Again, A Time Machine — Part five
White Columns, New York
22 October to 19 November 2011
Opening Friday 21 October 6 – 8 pm
Performance: Stewart Home and Kenneth Goldsmith
Saturday 22 October, 6.30pm
From his earliest work Stewart Home has expressed an avantgardist desire to write himself into the archive of culture. Mixing myth and polemic, with plagarism and a savage ideological critique, the parodic manifestoes of Generation Positive, progressed into the self-historicising magazine Smile, the Neoists, and finally The Art Strike – an aggressive appropriation of Gustav Metzger’s strike proposal. Home’s return to anti-art practice saw the publication of a rash of polymorphous perversities, including Red London, and Defiant Pose, exhibitions at City Racing, workfortheeyetodo, and with Imprint 93, as well as ongoing performance, prank and film work. His cultural output now forms a significant archive of counter-cultural activities, not only written into the archive of culture, but networked across it, in a practice which seamlessly moves between unearthing unknown radical histories such as Black Mask – Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, reworkings of Lettrist Cinema, and writing projects, such as Book Works’ recent Semina series.
More than thirty years on from his first cultural interventions, Home is more convinced than ever that since the world is disenchanted, telling outrages lies is the only means of approaching ‘truth’ and thus making life fabulous once again. Desiring greatness as well as grooviness, this is the first US retrospective of Home’s work and features a selection of artwork, including Art Strike Bed, Vermeer II and Becoming (M)other, with publications and ephemera. It presents a comprehensive overview of a practice that demonstrates a desire to continually reforge the passage between theory and practice, overcome canalised cultural pursuits and breach the false separations between art and politics and the private and social.
