Electronic Resistance - seek this out!

Cassette Culture

 Jerry Kranitz interviewed by Nigel Ayers



In the days before the internet made the entire past, present and future of music entirely accessible on your mobile phone, the way to find  adventurous music wasn’t really in the records shops – or even on occasional surfacings on  John Peel’s radio show - you’d have  to seek it out, to write to addresses that appeared in the back of records, cassettes . music papers, in music fanzines. You’d have to make the effort, buy stamps, and write away to find out.

After a lot of that kind of haphazard and fairly esoteric research, from the early 80s onwards,  a stream of surprising, innovative and creatively packaged- home produced music began to appear in my post bag,– fascinating & inspiring people I probably would never have found out about any other way -  through what has become known as “cassette culture”.  Some of them went on to get famous, most of them didn’t, that was never the point.. It was by and large anti-commercial and experimental, informal, inclusive, supportive networks – spanning 3 or 4 continents (including a few people right here in Cornwall). People from different backgrounds and motivations, exploring what art & music could be –often on the very cheap – with limited resources - more of a human relational thing than anything to do with stardom or bourgeois notions of talent or virtuosity. There was a lot of overlap with the mail art networks, but we’ll get into that later.

The German record label Vinyl on Demand has just released a very well researched book from a  US based historian of that “culture”. It comes packaged as a desirable hardback book with a double CD “Cassette Culture - Homemade Music and the Creative Spirit in the Pre-Internet-Age” It was a peculiar moment in musical history – an important moment that up till now, hasn’t really been properly documented. So, I got to interview the author and compiler of this book, Jerry Kranitz.


NIGEL: We’re living in interesting times –with this pandemic -and one of the effect of this crisis’s people are being forced to reassess the ways they interact with other people in the world, and especially the way the approach their art forms. It seems like everybody is working from home now, and relying heavily on parcels through the post. People are getting into DIY and valuing craft – to me it seems that ethos of valuing human relationships, rather than cash, that went into cassette culture has become very timely.
What thoughts do you have on this?
JERRY: Even prior to the pandemic I had seen people coming together in a good old DIY fashion. Regardless of any deserved criticism, social media has been a valuable forum for people of like interests to communicate and collaborate. For example, the Facebook ‘Electronic Cottage’ group consists of both veteran homemade artists from the 1980s and young bucks. I’ve watched in delight as the members have collaborated on numerous projects. Members regularly post photos of mail art they have received from each other. In the case of this particular group, much of the camaraderie has been due to the efforts and enthusiasm of Hal McGee, and in this forum it has worked like a champ.

But YES, the pandemic has influenced some projects. Only this week a call went out for a ‘mail art/music exchange project, which will be conducted completely through postal mail’. And in late April the Harsh Reality label released a fantastic compilation called ‘I Got The Corona Virus-19 Blues’.

The ‘interesting’ times we live in are riddled with negativity and division. Here in the U.S. I sometimes feel like I live in doppelganger worlds. But people are just so amazingly CREATIVE, and they always have been. DIY… the Network of creators… they keep right on making stuff and interacting with one another to do so. That’s what keeps me from getting discouraged. That’s what keeps me optimistic and believing there’s hope.

NIGEL: Can you tell us a little about what prompted you to write the book?
JERRY: From 1998-2016 I published a music zine, which still exists in static form at Aural-Innovations.com. In the early years I noticed a pattern among several of the artists I was interviewing. People talking about making cassette tapes in the 1980s and 90s, and a network of trading and collaboration. I started investigating, hurled myself down a homemade music/cassette culture rabbit hole, and eventually realized that there was a story to tell and I felt compelled to tell it.

Specifically, that the cassette culture network that emerged from the late 1970s is A) a less than fleshed out component of the larger post-punk story, and B) cassette culture is part of the ongoing story of 20th independence in the arts (e.g., Dada, Fluxus, Mail Art). From the beginning my goal was to approach the project as social history.

I spent from 2007-2017 researching and writing the book. I was convinced all that time that someone would beat me to the punch. Because no one, to date, has tackled this story from a comprehensive historical standpoint. There were a number of approaches I could have taken. History can only be fully understood when broken down into components. I’m sure there will be lots of criticism that boils down to how I could have approached the story. I hope my book inspires others to tell the tale from other angles.

 

NIGEL: “Cassette Culture” can mean a few things:
For example there is the page in Wikipedia, which lists cassette focused labels such as my own Sterile Records, Third Mind, etc. In a sense though, these – or small often cottage industry labels such as ROIR, Audio Arts, Touch, Industrial Records, Staaltape, - though drawing from “cassette culture” might not be representative of the more free – social relational phenomenon you concentrate on in the book. What do you think?
 

JERRY: I do think these labels are part of the story, and I get deep into cottage industry labels in the book. Distribution, getting work OUT THERE, is a fascinating topic. It is TOUGH. In the book I talk about the Rough Trade ‘Cartel’. Heck, even a company like Rough Trade couldn’t get very far attempting a mutually beneficial collaboration for the purpose of creating a distribution network. Industrial Records certainly seemed to achieve something more than cottage industry success. They were a key influence, model, and enabler for a lot of individuals who genuinely did operate on their own as usually one person operations. One thing I learned from researching and writing this book is that there really is no way to run a label and not have it COST you without engaging in some measure of business savvy Capitalism.

NIGEL: There have been other books about “cassette culture” eg “Cassette Mythos” (1992)
Thurston Moore “ Mix Tape: the art of Cassette Culture”(2004)
John Z Komurki “Cassette culture” (2019) – the ultimate guide to the Tapenaissance”,
What are your impressions of these books & do they cover similar or different territory to your own?
 

JERRY: Cassette Mythos is the only book that has targeted the cassette culture that is the focus of my book. The difference is that while my book is a history written from decades of hindsight, Cassette Mythos was a collection of essays by participants in the hometaper network detailing how to get involved in the cassette scene, how to make your own cassettes, case studies, personal reflections, and strategies. Though published in 1992, the essays had actually been written in the mid-late 1980s, precisely when the scene was in full bloom. Cassette Mythos editor Robin James wrote the Forward to my book.

Thurston Moore’s Cassette Culture has ZERO relation to the subject of my book. As his title – ‘Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture’ – indicates, it’s all about mix tapes. I made loads of mix tapes in the 1970s, all Best Of collections from my record albums. Perfectly valid use of cassettes. But they were not the original recordings by homemade musicians and audio artists that are at the heart of my book.

This is the first I have heard of the Komurki book. It looks like it’s about the resurgence of the cassette tape. But there may be some history in it. I just ordered it. THANKS for the pointer!!

NIGEL: Apparently cassettes are suddenly fashionable again, more people are buying them than at any time since the 80s – what are your thoughts on this phenomenon?
JERRY: I’ve seen this in a big way. Lots of them are coming from younger artists who must have been very young or not even born yet in the 1980s. I’ve not questioned any of them about it, but I suspect it’s a nostalgia thing? Just like the return of vinyl? The guy who runs a little independently owned record store in my town stocks lots of them produced by local/regional artists and labels. He knows me as the guy who likes ‘weird stuff’ and contacts me when he gets in interesting tapes. I gobble them up.

Speaking for myself, I like that these folks are producing cassettes instead of what would probably have been CDRs. I really hate CDRs. I’ve got nearly 40 year old cassettes that still play fine. But I have loads of CDRs from over the years that died ridiculously fast. And I never gave up vinyl. I’m thrilled that vinyl and tapes are back. That’s what I grew up with and that’s what I love.

NIGEL: Cassette artists and labels often took great care in the packaging of their releases, with cassettes
frequently presented as full blown works of art. The ornate and often confounding packaging was done
in the spirit of the mail art movement. Could you give us examples of some of your favourites?
JERRY: This topic deserves an oversized picture book of its own. And it gets back to what I said earlier about how people are just so darn CREATIVE. I could go on and on but I’ll give a few of the more elaborate examples…

James Hill, in a 1986 issue of Sound Choice magazine, wrote an article about creative mailers. He describes spotting a two-foot disengaged doll leg lying in a pile of trash on a street corner. He grabbed it and when he got home found that a cassette fit perfectly into the upper portion of the leg, and then filled the rest with additional goodies such as puffed yellow corn, buttons, and an assortment of other mail art.

'Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music' by Soviet France was a 2-tape set that came packaged in an engraved handmade ceramic container, wrapped in a screen-printed mock American flag with hammer & sickles instead of stars, a bird feather from the shores of the Irish Sea, and a fold-out info sheet with instructions for use and other artwork.

While I was researching the book I read a lot of hysterical reviewer impressions of these packages. Here's one from a 1984 issue of Op: SHUT UP! Cassettes: A new concept in low-budget mail-order tape art: Piece O’Tape. It’s almost perfect – short, sweet, light, interesting, inexpensive to send and manufacture. Unfortunately rather difficult for me (with 6 thumbs) to handle the little bitty limp ribbon of cassette tape 'one or two feet long', elaborately wrapped in paper, plastic, tin foil, more paper, more tin foil, with little smart-assed messages on each layer. I got it to play once, it was at an odd speed. Just the thing for cryptologists.

NIGEL: I’m interested also in relation to the new interest in craft based music objects - lathe-cut records and what looks like a mini-revival in home produced CDRs (TQ zine for example).
Any thoughts?
JERRY: I’ve seen a few of the lathe-cut records. They’re interesting, and more of a personal thing for the artist. The couple I’ve got, the only way to get them was directly from the artists, so there was that crucial connection. As for the mini-revival in home produced CDRs, I wasn’t aware the darn things had gone away!

 

NIGEL: There is a large part of your book dedicated to what “cassette culture” is NOT – could you give us a potted idea of the various definitions you are using here?
JERRY: I was very concerned about ‘Definition’, hence the Introduction having What is this book about and what is this book NOT about sections. I wanted to be clear that my focus is about the Network… the pre-internet Social Network… and how the participants functioned within it, not having the benefit of email and uploads/downloads. And it was a genuine social network for so many. I was concerned that it be clear I was focusing on how the participants discovered each other and  communicated via small press publications/zines, through the postal service, traded, collaborated, and, to the extent that any of them cared to, spread the word about their creations.

I touched on the what the book is NOT about responding to your question about Thurston Moore’s Cassette Culture Mix Tapes book. I’m not talking about mix tapes or demos, but recordings of original works that in most cases were created in the artists homes. I also wanted to be clear that this is in no way an index of artists. I made zero attempt at being comprehensive as regards the participants. All individuals I interviewed or in any way included are ‘representative’.

Having said that, I did attempt to interview artists in different countries. At the time I’m responding to these questions the book is only starting to trickle into people’s hands. A couple people noted that it seems Americentric. That’s fair, and probably because most publications from the 1980s available to me were American. But I do attempt to tell the story from a global perspective.



VOD 158: JERRY KRANITZ / VARIOUS: Cassette Culture - Homemade Music
Available from https://www.vod-records.com/
 

Imber Village & The Delaware Road

So Ian and myself set off from Cornwall on  a Saturday morning to Salisbury Plain - bright and early as the A303 is likely to be gridlocked. Traffic was pretty slow, we took the turnoff past the horror that is the Stonehenge Experience,and then...after a while..
  along this single track road across the Plain, on roads that are built for tractors and moving troops around.

There’s a lot of vintage  red double decker London buses out, and lots of people out for the day. This is the one weekend of the year that the public are allowed into the Imber ghost village.

This village was evacuated in 1943 - and has been used for military training ever since. There’s lots of signs up telling you not to pick up anything that might be an unexploded bomb..well I go for a pee in the bushes behind the car park and find this little unusual metal kind of thing, that looks like it may be some sort of a detonator, er maybe the sort of a thing that a person might pick up and it blows their arm off…so maybe I won’t take that home with. me.

So there’s the village of Imber, presenting very post-Brexit image of rural England, families picnicking by the barbed wire that surrounds the 16th century  church, a windowless pubs and farmhouses..the militray industrial complex rooted in the chocolate box rural.










Somehow there’s a bit of  a Scarfolk vibe going on ---  time has become a loop – and we’re living through a time of power cuts and UFO sightings and cold war paranoia and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
So after while, we set off to the New Zealand farm, where this Delaware Road festival is happening in - just back down the track a bit. It's a military training site surrounded by barbed wire & surveillance towers . My bag gets  checked over by security --- no they aren’t suppositories, they’re earplugs----


The hidden history of the 20th century....

The camp site is good and has clean enough portaloos. There’s a couple of spent bullet cases where we pitch the tent.

 I’m guessing there’s an air of paranoia in the concept behind this festival, but I have to say, in the past I’ve been to some seriously bleak and fairly scary  pop festivals, this was in no way one of them.. This one is lovely, there’s a set of concrete buildings, called STONE TENTS, with some spaces as big as a sitting room, some as big as maybe a classroom, and a biggish Nissen hut for the main stage. And most of it is indoors, so there’s very little sound leakage form one venue to another. It’s ideal for left field electronic music and sound and video installations, and that’s what there are here.


A beautiful re-purposing of a space normally used to train people to kill other people. Well, if you don’t think too hard about that, it’s great.



The beer is good and there are number of trajectories I could have taken.. there’s a few faces I recognise: snookering synth superstar Steve Davis is here, the Well Weird West crew from Yeovil have a bunker to themselves, there's people we see on the weirdy music circuit - if there is such a thing..

Theres' something strange set up in the back of a van:




















There’s 40 acts in 10 hours, and mostly there’s about three things I want to see on at once.

Best thing is to give up on planning and just wander around....

 Here’s some of things I did see:
Alison Cotton – melancholic viola
Cukoo –great  synth pop 










Penny Rimbaud doing a Q;A about the old days in Crass and then some of his beatnik poetry


















A documentary film about Wally Hope (that voice on the phone sounds familiar)



Sarah Angliss gives  talk on a man who sold fall out shelters in the 80s and the ridiculous Protect and Survive monthly magazine.
Ian Helliwell – with some sort of tiny video projecting sound to light &;what looks like a battery powered interociter  on his desk.



Howlround –– in a room crammed with people and tripped out projections. –















Sequential – a  video installation , mesh screen and normal screen with soundtrack left running. Blurry mix of mayday, folk festivals, fires, and flashes of magical symbols and map references and computer code on mesh screen

Kemper Norton – the missing link between Cornish folk and techno youth on mushrooms
Ekoplekz –– I hope somebody recorded what he was doing
Cattle (heavy metal two drummers & very popular here)
Lone Taxidermist – very very loud and playing two human spines

..a siren goes off... a procession with green faced morris men ...

A’Bear  -lovely happy uplifting dancey stuff, this fixed my aching back.

it's all a blurr..but..

An amazing bit of organisation by https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/.
All in all a brilliant weekend!

Nocturnal Emissions in Transmission, Dartington, Devon, Duty Experiment 2018 Years

MuhMur Radio Nocturnal Emissions Special Part One : Featuring the sounds of Nocturnal Emissions plus tracks from I.B.F. (Ideas Beyond Filth), Bourbonese Qualk, Caroline K and The Pump. Full track listing will appear on the ReMuhMuration blog. This was broadcast on SoundArt Radio. 26 August 2018.



MuhMur Radio Nocturnal Emissions Special Part Two featuring a live performance from Nigel Ayers and 'In Conversation' with Tony Whitehead (Very Quiet Records), plus sounds from Nocturnal Emissions and Ayers/Everall/Harris. This programme was broadcast on SoundArt Radio August 26 2018.

Monstermind: The magical life and art of Tony "Doc" Shiels

Monstermind by Rupert White is packed with rare photos, a well-researched tale of the magical life and art of Tony “Doc” Shiels, surrealist, magician and creator of folklore.

From Doc’s involvement  in the ‘50s St Ives art scene– then the hippest happening place in the world for abstract art - to being barred from St Ives pubs for being a beatnik (I  know how it feels, I was there a decade or so later), being banged up in St Ives nick for barmy behaviour  (likewise), and onto  increasingly surrealistic monster-raising stunts...
Check out how Doc conjures up Morgawr, the Falmouth sea serpent, (or was it a sea-slug?), the Ponsanooth Fairy Photos, the Owlman of Mawnan.

Many other curious entertainments feature in the book.

In the mid-70s Shiels and his family became known in tabloid newspapers as “The weirdest family in the land”.

As it says on the cover, “Shiels used skills learnt as an artist to manipulate the public in a brazen and audacious display of theatrical, imaginative daring. In the process he left an indefinable but not insignificant magical and artistic legacy”.

 All these years after the two sevens clashed, I’m not sure what rates as the magical highlight of 1977, was it the situ-shamanism of the New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, was it the Hammer House of Windsor’s Jubilee itself, or was it was it Doc Shiels’ manifestation of the Loch Ness Monster?

Monstermind offers a welcome antidote to the horrid occult practices of the likes of Aleister Campbell and may help those of you still suffering from the theeee goth hangover onto the road to recovery…

A cracking read.
Doc's paintings rock.
Also, there's some very good  bits in here where Rupert contextualises Doc's practice in terms of developments in dematerialised art.

Now I want the big glossy coffee table-sized monograph. 

 (Will somebody publish one, please?)


Nnid Nid!!!

Monstermind: The Magical Life and Art of Tony 'Doc' Shiels:
Paperback: 157 pages
Publisher: Antenna Publications; First edition (1 Feb. 2015)
 ISBN-10: 0993216412
ISBN-13: 978-0993216411
Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Monstermind-Magical-Life-Tony-Shiels/dp/0993216412


 

May Day

 

Here we were doing our fertility rites in Parliament Square, London, in the year 2000. 

I was told this was the first maypole there since Oliver Cromwell banned them

Have a belting Beltane!


Many thanks to http://www.lawrencespicturepage.co.uk

Action Painting : Windsor Free Festival 1974

A little bit of footage of the cop I decorated with fluorescent green paint when he was beating up a peaceable member of the public at the Windsor Free Festival back in 1974. see my earlier blog about the free festivals.

The still image was in The Sun newspaper the next day (below) , the movie footage is from "Festival Britannia", which was broadcast on BBC4 in 2010.

The soundtrack is from "Extraordinary Rendition" by Nocturnal Emissions, 2010. (coming soon..)



29th August 1974,
After a week of low-key harassment, a horde of vicious coppers are wrecking everything at Windsor Free Festival. The boys in blue have dragged me out of my tent in the early hours of the morning and now the bastards are roughing up the young women running the free food kitchen that has sustained me for the week. I’ve a pot of fluorescent green poster paint in my pocket I’ve been carrying round for a while, thinking maybe I’ll do a bit of body painting with it or something... I chuck the whole pot over a particularly violent rozzer. The next thing I know this big ugly cop and two other flatfoots have jumped on me, they’ve got me down on the floor, twisting my arms up my back and dragging me along the turf by my hair in the direction of their Black Marias. “You’re nicked “they might have said except thirty or so public spirited citizens jump on top of PC Plod & his mates and somehow I get squeezed out from underneath this mass scrummage like a freshly ejaculated spermy thing.

I run off and swap clothes with a mate so I’m disguised and won’t be recognised. Later that night, I spot the big ugly cop he’s not bothered to clean himself up, he’s still got the paint on his face, dirty bugger. Next day he’s got his photo in The Sun “Target- a smeared face .. dignity intact” reads the caption. Oh I get it, propaganda. Dignity my arse, he was a thug.

It was a long time ago, but I kept the newspaper clipping, dull and monochromatic and old-school though it was. The coppers’ uniforms look like something out of Enid Blyton, that’s why they were called Plod. Hippies look funny. But it was good to be involved in that counter-cultural stuff.

The Free Festivals were amazing examples of good humoured insurrection, especially the Windsor one, squatting in the Queen’s back yard. Now everything’s so commercialized and you’ve got digital entertainment coming out of every orifice, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer and politicians keep mongering these horrible wars and it’s all for corporate greed. And sometimes it feels like there just isn’t any opposition any more, and then something wonderful happens, like Charles and Camilla get paint-bombed and the Tory HQ gets trashed and loads of what the ruling class doesn’t want you to know, but you know anyway but can’t really prove ,gets published by Wikileaks and you think, well maybe there’s hope for us all yet.

The other night there was this documentary, Festival Britannia, about the old festivals on TV and there’s footage of Windsor in it I’d never seen before and there’s a few seconds of the big ugly cop in it, this time in colour. I think I did a good job of the paint work.

Nigel Ayers "Spoon" (1970)

This is the first film I made. It's shot on Standard 8mm film stock in Tideswell, Derbyshire, 1970. I'd be 13 years old. The cast includes myself, John Allen, Danny Ayers, Mary Ayers and Nick Buttle. The original footage is silent. The soundtrack here is from Nocturnal Emissions "Duty Experiment" CD, recorded a decade later.

Keeping Hope Alive

Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor

Following his death in 1975, the ashes of Wally Hope, founder of Stonehenge People's Free Festival, were scattered in the centre of Stonehenge. When a child tasted the ashes the rest of the group followed this lead. In the following decades, as the festival increasingly became the site of contest about British heritage and culture, the story of Wally's ashes was told at significant times. His name continues to be invoked at gatherings today. This paper discusses these events as 'the making of an ancestor', and explores wider contexts in which they might be understood. These include Druidic involvement in the revival of cremation, Amazonian bone-ash endo-cannibalism, and popular means of speaking of and to dead relatives. In addition to considering the role of 'ancestors' in contemporary Britain, the paper contributes to considerations of 'ancestry' as a different way of being dead, of a particular moment in the evolution of an alternative religious neo-tribal movement, of the meanings of 'cannibalism', and of the ways in which human remains might be treated by the bereaved and by various other interested parties.

Harvey, Graham (2004). Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor. Mortality, 9(3), pp. 255–267.

see http://oro.open.ac.uk/3219/

see also http://www.earthlydelights.co.uk/netnews/wally.html

see also http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=180481282065&ref=mf

Free Festivals, UFOs and the 1970s

At the age of 16 I began spending my summers hitchhiking around the UK. Along my way, I attended various Free Festivals, notably events in Windsor Great Park in 1973 and 1974. The ethic of these festivals was completely different from that of commercial pop festivals, then or now. The Free Festivals were effectively mass proletarian squats of land, organised on an autonomous DIY-ethic of "bring what you expect to find". Free communal food supplies were organised as well as free entertainment in the form of "underground" rock acts & their light shows, often by "name" acts of the time - Hawkwind, Gong, as well as dozens of more obscure and unknown acts including the electronic band Zorch, the Stranglers, Joe Strummer's 101ers.

Arriving early and leaving late at these events, which tended to last for weeks rather than days, I got acquainted most of their organisers, I also found myself being interviewed and photographed by national newspapers. The ad hoc way these events were organised meant that people from the libertarian far left were joining forces with lifestyle anarchists others with far more right wing brands of individualism. Members of authoritarian cults such as the Hare Krishnas rubbed shoulders with anarcho-capitalist dope dealers, Hells Angels, gay liberationists, rock entrepreneurs, weekend hippies and quite a few ordinary normal people.

The 1974 Windsor Free Festival took place - without Royal permission - in the park adjoining the royal castle. The national press pretended to be scandalised by (true) stories of giveaways of thousands of tabs of LSD, public nudity and open cannabis smoking. After 10 days the festival was brought to abrupt end by a violent eviction carried out by hundreds of police officers. At one stage I myself was arrested and roughed up by three police officers, but several dozen public-spirited citizens helped enable my escape. Many of my friends were not so fortunate and ended up in police cells. I spent a night or two in a friend's house in London, then took up an invitation to join Fort Wally, a dissident camp within the Stonehenge complex, which I had briefly visited earlier.

I stayed for a few weeks in Fort Wally, a camp of 30 or so people, close to the Stonehenge monument in a communal geodesic dome.

There were many different motivations behind the people at the camp. Some were obviously from highly privileged backgrounds, some were minors who had run away from abusive parents, some were petty criminals and addicts, some were mentally ill, some were hardcore mystics and some were teenaged hedonists. During my time there, I managed to gain an access to the central circle of stones, to which the public are nowadays generally denied. On one occasion this was by vaulting a barbed wire fence, on others we were let in by the official custodians. The Stonehenge monument I found mysterious but disappointing. Stonehenge lacks the subtle aesthetic appeal of a site such as Avebury or indeed many of the thousands of smaller Neolithic sites scattered over the British Isles and Continental Europe. However, I became fascinated by the belief systems of the people I was associating with at the camp, and how their theories failed to measure up to experienced phenomena. Their faith in a DIY culture was one that I continue, perhaps naively, to share. Lifestyle anarchism was one which I had most difficulties with. I have never had the desire to live for any length of time in a commune, and I never embraced the primitivism of some of those who went on to become teepee dwellers. Recreational drug use had some benefits and many disadvantages. Already a long term sceptic, I took the mysticism with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the layers of meanings this prehistoric site had accrued.

One incident in particular stands out in my memory. On the night of the full moon, around midnight around 20 of us were admitted inside the fenced enclosure to the centre of the stones by a friendly night security man. Having got there, and having no unifying religious or scientific background, I wondered for a while what we were supposed to do. Someone suggested holding hands and chanting Om. I thought this suggestion was silly, as I couldn't see the relevance of a Hindu mantra to a European site of largely unknown origins that by all accounts predated that living Asian religion. But for want of a better plan, I joined in, staring at the night sky as we all chanted Oooooommmmmm. After a few minutes three objects appeared from the distance and flew high above our heads. There were three coloured lights on each of these objects each forming a triangle. I interpreted these objects to be helicopters from one of the nearby military bases and a coincidence that they should be on full-moon manoeuvres at same time we were omming. As far as I was concerned, the only strange thing about the experience was the helicopters were silent, I took this to be because they had been very high above us.

At the time I was unimpressed, but for some of the people there this was a very moving experience. A young man I met there, told me he felt like he was now full of an incredible energy and felt able to shout louder than anyone on earth. He also said, "Wasn't it great when the flying saucers appeared?". I humoured him. These were not flying saucers, they were triangles of light - nothing like the giant chrome hubcaps photographed by George Adamski and others. I thought the entire event was the ultimate in corniness and cliché. A circle of hippies chanting Om at Stonehenge at the midnight of a full moon - of course UFOs would appear - and of course no-one would believe me if I were to relate this story 30 years in the future. Later I learned that triangles of light belong to a certain category of UFOs and are not always thought to be of extra-terrestrial origin. Some have argued that these manifestations may in fact constitute a form of telepathic communications between the Earth Mother Gaia and her advanced primate surface dwellers. These thought-form communications often take on the appearance of shiny technological gadgetry with flashing lights, as this has been found to focus the attention of advanced primates. Years later, when working on a web site development in Dublin, I met man who told me he had been a RAF technician stationed on Salisbury Plain at this time, working on the development of silent helicopters. I think it is wise to neither believe nor disbelieve any of these explanations of what I experienced. Whether I can trust my memory of those events 30 years later is another question, but over time they have accrued a far more complex meaning for me than they ever did in my teenage years.

At the end of the summer of 1974 I was faced with a choice, either to join in an overland trek to India (in a former hearse), or to return to my Art Foundation course in Chesterfield. I chose the art course as I liked to experiment with technology, I liked the sort of art you could display indoors and I liked my home comforts.

However, my encounters with the counter culture furnished me with a reading list of unorthodox archaeology and redundant fringe belief systems. I enthusiastically consumed books such as John Michell's View Over Atlantis, Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track, Eric Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. I found myself reading these books mainly as entertainment, as fiction, though I also conducted hands-on experiments in ley-hunting, orgone accumulation, and the like. The visual side of these subjects, sacred geometry, pyramids, etc fed into my art work, as did some of my more nightmarish experiences with authoritarian society, which I don't have the space or inclination to deal with right now.

Experiences in the field showed me that reality matched neither an orthodox or an "alternative" view. All sides were obviously faking their results in order to support their preposterous theories. Exploring fringe beliefs was a useful tactic at art school, as I had at that time very little interest in, or knowledge, of art history. My art comes primarily from my own experience, my understanding of art history came later. I was using my hands and eyes and body to create real things in the world and through this interaction was examining my experience of the world. Using the structure of fringe beliefs, I could explain my work in non-art terms, referring to subject matter outside the "art world". At the same time, I think I may have disappointed anyone who assumed I actually believed in the subject matter I was exploring. I was covered by the fact that similar occultist tropes were being presented as Land Art by Richard Long, Robert Smithson etc, and as performance art and sculptural objects by Joseph Beuys and many others. So my work could easily be understood as being well within the parameters of acceptable art practice.

I do not think art is a mystical process. Any mysticism accrued to art making are largely the result of the alienations imposed by consumer society, and a hangover from the religious indoctrination of earlier centuries. However, I find it is often difficult to explain the processes of art-making, especially the "life" of art outside the "author" in any other ways than those of Magick. Magick, like post-modernism is a lot to do with manipulating symbols to influence consciousness. From whatever ethical, religious or political standpoint you take, to work in art is to work with real things and to do with exploring the fabric of reality, it is also about sharing that exploration and experience with other people.

Nigel Ayers, April 2006

Sid Rawle R.I.P.

The social activist Sid Rawle, or as the gutter press used to call him, "King of the Hippies", died last week.

In the '60s, he was one of the Hyde Park Diggers commune who were given an island, by John Lennon, off the coast of Ireland to establish an alternative society. He was often on the mic at the Free Festivals, officiating at marriages and funerals, and published International Times for a while. In the '80s he was with the Peace Convoy at the Molesworth peace camp and he's well-known to many in traveler and Green circles.

Our paths crossed quite a few times in the years following the police attack on the Windsor Free Festival in 1974. He was inspiring company.

R.I.P.

What is Space Cornish?

see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/a-dictionary-of-space-cornish/1159492


available from amazon

Stewart Home on neoism, plagiarism and altermodernism

Stewart Home is a counter-cultural icon who, as a writer, artist and thinker has been involved with cultural and counter-cultural activities for more than 30 years.


First of all could you tell us a bit about your background, and what propelled you into working in a public arena?

I didn't have any background to propel me into doing stuff in public, most of the kids I went to school with either went on to work in factories or joined the army. My school did produce a few really famous male rock musicians and one famous female nude model! I didn't like the music made by the rock stars who’d been to my school and there weren't the same opportunities to make a career from nude modelling for boys at that time. I even turned down the odd offer to appear in gay porn movies, where I'd get a hundred quid and they didn't even need to show my face, just my arse.

I was very into music, and started writing reviews in the late seventies to get free records and get into gigs for free. I also started playing in bands, but mainly they weren't very good. The first band I was in that played proper gigs, as opposed to parties, was a ska band called The Molotovs and we murdered tunes like "Johnny Too Bad" and "54-46 Was My Number". The next band I was in used to murder tunes like "Louie Louie" and "Real Cool Time", but did a rather good version of "Gloria" - and we were more inclined to play original material and keep covers for encores, so that people would have already decided they liked us before we gave them the opportunity to judge what we were doing against an earlier version of a song.


So, we're talking about the late 70s / early 80s . A time before the Internet, satellite TV, mobile phones, cheap air flights, cheap heroin etc. I think what was distinctive about that era, which perhaps isn't so true now, is the way complex social networks grew around such artefacts as vinyl records, and xeroxed 'zines, which seemed a possible way out of the mundaneity of everyday life. And there was perhaps an occasional sense of community in opposition to Thatcher and the destruction of the welfare state.

I get the impression that from a very early age you had a high degree of motivation, and that motivation was towards activities that many would find difficult and materially unrewarding, even futile. For example, back in 1980, it wasn't considered hip to be an artist and few people would visit galleries. Likewise the novel wasn't exactly a "weapon of choice" back then. Forming a band would also have been an effort of self-organization, since musical instruments were relatively more difficult and expensive to get hold of.

Yes, back at the end of the 70's I was very aware of the communities formed around bands and fanzines. However, after a while I found that scene a bit unsatisfying. I liked music a lot but things got very narrowed down into genres, and this was a particular problem on the punk scene which seemed to view itself as much more progressive than other youth cultures but in practice tended to be more bigoted.

I liked some punk bands, although in retrospect a lot of what I liked wasn’t really punk but power pop or pub rock dressed up to look like punk. I also liked soul and funk. Most of those on the punk scene really looked down on you if you also liked Afro-American music, and there was a sometimes unconscious and sometimes not so unconscious racism in this. Kids into disco, northern soul and funk, tended to be more open minded about the different types of music someone like me might have been into. And this punk bigotry became even more of a drag when the punk scene split into Anarcho, Gothic, Oi! etc. Also when I was writing in or producing my own zines I didn’t just want to cover music and this often got a bad reaction. I just wanted do be involved in something more interesting than these increasingly narrow punk scenes.

I used to also spent a lot of time at cinemas around London and in particular The Scala, first on Tottenham Street and then after it moved to Kings X (above left) in the early eighties. And I was reading a lot of the modernist classics, from Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs – as well as seeing them on film, Burroughs in Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups and as narrator of Witchcraft Through The Ages (below right); Robbe-Grillet as a screenwriter on Last Year At Marienbad and as writer/director on Trans-Europe Express etc.

Mike Heart who was on the fiction desk at Compendium from about 1979 on told me years later he could tell I was one of the more interesting kids coming in to buy books. He said he divided the teenagers like me who were buying books from then into two groups, the ones worth encouraging with their reading and the ones who weren’t. So if you went in and bought Kerouac then Mike would just take your money, but if like me you bought Burroughs he’d suggest other stuff you might be into and try and get it cheaply for you too. But I met a lot of people who’d turn me onto stuff I didn’t know, not just Mike Heart.

So it wasn’t like today when you could just get this amazing range of information from the internet, you’d have to seek it out.

But there were older people around who’d turn me onto a lot. It required a certain amount of motivations, but it wasn’t all unaided effort. These sort of interests weren’t encouraged at school, since we didn’t even do schlock like Shakespeare, the English teacher told my class we were too thick for the Bard which was why we did the only examining board in English literature where you could do all modern texts. And we were like the elite of a very crap school, seven streamed classes in the year and only in the top two were you allowed to do O-levels as it was then. The three beneath you could do CSE, which in the old system was seen as not nearly as good as an O-level, then beneath that were the non-exam classes for those considered not good enough to do CSE, the bottom classes were mainly made up of kids from the children’s home and kids from Muslim families. The school was completely institutionally racist, it must have been about 25 percent Muslim kids and yet there was only one Muslim girl in the O-level classes, the rest were in the CSE and non-exam classes! But that was the norm back then in the seventies, when I left school I went and worked in a factory for a while and I quickly got a cushy job in the finishing department coz I was literate and numerate so I could count and sign everything out. A lot of the white guys in there were illiterate, and those that weren’t got the easy jobs, and if they were older than me got to be the foremen. There were Muslims who had the literacy and numeracy to take these posts but they just weren’t given them. So I didn’t grow up with anyone who knew anything about the art world or knew writers or anything. Music seemed a bit closer coz my school had produced some well known rock musicians. But I just found the world interesting, so I wasn’t gonna let the teachers telling me and all the other kids in the school we were thick hold me back.



Can you tell me something about 'Smile' magazine, and the context it arose in? At the time, it looked like it might have been difficult and expensive to produce. You wouldn't have been using computers back then, and there wouldn't have been digital printing. How did you distribute it?

'Smile' started because I was doing these funny little poems, mainly as a reaction to the stuff I was hearing read at clubs back then. In the very early eighties I used to go to places like Evening Falls/Suns of Dada in the basement of Slightly Oliver’s Wine Bar in Holborn, London. They’d have people like Anne Clark doing this supposed street poetry, but I really hated the mix of socialist realism and gothic elements in a lot of what was being done then. It was really really bad aesthetically and I saw it as the sub-literary equivalent of the very worst music that came out of the punk/new wave scene: bands that really suck like Siouxsie and the Banshees or The Cure. So I’d write these really banal and short still life type poems about fruit and vegetables and get up and do those as a way of taking the piss out of what was poetically dominant on that scene...So the first couple of issues of Smile were just a way of collecting some of this spoken word material together. I put the first one together at the end of 1983 and it was published in January 1984, then I did the second issue within two months of that…

I suggested in the first issues of Smile that other people should do magazines with the same name, a kind of neo-dadaist joke although I was quite serious about getting other people to use the name. Then I ran into the Neoists, and discovered Dave Zack’s Monty Cantsin project, where lots of people would use the same performing name, which was very much along the same lines.

I got a cheap print deal via someone I knew from political groups for the first couple of issues. Then the print shop where that was done closed down. The next few issues weren’t so well produced. But they were all off-set apart from issue 6 which was silk-screened. They were done in runs of somewhere between a thousand and two thousand. Then I got some better printing sorted out, done at a discount but I still had to go easy on my dole money to have the readies to pay for it. I’d eat really cheap food, scavenged vegetable, beans, bread, pasta, and save money out of my dole cheques to pay for printing and also doing stuff in galleries or mail art. Art openings were better then than today 'coz you could get free drinks and they’d often have food too! So as far as possible I’d live on other people’s dip. Verso book launches were particularly good for free food, so I’d go early to those. They bought all these Marks & Spencer's nibbles, very flash!

Then I borrowed an IBM compositor, which went around political groups I was involved with, and I’d use like spot colours on the cover, and glossy paper. I’d learnt to touch type when I was sixteen so I was quite fast with the compositor, and it wasn’t really that much more complicated than an electric typewriter, it didn’t take long to learn how to use it. Back then looking professional really helped shift stuff. In the mid-eighties most underground publications were done on typewriters, so the fact that I typeset mine myself really made it look better and got it to stand out. I also typeset stuff for a load of other people when I had the compositor.

Volatile memory and you could put in about a column and a half of text at a time in the small type sizes I favoured. You’d programme it to stop and you’d have to change the golf-ball head if you wanted to change the type or put in italic or something. But compared to a lot of what was around it looked really flash. And I was parodying British newspapers and advertising, so on one issue as a joke I put ‘Forward With Libya’ rather than the more famous ‘red top’ slogan ‘Forward With Britain’, and 'coz it looked good a rumour went round I was funded with Libyian money, although it was just my dole cheques.

I made the magazines really cheap too, like 30p, but I’d make at least costs back. It was very easy to shift 2000 copies then just through the radical bookshops around London and out to a few other outlets beyond London that requested it. Younger kids forget how different it was in that pre-Internet era. It is much harder to shift publications in those kind of numbers now than it was back then. I’d just get on my bicycle with the magazines in a rucksack on my back and take them around myself. I was in inner London but I liked cycling so I thought nothing of going all over greater London distributing stuff on my bicycle. Things that went further were mailed or I took them if I was passing through.



Punk had radicalised a lot of people at the time: partly in opposition to an increasingly right-wing government. What were the other influences and cross-currents around at the time as you recall them affecting you?

The big thing for me as a kid in terms of political influence was a bit earlier than that. The three day week then the two elections in 1974. Heath had that line about who rules the country me or the miners; and I’d be going to school through that and it was nothing but a sea of Labour posters all the way there.

Obviously Labour wasn’t radical but because of the rhetoric of the Tories as a 12 year old I felt we were really close to a working class revolution, which of course was a very exciting prospect! I was already very anti-monarchist and anti-capitalist before punk. Partly it was a great way to wind up the teachers. I’d get Capital by Marx out of the local library and carry it around school, although I didn’t read a word of Marx until after I’d left. But it was a great wind-up to the teachers. I got a copy of Willie Hamilton’s anti-monarchist book “My Queen & I” when that came out in paperback and I’d put that on my desk; it really annoyed the teachers.

So to me punk wasn’t really that important for those political attitudes they were already there. In retrospect I think punk wasn’t that useful, it kinda killed rock and roll, and also there was an incredibly bigotry among sections of the punk scene against disco and soul, which just wasn’t helpful. Looking back on it, I think punk was massively over-rated. There were interesting things around it, but often that was power pop or pub rock dress in punk rags as a way of attracting an audience. Listening to bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash now, they sound pretty awful.



What was it that drew you to Neoism subsequently? Is it possible to describe what Neoism was?

Neoism was just a bunch of people internationally who appeared to be doing the same things I was doing. So it appealed for that reason, and because I’ve always considered collective activity on cultural and other fronts to be important. As far as the name goes, Neoism can be summed up with the explanation that it was a prefix and a suffix without any content… But actually you can see it very much in a tradition of avant-garde anti-art, more running through dada and fluxus and mail art until I came along and injected some situationist influences. But some of those involved claim it wasn’t anything to do with art and was instead occult speculation or a new way of living, while others claimed to be artists. But if those involved in Neoism were artists, they certainly weren’t money artists but ‘real’ ‘undergrounders’.



Later in the 80's you had shows at prestigious venues like Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and Chisenhale in London amongst others (pictures left and above x2). How did these come about? How did the shows relate to your other interests and concerns? Did they embody particular political or philosophical ideas for example?

I was interested in demonstrating that art was a process of bureaucratic manipulation, that art was whatever those in a position of cultural power said was art. So I set out to establish myself as an artist to prove that anyone who understood the art system could manipulate it in this way. For this reason it was important for me to do gallery shows. Getting in those legitimate spaces and getting reviews in the national press and art magazines - which was achieved with those shows you mentioned - proved that someone like myself could just set out to put themselves in the position of an artist, you didn’t need the right background or training, you just needed to understand how to manipulate the institution of art.

But those shows were also really interesting group collaborations involving not only me but also people like Stefan Szczelkun and Ed Baxter who now runs Resonance FM. The 'Art In Ruins' duo Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks were also involved. We had huge fights and arguments about what we were doing and how this related to our opposition to the mainstream art world and culture at that time. I don’t think everyone was coming from the same position but we all wanted to smash culture as it existed at that time and remake it in a less elitist form. But then, of course, the yBa came along and things got worse.

I was messing around with stuff, edging my way into galleries. At that time people in the London art world didn’t know much about Fluxus and the Stiuationists, but I’d been doing research into them and published stuff in Smile relating to that, so people realised I knew about that and thought I’d been interesting to know and work with. Stefan Szczelkun I came across through mail art but he was in South London and invited me to the first Our Wonderful Culture show opening. I think Stefan must have pointed me out to Ed Baxter, because he came over to me and started up a conversation about some of the stuff I was writing up in Smile, then he took me across to meet Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks. Stefan had been asked to do a show at Chisenhale and I think pretty much that night it was all agreed we’d try to do something collectively. So that was how that and the Transmission show and later ones in Malmo and Luton came about. But at the same time I was meeting other people in other ways. I was putting pieces in to the group shows at DIY Gallery that used to be in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. So I was dealing with people there who were interesting like Chris Saunders, but it wasn’t just him there were a load of other people around him.



The Festival of Plagiarism, which you instigated and organised, in January and February 1988 was a large number of events, including art exhibitions, music perfomances, video, actions (such as National Home Taping Day) and performances to which anyone was invited to contribute. Aimed squarely at "the false individualism of consumer society", as I remember, it took its ethos from "underground" DIY modes of collective organisation. The events ran in community spaces such as Community Copy Art and small galleries rather than in "establishment" art spaces. A major achievement of the FOP was to show that it is possible to organise an ambitious cultural event without enough money to cover any more than the most minimal of expenses - the festival had no sponsor, two of the three main organisers were registered as unemployed and the third was on a minimal wage from a book distribution service at the time.

My own contribution to the festival was to organise & perform in a loud samplist/exploitation night at the London Musicians Collective as Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, along with Mixmaster Morris' Irresistible Force and Pornosect. Who else do you remember as being important contributors to this event and what else can you say about plagiarism?

The answers to that are all really in The Festival Of Plagiarism booklet, the text of which has been on my website for a few years. There are a few pages of that starting at: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/festplag.htm and you’ll find most of the names of those involved there too. So no point in me repeating them here.

Graham Harwood is someone I haven’t mentioned who really involved himself in that.

I think the point of using the term plagiarism was that it was provocative in a way that appropriation and detournement weren’t, although what we did related to both those practices. Again we had a lot of arguments about what we were doing and why, particularly Ed Baxter and me. Hannah Vowles and Glynn Banks weren’t involved with 'The Festival of Plagiarism', but they used to like arguing too when we did the group installations.

The piece I’ve given the link to takes a very different line from the report Ed Baxter produced for an early issue of Variant. But we were all incredibly serious young men and women back then, but also very fond of jokes. The humour I favoured was a little more low-brow than what Ed was into at the time. However, through it all we’ve remained fast friends and have remained antagonistic towards commodified culture. So I think the message here and in the other things we did was that if there is to be a better world, we have to make it ourselves. And that was kinda the message of the Art Strike too: it’s up to us to make it new and seize control of the world, and the elitist art system only exists to hold us back, which is of course why we need to smash it.


Your book 'The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War' was published around the same time: in 1988 (front cover left). Am I right that it included essays and ideas written during the previous 10 years and published in magazines like VAGUE?

VAGUE really caught people’s imagination in the eighties and shifted a lot of copies, and I did contribute to it. But that historical textual practice about the avant-garde was much more developed through my own publications, particularly Smile magazine. However, while the research went back over quite a few years, 'Assault On Culture' was written from scratch in about six months in 1987, the year before it was published. It didn’t incorporate earlier texts although it did incorporate information from some earlier texts, with the main source of these being issues 8 and 9 of Smile.


During the nineties you turned more towards writing novels, ostensibly as a way to earn a living, but remained involved with the art world through contacts like Matthew Higgs. You were, for example, included in Life/Live in Paris in 1996, and made work for Imprint 93 (eg pin badge left below). But I sense that your interest in art had changed. Had you lost some of that residual belief in art as a force for change perhaps?

I wrote my first two novels in the eighties, and was writing the shorter fictions that led into them from the mid-eighties onwards. After eighties I was just a little bored with the art world and didn’t particularly have plans to go back into it once I’d done the Art Strike from January 1990 to January 1993. However, Mathew Higgs was very keen for me to do stuff with him, so eventually I did and then with various other people.

Matthew was very keen to organise an alternative to the tedium of the yBa, something I definitely sympathised with. But in the nineties there was a lot of very interesting non-literary activity that was also well outside the art world in the form of things like London Psychogeographical Association, Luther Blissett Project, Association of Autonomous Astronauts. So there were many prank activities going on, I was running the Neoist Alliance - which had nothing to do with the old Neoist Network.

These non-commodified practices which attempt to overflow the canalisation of culture and politics just seemed very exciting in comparison to the art and literary worlds. So that was really where my main focus was. But also I’d be asked to go to a lot of very pleasant art world parties, and I’m not one to forgo a good time…

During the Art Strike I’d signed back on the dole but from the mid-nineties on I was supporting myself mainly from the royalties from my novels. They were being translated in Europe and because the pound wasn’t too high that was a nice little income, not as much as I’d have got from a crap factory job but enough to live on. So it is true to say my novels were at that time my main source of income.


I understand you interviewed Ralph Rumney - the only English member of the original Situationist group - for Art Monthly a few years ago. What many don't know is that not only was he an accomplished abstract painter (see picture below left), but that he actually lived in St Ives and worked with Barbara Hepworth for a while.

At various points in the last 20 years, and before, the Situationists have been invoked by artists interested in art or other cultural activities purporting to have a radical edge. What do you make of the ways in which these ideas have been used?

Nothing would surprise me about Ralph Runmey, he did so many different things and had so many different lives. I found the way he’d completely change the style of the art he made every few years fascinating. But yes I interviewed him a couple of times, once for The Assault On Culture and then a couple of years later for Art Monthly in 1989, the latter interview is online at http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/rumney.htm

As far as the art world goes, I don’t think many people within it know what the situationists were really about – i.e. proletarian/communist revolution - they just invoke the name as a kind of buzzword intended to signify some kind of vague radicalism. Will Self does much the same in the literary world, but I get the impression he’s more interested in his status as a middle class literary gentleman than creating a world without money or classes and abolishing alienation. There is no point getting heated about this, I’m not precious about the situationists and given their obsession with recuperation they presumably expected as much. As anything more than a vague buzzword the situationists are only of any use if you understand them in the context of the ultra-left and can see that their weaknesses stem from them being too reliant on councilist traditions, which they’d never really attempted to synthesise with Bordigism. That said, they understood well enough the necessity of constantly reforging the passage between theory and practice, whereas their invocation in the art world is more generally idealist. I think the interesting use of elements of what they did occurs elsewhere, and in the 1990s this might be found in the London Psychogeographical Association, The Association of Autonomous Astronauts or the Luther Blissett Project. For me the Situationist International is most interesting up to 1962, before the split between the more ‘cultural’ and more ‘political’ factions, because I’m committed to overflowing all divisions between culture and politics.



You are still busy with a number of projects. For example you curated a show called Hallucination Generation at the Arnolfini (presumably with current Tate St Ives director Martin Clark) in 2006 and you've been involved with making documentaries with Jeremy Deller and the K-Foundation. Could you summarise some of your other current projects so that we can link to them?

One of the main things I’m doing at the moment is editing the Semina series of experimental novels for Book Works. In the past ten days or so I’ve done three public readings and a talk on Ray Johnson and mail art, but what I do varies all the time. Public events are listed on the home page of my website.

But a lot of stuff is more spontaneous, so it just kinda happens with the people who are around. Another thing that is coming up is a big Art Strike Biennial meeting in Alytus in Lithuania this August. And of course my blog on the back end of my website sometimes reveals where I’ve just been or what I’ve just been doing. That said, there generally isn’t any reason to blog about my readings and talks, although if something a bit different happens there might be. But the blog is a good way to keep things moving along, critique, discussion and practice too of course! The comments are to me just as important as the main part of the blog. I think you can see new ways of writing emerging with this… it is a lot looser and freer than printed texts, and a lot less fixed, I love its incompleteness…



On your blog you were critical of Altermodernism: the concept, perhaps, more than the show. But what do you make of Bourriaud’s take on global culture? A feature on artcornwall.org suggested that its in the interest of big institutions like the Tate, like other types of corporations, to attempt to increase their influence world-wide by embracing and promoting a notion of global culture that is actually rather spurious. What do you make of this? What are the other issues highlighted by this show in your view?

I haven’t come across anyone in the London art world who takes the idea of Altermodern seriously. I don’t think Bourriaud knows what modernism and post-modernism are, and for me they are linked – as I first said in the mid-eighties, two stages in a single trajectory – they aren’t opposed to each other. Bourriaud is probably better suited to working for Primark than in galleries, he’s certainly the curational equivalent of a cheap fashion brand. You can almost imagine the meetings they had for the Tate Triennial: “So we’ve done the winter Zeitgeist, which was post-modernism, so I’ve got this great idea to make it over as the Altermodern for our Spring Collection.” Completely ridiculous!

The only people who took the Altermodern seriously were super-sad indie-kids like Nick Currie. And Currie’s blog defences of Altermodern were pretty marginal; he even admitted in one of the comments he hadn’t even seen he show, because he was in Berlin not London! No one but an indie-wanker could take Bourriaud seriously as an intellectual, and obviously the odd twerp like Currie who misidentifies Bourriaud as being an intellectual isn’t worth engaging with since he is so intellectually inert he doesn’t appear to have even the slightest inkling of how intellectuals function as a class fraction. Whether you agree with them or not, people like Peter Osbourne and those around Radical Philosophy in London are intellectuals - you know “thinkers” - but Bourriaud isn’t an intellectual he’s just pathetic fashion victim dressed in truly shitty designer knitwear. Likewise, Altermodern is just a haphazard collection of trendy art that Bourriaud claims to likes. It has no substance.

My view is that the Tate decided to run with Altermodern as a marketing strategy because it is desperate to cover up the patchy nature of its collection. In the US you have serious funding for the big art institutions and so they can afford to buy up the big names and have reasonably comprehensive collections. The cost of this is that it is the boards and funders who really control the institutions and the directors and curators are more like functionaries. In Europe curators like to have more control, but at the cost of not getting the same kind of financial backing. So the art in The Tate collection is like Swiss cheese, it’s full of holes. Something like Altermodern is a desperate attempt to cover this up. It’s a bad conjuring trick. The Tate gets Bourriaud to definite the current cultural moment as the Altermodern, the Tate has the Altermodern show, therefore there are no holes in the Tate Collection. Other than the odd pig-ignorant indie kid, no one is fooled by this, not even the people doing it. The Tate clearly don’t believe its own hype or else they wouldn’t be running satellite screenings of 1970s films like Westworld and Radio On as part of Altermodern. It’s utterly ridiculous, a bad comedy sketch. I think the main thing the Altermodern show highlights is the bankruptcy of the art world!

I don’t think Bourriaud has a take on global culture, he writes the global element out of modernism, so that he can re-write it into the Altermodern. But this is simply absurd. Capitalism is a totalising and modernism emerges from that, it was always and already global...


Interview for www.artcornwall.org by Nigel Ayers 29/4/09

http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/

Noise and Politics

Industrial music - no thanks! Noise and politics - yes please!
One of the things I always disliked about the Industrial music scene was its abject failure to engage in a progressive debate about noise and politics. It just didn't, because it was all about "art" and promoting individualist hero worship. So, because of structural faults and a lack of politicised critique within its copycat fans, in its current version it has allowed a tiny "apolitical" scene to develop in which the propaganda produced by some extreme right wing elements has become regarded as acceptable. I'm sick of it and that is why I've been turning down a few "myspace friends" requests lately.

On the other hand, I can recommend an interesting magazine which has emerged though the breakcore scene, which seems to at least attempt to engage in noise and politics from a vaguely leftist (and pro-technology) perspective.

"DATACIDE 10 is OUT NOW: with 56 pages the biggest datacide so far, it's full of features and reviews.
Secessionist Outernational: Self-Exile and Poetry, Howard Slater: Convergent Suggestion - on Surrealism and Organisation, JR: Denial Networks - On Crisis and Continuity in the 9/11 Truth Movement, Neil Transpontine: A Loop Da Loop Era - towards an (anti-)history of Rave, CF: Radical Intersections, Controlled Weirdness: You're Too Young to Remember the Eighties - Dancing in a different time, The Reverend: More than just a Night out - Rave as confrontation, Dan Hekate: All things fall and will be built again, Rafael Castellanos: Visible and invisible fragments of experiences (About Bogotrax festival), Hans-Christian Psaar: Commodities for the Jilted Generation, Alexis Wolton: Teknival and the emancipatory potential of technology, Riccardo Balli: Audio-Philosophical Dwellings.
Stewart Home on Peter Whitehead and the Sixties, Nemeton on Boris Mikhailov's Unfinished Dissertation, JR on "The Description of Bankruptcy", CF on François Genoud, Balli on "Situationism on Wheels", CF on "Battlenoise!" and the ideology of Martial Industrial, Plus record reviews, charts, Bloor Schleppy, End of Vinyl?, Pencilbreak and more.
available for EUR 3.00 from praxis.c8.com/catalog now
or from good stores and mail orders soon!"