Book Description

“The only movement to work consistently towards the death of history since the disbanding of the Situationist International has been the Global Neoist Network.Since 1979, Neoism has been defending the revolutionary gains made by the Situationists and Fluxus. The Neoists are the only group to have brought about the conjunction of nihilism and historical consciousness — the two elements essential for the destruction of the old order, the order of history.” You can never quite be sure to what degree Stewart Home, (or the Neoists from whom he noisily split, but under who’s banner he long continued to write / agitate), is/was taking the p*ss. Decades of provocation, parody, backhanded agitation, ideological feuding, art, anti art, ideological feuding as both art and anti art, all of it written up, reported upon, exaggerated, added to, invented, and thrown into the face of late 20th / 21st century culture /subculture, first as polemic, eventually as farce. Mind Invaders was first published in 1997, culled from a panopoly of underported , unregarded, barely noticed sources : obscure zines, half finished manifesto’s , loosely formed political strands starting to coalesce in shaded corners of the early web. Through force of will and a desire to exist, it pulled together a ramschackle, but somehow cohesive collection of currents that run deep through the post Situationist, anti-art, anti-trot, anti-spectacle European underground, tracing a definable lineage back from Dada > Bauhaus > Lettristes, through to the mail art movement of the 60’s, loosely tied to Fluxus, and by it’s very nature, a scattered, interconnected avant garde network, attempting to subvert the art-industrial complex by circumventing it, undermining commercial straitjackets by ignoring them. Techno paganism and Avant-bardism, 3 sided football, Five Year Plans for establishing community-based Autonomous space programmes around the world, psychogeographers planning to levitate . the Corn Exchange in Hulme...and most prominently,“The Luther Blissett Project, launched in Bologna, Summer ’94, by an international gang of revolutionaries, mail artists, poets, performers, underground ’zines, cybernauts and squatters, collectively casting a long, long shadow.