Stewart Home's Blog, page 15

Still the same old song from the former Artists' Placement Group…

John Latham and the Artists' Placement Group came up in conversation the other day. While I liked much of what Latham did, I always found the theoretical justifications for his work extremely dubious. Thus when through Latham I came into direct contact with the Artists' Placement Group (APG) in the 1980s, I found it utterly ridiculous. Now that the APG is no longer a going concern and The Tate has purchased its archives, it is unfortunately easier for for those coming across it for the first ...

Ray 'The Cat' Jones, the Hackney connection… completely missed by Iain Sinclair!

Way back in February I posted a couple of blogs about Iain Sinclair's book Hackney, That Rose Red Empire. What I didn't realise back then, or even earlier when I'd given Sinclair a few pointers as regards research on this book, was that Ray 'The Cat' Jones was a long time Hackney character who during the 1990s featured regularly in The Hackney Gazette. Since Ray doesn't feature in Sinclair's book, I guess this proves that neither of us read the Hackney press with any diligence….

Ray lived for ...

From censorship to John Latham and back again…

The oldest of suppressed traditions

In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent "reality" of our "time". Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, "literate" consensus...

John Latham, the birth of conceptual art & the 1960s drug culture at St Martin's School of Art

Art and Culture AKA Still and Chew (1966-1969 or 1966-67) by John Latham (1921-2006) is a key work of conceptual art that was purchased by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1969. John Perreault stripped the frequently repeated legends that surround this piece down to their bare bones in an Arts Journal blog: "John Latham is an art hero because in 1966 he instigated an event called Still and Chew that required several participants to bite off, masticate, and then spit out pages from...

Another round of burglary with Ray 'The Cat' Jones

I finally caught up with one time Ray 'The Cat' Jones press spokesman Michael Morgan at his Hackney flat yesterday. We spent much of the day going over Ray's life-story, and Michael also kindly presented me with a bundle of press clippings and other material he'd photocopied for me.

Among the many impressive cuttings Michael Morgan gave me is one entitled 'The Night I Stole Liz's Jewels In The Gresham' (from the Irish tabloid The Sunday World, 23 November 1997):

"One of the world's oldest...

Wigan Casino directed by Tony Palmer showing at Space in Hackney

By the time I left school at sixteen in the late-seventies the big sound was disco. That said, the real hipsters among the kids who underwent the same non-education as me were into northern soul (rare mainly American and mainly 1960s records that sounded  like Motown but never made the pop charts). I first came across northern soul in the mid-seventies because a school friend shared a bedroom with an older brother who was obsessed with a handful of northern soul platters. This big brother...

Pleasure never hurt anyone… some Cocteau Twins pre-history and the way London rocked 30 years ago!

I've never been into the Cocteau Twins myself… just ain't my thing. However, I recently got into an online discussion in which I mentioned that I'd known their second and main bass player Simone Raymonde in the old days when he'd been in a band called Disruptive Patterns, and that this group had morphed into The Drowning Craze. Or rather, I mentioned that the Drowning Craze had emerged from a band whose name I couldn't remember off the top of my head! It took some serious thinking to...

From Alejandro Jodorowsky to Breakin', there ain't nothing going down but the rent….

You have to love Alejandro 'Chuckles' Jodorowsky… he's such a great conman that he's able to fool most of his fans most of the time (fooling all the people at any one time is rather more difficult). His first feature film Fando y Lis (1968) was fabulous, but his output went gradually downhill from there…. as I've already said in different words elsewhere on this site. Nonetheless, I've enjoyed watching Chuckles' almost overnight transformation from an obscure cult figure whose films were...

transcript by Heimrad Backer

Heimrad Backer's book of concrete poetry transcript (to be published in Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling's English translation by Dalkey Archive next March) consists entirely of quotations of material relating to the holocaust seen from the perspective of both its victims and the perpetrators. A few rearrangements using techniques such as repetition (all indicated in the notes at the end) are made to draw out the nature of the language used, particularly as regards documents that...

The only reasonable perspective on Martin Heidegger is that he was a complete scumbag!

One of the things that really depresses me about post-graduate fine art education in London is that the Nazi thug Martin Heidegger has become central to the teaching of many theory modules on practice-led courses. Heidegger wasn't your ordinary Nazi party member, he not only wanted to introduce the Fuhrer-principle into the German university system, he actually attempted to take on the position of spiritual leader of National Socialism – which had he been successful, would have placed him...