Customer Reviews

Assault on Culture

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Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press/Unpopular Books, 1988)

Home's first published work, The Assault on Culture is a slim survey of twentieth-century avant-garde art in which Home attempts to draw the influences that ran through various Utopian artistic movements. It was a first step in a right direction, though one no one (including Home) has picked up on in the intervening fifteen years. Pity, as Home (who knows he's only scratching the surface, ans as much as says so in the afterward) laid the groundwork for a unified field theory of the avant-garde that could be a truly groundbreaking work. If he were to return to it now, given Home's ever-increasing popularity, he could come up with a definitive volume. Look at The Assault on Culture as an outline of what might have been.

The chapters are short and snappy, introducing the reader to various movements (most of which he's probably never heard of), tracing the back-and-forth of various artists within them and touching on the political upheavals that led to person X getting kicked out of movement A and going on to form movement B, or what have you. In one sense, The Assault on Culture is a family tree. It is perhaps best looked at this way, and as something upon which others could build future research. So what are you waiting for? Hop to it. ***

Stewart Home's overview of amusing 20th century art hipsters ranges from dada to punk. It is unpretentious and unflattering and yet extremely entertaining to think of the myriad ways art punks have had a good time in the name of History in this quirky century's worth of reflections on millenarian one-man outbursts and odd collective hallucinations. I think his account is much less tedious than most such accounts and a good present for a young person with green hair at Christmas who likes to read a bit. -- Kirby Olso

I have been reading around , and studying the post Futurist/Dada avant garde scene for nearly 25 years, and Home's work is as good as it gets.

Ignore the other reviewers who read Home's work as "fun and hip" -- but shallow and flawed. Such judgments prove just how little the American audience understand European art movements of the 20th century -- Home's work is far far deeper, and along with the source texts from Debord, Vaneigem etc -- his book will set the benchmark for awhile yet.

Home's work is no idle commentary on Debord's work, neither is it a book of adulation, or simplistic analysis -- Home has a sharp, perceptive mind, that ADDS SIGNIFICANTLY to an understanding of Dada, Futurism, Situationists, the Lettrists, and even to an understanding of medieval mystic heretics and their ascetic subversion of accepted reality,as well as touching on Rimbaud and Baudelaire's place in the lineage,commenting on their concept of the flaneur.

And Home is no fawning "fan boy" either, in awe of art's "heroes". His work is not a hagiography, and he is, at points, scathingly , perceptively critical of those involved -- see his pertinent dismissal of certain aspects of Tzara, Adorno and Debord's contradictory dialetic,theory and intellectual snobbery.

Along with SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, DADA DRUMMER, FLIGHT OUT OF TIME,REVOLUTION OF EVERY DAY LIFE, Richter's DADA ART AND ANTI ART,Flynt's BLUEPRINT FOR A HIGHER CIVILIZATION and MARINETTI'S FUTURIST MANIFESTOES -- Home's work is *THE* definitive analytic, critical text of the moment.

Home's work is essential reading for anyone at all interested in 20th Century art, and by association, the field of knowledge the key Post Modernists (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard) went on to exploit.If you enjoyed "The Spectre of Marx","Discipline and Punish," For a "Political Economy of the Sign" -- then "Assault on Culture" is for you.

As far as art critique and total subversion of political dialectic goes --Home is where it's at -- most of the others are fakers.

Home is the real thing -- Ask Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, and Henry Flynt.


The other reviews here show so very little understanding of the entire field Home investigates so critically, and so very well.

Very funny, entertaining and a valuable, inspirational book. The Berliner above takes it perhaps a bit too seriously, and maybe hopes for the chimera of a dispassionate analysis? Of course it is a product of the "lumpen-intellectuals", and so it is written by someone who relishes the spirit of the crazy movements documented. Of course it is a contradictory, confused piece. That's what makes it so interesting and hilarious.

A mere patchwork of aphorisms, Stewart Home's "Assault on Culture" fails because of its inflated gesture. The book debunks itself as a product of the very "lumpen intelligentsia" it ridicules since the dialectics of the notions sought to be criticized backlashes against their very critique: Although "The Assault on Culture" suggests being about "culture," the notion itself is not critically examined, but reinforced in the feuilletonistic sense of "the art world." This is manifest in such linguistic twists as the "cultural worker"Ñtautological if "culture" had been more thoroughly reflected, backlashing into re-affirmation of its replace-term nevertheless. While "The Assault on Culture" may be in itself as much an aporia as Neo-ism is an oxymoron, "The Assault on the Art World" would have described the project better, and left its terminological calamities more obviously unresolved