BUBONIC PLAGIARISM: STEWART HOME ON ART, POLITICS AND APPROPRIATION. Sabotage Editions, London 2006, ISBN 0 95400633X

The blurb:
Everything I see influences my work, both positively and negatively. I look at a lot of stuff and more often than not it makes me very certain about what I don’t want to do. What I'm one hundred and one percent against is this culture of mindless quotation, the idea that it is really cool just to cite things, and this pathetic practice completely permeates the art world at the moment and it’s insufferably boring. There’s nothing wrong with picking up on something but you need to run with it, redeploy it, transform it. You shouldn't just slavishly cite, you should always be actively doing something with the cultures we've inherited. The difference between doing and quoting is, in a nutshell, what separates detournement from appropriation. Reproduction alone is simply pointless reiteration, it’s completely mechanical and reveals the mind behind it to be retarded.

People like Angela Bulloch keep saying they’re referring to different things in their work, but they rarely provide any reason as to why they’re citing them. Bulloch is happy just to quote, which is why what she does is as dull as ditch water. She and the people she works with. like Liam Gillick. number among the most boring ‘name’ artists in the world. This is one of the reasons why the French government has been so heavily subsidising all the nonsense we've seen lately about relational aesthetics. Gillick is, of course, one of the key non-Gallic players, although as one would expect given the source of finance, it’s chiefly a French phenomena with a little international anti-flavouring to add to the bland-out factor. Capitalist politicians want people to think pointless quotational inanities are in some way radical, to ensure art bores are diverted from becoming engaged with anything that might actually threaten the status quo. Exemplars of ‘relational aesthetics’ like Rirkrit Tiravanija doling out food to rich collectors and dealers at art fairs and this being treated as an aesthetic development is just a joke. Twenty years before Tiravanija attempted anything like this, when Pete Horobin was creating situations in which different kinds of people could talk and eat as works of art, he picked on marginal spaces like The Basement in Newcastle and dragged people in off the street. Whatever criticisms one might make of Horobin's art radicalism, he was at least sincere. Tiravanija's work looks remarkably like a recuperation of Horobin's earlier interventions since he re-enacts these pieces at swanky biennials, which defuses their potentially radical content.

This pamphlet is a collection of seven interviews with Stewart Home, of which the following can be found on this site:

Bolt On Neoism

Doin' It To Death

I Fuck Like A Rabbit

Down & Dirty

64 pages.

Bibliography