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The Assault on Culture, Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War
" A straightforward account of the vanguards that followed Letlrisme, fluxus, Neoism and others even more obscure" Village Voice."Home's book is the first that I know of to chart this particular 'tradition' and to treat it seriously. It is a healthy corrective to the overly aestheticised view of 20th century avant-gorde art that now prevails." City Limits." Much of the information is taken from obscure sources and the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. It demystifies the political and artistic practices of opponents to the dominant culture and serves as a basic reference for a field largely undocumented in English. It is also engagingly honest, unpretentious, questioning and immediate in its impact" Artists Newsletter."Reflecting the uncategorisable aspect of art that hurls itself into visionary politics, the book will engage political scientists, performance artists and activists" Art and Text." Apocalyptic in the literal sense of the an uncovering, revelation, a vision" New Statesman." A concise introduction to a whole mess of troublemakers through the ages... well written, incisive and colourful" NME."Informative and provocative" Art Forum.
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First published January 1, 1988
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About the author
Stewart Home
95 books284 followersStewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for novels such as the non-narrative "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in "Tainted Love" (2005), and more recent books such as "She's My Witch" (2020) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature.
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 27, 2011
You can read the whole of this book online. The links to the individual chapters are here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sp/...
September 1, 2025
Reitero lo que el mismo autor dice en el epílogo: se queda corto, es casi una enumeración de movimientos y grupos underground de los 60/70/80 sin entrar demasiado en detalle, ni en sus conexiones, ni en su ideario concreto. Viendo la poca repercusión política que han tenido estos grupos y como la socialdemocracia ha acabado engullendo a los más listos de sus representantes, quizá ya ni tenga sentido seguir indagando si no es como un ejercicio de onanismo hipster.
February 3, 2017
A lot of nitpicking and downright insults against the situationists for doing shit every vanguard ever did. I'm not completely sure if Home is doing some debordian agitprop in an attempt to detourn situationist culture itself or if Debord just spanked him or some shit, but a lot of the criticism towards the IS could also be directed to Fluxus or even Neoism itself.
Still, I'm gonna recommend this because this is a great starting point for anyone into anti-art, the vanguards and etc., a very interesting read at what I call the apocalyptic tradition. Take this stuff with a grain of salt though, just take a look at when Home literally calls the IS people witches and shit while ignoring a very clear tendence in all those groups to get involved in gnosticism / neopaganism / eastern-religions, only to casually mention it as a minor quirk everywhere else a couple of paragraphs later.
Still, I'm gonna recommend this because this is a great starting point for anyone into anti-art, the vanguards and etc., a very interesting read at what I call the apocalyptic tradition. Take this stuff with a grain of salt though, just take a look at when Home literally calls the IS people witches and shit while ignoring a very clear tendence in all those groups to get involved in gnosticism / neopaganism / eastern-religions, only to casually mention it as a minor quirk everywhere else a couple of paragraphs later.
April 12, 2008
I am impressed with this book because my wife who is Japanese - this was her first book she read in English from beginning to the end. Not an easy read with respect to a second-language reader - but nevertheless it's a good introduction to the 'isms' that affected the 20th Century.
Stewart Home is always interesting and always (if I can use the word) fun. i enjoy his books greatly.
Stewart Home is always interesting and always (if I can use the word) fun. i enjoy his books greatly.
May 21, 2020
I appreciate this as a grounding sketch of several artistic groups/movements that stretch the mid- to late- portions of the 20th century. That's a lot of ground to cover and Home is obviously not concerned with presenting a totally cohesive image of dissident art movements. There's holes, we skip over them as we move forward and it's not a big deal.
I particularly liked how Home had a bone to pick with the Situationist International, or maybe just Guy Debord specifically. I laughed every time Home zoomed in on the way the SI documented their progress and victories and compared it to other journalistic or first-person accounts, sometimes citing comments by many of the excised group members to complicate the historicity and theory-rockstar image that Guy and the SI have tried to prop up. It's necessary work to throw mud at idols and draw attention to their pretentious like this.
The big takeaways for me were the materialistic interpretation of art as a bourgois tradition which several of these supposedly 'anti-art' movements, groups or individuals variously never considered, took an opposite stance to while ostensibly being revolutionary, or realized this material condition only unconsciously in their methods, speech and action. This also really lucidly lays out what the motion of dissidence and transgression, in that this kind of work and behavior is explicitly not profitable, glamorous or useful within the modern capitalist world of art. Accessible, breezy and entertaining stuff here. High recommendation. Will probably find this rewarding to reference in the future.
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May 30, 2025Opracowanie bardzo bogate w spektrum wywrotowych idei, intelektualnie wypchane po brzegi, ale jednocześnie jakby na kolanie napisane w pośpiechu, po łebkach. Jak dla mnie Home przesadza też z krytyką Deborda, ale koniec końców to bardzo cenna baza do dalszych poszukiwań i rzecz absolutnie pionierska – zwłaszcza jeśli chodzi o polskie wydanie.
January 8, 2024
A very interesting read, although written tendentiously, which is not surprising since the author himself was a participant of the described artistic movements.
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October 15, 2025samizdat
April 29, 2016
A bit of background: I read this in an avant-garde literature group I am in and the founder of the group is a serious scholar of the Situationists. In fact another group member is a professor of transgressive film and a child of the 60s in NY and SF. So between them they were able to fill me in where the book was lacking. I found it heavy on opinion and short on details, and Home moves very quickly from movement to movement, dismissing nearly everyone along the way. So if, like me, you are a relative n00b to this area of art history, delve deeper.
However, 25 years later, this slender, wisp of a book, with its breezy treatments of several serious art/culture/political groups and movements sprung up after WWII, is *still* the only comprehensive all-in-one work on the topic. Plenty of other authors cover specific people and movements in much greater detail, but if you want a good overview, this is still a good first stop to make. I recommend it as a sort of SI primer.
That said, the book is out of print and not likely to be reissued, although a free PDF is available online (which is how I read it). The "layout" is not very forgiving but, eh, it's a PDF.
I think Home sums up the book pretty well in his afterword:
"Although this text has been an attempt to take an objective view of a dissident tradition, the author has not entirely shed his subjective biases. He has failed to make any proper distinction between an 'ism,' a 'movement,' a 'sensibility' and a 'tradition.' In this Afterword, he will attempt to define these terms. He has chosen not to apply the resulting definitions back onto the main body of the text; preferring to view it as a record of a specific stage in the development of his thought, rather than something which can be definitively completed."
It's worth noting this is Home's first book, written at age 25. The short essays are pretty well written and sourced, but it has a kind of snide, condescending, journaling-at-a-coffeehouse undertone. Blaze through it and pick up Lipstick Traces by Griel Marcus or The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark, or others.
However, 25 years later, this slender, wisp of a book, with its breezy treatments of several serious art/culture/political groups and movements sprung up after WWII, is *still* the only comprehensive all-in-one work on the topic. Plenty of other authors cover specific people and movements in much greater detail, but if you want a good overview, this is still a good first stop to make. I recommend it as a sort of SI primer.
That said, the book is out of print and not likely to be reissued, although a free PDF is available online (which is how I read it). The "layout" is not very forgiving but, eh, it's a PDF.
I think Home sums up the book pretty well in his afterword:
"Although this text has been an attempt to take an objective view of a dissident tradition, the author has not entirely shed his subjective biases. He has failed to make any proper distinction between an 'ism,' a 'movement,' a 'sensibility' and a 'tradition.' In this Afterword, he will attempt to define these terms. He has chosen not to apply the resulting definitions back onto the main body of the text; preferring to view it as a record of a specific stage in the development of his thought, rather than something which can be definitively completed."
It's worth noting this is Home's first book, written at age 25. The short essays are pretty well written and sourced, but it has a kind of snide, condescending, journaling-at-a-coffeehouse undertone. Blaze through it and pick up Lipstick Traces by Griel Marcus or The Beach Beneath the Street by McKenzie Wark, or others.
September 3, 2016
The post-surrealist artistic and cultural tendencies leading to punk traced elegantly by Griel Marcus in his Lipstick Traces are explored here by one of the UK's most well-placed art practitioners and activists. Whereas Marcus bring a potent critical cultural sensitivity to his analysis, Home adds a depth of art practice and anarchist politics that Marcus skirts. A fabulous introduction to some of the submerged cultural an artistic tendencies of the 20th century - even though it is a little too cursory, more descriptive than analytical, and wold have benefited from a more directed further reading section.
December 1, 2007
Home, a critic of the Situationists, is at his strongest when uncovering and exposing some of the myths associated with the movement. This is not that book. Most of this book is simply descriptions of some of the more obscure political/artistic movements of the 20th century some of which really were never all that relevant to begin with. It is interesting as a documentation of little known movements and groups, some of which consisted of no more than one individual. As for Home himself, well, he's always trying to do things half-assed. This book is a testament to his work ethic.
May 8, 2012
A brief historical overview of 20th century art movements (sorry, I know Home in the afterward makes distinctions about what he does and doesn't regard as a "movement")and the different ideologies and socio-political climates that surrounded them. The stuff your art history teacher dismissed or shied away from. And Home's unabashed subjectivity makes this far more engaging than any purely academic treatise on modern art.
July 3, 2018
Ottima analisi dei movimenti "avanguardistici" susseguitisi tra gli anni '50 e '80 del Novecento. Home è succinto quanto preciso nel gettare uno sguardo (spesso impietoso) su movimenti tanto spesso oscuri quanto fondamentali per capire le forme assunte dalla cultura e da ciò che chiamiamo "arte" nel secondo novecento (e di conseguenza oggi). Fondamentale il riferimento al pensiero di Roger Taylor (vedi annotazione).
December 3, 2008
It seemed too general and anyone who knows anything about the subject would know that Home picked out only a small part about each subject. I felt the same way about Mike Davis' City of Quartz. If you know a little bit about what he's writing about, it feels like he took the information like gossip. It's not necessarily a good overview.
August 13, 2016
Assault on Culture describes attempts by artists & art theorists to create art that wouldn't be a product to be bought and sold, separate artist from non-artist and/or art from everyday life, reinforce the tastes of the powers-that-be, etc. Short & kooky.
October 8, 2008
A história da arte não contada pela professora! Imperdível para estudiosos e amantes da arte.
Currently reading
October 9, 2008Borrowed from Tomislav. Appropriately, its pretty crazy.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews