Avant-Garde and Subculture. Learning from Lettrism

In "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War", Stewart Home outlines the subterranean history of mid-to-late 20th century avant-gardes in which artistic and political vanguardism emerge as indissociable. In a comprehensive overview of relatively marginal movements—such as lettrism, situationism, and punk—Home analyzes these radical practices and experiences, which, due to their involvement in alternative forms of sociability as well as their relational, process-oriented, and political character, have remained at the margins of dominant art historiography. Home thereby establishes a critical rewriting of the neo avant-garde from a perspective that shares little with the paradigm of modernist formalism. His lecture will focus specifically on the lettrism, the precursor of situationism.

Stewart Home (London, 1962) is one of the promoters of neoism and art strike as well as a distinguished figure of plagiarism. Author of The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1993) and editor of Smile (The International Magazine of Multiple Origins), Home is also known for his "extreme" urban novels such as Red London (1994), Slow Death (1996), and, most recently, 69 things to do with a Dead Princess (2002), as well as his role as a musician associated with punk.