Neoism
Encyclopedia
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. It operates with collectively shared pseudonym
s and identities
, pranks, paradox
es, plagiarism
and fake
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
main source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
through the Mail Art
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer Stewart Home
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
, Surrealism
, Fluxus
and
Concept Art
), punk
, 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 -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
in Montreal
, Canada
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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 continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining 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 virus
es, 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.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
's condemnation of anarchists
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
session on anti- m and anti-racism in London
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
, and John Berndt
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
left mail art
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, Stewart Home
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
activists of the Luther Blissett
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
city of Wiesbaden
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
received the Governor General's Award
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
.
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
and Art Strike 1990-1993
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
, Luther Blissett
, Alexander Brener
/Barbara Schurz
, Lee Wells
, spart
and Luke Haines
(of The Auteurs
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
s and identities
, pranks, paradox
es, plagiarism
and fake
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
main source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
through the Mail Art
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer Stewart Home
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
, Surrealism
, Fluxus
and
Concept Art
), punk
, 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 -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
in Montreal
, Canada
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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 continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining 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 virus
es, 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.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
's condemnation of anarchists
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
session on anti- m and anti-racism in London
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
, and John Berndt
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
left mail art
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, Stewart Home
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
activists of the Luther Blissett
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
city of Wiesbaden
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
received the Governor General's Award
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
.
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
and Art Strike 1990-1993
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
, Luther Blissett
, Alexander Brener
/Barbara Schurz
, Lee Wells
, spart
and Luke Haines
(of The Auteurs
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
s and identities
, pranks, paradox
es, plagiarism
and fake
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
main source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
through the Mail Art
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer Stewart Home
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
, Surrealism
, Fluxus
and
Concept Art
), punk
, 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 -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
in Montreal
, Canada
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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 continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining 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 virus
es, 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.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
's condemnation of anarchists
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
session on anti- m and anti-racism in London
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
, and John Berndt
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
left mail art
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, Stewart Home
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
activists of the Luther Blissett
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
city of Wiesbaden
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
received the Governor General's Award
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
.
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
and Art Strike 1990-1993
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
, Luther Blissett
, Alexander Brener
/Barbara Schurz
, Lee Wells
, spart
and Luke Haines
(of The Auteurs
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s and identities
Cultural identity
Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
, pranks, paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
es, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and fake
Fake
Fake means not real.Fake may also refer to:In music:* Fake , a Swedish synthpop band active in the 1980s*Fake?, a Japanese rock band* Fake , 2010 song by Ai featuring Namie Amuro...
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
Background
Definitions of Neoism and Neoist activity are currently disputed. Themain source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
through the 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...
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer 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...
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
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...
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
and
Concept Art
Concept art
Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in films, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design...
), punk
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
, industrial music
Industrial music
Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...
and
electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
,
Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
literature, 'pataphysics and speculative science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
.
Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
and street
performance, language writing (later known as language poetry),
experimental film
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
and video
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, 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...
, the early
Church of the Subgenius
Church of the SubGenius
The Church of the SubGenius is a "parody religion" organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on...
and gay and lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture
into a self-written urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
. As a side effect, many other
subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
History
Neoism was coined in 1914 by the American satirist Franklin P. Adams as a parody of modern arts. Sydney J. Bounds used the word as the name of a planet in his 1977 Science Fiction story No Way Back. In 1979, the name was reused for a subcultural -ism that grew out of the mail artMail 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...
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, the 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...
network continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
lived by Neoists in their everyday life.
For these purposes, Neoists employed performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, small press publications (such as Smile
SMILE (magazine)
SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. Since 1984, an estimated 100 different issues of SMILE have been published by different people in different countries of the world.-History:...
, the international magazine of multiple origins) and computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
es, but also food (Chapati
Chapati
Chapati or Chapatti or Chapathi is an unleavened flatbread from the Indian subcontinent. Versions of it are found in Turkmenistan and in East African countries Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania...
), flaming steam irons and metal coat hangers (used as telepathic antennas). Borrowing from Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, 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
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
and Neoism.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
National Assembly Against Racism
The National Assembly Against Racism is or was a British anti-racist and anti-fascist group.-External links:...
's condemnation of anarchists
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
European Social Forum
The European Social Forum is a recurring conference held by members of the alter-globalization movement . In the first few years after it started in 2002 the conference was held every year, but later it became biannual due to difficulties with finding host countries...
session on anti- m and anti-racism 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...
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman is the most commonly used name by an American mail artist and writer who has been active since the early 1970s.Heavily influenced by post-war pulp writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Raymond Chandler and Fredric Brown as well as by modernists like Ray Johnson, Francis Ponge and the...
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
Sal Mineo
Salvatore "Sal" Mineo, Jr. , was an American film and theatre actor, best known for his performance as John "Plato" Crawford opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause...
, and John Berndt
John Berndt
John Berndt is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. He participated in the second wave of the neoism cultural movement, the first wave having consisted of Monty Cantsin, Istvan Kantor, and...
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch , also known as Pan, P.A.N., Panman, Panpost and the Post Art Network, is an American multi-media artist from Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Since 1982 he has lived in New York City...
left 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...
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, 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...
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
activists of the Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
city of Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
received the Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Influences on other artists and subcultures
Notable artists who participated in Neoist apartment festivals include early street artist Richard HambletonRichard Hambleton
Richard Hambleton is an artist-painter currently living and working in the Lower East Side of New York City. Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He is the surviving member of a group who, together with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, had great success coming out...
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
Jack Smith
-In sport:*Jack Smith , 19th century footballer in 1892–1895*Jack Smith , English player with Wolverhampton Wanderers and others* Jack Smith , English international footballer...
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup is a German experimental filmmaker and media artist, living in Berlin. Since 2006 he has been Professor for Film/Video at the University of Braunschweig in Germany...
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and Art Strike 1990-1993
Art Strike 1990-1993
Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home 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 and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through...
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely 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...
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition...
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a worldwide network of community based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. The AAA was founded 23 April 1995. Although many of their activities were reported as serious participation in conferences or protests against the militarization of...
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
The KLF
The KLF were one of the seminal bands of the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
, Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
, Alexander Brener
Alexander Brener
Alexander Davidovič Brener born 1957 in Alma-Ata, is a Russian-Jewish performance artist. His performances of note include defecating in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets, and vandalizing art work.He was jailed in 1997 for...
/Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz was born 1973 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia. She is an artist and self-described "revolutionary activist" from Austria....
, Lee Wells
Lee Wells
Lee Wells is an artist, independent curator, as well as a technology and art consultant currently living and working New York. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, and Co-Founder of Perpetual art machine, [PAM]...
, spart
Spart
Spart or Spart Action is a political/cultural group/movement founded in 2001. Its roots lie in the avant-garde tradition, although what distinguishes it from other similar practices is an understanding of the avant-garde as a genre, rather than heritage...
and Luke Haines
Luke Haines
Luke Haines is an English musician, songwriter and author, who has recorded music under various names and with various bands, including The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder.-'New Wave':...
(of The Auteurs
The Auteurs
The Auteurs were a British alternative rock band of the 1990s, and a vehicle for the songwriting talents of Luke Haines .-Career:...
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
David O. Russell
David Owen Russell is an American film director and screenwriter. He has been praised for the loose, comic energy that characterizes his work, and is notorious for his explosive confrontations with cast members.-Early life:...
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters....
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
Jason Schwartzman
Jason Francesco Schwartzman is an American actor and musician. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the Hollywood films Rushmore, Spun, I Heart Huckabees, Shopgirl, Marie Antoinette, The Darjeeling Limited, Funny People, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World...
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
Selected Books
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. It operates with collectively shared pseudonymPseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s and identities
Cultural identity
Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
, pranks, paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
es, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and fake
Fake
Fake means not real.Fake may also refer to:In music:* Fake , a Swedish synthpop band active in the 1980s*Fake?, a Japanese rock band* Fake , 2010 song by Ai featuring Namie Amuro...
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
Background
Definitions of Neoism and Neoist activity are currently disputed. Themain source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
through the 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...
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer 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...
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
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...
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
and
Concept Art
Concept art
Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in films, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design...
), punk
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
, industrial music
Industrial music
Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...
and
electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
,
Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
literature, 'pataphysics and speculative science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
.
Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
and street
performance, language writing (later known as language poetry),
experimental film
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
and video
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, 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...
, the early
Church of the Subgenius
Church of the SubGenius
The Church of the SubGenius is a "parody religion" organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on...
and gay and lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture
into a self-written urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
. As a side effect, many other
subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
History
Neoism was coined in 1914 by the American satirist Franklin P. Adams as a parody of modern arts. Sydney J. Bounds used the word as the name of a planet in his 1977 Science Fiction story No Way Back. In 1979, the name was reused for a subcultural -ism that grew out of the mail artMail 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...
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, the 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...
network continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
lived by Neoists in their everyday life.
For these purposes, Neoists employed performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, small press publications (such as Smile
SMILE (magazine)
SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. Since 1984, an estimated 100 different issues of SMILE have been published by different people in different countries of the world.-History:...
, the international magazine of multiple origins) and computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
es, but also food (Chapati
Chapati
Chapati or Chapatti or Chapathi is an unleavened flatbread from the Indian subcontinent. Versions of it are found in Turkmenistan and in East African countries Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania...
), flaming steam irons and metal coat hangers (used as telepathic antennas). Borrowing from Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, 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
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
and Neoism.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
National Assembly Against Racism
The National Assembly Against Racism is or was a British anti-racist and anti-fascist group.-External links:...
's condemnation of anarchists
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
European Social Forum
The European Social Forum is a recurring conference held by members of the alter-globalization movement . In the first few years after it started in 2002 the conference was held every year, but later it became biannual due to difficulties with finding host countries...
session on anti- m and anti-racism 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...
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman is the most commonly used name by an American mail artist and writer who has been active since the early 1970s.Heavily influenced by post-war pulp writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Raymond Chandler and Fredric Brown as well as by modernists like Ray Johnson, Francis Ponge and the...
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
Sal Mineo
Salvatore "Sal" Mineo, Jr. , was an American film and theatre actor, best known for his performance as John "Plato" Crawford opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause...
, and John Berndt
John Berndt
John Berndt is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. He participated in the second wave of the neoism cultural movement, the first wave having consisted of Monty Cantsin, Istvan Kantor, and...
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch , also known as Pan, P.A.N., Panman, Panpost and the Post Art Network, is an American multi-media artist from Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Since 1982 he has lived in New York City...
left 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...
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, 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...
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
activists of the Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
city of Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
received the Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Influences on other artists and subcultures
Notable artists who participated in Neoist apartment festivals include early street artist Richard HambletonRichard Hambleton
Richard Hambleton is an artist-painter currently living and working in the Lower East Side of New York City. Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He is the surviving member of a group who, together with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, had great success coming out...
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
Jack Smith
-In sport:*Jack Smith , 19th century footballer in 1892–1895*Jack Smith , English player with Wolverhampton Wanderers and others* Jack Smith , English international footballer...
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup is a German experimental filmmaker and media artist, living in Berlin. Since 2006 he has been Professor for Film/Video at the University of Braunschweig in Germany...
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and Art Strike 1990-1993
Art Strike 1990-1993
Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home 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 and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through...
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely 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...
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition...
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a worldwide network of community based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. The AAA was founded 23 April 1995. Although many of their activities were reported as serious participation in conferences or protests against the militarization of...
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
The KLF
The KLF were one of the seminal bands of the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
, Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
, Alexander Brener
Alexander Brener
Alexander Davidovič Brener born 1957 in Alma-Ata, is a Russian-Jewish performance artist. His performances of note include defecating in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets, and vandalizing art work.He was jailed in 1997 for...
/Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz was born 1973 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia. She is an artist and self-described "revolutionary activist" from Austria....
, Lee Wells
Lee Wells
Lee Wells is an artist, independent curator, as well as a technology and art consultant currently living and working New York. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, and Co-Founder of Perpetual art machine, [PAM]...
, spart
Spart
Spart or Spart Action is a political/cultural group/movement founded in 2001. Its roots lie in the avant-garde tradition, although what distinguishes it from other similar practices is an understanding of the avant-garde as a genre, rather than heritage...
and Luke Haines
Luke Haines
Luke Haines is an English musician, songwriter and author, who has recorded music under various names and with various bands, including The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder.-'New Wave':...
(of The Auteurs
The Auteurs
The Auteurs were a British alternative rock band of the 1990s, and a vehicle for the songwriting talents of Luke Haines .-Career:...
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
David O. Russell
David Owen Russell is an American film director and screenwriter. He has been praised for the loose, comic energy that characterizes his work, and is notorious for his explosive confrontations with cast members.-Early life:...
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters....
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
Jason Schwartzman
Jason Francesco Schwartzman is an American actor and musician. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the Hollywood films Rushmore, Spun, I Heart Huckabees, Shopgirl, Marie Antoinette, The Darjeeling Limited, Funny People, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World...
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
Selected Books
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. It operates with collectively shared pseudonymPseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
s and identities
Cultural identity
Cultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
, pranks, paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
es, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and fake
Fake
Fake means not real.Fake may also refer to:In music:* Fake , a Swedish synthpop band active in the 1980s*Fake?, a Japanese rock band* Fake , 2010 song by Ai featuring Namie Amuro...
s, and has created multiple contradicting
definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization.
Background
Definitions of Neoism and Neoist activity are currently disputed. Themain source of this are splits within the Neoist network which created
vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its
history. Undisputed, however are the origins of the movement in the mid- to late 1970s Canada, and the coinage of the multiple identity Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
through the 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...
ist David Zack (died ca. 1995) (perhaps with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
).
Schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the open Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer 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...
sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's
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...
books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet). In non-Neoist terms,
Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the
beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others,
experimental arts (such as Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
, Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
and
Concept Art
Concept art
Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in films, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design...
), punk
Punk subculture
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, and forms of expression, including fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film, which grew out of punk rock.-History:...
, industrial music
Industrial music
Industrial music is a style of experimental music that draws on transgressive and provocative themes. The term was coined in the mid-1970s with the founding of Industrial Records by the band Throbbing Gristle, and the creation of the slogan "industrial music for industrial people". In general, the...
and
electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
,
Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
literature, 'pataphysics and speculative science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
.
Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
and street
performance, language writing (later known as language poetry),
experimental film
Experimental film
Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...
and video
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
, 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...
, the early
Church of the Subgenius
Church of the SubGenius
The Church of the SubGenius is a "parody religion" organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominence in the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on...
and gay and lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture
into a self-written urban legend
Urban legend
An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...
. As a side effect, many other
subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have -
often vaguely - referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth.
History
Neoism was coined in 1914 by the American satirist Franklin P. Adams as a parody of modern arts. Sydney J. Bounds used the word as the name of a planet in his 1977 Science Fiction story No Way Back. In 1979, the name was reused for a subcultural -ism that grew out of the mail artMail 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...
network, particularly those parts of mail art that emphasized - rather than the exchange of artwork - alternative lifestyles, pranks, practical jokes, the use of pseudonyms and experimentation with identity .
Centered around the idea of the "open pop star" or multiple persona Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
in Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, New York, New York and Baltimore, Maryland in the United States . 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
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
, the 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...
network continued to be used as the main communication and propaganda channel for Neoism.
Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
lived by Neoists in their everyday life.
For these purposes, Neoists employed performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, small press publications (such as Smile
SMILE (magazine)
SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. Since 1984, an estimated 100 different issues of SMILE have been published by different people in different countries of the world.-History:...
, the international magazine of multiple origins) and computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
es, but also food (Chapati
Chapati
Chapati or Chapatti or Chapathi is an unleavened flatbread from the Indian subcontinent. Versions of it are found in Turkmenistan and in East African countries Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania...
), flaming steam irons and metal coat hangers (used as telepathic antennas). Borrowing from Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, 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
Monty Cantsin
Monty Cantsin is a multiple-use name that anyone can adopt, but has close ties to Neoism. Monty Cantsin was originally conceived as an "open pop star." In a philosophy anticipating that of free software and open source, anyone should perform in his name and thus contribute to and participate in his...
and Neoism.
In 2004 Neoism was cited by Javier Ruis in response to the National Assembly Against Racism
National Assembly Against Racism
The National Assembly Against Racism is or was a British anti-racist and anti-fascist group.-External links:...
's condemnation of anarchists
Anarchism
Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...
disrupting the Third European Social Forum
European Social Forum
The European Social Forum is a recurring conference held by members of the alter-globalization movement . In the first few years after it started in 2002 the conference was held every year, but later it became biannual due to difficulties with finding host countries...
session on anti- m and anti-racism 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...
(PGA Considered As Neoist Invisible Theatre).
In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
, which other Neoists adopted by declaring
Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement
"Neoism/Anti-Neoism
Anti-Neoism
The anti-Neoism movement can be viewed as a part of, or a response to, the Neoism movement in art.The anti-neoist activation at BABOCO, in Paris, was the sixth in a series of fifteen activations sponsored by Edigio Álvaro and the Diagonale, espace critique collective. The exact date of this event...
/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman
Blaster Al Ackerman is the most commonly used name by an American mail artist and writer who has been active since the early 1970s.Heavily influenced by post-war pulp writers like Theodore Sturgeon, Raymond Chandler and Fredric Brown as well as by modernists like Ray Johnson, Francis Ponge and the...
declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo
Sal Mineo
Salvatore "Sal" Mineo, Jr. , was an American film and theatre actor, best known for his performance as John "Plato" Crawford opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause...
, and John Berndt
John Berndt
John Berndt is a musician and organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland who is best known as an extended-technique experimental saxophonist and electronic musician. He participated in the second wave of the neoism cultural movement, the first wave having consisted of Monty Cantsin, Istvan Kantor, and...
was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1989, following the post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism" in Glasgow, Scotland, artist Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch
Mark Bloch , also known as Pan, P.A.N., Panman, Panpost and the Post Art Network, is an American multi-media artist from Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Since 1982 he has lived in New York City...
left 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...
and after publishing "The Last Word" remained defiantly silent on Neoism for almost two decades. In 1994, 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...
founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
activists of the Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista".
In 1997, the critic Oliver Marchart organized a "Neoist World Congress" in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
which did not involve any Neoists. In 2001, the Professional Association of Visual Artists in the German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
city of Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
declared itself Neoist. In 2004 Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor
Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and founder of Neoism....
received the Governor General's Award
Governor General's Award
The Governor General's Awards are a collection of awards presented by the Governor General of Canada, marking distinction in a number of academic, artistic and social fields. The first was conceived in 1937 by Lord Tweedsmuir, a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction who created the Governor...
, and an international "Neoist Department Festival" took place in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
.
Influences on other artists and subcultures
Notable artists who participated in Neoist apartment festivals include early street artist Richard HambletonRichard Hambleton
Richard Hambleton is an artist-painter currently living and working in the Lower East Side of New York City. Richard Hambleton has been called the godfather of street art. He is the surviving member of a group who, together with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, had great success coming out...
, writer and director Kirby Malone, underground filmmaker Jack Smith
Jack Smith
-In sport:*Jack Smith , 19th century footballer in 1892–1895*Jack Smith , English player with Wolverhampton Wanderers and others* Jack Smith , English international footballer...
, media artist Bill Vorn, the German painter Blalla W. Hallmann, the filmmaker Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup
Michael Brynntrup is a German experimental filmmaker and media artist, living in Berlin. Since 2006 he has been Professor for Film/Video at the University of Braunschweig in Germany...
and the model and actress Eugenie Vincent.
Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
and Art Strike 1990-1993
Art Strike 1990-1993
Campaign launched in 1986 by Stewart Home 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 and the Art Workers Coalition in the 1960s, it was not merely a boycott of art institutions through...
campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely 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...
after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition...
music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Association of Autonomous Astronauts
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a worldwide network of community based groups dedicated to building their own spaceships. The AAA was founded 23 April 1995. Although many of their activities were reported as serious participation in conferences or protests against the militarization of...
, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF
The KLF
The KLF were one of the seminal bands of the British acid house movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s....
, Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
, Alexander Brener
Alexander Brener
Alexander Davidovič Brener born 1957 in Alma-Ata, is a Russian-Jewish performance artist. His performances of note include defecating in front of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets, and vandalizing art work.He was jailed in 1997 for...
/Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz
Barbara Schurz was born 1973 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia. She is an artist and self-described "revolutionary activist" from Austria....
, Lee Wells
Lee Wells
Lee Wells is an artist, independent curator, as well as a technology and art consultant currently living and working New York. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, and Co-Founder of Perpetual art machine, [PAM]...
, spart
Spart
Spart or Spart Action is a political/cultural group/movement founded in 2001. Its roots lie in the avant-garde tradition, although what distinguishes it from other similar practices is an understanding of the avant-garde as a genre, rather than heritage...
and Luke Haines
Luke Haines
Luke Haines is an English musician, songwriter and author, who has recorded music under various names and with various bands, including The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder.-'New Wave':...
(of The Auteurs
The Auteurs
The Auteurs were a British alternative rock band of the 1990s, and a vehicle for the songwriting talents of Luke Haines .-Career:...
and Black Box Recorder). The contemporary Dutch Artist Thomas Raat created a series of artworks based on Neoist manifestos and photographic documents.
Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell
David O. Russell
David Owen Russell is an American film director and screenwriter. He has been praised for the loose, comic energy that characterizes his work, and is notorious for his explosive confrontations with cast members.-Early life:...
's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters....
's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman
Jason Schwartzman
Jason Francesco Schwartzman is an American actor and musician. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the Hollywood films Rushmore, Spun, I Heart Huckabees, Shopgirl, Marie Antoinette, The Darjeeling Limited, Funny People, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World...
's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.
The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal—albeit applicable—definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."
Selected Books
- A Neoist Research Project (2010), ed. N.O. Cantsin, London: OpenMute, ISBN 978-1-906496-46-3, 246 pages; the first comprehensive anthology and source book of Neoist writing and images, documenting Neoist interventions, Apartment Festivals, definitions and pamphlets of Neoism and affiliated currents, language and identity experiments and Neoist concepts and memes.
- Touchon, Cecil (2008). New and Improved Neoist Manifesto—a Trans-Lingual Edition. The Neoist Society in association with Ontological Museum Publications. ISBN 978-0-615-25881-2. Features Touchon's trans-lingual Neoist Manifesto with commentaries by Monte Cantsin and Karen Eliot.
External links
- Neoist site
- The Neoist Society
- A Mere Outline of a Neoist Thesaurus
- Anti-Neoist site
- http://panmodern.com/neoism.htmlPan-Neoist manifesto from "C-NILE", a reluctant parody of SmileSMILE (magazine)SMILE is an international magazine of multiple origins. Since 1984, an estimated 100 different issues of SMILE have been published by different people in different countries of the world.-History:...
] - Pan-Neoist reflections on the 1989 post-Neoist "Festival of Plagiarism"
- Neoism node in everything2.com
- Neoist Manifestos
