Books
Home's first books, which appeared between 1988 and 1995, are essentially an outgrowth and elaboration of his earlier SMILE writings, though without their fragmentary-aphoristic character and eclectic mix of genres. The Assault on Culture, written when Home was twenty-five, is an underground art history sketching Home's ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of post-war culture to make it conclude with Neoism (and which it is sometimes claimed includes character assassinations of individual Neoists) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis. Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, aluthet that time at least, been under-documented. Like Home's other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International.
Pure Mania, Home's first novel from 1989, took the recipe of the Richard Allen parodies from SMILE and turned them into a recipe for much of his subsequent novel writing of the 1990s (there are exceptions such as the non-linear "Come Before Christ & Murder Love"). The book Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers featured, on its first part, abridged versions of Home's manifesto-style writings from SMILE, and a compilation of writings and reactions regarding the Art Strike from various authors and sources, mainly Mail Art publications.
His 1995 novel Slow Death fictionalises and ridicules this process of the historification of Neoism (including the planting of archives at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum; this recently became reality when Home sold the V&A his own archive documenting twenty years of his art and underground activities including those involving Neoism) as if to give his own game away but, typically with Home, as soon as one agenda has, apparently, been exposed, whether Home's own or one at large, the game moves on so that he constantly forces readers into a position of 'Should I believe any of this?'.
With the publication of his novel 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess (Canongate, Edinburgh 2002), Home finally got the British literary press sitting up and taking serious notice of him, ironically for a book which carries his most acidic condemnations of the literary establishment. Home's skinhead looks and attitude on official photographs of the mid-nineties are merely publicity poses, and recently he has been much more inclined to appear nude in publicity material (this started after Home consented to appear in a nude celebrity feature for a Finnish newspaper in 2004); and this nudity is something that offends just as much as Home's earlier faked 'hard man' looks.
Read more about this topic: Stewart Home
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