According to Stewart Home, the Neoists were an eighties manifestation of an avant-garde tradition that agitates against the aesthetic and philosophical conceptions of the dominant culture. For the past decade, the Neoist scene has been dominated by the post-situationist dogmas spread by this hard-working sloganeer. But Home's historicisation has been criticised by first generation Neoists such as Dave Zack and Al Ackerman, indeed the originators of the movement dismiss Home's writing on their activities as completely ridiculous.
The Neoists wanted to recycle everything: the s avant-garde Fluxus, Minimal, Mail Art , and they were more interested in myth making and media manipulation than creating serious art works.
The Neoists were pranksters, low-scale saboteurs similar to Fritz Teufel, Dieter Kunzelmann and the satirist Wolfgang Neuss, but with the crucial qualification that the Neoists were a thousand times more obscure. Neoist events from the late seventies onwards were archetypal manifestations of eighties anti-anti-actionism that could be found in virtually any medium-sized town. The element of trash vulgarisation was consciously emphasised in so-called Apartment Festival, i.
Every eighties performance artist wanted to be on TV, an attitude that both prefigured and influenced the demotic voicing and cheesy displays of contemporary 'young British art'. Five male Neoists caught gonorrhoea fucking the same - now famous - female art student during the Eighth International Apartment Festival in London.
Sporadically, a threadbare post-Neoism raises its ugly head. Today, the ex-Neoists tend towards the occult, mathematics and philosophy, particularly Frege and Gotthard Guenther. A turn away from actionism into the infinite depths of self-referentiality.
