English. I know some of my bilingual readers have enjoyed comparing the original interviews about the Spanish edition of Memphis Underground and their translations… so this provides another opportunity for them to do so. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish but are fluent in English, you get to read something you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I haven’t run through all the Spanish interviews I’ve done yet but I’m tempted to call it quits with this one for now…

Raül De Tena:. At one point in Memphis Underground you say that you’re gonna use one of the sentences you just wrote to answer a random journalist. That part of the book scared me when I started to write down these questions… Are you gonna answer the truth and only the truth in this interview? Or is it better keep the mystery to make the interview more appealing?

Stewart Home: I don’t think I wrote that in the book but this might be because of the way the passage has been translated or perhaps you’re misremembering it. My memory is often so faulty that I’ve no idea about the actual content of things I wrote last week, let alone a few years ago! And the same goes for what I read, but much more so!

Anyway, I think the passage you’re referring to is the following: “In my rereading of Marcuse, I paid particular attention to the chapter entitled The Aesthetic Dimension, since I thought it might be amusing to bamboozle a journalist by using this as a theoretical justification for my own work.”

This is from one of the diary sections in Memphis Underground written as if it is a piece of non-fiction by me, rather than one of the fictional sections, so I’m not surprised it would worry you as a journalist. In journalism (and I too write journalism) we assume that truth is something we can reach, but as an anti-novelist I have to assume it is something slippery that escapes us but that can be approached more closely through fiction than non-fiction. The tricky bit here is that Memphis Underground contains both fiction and non-fiction, or at least blends them.. One of the intended effects of much of my prose is to amuse – and also if the reader thinks deeply about how I’m giving them laughs, to leave them all at sea! Confused? You will be!

Raül De Tena: Anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography are three important concepts in Memphis Underground. Do you think a reader who doesn’t know anything about those concepts can enjoy the book? Or you don’t even care about those considerations?

Stewart Home: I don’t think most people need to know anything about anything to enjoy the book – as long as they haven’t been brainwashed into thinking about ‘literature’ in the restricted sense of bourgeois subjectivity. Those who think that books are about linear plot and plodding characterisation will have a real problem with my writing. We can liken those with this outlook to people who think paintings have to be representational – they’re living in the past and incapable of understanding contemporary culture. But aside from plonkers of this stripe, I don’t think anyone will have any problems understanding Memphis Underground. I think it’s a very accessible book for contemporary readers, and they’ll laugh their asses off as they go through it.

Raül De Tena: The concepts I just mentioned are referred to a lot in the book, but how do anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography influence your writing and your style in Memphis Underground?

Stewart Home: Of these three concepts the most important is anti-literature – this is a tradition that predates literature and that encompasses black humour, theory and experimentation with prose and poetic forms. One could cite anything from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to the works of Kathy Acker by way of Karl Marx…. The important thing is not to restrict yourself to the genre known as literary fiction. Most of the contemporary writers promoted as being worthwhile by the bourgeois press are in fact boring, and this is precisely because they project themselves as being serious. To do anything worthwhile you have to get over the adolescent mania for being po-faced and grow up and grow into humour and laughs. The adolescent thinks that to be adult you have to always act like grown up – whereas the precise opposite is the case. To be properly grown up and to do anything really serious you have to do it with humour and levity. There are just way too many middle-aged writers out there whose misplaced sense of ‘gravity’ and importance reveals them to still have the minds of adolescents. Only anti-literature attains the levity that is a necessary corollary to real gravity.

Moving on, neoism is a prefix and a suffix without any content…. but then as Hegel demonstrated if you have nothing you have to have something because one is meaningless without the other. And if you’ve something and nothing then you must have becoming and from this foundation Hegel builds his entire philosophical system – which I find pretty hilarious, although I wouldn’t go along with it’s final realisation in the Prussian State and God, which is unfortunately where Hegel took it…. Returning to neoism, if it is nothing then it must be everything… And it can be pretty much whatever you want, so my take on neoism in Memphis Underground is subjective and possibly solipsistic!

Finally as regards this question, psychogeography is now so popular with the chattering classes and sections of the literary establishment that pretty much everyone who ever had anything to do with it in its earlier incarnations tends to disavow it. But for the situationists it was a way of drawing up new emotional maps of the city, although before doing this they’d have to get blind drunk or really stoned and then wander around letting the unconscious solicitations of the architecture draw them on. It was only by getting completely out of it that the situationists were able to do psychogeorgraphy and this is something that seems to be lost on many contemporary practitioners of the craft… and may explain why their results, in England anyway where psychogreography seems to be most popular, are so utterly useless…

Raül De Tena: When you read through Memphis Underground you are left thinking that the book is a direct attack on two concepts. First of all, art as a business and as a dead scene. Is there no hope for art in the 21st Century?

Stewart Home: As the radical New York group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker (UATWM) declared back in the 1960s: “Art is Dead Baby! Burn The Museums!”

Raül De Tena: It’s interesting that the only hope for art in Memphis Underground is precisely through fakery. But even that practice seems to be pretty ridiculous… Don’t you trust the fake as a motor for art any more? Or is even fake art a business?

Stewart Home: Well you know what they say – “Fake It Till You Make It!” This is also called the ‘act as if” doctrine and in English it is a common catchphrase that exhorts us to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence. Fake art all too often falls into this trap and becomes real art, and I’m definitely faking it here coz I just copied and pasted the previous sentence from Wikipedia…. But to return to what I was saying, even being landed with the label art is a problem nowadays because it means people can put something that might otherwise disturb them in a little mental box and not even think about it. This was not a dilemma the Dadaists had to deal with when they embraced the negative a century ago… But Dadaist art trapped in museums does become a part of this problematic. Duchamp says somewhere that art dies (it has a life of maybe 30 or 40 years) and then ends up in graveyards called museums…. The same can be said of anti-art and fake art nowadays, except the half-life of such projects is getting shorter by the minute.

Raül De Tena: Your interest in fakery seems to relate to the annihilation of individuality (this is the other main concept Memphis Underground appears to be attacking). In the book you’re always ‘playing’ with the reader so the reader never knows who’s really the main character – or if it’s even the same person. Are you trying to annihilate the usual certainty of literature about the main character’s individuality and psychology? Or is this just a game played with the reader?

Stewart Home: There’s a difference between us all being unique individuals (although not necessarily that unique in our desires and tastes) and the ideology of individuality. I see characterisation in literature and all psychology from Freud to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and beyond, as bourgeois. Therefore this trope in literary fiction and the psychoanalytic theories associated with it for the past hundred years or so do need to be smashed! So what you’re asking me about is more than a game played with my readers….

Raül De Tena: Memphis Underground seems to be divided into two parts. The first half of the book is more classical, and the second half is perhaps your revenge against those who thought the whole book was gonna be easy reading… Is that division into two parts intentional? Do you usually think about the accessibility of what you’re writing?

Stewart Home: I always think about the audience for what I do, but the audience does not have to be broad, although sometimes it is. No book is going to have universal appeal. Memphis Underground has four main parts and some nice fills between these… and the opening was designed to read like a really typical piece of bland contemporary writing, which is then smashed up against a description of a map like you’d find in the French nouveau roman. So the book does set up the expectation that it will be more conventional than it ends up being, and I rerun that trope as you move through the text. But I don’t think that makes Memphis Underground hard to read for those have open minds, but it does create an accessibility problem for those who have been conditioned in their expectations by conventional bourgeois literature….

Raül De Tena: Lady Di and Death appear as characters on Memphis Underground. I find this awesome… But didn’t you think it was gonna be a dangerous move? Do you think you succeed using them as characters?

Stewart Home: Unless you’re prepared to take chances, and really willing to fail, then you’re not going to move writing or any other cultural form forward. Lady Di was probably the biggest celebrity we had in England for a hundred years, and like all celebrities the coverage of her drained her of all real humanity until we were only left with a cipher…. So I don’t think I could easily go wrong with her… In his 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman has a knight play chess with a personification of Death and I thought that was hilarious. So that was my starting point but obviously I wanted to trash Death up and not treat ‘him’ too seriously. So the humour in my use of Death is intentional, whereas in Bergman’s case I suspect it was unconscious…But again judged on my terms I’d say my use of Death was a huge success….

Raül De Tena: You mention Joyce and Finnegans Wake as the death of literature. Haven’t you found any interesting authors after Joyce? Could you mention some and why you find them interesting?

Stewart Home: There are many… Clarence Cooper Junior for his vision of prison and junkie life. Blaster Al Ackerman for his fried humour. Ann Quin for her deployment of a ventriloquist dummy in her first novel Berg. Alain Robb-Grillet both for his use of repetition and multiple perspectives…. and also for attacking the bourgeois disdain for pleasure – of which humour and laughter are important examples, as well as eroticism which is the springboard for Robbe-Grillet’s critique. British beat novelist Alex Trocchi for being a friend of my mother, and the fact they dealt smack together…. The list could go on and on and on! But I’ll stop here!

Raül De Tena: Your vision of London in Memphis Underground is fairly negative. Has it changed recently? How is your vision of London right now?

Stewart Home: London is always best in winter and in a recession, it ain’t a pretty city but it can be picaresque. Unfortunately the fact that there is a global market in London property means that the process of gentrification is continuing and rather than the rich and poor living side by side as has been the case for hundreds of years, the city is in danger of turning into somewhere like Paris with poverty concentrated in a ring around the outside, that is to say in the suburbs. So London ain’t what it used to be but then change is an integral part of the urban experience. But London is now much more like any other European city than the place I knew as a kid and teenager, when it was much dirtier and more smashed up, but also more unique….

Raül De Tena: Music is pretty important in Memphis Underground… Aren’t you afraid someone could think you’re part of pop literature (such as Nick Hornby)?

Stewart Home: I wouldn’t mind being seen as a part of pop literature if that meant like Michael Moorcock or some cool sci-fi writers. But Nick Horby! Ha ha ha! He just completely sucks….

Raül De Tena: You’re gonna be in Barcelona in May as part of Primera Persona. What can we expect of your lecture?

Stewart Home: Expect the unexpected – and loads more of the same as you get in this interview! My writing will give you better orgasms, but seeing me in the flesh is even better!

Raül De Tena: Javier Calvo’s gonna be with you at Primera Persona. Do you know his work? What do you think about it?

Stewart Home: I don’t read Spanish but I’m told by people who do that his writing is fabulous. So it will be groovy to appear with him!

Raül De Tena: Right now in Spain you’re considered a big influence on some important writers. Do you think your work has any connection with contemporary Spanish literature?

Stewart Home: I feel a strong connection for sure – and especially to hot female Spanish writers… I think I can develop my relationship with Spanish literature much further by getting to know some of these lit chicks intimately. I’d particularly like to meet some Spanish girl power writers who are churning out novels about sex and proletarian revolution – and who like to wear short skirts and white boots! But even if they’re not writers but are hot and like to wear white boots and skimpy dresses, then I’ll still be happy to meet any Spanish girls when I’m in Spain or if they come to London….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

I Just Can’t Get Enough Spanish Fly: Stewart Home interviewed by Joan Cabot

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now.

Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice?

Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old. When I was in my early twenties I started reading through all the books I could lay my hands on by a number of authors as if they constituted a single work. Among the many writers I re-read the one I liked most was Mick Norman (AKA Laurence James), in whose books the the gay hell’s angels were even harder than the straight bikers and whose politics were of the liberal left. The best known of these hacks is James Moffatt AKA Richard Allen who wrote a series of skinhead books.

With this more focused re-reading, what I noticed is that a lot of the authors I’d checked out when I was young repeated plots and sentences and sometimes even paragraphs from one book to the next. So I thought it would be interesting to write fiction about youth cults in which I compressed this process, with every other page being an almost identical sex scene (which made writing the books very easy). I decided to use lots of deliberately repeated words and phrases in a single book.

I was taking different influences and mixing them together. I was aware of the way surrealism and the French nouveau roman had inscribed elements of pulp prose into what were essentially non-linear and highbrow novels. I wanted to take that further and apply Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation (it was the eighties) to plot within my books – so they resembled pulp more closely than say the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet but at the same time because they collapsed the repetitious effects of reading a dozen novels by the same pulp author into one book, they effectively deconstructed themselves as fiction and escaped being easily categorised as either art or low brow prose.

Over the course of five very similar novels – Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death – I felt I’d perfected what I wanted to do with this approach to writing. Therefore after completing Slow Death, the last and I’d say my best book using this third person condensed and collapsed pulp style, I wanted to move on. I then decided to do a self-consciously non-linear book about the occult and mind control. My first five books were written in the third person and I wanted to switch to writing in the first person; this really limits what you can do as an author but I figured if the narrator’s personality changed every time he had an orgasm (due to mind control – and there is a lot of sex in the book), then working in the first person wouldn’t be too difficult. Once this book – Come Before Christ and Murder Love – was published, the critics in the UK immediately noticed I’d been influenced by Robbe-Grillet, whereas although he was a major influence in my earlier books the way I worked this through was less obvious and many critics didn’t understand that I was producing a simulacrum of pulp and had no interest in writing pulp books.

Anyway, as I’ve continued to write novels I’ve used different approaches with different books. But until my last anti-novel I stuck with first person narration – in both male and female voices. I’ve tried to structure each book differently. With 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess I set the book in Aberdeenshire (which is a part of the British Isles not much used as a setting for fiction) and incorporated a lot of capsule book reviews. With Cunt I was self-consciously creating a post-modern variant on the picaresque novel. Whips & Furs was a cut and paste novel where I simply altered two nineteenth-century books and spliced them together to make a work with a more contemporary structure. In many ways that was an editing job since I did very little original writing to produce it. In Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph was exactly 100 words long. With Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – my most recently published book and written after Memphis Underground – I wanted to make bigger changes to my writing style so I wrote in the second person (which I hadn’t done before – addressing the reader as ‘you’ rather than referring to the narrator as ‘I’) and I used a lot of sampled penis enlargement spam in the text. With Memphis Underground I wanted to structure a book using a classic science-fiction device but at the same time not write sci-fi. So the first half of the book is the events in the life of the narrator six months apart and cut against each other chapter by chapter, and because the narrator has changed his name the reader may not realise straight away that the alternating chapters are about the same person.

Joan Cabot: In the book you write that MU is a book about how housing projects affect people’s life (sorry, it may not be the exact words, but I have to translate the translation…), but I think you talk about a lot more things in the book…

Stewart Home: Obviously Memphis Underground is also about art and London and celebrity and many other things. It is also concerned with writing and how most so-called contemporary literature is old-fashioned and ill-suited to the times in which we live. Of course the book also deals with sex and the idea of death… But there’s no point providing an exhaustive list of the various subjects it covers, including of course train travel in Germany!

Joan Cabot: I think art is in fact the main subject of the book. How will you define your relation with the art world?

Stewart Home: I think that my relationship to the art world is troubled. But at the same time I’m well connected within it, particularly in London, and could be described as an art world insider. It is part of the nature of the art world that no one thinks they are truly inside it, but of course many are. Where I take a different stand from many others is in being more critical of the commodification of culture and in viewing the role of the artist dialectically. Thus because I know disalienation is integral to the communist project, I also understand that to become truly human we have to realise every aspect of what we are – what is sometimes called our ‘species being’. Aside from being social that also means integrating our physical, emotional and intellectual activity. So rather than one person being a brain worker (white collar) and another performing physical labour (blue collar), in a classless society (which will also be one without money and nation states), we’ll all do a bit of everything and have a lot of variety in our lives. To look at the role of the artist in a positive light, it is a deformed prefiguration of how we’ll all be in post-capitalist society. But the artist is also a specialised non-specialist in a commodified gallery system, so you can also look at that role negatively and stress it’s alienation and disconnection from what it is to be truly human.

Joan Cabot:  I always though that art should be indistinguishable from vandalism nowadays…

Stewart Home: There’s not much new in that, it runs through a lot of modernism and post-modernism. Dada was the first worthwhile modernist movement to stress the suppression of art and negation and the negative in general, and I find that preferable to surrealism that mistakenly attempted to realise art rather than treating it as a product of capitalist society. In the second half of the twentieth-century the negative again rose to the surface in art movements ranging from nouveau realisme through Fluxus to auto-destructive art. In the visual arts post-modernism has tended towards a recuperation of this negative attitude and its diversion into commercial ends. Late twentieth-century writers such as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker were on the whole using the negative in more interesting ways than gallery artists.

Joan Cabot: I’m sure you have another idea about the motivations to work against the establishment of modern art, but, isn’t it fun just to piss them off?

Stewart Home: Sure. That’s why I inserted the names of many well-known artists into the penis enlargement spam I appropriated to use in my last book. In New York the piece that got quoted the most was: “7 inches simply isn’t big enough to pleasure the Gorilla Girls.” And while many found that funny, those who make the mistake of taking post-modern art seriously were upset by it.

Joan Cabot:  You’ve written books about utopian artistic movements and punk… Which interest came first? How much of the relation between art & music movements are true and how much just a way to legitimate the music that we like?

Stewart Home: One interest doesn’t really come before the other – although I was into pop music first. I have clear memories from when I was two years old. So I remember some sixties music from the time – but what I mostly heard when I was small wasn’t of much interest to me. Too much of The Beatles and not enough of mod and freakbeat bands such as The Small Faces, The Who, The Downliners Sect, The Creation and The Action. I remember one morning when I was taking the bus to school and all the kids were talking about the news that the Beatles were breaking up. Some of the older children were quite upset but I was one of the younger ones and I really didn’t care about The Beatles and the fact they were breaking up didn’t bother me. The first music that got me really excited was glam rock. I liked T. Rex best of all. I liked it most when they were doing tunes like Get It On And Jeepster. I also liked bands like Slade and The Sweet – and from the USA Alice Cooper and Suzi Quatro. But then just silly songs like Me & You & A Dog Named Boo by Lobo also appealed to me. But after 1973 the quality of glam singles started falling away. So by the time I was 12 I was looking back into the history of pop…. That’s when I discovered old soul records like Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, or You Can’t Sit Down by the Phil Upchurch Combo: and at the same time started digging all the London mod and freakbeat groups of the 1960s….

I came across dada and happenings and pop art when I was about 12, in books to start with. I guess I was into music before that but the two interests both kept growing – with music way ahead until I was about 20. The idea of what art is has changed a lot of the last thirty years – so now you have people talking about pop music and football as art, which didn’t happen in the old days. The most over-hyped relationship between music and the kind of anti- art that interests me is found in discourse around punk, which some pundits claim is situationist inspired. Such claims are ridiculous as I demonstrate in my book Cranked Up Really High. It’s just a way for silly American music journalists to pretend they’re art history professors, and for English cultural studies lecturers to pretend they’re hip… Rock and roll is somewhere else entirely!

Joan Cabot: Do you think that your books are understandable and enjoyable for anybody. I mean, what kind of people is interested in your work? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Stewart Home: My books are written for people with a sense of humour. I really enjoy the way they wind up and upset those who are upright and serious about literature and music and art. I tend to scream along to the sound of my keyboard as I type my novels, and I’m very happy when my readers laugh out loud when looking at my books. Intellectuals are a sorry bunch so I don’t expect them to be grooved by my prose.

Joan Cabot: Some of your former fictional books are not translated in Spanish. Do you know if there are plans to do so?

Stewart Home: I guess if Memphis Underground sells well then more of my novels will be translated into Spanish. But I haven’t signed any contracts for more books yet. It’s curious watching which books get translated into what language. I have books in many languages but it was my two full-length non-fiction books – Assault On Culture and Cranked Up Really High – that appeared first in Spanish. Both those and another non-fiction book came out in Italy before a small publisher did one of my novels there. In French, Russian, Finnish, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian etc. I only have novels published. In languages such as Lithuanian, Portuguese (with a Brazilian publisher) and Polish only my non-fiction books are translated. It is very hard to predict what will happen with translations.

Joan Cabot: What are you working on now?

Stewart Home: I recently finished a novel based on the life of one of my relatives who was a famous cat-burglar and prison escaper – he was originally from south Wales but pursed his life of crime in London from the 1940s to the 1970s. That book’s called The Nine Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones. This week I have to install a solo show in a London gallery. But with the nice coverage I’ve been getting for this new translation of Memphis Underground I think I might well spend the summer getting to know some hot Spanish girls very very well… that’s the kind of ‘work’ I like doing best!

Joan Cabot: In the book, you say that you cannot distinguish between England and any other country, but I think that something like MU is in some sense a very British book…

Stewart Home: There are different cultures around the world and what you’ll write in English is going to be different to what you’d write if you were using – for example – Spanish. That said I’m against national borders, not against regional difference. But London is now a very European city. It is much much cleaner than it was when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and with that cleanness it has lost much of its old identity. That said not everything has got worse. The food you can eat in London today is way better than what you got when I was small! The food used to be really terrible but now it’s actually very good if you pick and choose. I’m not sure that Memphis Underground is that British, I think I’m more a product of London, and I find it extremely difficult to identify with the rest of England let alone the rest of the British Isles… My mother was Welsh but came from an Irish family, so we’ve been moving slowly east. I don’t really want to go anywhere, I like London… although it is always nice to have a change and visit somewhere like Barcelona or Bilbao or Valencia or Madrid, or even some of the smaller towns like Burgos or Carmona…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

10 Greatest Anti-Art Suicides (Before Mike Kelly)

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

The news that LA art scenester Mike Kelly just topped himself led me to wonder whether in ten years time he’d make anyone’s list of best ever anti-art suicides. Was his death a resolute ‘NO’ to capitalist exploitation? Or was it as tedious and pathetic as the suicide of Kurt Cobain? I’ll leave you to judge that one and give you instead my top 10 suicides. Since Kelly founded the bands Destroy All Monsters (who I saw in London in the late-seventies after he’d left the group) and Poetics (with John Miller and Tony Oursler), I’m including musicians in this alongside those involved in more visual and literary forms of anti-art.

1. Ray Johnson – a pop and correspondence anti-artist. Ray makes number one in my list because although I never met him, I did have a very minor correspondence with Johnson about 25 years ago. So there’s a small personal connection and we all know nepotism rules in the art and anti-art world. ‘New York’s most famous unknown artist’ drowned himself off Long Island in 1995 – some say it was a final work of performance art.

2. Ann Quin – a 1960s British experimental novelist who did many things before and better than her now more famous contemporary B. S. Johnson (he topped himself by slitting his wrists while lying in a warm bath shortly after Quin’s summer 1973 death). Although Quinn’s first novel Berg (1964) made an impact, by the time she drowned herself, her critical stock had dwindled. Like Ray Johnson, she swam out to sea – but into the English Channel from Brighton’s Palace Pier, rather than the North Atlantic.

3. Arthur Cravan – was a dadaist who specialised in boasting and reinventing himself. Among other stunts, he fought world boxing champion Jack Johnson drunk, and was quickly knocked out. In 1918 Cravan disappeared sailing a boat in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico and is presumed to have drowned. His rather ambiguous suicide set the tone for the deaths of later artists such as Bas Jan Ader (who was lost at sea in the North Atlantic in 1975). For me death at sea is the best way to go (it’s oceanic), but having given you three of these I’ll move on to lesser forms of suicide.

4. Donny Hathaway  – is probably best known for his duets with Roberta Flack but his solo work constitutes some of the classiest soul made in the 1970s. Despite success as a singer and songwriter, Hathaway demonstrated to the likes of Herman Brood that the best way to end it all is by throwing yourself into the street from the glittering heights of an exclusive hotel. In Hathaway’s case this was from floor 15 of the Essex House Hotel in New York. Hathaway appears to have been suffering from schizophrenia before his death. His funeral was conducted by the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

5. Jacques Vaché – was a friend of Andre Breton and thus French surrealism’s most famous suicide. He didn’t really do much but maintain an attitude of indifference and disdain towards the world. Vaché killed himself by taking an overdose of opium, and thus blazed a trail for punk rockers like Darby Crash of Los Angeles band The Germs (who deliberately took an overdose of heroin in 1980).

6. Graham Bond – was in at the start of the British blues boom of the 1960s, but he is inevitably included here because he appeared in Gonks Go Beat, an unbelievably bad British movie that Mike Kelly saw on late-night TV somewhere and wanted to see again because he couldn’t quite believe what he’d been viewing. Via a mutual friend I was asked if I could help Kelly locate this item (this was before it was reissued on DVD). I found a bootleg version and passed on the information about where and how to buy it. Returning to Bond, his career basically spiralled downhill from the late-sixties onwards with this decline fuelled by drink, drugs and involvement in the occult. I picked up a typical story about Bond looking for money when I interviewed one time New English Library (NEL) editor Laurence James back in the 1990s, although I don’t seem to have included it in the published version of my conversation. Bond turned up at the NEL offices one day demanding money because somehow a photograph of him had found its way into a Hells Angels magazine published by the company (who’d thought this was a picture of a hells angel and had not realised it was in fact an image of a musician). Bond pretended to be outraged and claimed this mishap would ruin his public reputation. James gave Bond a few quid and the musician went away a happy man because he’d scored enough money to buy whatever drugs he needed that day. In 1974 Bond did the decent thing and jumped in front of a tube train at Finsbury Park Station in north London.

7. Herman Brood – is well known for songs like 1978′s Rock & Roll Junkie (which includes the line: “and when I do my suicide for you I hope you miss me too…”). in later life this Dutch rocker swapped pop excess for a career as a not particularly interesting painter. Sick from prolonged drug use and unable to kick his habit, in 2001 Brood leapt to his death from the rooftop of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. When I heard about this the first thought that popped into my head was that I’d thought Brood’s leather jeans looked ugly and uncool when I’ d seen him perform with his band Wild Romance in London in the late-seventies.

8. Adrian Borland – is someone I almost have a personal connection to, since he knew a number of my friends. In the late-eighties I spotted Borland posing outside a London rock venue. He was once in a seriously obscure band called Rat Poison (with a friend of mine in fact) although he later falsely claimed his first group was The Outsiders. As far as I’m aware Rat Poison only ever played one gig at New Malden Town Hall (in south west London). When I came across Borland he was obviously waiting to be recognised, and he gave me a huge smile as I walked over to him. “I know you!” I said before pausing dramatically. “You was in Rat Poison!” Borland’s jaw dropped, he’d lost his rock star composure but eventually managed to blurt: “I’m Adrian Borland. I’ve gone solo now but I used to be in The Sound.” “Never heard of ‘em mate!” I shot back before stomping off leaving my victim completely bemused. When Borland ended it all by jumping in front of a train in 1999 I wasn’t surprised – he seemed to have been in the rock business for the wrong reasons. He was more interested in fame than music and that was bound to result in him becoming very frustrated. Of course, Borland only makes this list because I like to flatter myself I made a small contribution towards his death!

9. Wendy O. Williams  – was the singer in the dire American hardcore punk/metal band The Plasmatics. I always liked the idea of Williams far more than the music her band made. She’d started her career in the entertainment business by performing in sex shows, and never really moved away from that since she was usually topless on stage. Frustrated at her inability to break into the mainstream, in 1998 Williams went into the woods near her home and blew her brains out with a gun.

10. Guy Debord – this lettriste and situationist claimed that he wrote less than most writers but drank more than most drinkers. Little surprise then that in 1994 Debord shot himself because he could no longer bear the pain of the illnesses brought on by his excessive consumption of alcohol. Debord only limps in at number 10 because a more interesting dadaist suicide appears to be a completely fictional character. Julien Torma allegedly wandered ill-clad into the Tyrolian mountains at the age of 30 to end it all, and was never seen again. I like to laugh along with Torma’s aphorism: “Perfection is mediocrity. Only excess is beautiful.” Debord by way of contrast, seems to have taken this absurd joke seriously.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in art criticism, drugs, exhibitionism, music | 27 Comments »

Bourriaud’s ‘Altermodern’, an eclectic mix of bullshit & bad taste

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

The recent trend for curators to view themselves as the ‘real’ ‘heroes’ of the art world continues with the Parisian fashion-poodle Nicolas Bourriaud (AKA Boring Ass) using “Altermodern”, the 2009 Tate Triennial, to promote himself over and above anything he’s actually included in this aesthetic disaster. The selection of works for ‘Altermodern’ struck me as remarkably similar to the last ‘big’ show I’d seen curated by Bourriaud, the Lyon Biennial in 2005. The art itself doesn’t really matter, it is there to illustrate a thesis. The thesis doesn’t matter either since it exists to facilitate Bourriaud’s career; and Bourriaud certainly doesn’t matter because he is simply yet another dim-witted cultural bureaucrat thrown up by the institution of art.

In Lyon, Bourriaud’s theme was Expérience de la Durée, which Frieze summed up as: “an art-historical argument for a ‘long 1990s’…. Unlike Cinderella, methods of making and thinking about art don’t become unwelcome at the ball just because the clock strikes midnight. If time, for David Bowie, ‘flexes like a whore’, for Bourriaud and Sans (Boring Ass’s Lyon co-curator and Palais de Tokyo chum) its movements are closer to soporific languor.” (Frieze ±95, Nov-Dec 2005).

For the Tate Triennial, Bourriaud has adopted a technique much beloved by talentless song-smiths when record companies demand new material they haven’t yet composed, take an existing riff and reverse it. Thus the back cover of the Triennial catalogue announces: “Few books introduce a word into the language as this one does. The term ‘altermodern’ has been coined by leading critical theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the art that has arrived at the end of the postmodern period, made in today’s global context, as a reaction against cultural standardisation.’ This claim singularly fails to mark out any new field for ‘contemporary’ cultural practice, since art in the modern sense of the term developed more than two centuries ago in reaction to the cultural standardisation of the first industrial revolution, and in the context of the development and global expansion of capitalism (the initial moves from its formal to its real domination, a process that continued until well into the 20th century). And it should hardly need stating that the justification for Bourriaud’s Tate squib is simply Lyon 2005 in reverse. But forwards, backwards or anagramatised, the notions Bourriaud hangs his shows on all amount to the same thing: bullshit.

So much for the (non)-’theory’, what about the art? The video installation Hermitos Children by Spartacus Chetwynd looks like out-takes from a promo by a really bad indie band replete with mock-shocking nudity (zzzzzzz). Nathaniel Mellors’ Gaintbum is even worse, featuring as it does films of would-be luvvies rehearsing for a play about being stuck inside a huge arse (and yes, the free guide really does explain that coprophilia is “an obsession with excrement”). While in The Plover’s Wing, Marcus Coates fakes it up as a shaman, and comes across as truly pathetic because he clearly has no idea that practices he is unable to even parody, emerged at the very moment tribal society began to stratify into class societies, and were thus a response to alienation.

That said, there is the odd decent piece in Altermodern, even if Bourriaud is only able to include the most outstanding work by completely over-indulging his taste for slip-shod curational methods. The Tate Triennial is supposedly an exhibition of emerging British artists, Gustav Metzger is actually stateless (he does live in London) and his art world reputation dates all the way back to the 1960s. Those two things don’t particularly matter to me in relation to the curation of this show, but I do object to Bourriaud re-dating Metzger’s work so that it can be presented as recent art. Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment dates from 1965, not 2006 as the labelling in Bourriaud’s Altermodern exhibition would have it. This work has also been shown relatively recently as part of the Gustav Metzger Retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1998/99, and the photograph in the MOMA Papers Volume 3 (page 40) produced to accompany that exhibition is dated ’1965/98′ (the standard method of dating re-made work when the ‘original’ is unavailable). Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment was shown again as part of the Summer of Love show at Tate Liverpool (2005) and then toured in Europe through to late summer 2006. The piece was re-made once more for this exhibition and is correctly dated in the catalogue (page 221) as “1965/2005″. The Tate then bought the piece from Metzger, and it should have been labelled in Altermodern as “1965/2005″; but this dating would render its inclusion absurd, and a charlatan like Bourriaud – who can’t be bothered to seek out decent contemporary work – has no qualms about faking the provenance of a piece like Liquid Crystal Environment.

But let’s move on to the catalogue, which like the posters and other graphic elements in the show was designed by M/M, the Paris based team of Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak. The Design Museum sums up the career of these bozos with the following words: “After starting out with music projects, M/M became involved with Yamamoto and Sitbon in 1995 and have since worked for other fashion houses including Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton and Calvin Klein. Their work in the art world ranges from commissions for museums such as Centre Georges Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, to collaborations with artists like Philippe Parreno and Pierre Hughe. Amzalag and Augustyniak also work as creative consultants to Paris Vogue.” My own take is that M/M’s way too self-conscious use of ‘ecentric’ typefaces is unnecessarily baroque and looks like complete shit. In a classic triumph of would-be ‘style’ over substance, M/M don’t put page numbers on certain sections of the Altermodern catalogue, including the three ‘keynote’ essays at the front (meaning that anyone wanting to cite quotes has to count off the pages by turning them); no doubt if M/M were architects the idea of getting ‘transgressive’ by designing buildings without foundations would appeal to them. That said, the catalogue’s content is even worse that its cretinous design.

Bourriaud’s introduction to the Triennial catalogue exposes the lack of anything substantial behind his half-baked notion of the ‘altermodern’. To quote Boring Ass directly: “The term ‘altermodern, which serves as the title of the present exhibition and to delimit the void beyond the post-modern, has its roots in the idea of ‘otherness’.” (page 12). If Bourriaud sees a void beyond postmodernism, this is presumably because he is loathe to admit that capitalism (like feudalism and every other form of exploitation to be found in recorded history) has a finite life-span. Likewise by connecting alter to other, Bourriaud reminded me of a book I read a dozen years ago, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power by Cinzia Sartini Blum (University of California Press, 1996). In this tome, Blum “investigates a diverse array of… futurist textual practices that range from formal experimentation with ‘words in freedom’ to nationalist manifestos that advocate intervention in World War I and anticipate subsequent fascist rhetoric of power and virility.” Curiously, some of Bourriaud’s rhetoric does indeed echo Marienetti’s ‘other’ modernism, viz: “altermodernism sees itself as a constellation of ideas linked by the emerging and ultimately irresistible will to create a form of modernism for the twenty-first century.” (catalogue, page 12). So don’t go accusing Boring Ass of being a ‘mainstream’ liberal, since he counterposes ‘irresistible will’ to notions of agency! That said, it might be that ‘natural’ ‘leaders’ like Bourriaud have ‘will’ and ‘agency’, and it is this which will determine the altermodern ‘evolution’ of ‘the masses’! I am, of course, assuming here that when Boring Ass anthropomorphises altermodernism by talking about how it ‘sees itself”, he is simultaneously indulging in a process of personification in which he becomes the physical embodiment of his own ‘ideal’ In which case altermodernism might more properly be taken as a synonym for Bourriaud’s personal variant on narcissism.

Moving on, Bourriaud pointedly steps back from anything as contentious as overt link-ups with full blown fascist modernism: “The historical role of modernism, in the sense of a phenomenon arising within the domain of art, resides in its ability to jolt us out of tradition; it embodies a cultural exodus, an escape from the confines of nationalism and identity tagging, but also from the mainstream whose tendency is to reify thought and practice. Under threat from fundamentalism and consumer driven uniformisation, menaced by massification and the enforced re-abandonment of individual identity, art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. And this new modernism, for the first time, will have resulted from global dialogue. Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western pretensions to determine the world’s direction and the speed of its development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero; today, temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate, however, that we are on the verge of a leap out of the postmodern period and the (essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible; a a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism.” (page 12).

All of which can be taken as so much sound and fury signifying nothing, the proverbial tale told by an idiot, because post-colonialism was ‘always and already’ an integral part of modernity (just as modernism and modernity are inseparable from a process of globalisation that was already in motion in the sixteenth century; and rather than marking a break with modernism, ‘post’-modernism is actually a continuation of modernity). It strikes me that Bourriaud might benefit from sitting down with a few books written by the likes of Paul Gilroy. Likewise, Boring Ass talks of the historical role of artistic modernism, then of the historical counters being reset to zero (which he presumably sees as nullifying any historical role modernism performed); similarly, he speaks of our contemporary world being characterised by a complex network stripped of a centre, as well as the threat of ‘the mainstream’ reifying thought and practice. If there is a dialectical telos at work in Bourriaud’s ‘thought’ to provide a methodological underpinning to these otherwise senseless inversions, then it stands in direct contradiction to the claims he makes elsewhere in this text such as: “Our civilisation, which bears imprints of a multicultural explosion and the proliferation of cultural strata, resembles a structureless constellation awaiting transformation into an archipelago.” It looks like what is waiting to kick off here is that old idealist fallacy about consciousness being brought in from outside the ‘masses’, a trope much beloved by the likes of Lenin and Mussolini. Likewise, while artistic modernism may indeed – as Bourriaud claims – serve to ‘jolt us out of tradition’, it is important to remember that fundamentalism and traditionalism are also products of modernity in its broadest sense. Given the positions Bourriaud strikes, it unfortunately also becomes necessary to restate once again that artistic modernism is not necessarily incompatible with fascism and/or nationalism, and indeed that fascism is not incompatible with anarchism (see, for example, my text of a dozen years ago Anarchist Integralism).

Bourriaud’s rant about the “threat from fundamentalism and consumer driven uniformisation” and “being menaced by massification and the enforced re-abandonment of individual identity”, like his ritual denunciations of multiculturalism, are familiar enough as political rhetoric. That said, most of us are probably more used to seeing such positions articulated by ideologically motivated crytpo-fascists than art curators. Of course, it is possible that when Bourriaud speaks of ‘the threat from fundamentalism’ he means the type found in the US Bible belt, but if this is the case it is extremely foolish of him to refrain from explicitly saying so because the terminology he uses is so closely bound up with the political rhetoric of groups like the French Nouvelle Droite that many people will assume he is invoking so called “Muslim fundamentalists”.

In a review I wrote for Art Monthly last summer, I observed: “Interviewed recently by Anthony Gardner and Daniel Palmer, Bourriaud claimed ‘our new modernity is based on translation’… When in the interview just mentioned, Bourriaud speaks of the ‘fight for autonomy and the possibility of singularity’, he could be mistaken for a late-twentieth century disciple of Italian Dadaist Julius Evola.” The specific disciples I was thinking of were Nouvelle Droite ideologues such as Alain de Benoist, people who were far more influenced by Evola’s fascist politics than his brief involvement with the modernist avant-garde. I would, however, stress that I quite deliberately used the term ‘mistaken for’ and I am NOT claiming Bourriaud is an unreconstructed crypto-fascist.

The Wikipedia (on 16 February 2009) summarises Alain de Benoist’s views thus: ““from being close to fascist French movements at the beginning of his writings in 1970, he moved to attacks on globalisation, unrestricted mass immigration and liberalism as being ultimately fatal to the existence of Europe through their divisiveness and internal faults. His influences include Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Jünger, Jean Baudrillard, Helmut Schelsky, Konrad Lorenz, and other intellectuals. Against the liberal melting-pot of the U.S., Benoist is in favour of separate civilisations and cultures. He also says he opposes Jean-Marie Le Pen, racism and anti-Semitism. He has opposed Arab immigration in France, while supporting ties with Islamic culture. He has also tried to distance himself from Adolf Hitler, Vichy France or Aryan supremacy, in favor of concepts like ‘ethnopluralism,’ in which organic, ethnic cultures and nations must live and develop in separation from one another.”

Despite Bourriaud’s inflammatory rhetoric about ‘a multicultural explosion’ in the Tate Triennial catalogue, I continue to view him as an over-ambitious culture industry hack rather than a political demagogue. He may have picked up the moronic phraseology he employs almost unconsciously and have no idea of what it signifies politically. On the other hand, Boring Ass may be hedging his bets, thinking that ambiguous statements of the kind he is making about the ‘altermodern’ will ingratiate him with the political establishment in France if there are further swings to the right. It isn’t entirely clear to me what Bourriaud’s ambitions are, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he wanted to be director of an institution such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, or else running cultural policy for the French government; and if this is what he desires, then his curational charlatanism (viz re-dating Metzger’s work) indicates that he is unscrupulous enough to attempt to achieve it through a somewhat ambiguous redeployment of Nouvelle Droite motifs.

There are only two pieces in the Altermodern show that actually resonate with Bourriaud’s inflammatory catalogue essay. Curiously, Adrian Searle in his Guardian online review felt moved to link them: “…one sits and listens to Olivia Plender’s description of the relationship between Robin Hood and the various splits in the scouting movement in the early 20th century, and how that eventually led – via digressions on EM Forster, the Kibbo Kift and the archives at the Whitechapel Gallery – to a troubling faction called the Green Shirts (not a million miles from the fascist Blackshirts), who railed against the British Credit System in the 1930s (one of their number fired an arrow at 10 Downing Street). On the table, there are last week’s newspapers, with their credit-crunch headlines. The point circuitously being made is not so different from that of the mad, anti-semitic conspiracy theorist in Mike Nelson’s installation. Everything is connected, they both say. We just need the key.”

I have already criticised Mike Nelson elsewhere (bottom part of that page) for his redeployment of anti-Semitic motifs in a different work, which was done ‘without a suitable critical framing’. There I also observed: “the art world doesn’t just represent violence, it also reproduces it; and like the rest of capitalist society, often in its most murderous forms. Art won’t save the world; only the vast majority of us acting collectively can make this marvellous green planet somewhere that is really worth living.”

So to sum up, Altermodern at Tate Britain isn’t really about what’s happening in contemporary art, it is actually about Nicolas Bourriad and very little else. The show itself is boring and you really don’t need to see it. Nonetheless, just what were the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation thinking of when they underwrote Bourriaud’s ‘altermodern’ activities? Answers in the comments please!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in exhibitions | 46 Comments »