Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home

Stewart Home

Stewart Home is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess , his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love , and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red...

 which called upon all artists to cease their artistic work between January 1, 1990 and January 1, 1993. Unlike the art strikes proposed by Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger

Gustav Metzger is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966...

 and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through artists, but a provocation of artists addressing their understanding of art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 and their
identity as artists.

The Art Strike 1990-1993 campaign received next to no attention in contemporary gallery and museum art, but resonated chiefly in artistic subcultures, above all Neoism

Neoism

Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...

 and Mail Art

Mail art

Mail art is a worldwide cultural movement that began in the early 1960s and involves sending visual art through the international postal system. Mail Art is also known as Postal Art or Correspondence Art...

. "Art Strike Action Committees", often run by single activists, existed in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

, Baltimore

Baltimore

Baltimore is the largest independent city in the United States and the largest city and cultural center of the US state of Maryland. The city is located in central Maryland along the tidal portion of the Patapsco River, an arm of the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore is sometimes referred to as Baltimore...

, Albany

Albany, New York

Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York's Capital District. Roughly north of New York City, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River...

/NY, San Francisco, Montevideo, and Uruguay. An Art Strike newsletter "YAWN" was anonymously published by Lloyd Dunn

Lloyd Dunn

Lloyd John Dunn is a founding member of the mixed-media and experimental sound art group the Tape-beatles and founder, publisher and editor of several small-press magazines, such as PhotoStatic and Retrofuturism...

 in Iowa City and appeared in forty five issues during the strike period.

External links

• YAWN archive with all issues of the Art Strike newsletter as freely downloadable PDF files
• The Art Strike Papers, 1991 sourcebook with essays and news coverage on the Art Strike 1990-1993, edited by Stewart Home
  Stewart Home
  Stewart Home is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess , his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love , and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red...
  
   and with a preface of James Mannox
• Archive of Art Strike materials from an early Neoist website
• "What Means this "Art Strike"? (Social Movement and/or "Bad Idea"?)" - Essay by Shawn P. Wilbur