The Neoist Society presents this important document of Neoism for a world hungry for a new revolutionary message. This unusual - trans lingual - edition is an abstract manifesto that allows the user to interpret it in any way that he can. Literally any Neoist from any place or any time can understand it's purely visual message.
"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 contents: "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 Action: 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 Movement: Concrete Life Examples," "Macmag Virus," "March 24," "Cogito of the pseudo-scientist, experimenting with mild trauma," "Physics," "The Comb," "the gold flag of near neologisms: 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."
Networking means to create nets of relations, where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the audience, act on the same level. The book is a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of media and art projects which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the creation of Italian hacker communities. The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, disseminated through independent and collective projects where the idea of freedom of expression is a central theme. In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed. The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today. It builds a reflection on the new role of the artist and author who becomes a networker, operating in collective nets, reconnecting to Neoavant-garde practices of the 1960s (first and foremost Fluxus), but also Mail Art, Neoism and Luther Blissett. A path which began in BBSes, alternative web platforms spread in Italy through the 1980s even before the Internet even existed, and then moved on to Hackmeetings, to Telestreet and networking art by different artists such as 0100101110101101.ORG, [epidemiC], Jaromil, Giacomo Verde, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Correnti Magnetiche, Candida TV, Tommaso Tozzi, Federico Bucalossi, Massimo Contrasto, Mariano Equizzi, Pigreca, Molleindustria, Guerriglia Marketing, Sexyshock, Phag Off and many others.
"Home is a novelist, art agitator, and documenter of art terrorism... The art terrorist's art terrorist." "Modern Review." "Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis" is concerned with what's been happening at the cutting edge of culture since the demise of Fluxus and the Situationists. It provides inside information on the Neoists, Plagiarists, Art Strikers, London Psychogeographical Association, K Foundation, and other groups that are even more obscure. "
Natural Born Fluxus is that tendency among artists to engage in Fluxus-like behaviors even if they never heard of Fluxus. Or possibly we could say that Fluxus ideas come out of a naturally occurring tendency in all artists that we now think of as Fluxus. It could be that the free wheeling nature of Fluxus allows artists to enjoy their creative, or at least peculiar, tendencies in an unfettered way that other forms of organized artistic activities do not. Includes: Peter Frank, Cecil Touchon, John M. Bennett, Ruud Janssen, Don Boyd, Keith Buchholz, Adam Overton, Sheila E. Murphy, Madawg, Litsa Spathi, Gregory Steel, Mark Block, Christine Tarantino, Allan Revich, Lorraine Kwan, Matthew Rose, Reid Wood, Luc Fierens, Brad Brace, Mary Campbell, Zachary Scott Lawrence, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, Eric KM Clark, Brian R. Nickerson, Walter Cianciusi, Neil Horsky, Roger Stevens, Matt Taggart, Anya E.V. Liftig, Yves Maraux, Roland Halbritter.
“Don’t start an art collective until you read this book.” —Guerrilla Girls “Ever since Web 2.0 with its wikis, blogs and social networks the art of collaboration is back on the agenda. Collectivism after Modernism convincingly proves that art collectives did not stop after the proclaimed death of the historical avant-gardes. Like never before technology reinvents the social and artists claim the steering wheel!” —Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam “This examination of the succession of post-war avant-gardes and collectives is new, important, and engaged.” — Stephen F. Eisenman, author of The Abu Ghraib Effect “Collectivism after Modernism crucially helps us understand what artists and others can do in mushy, stinky times like ours. What can the seemingly powerless do in the face of mighty forces that seem to have their act really together? Here, Stimson and Sholette put forth many good answers.” —Yes Men Spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism explores the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Jesse Drew, Okwui Enwezor, Rubn Gallo, Chris Gilbert, Brian Holmes, Alan Moore, Jelena Stojanovi´c, Reiko Tomii, Rachel Weiss. Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. “To understand the various forms of postwar collectivism as historically determined phenomena and to articulate the possibilities for contemporary collectivist art production is the aim of Collectivism after Modernism. The essays assembled in this anthology argue that to make truly collective art means to reconsider the relation between art and public; examples from the Situationist International and Group Material to Paper Tiger Television and the Congolese collective Le Groupe Amos make the point. To construct an art of shared experience means to go beyond projecting what Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette call the “imagined community”: a collective has to be more than an ideal, and more than communal craft; it has to be a truly social enterprise. Not only does it use unconventional forms and media to communicate the issues and experiences usually excluded from artistic representation, but it gives voice to a multiplicity of perspectives. At its best it relies on the participation of the audience to actively contribute to the work, carrying forth the dialogue it inspires.” —BOMB
