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Event
STEWART HOME: SHORT WORKS (1986-2004)
Dir. Stewart Home, 1986 - 2004.
UK. 85 min.
A survey of past short works by Stewart Home, including 2004's THE ECLIPSE & RE-EMERGENCE OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
THE EIGHTIES
1986, 4 min.
"This is an edit of a durational piece made in May 1986, which originally lasted one hour and only had incidental ambient noise on the soundtrack. It is more hardcore 'art' as it was originally made but this is the YouTube generation recut 21 years down the line. Other hour long durational pieces made in the eighties include a fabulous video of Pete Horobin and I taking afternoon tea that begins with a five minute static shot of the table before we sit down at it. We really knew how to make fun films back then... I love them, but YouTube doesn't carry hour long works, so you got this instead. My song on the soundtrack was also composed in the eighties, although this particular version was recorded in the nineties. But this static record of my head being shaved from a curly mop sums up the eighties for me. Immediately prior to this a friend in Hackney used to do my hair for me, and she also worked on Mel & Kim's barnets (so I met them a couple of times before they were famous when I headed down to Shakespeare Walk to get my hair cut)... and since I first put this up I have been getting a lot of comments about how much Britney Spears looks like me... don't forget I did this 20 years before her..." (Stewart Home)
I WANNA DIE IN THE TV
1986, 1 min.
The screen is pure surface, it has no depth, and where there is no life there is no death..... The voices on the soundtrack belong to Stewart Home and Pete Horobin
TV FREAK
1986, 2 min.
"An oldie but goldie video piece from May 1986, but this is the length I always intended it to be. Looks just about perfect to me now I've added the titles, which I didn't manage at the time I made it 21 years ago." (Stewart Home)
BAKED BEAN JUNKIE GROSS OUT
1986, 7 min.
"The avant-garde art of boredom taken to new extremes back in 1986! A Neoist anti-classic! I performed for the camera and immediately after shooting I recorded the voice over in one take, sounding about as sincere as a snake oil salesman. Pete Horobin shot this and nearly all the edits are in camera because we didn't have free access to proper edit suites at the time and tried to minimize whatever time we paid for. Any visual edits we made to what we did were crashed between a domestic machine and the camera, cruder than editing Super 8, hence our preference for in camera editing - and not even a master of multi-tasking like me was able to perform and simultaneously do in camera editing. That said VHS film was cheaper to the superior looking 8mm celluloid and enabled us impoverished dole queue 'aesthetes' to shoot a lot more 'film'. As a result we didn't title this piece or much other material at the time, the titles and credits were added just before I put this up here, but the rest of the visuals are exactly as we left them 21 years ago. I didn't bother showing this anywhere at the time, but on reviewing it recently I realized I was making YouTube type shorts a couple of decades before most of you; it just looks different because we had clunky VHS cameras then, not digital... but the 'spirit' is the same. And please note the sacrifices I make for aesthetic effect; I even drink a can of Coke in this (well it looks like I did, but actually I poured the crud inside the can away and replaced it with water - couldn't have got away with that using a bottle). And dig the Wm Low baked bean tin, a supermarket that could be found around Scottish north east back in the eighties but that disappeared a decade or probably more ago..." (Stewart Home)
REFUSE
1988, 5 min.
By Stewart Home, Andy Hopton, Art In Ruins, Denise Hawrysio, Ed Baxter and Simon Dickason at Galleriet Läderfabriken Malmö, October-November 1988.
"Note the sound on this was played at volume on a tape loop throughout the show; the lighting was ambient and while this couldn't be captured on camera, video effects were used in an attempt to replicate this. Please note that the quality reflects both the video technology of when this was done (1988) and tape decay (the colors have faded considerably and there are other faults). It is presented here as a historical artifact to give something of the flavor of the site specific installation work I was doing in the eighties." (Stewart Home)
TURN ON, TUNE IN, FREAK OUT
1989, 13 min.
Made with Neil Aberdeen, featuring Stefan Szczelkun, Gabrielle Quinn, Dick Arlen.
NO PITY
1993, 4 min.
Promo video for short story collection "No Pity" by Stewart Home (AK Press, 1993), made with Nick Abrahams and Mikey Tomkins and featuring music by Bloodsausage
RED LONDON
1994, 7 min.
Promo for Stewart Home novel Red London made with Nick Abrahams and Mickey Tompkins in 1994. Digitized from a VHS copy.
UT PICTURA POESIS
1997, 1 min.
"This was made as part of the Arts Council funded Blipvert Project in 1997, so it was one of six commissioned pieces cut into the ads at independent cinemas and was seen in that context by an audience of something like three quarters of a million people. It was shot at 50 Beck Road in Hackney (since I appear in it, Nick Abrahams was operating the camera) and edited at Artec at Highbury Corner. It was intended for cinema screening and the 'alienation effect' that is integral to it doesn't work outside that context, so it is placed here as a curiosity. This was an attempt to distill the lettrist cinematic experiments of the early 1950s (and in particular the feature length pieces "Has The Film Already Started", "Anti-Concept" and "Screams In Favour Of De Sade") into 45 seconds. Proletarian post-modernism lives on..." (Stewart Home)
THE ECLIPSE & RE-EMERGENCE OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
dir Stewart Home, 2004.
UK. 41 min.
Made by Stewart Home while in Melbourne as visiting artist at the Victorian College of the Arts in May 04. In the movie avant-garde techniques and the avant-garde obsession with death interweave with reflections on the life and death of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson. Images of his mum working as a fashion model and club hostess during the sixties are cut against and at times deliberately dissociated soundtrack that uses stories about her to explore the limits of documentary cinema. This is simultaneously an expression of love and loss and an attempt to draw out the ways in which the avant-garde Lettrist cinema of the early fifties in France was commercialized in the later work of Godard, Marker and Resnais.
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Spectacle is pleased to present a survey of artist Stewart Home's moving image works on the occasion of his cult classic, Defiant Pose, being put back into print by Penny-Ante Editions. Named the "Best Book of the Year" in 1991 by The Gay Times, today Chris Kraus describes Home's "proto-porn pageantry" as "timely (and) timeless... a satirical masterpiece, as funny twenty-five years later as when it first appeared." With STEWART HOME: FILMS (1986-2016) it is our hope that those familiar and unfamiliar with "cult writer" Stewart Home will gain new insight into his artistic practice.
Copies of Defiant Pose will be available at the screening.
STEWART HOME is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, activist, and internationally-acclaimed author. Homes writings include Pure Mania (Polygon, 1989), Defiant Pose (Peter Owen, 1991), Slow Death (Serpents Tail, 1996), 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess (Canongate, 2002), Tainted Love (Virgin Books, 2005), and Memphis Underground (Snowbooks, 2007). Between 2007 and 2010, Home was the commissioning editor of Semina, a series of acclaimed experimental novels from London art publisher Book Works, to which he contributed, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie (2010). In 2013, Stewart Home released Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (Penny-Ante Editions), named one of the Best Paperbacks of the Year by the Guardian, followed by The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones published by Test Centre in 2014. He was born and continues to reside in London. (www.stewarthomesociety.org)
Thanks to Rebekah Weikel & Penny-Ante Editions, Sukhdev Sandu & The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, and Triple Canopy.
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LocationSPECTACLE THEATER (View)
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11249
United States
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| Kid Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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