AGAIN A TIME MACHINE: STEWART HOME RETROSPECTIVE IN NEW YORK & LONDON

First shown at White Columns, 320 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014 - 22 October to 19 November 2011; then toured to Space Studios, 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH - 6 April to 19 May 2012. Curated by Matthew Higgs.

"In terms of resistance to easy absorption, (Prophet Royal) Robertson’s work is more than matched by White Columns’ second show: the first American exhibition devoted to Stewart Home, the British oppositional artist, latter-day Situationist, writer, editor, filmmaker, punk-rock musician, anti-art prankster and all-around contrarian who has been a thorn in the side of the British art and literary establishments for nearly 30 years. The exhibition includes a video interview concerning Mr. Home’s 1990-93 Art Strike, during which he purportedly abstained from cultural production, and copies of his fanzine Smile and his parodist pulp-fiction, including a sculpture made from stacks of his 2005 novel “Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton.” A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork. In all, few cultural producers seem to have been as busily and consistently canon-averse as Mr. Home."
Roberta Smith New York Times, 17 November 2011.

"The mini-retrospective features works from the mid-'80s to the present, and highlights Home's forays into self-publishing and multimedia art, and his relatively well-known experimental novels. There's a large display of his self-published magazine SMILE (1984–1989), a publication inspired in part by General Idea's FILE. Home produced SMILE with an aggressively antiestablishment agenda—one issue features an image of Molotov cocktails and the tagline "smile back at the ruling class." According to Home, the precept of the publication was that anyone in the world could publish their own SMILE, and that all magazines could be called SMILE. Several other publications created by people around the world under the name SMILE are also on view.

"A wall drawing done in the style of a homemade screen print features a man injecting himself and wearing a T-shirt inscribed with an adapted quote from Marx: "Heroin is the opiate of the people." It's a jab against Britain's anti-drug campaigns, which Home feels glamorized drugs by creating images featuring elegantly disheveled models.

"Global political themes parallel autobiographical themes. For his 2004 series of photographs, "Becoming (M)other," Home transferred images from his mother's modeling portfolio from the '60s onto images of himself emulating her poses. Identity of mother and son collapse into a third, less knowable being, for a personal and complex exploration of identity, sexuality and loss. (Home didn't grow up with his mother, and she died in 1979)."
Aimee Walleston, Art In America (online), 17 November 2011.

"In addition to vitrines containing rare copies of Smile and records of various actions, visitors could also watch a video of Stewart explaining the Art Strike and see the bed on which he'd reclined during the strike.  In the "years without art" - 1991-1994, as I recall - Stewart had ceased all artistic production.  This permitted a recalibration of his subjectivity, as well as posing a challenge to the commodification of creativity as a whole."
At The Sign Of The Pink Pig blog, 22 November 2011.

Becoming (M)other (work included in Time Machine retrospective)

The One & The Many (work included in Time Machine retrospective)

Vermeer II

Another page on Vermeer II

Ruins of Glamour

Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre

Art Strike

Curation and Violence at the ICA

London Art Tripping (psychogeography of 50 years of bohemianism)

Andre Stitt (live art and shamanism)

How To Improve The World (Hayward show of Arts Council Collection)

Art/Anti-Art