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2 Background 3 History 4 Influences and appropriations 5 Relevant quotes 6 External links |
Neoism is characterized by the countless contradicting definitions it spreads about itself, thereby defying any categorization and historification. The existence of paradox in Neoism is normal because to define Neoism is to define anti-Neoism. This paradox is similar to the wave/particle duality experiment as the observer becomes an integral part of the experiment himself. To NOT define Neoism is to be a Neoist. To put it differently, the aim of Neoism is for the creation of a situation in which there is total freedom and perpetual change -- thus also including categorical refusals and negations of the concepts of freedom and change.
In non- or anti-Neoist terms, Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the beginning put itself into (dis)continuity with, among others, experimental arts (such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Concept Art), punk culture, industrial music and electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements, Science Fiction literature, 'pataphysics and speculative science. Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti and street performance, language writing (later known as language poetry), experimental film and video, Mail Art, the early Church of the Subgenius and gay and lesbian culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture into a self-written urban legend. As a side effect, many other subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have vaguely referred to Neoism, frequently mistaking it, on the grounds of distorted accounts in pop cultural publications, for a post-situationist avant-garde.
Founded in 1979 by multiple persona Monty Cantsin in Montreal, Canada and Baltimore, USA, Neoism quickly spread to other places in America, Europe and Australia and involved up to two dozens of Neoists. Until the late 1980s and before the mass availability of the Internet, the mail art network was used as a communication and propaganda channel for Neoism. Neoists speak of "the great confusion" and "radical play" when they describe their strategy. It was spelled out in semi-private Apartment Festivals, which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998, and in publications. Both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical subversion of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity lived by Neoists in their everyday life. For these purposes, Neoists employed performance, video, small press publications (such as "SMILE", the international magazine of multiple origins) and computer viruses, but also food (Chapati), flaming steam irons and metal coat hangers (used as telepathic antennas). Borrowing from Thomas Pynchon, Neoism could be more suitably called an "anarchist miracle" of an international network of highly eccentric persons collaborating, often with extremist intensity, under the one shared identity of Monty Cantsin and Neoism.
General Definition
Background
History
Influences and appropriations
Neoist plays and tactics
like multiple names, plagiarism and pranks, sometimes mistaken for Neoism proper, were adopted, frequently by mixing in situationist discourse, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics music, the Luther Blissett project, the German Communication Guerilla campaign of the mid-1990s and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as http://www.0100101110101101.org and http://www.ubermorgen.com. Other artists whose works explicitly refers to Neoism (respectively its media image) are the KLF, Alexander Brener and performance theater groups like Showcase beat le mot.Relevant quotes
External links
