A Neoist Research Project

by N.O. Cantsin, N.O. Cantsin

"A Neoist Research Project" is the first comprehensive anthology and source book of Neoism, an international collective network of mostly anonymous and pseudonymous subcultural actionists and speculative experimenters. It consists of more than one hundred Neoist texts and two hundred images documenting diverse Neoist interventions, Neoist Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments, and Neoist memes such as the shared identity Monty Cantsin. From the "Neoist Chair and Chair Action", "Death Mauses Meat Pieces", "Kline Bottle Pieces", "Street performance actions against false infinity ", "APT 4, Low Theatre, Montreal", "Neoist Parking Meter Pay Me to Go Away", "Direct Address", "Contract", "The Ceiling Crashes in", "Neoism 101: Thought Projection", "Our Tactics against Stockhausen", "Seven Scripts for One Week of Neoist Activity", "Hypnotic Concrete Life Examples", "Macmag Virus", "March 24", "Cogito of the pseudo-scientist, experimenting with mild trauma", "Physics", "The Comb", "the gold flag of near the striped page", "The White Head", "APT 5", "What is an uh, uh, Apartment Festival??????", "Blo-Dart Acupuncture &/or Ear-Piercing", "Impractical Seriousness", "Krononautic Divector Field Didaction", "Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the So-Called Millionth Apartment Festival", "3 part action", "Neoist haircut", "non-participation", "Philosopher's Union soapbox stand", "anything is anything", "language constructions", "Dyslexia", "Continuity Poem (cinematic version)", "A note from the editors of SMILE", "Dialectical Immaterialism ", "Formula", "The Last Words of Wilhelm Reich, continued", "Theology", "Plenial Wer", "anti-art is art", "Censorship - the oldest of suppressed traditions", "Proletarian Posturing and the Strike which never Ends", "Neoism is simple", "What is Neoism?", "The First Announcement of Neoism", "The Generation Positive and Neoism", "Origins of Neoism Illuminated", "Bread + Pain + Love = Total Sex", ": anti-post-actualism++++++", "Western Cell Division", "Akademgorod", "Why Neoists do not drink alcohol", "The Eroticism of Boredom", "The Concept of Monty Cantsin", "Stupid Undergrounds", "Neoism propaganda sheet 1: SMILE", "Lt. Murnau", "Luther Blissett", "SMILE", "Blood, Bread and Beauty", "Plagerism", "The Curse of Originality", "The 56 Laws of Neoism".

266 pages, Paperback

First published April 23, 2010

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are at least 8 major published bks of neoist history & philosophy: "The Neoist Network's First European Training Camp" (June, 1982), "Neoism Now" (1986), "The Assault on Culture" (1988), "The Art Strike Papers" (1991), "Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis" (1995), "The House of Nine Squares" (1997), "Neoismus" (1997), & "A NEOIST RESEARCH PROJECT" (no publishing date given).

Of all of these, this one is probably by far my favorite. It's printed in stark black & white, the text is mostly in CAPITALS & has the look of having originated using a dot matrix printer - perhaps seemingly dating it from a 'poor' man's computer usage of the 1980s & 1990s. The images are in such high contrast that it's often difficult to 'read' them & they'd probably be generally incomprehensible to just about anyone but me & a very few others.

In fact, that characterizes the whole bk. WHO WD READ THIS?! Pondering, it occurs to me that only the bk's editor & myself wd read it cover-to-cover. It even seems possible that NO woman will EVER read it. & that even includes women who've participated in neoist festivals such as Gail Litfin, Casandra Von Rinteln, Eugenie Vincent, Sin-Dee Heidel, Nancy Andrews, Laure Drogoul, & etta cetera. The 1st 2 being dead is no excuse: a dedicated neoist &/or anti-neoist wd read this bk even post-mortem.

WHO ON EARTH WD GIVE A FLYING FUCK-A-DOODLE-DOO-DOO ABOUT THESE PSYCHOTIC LOSERS?! Or even understand what they're talking about?! The bk's divided into 5 sections: "ACTIVATIONS", "APT FESTS", "LANGUAGE", "NEOISM", & "REPLICATION". I'm not even sure that it's even always clear what the differences between the sections are. It's all so damned abstruse & obtuse. That, of course, is exactly why this is the most important bk on philosophy ever published. After all, "TRANSGRESSION RECOGNIZING ITSELF A LAW", right?

Have to admit, though, that the language is quite sophisticated & that advanced readers seeking opacity need not even open the cover of the bk to get the idea. Sortof. If you read no other section, make sure you read the "APT 81 TIM(NN) LAPS(NN) M(NN)MORY KRONOLOGY" for wch you'll need, unless you're about 14 yrs old w/ great eyesight (or hindsight), a magnifying lens. For that matter, read the rest of it w/ a magnifying lens - preferably outside on a very sunny day.

You cd look at this bk every day for the rest of yr life & still not be sure if the shoe's buttered on the other ft or not or if the "Blaster" & "Oz" are just figments of each other's imaginations. Personally, I support the theory in paragraph 8.

[Medio Mutante · Rating 3 out of 5]

disappointing collection of neoism - the biggest book to date - but i would skip it and just look at smile magazine and the first european training camp (all available on monoskop) ...or, in the true spirit of neoism "take things one step further by not doing them"

[Tobias Hess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since the 1980s and 1990s, Neoism has gained some notoriety in underground art circles. But most information on it was based on hearsay and semi-mythical accounts. Actual Neoist writings and documents were hard to come by. Many people therefore believed that Neoism was a hoax. Consisting only of Neoist texts and images written by various Neoists, the book removes much of the mystery. Styles and contents of the material vary a lot. The texts and images create a vivid and colorful picture of the movement. The editors chose not to attribute single texts and images with dates or easily identifiable author signatures. Nevertheless, the material gives away enough clues to identify them as products of a period from roughly the early 1980s to the 2000s. It has a strong underground, zine-cultural vibe and humor, comparable to (yet still different from) the earliest issues of General Idea's magazine FILE (General Idea: FILE Megazine).

The Neoism in this book is neither simply post-Fluxus, post-Situationist manifesto writing in the manner of Stewart Home, nor body techno performance art in the style of Istvan Kantor although both artists seem to be behind a couple of texts and images in the book. (The pieces "The Generation Positive and Neoism" and "The Concept of Monty Cantsin", for example, previously appeared in books by Stewart Home.) The picture of Neoism we obtain from this book is surprisingly different. It combines a European pataphysical sensibility of strange pseudo-science and language games with Northern American obsessions with conspiracies and mind control. Some texts resemble experimental poetry and cut-up writing, but in a functional way, as if they were protocols of weird behavioral experiments. Other writings are straightforward materialist critiques and conceptual definitions. There is a lot entertaining, powerful and puzzling material in this book. The lo-fi images, printed in stark black and white, are decipherable as documents of real life Neoist actions and events, but leave much to the imagination of the reader. Neoism, it seems, is not so much a movement, but a strange universe of its own.

This book sheds new light on Neoism while creating new mystery. This may explain why Neoism, which has existed for more than thirty years, still keeps fascinating artists and activists. True to its name, Neoism has not become historical yet.