Neoism

Neoism began in Montreal in 1979, when Hungarian-born performance artist Istvan Kantor launched the shared identity of Monty Cantsin - an "open pop star" anyone could inhabit. It grew into an international subculture of performance and media experimenters bound by mail art, cheap photocopy publishing, and a deliberately paradoxical philosophy: Neoists defined themselves through contradicting definitions, plagiarism, and prank, calling their tactics "the great confusion" and "radical play". Semi-private Apartment Festivals took place across North America, Europe, and Australia between 1980 and 1998, and the magazine Smile billed itself as existing in "multiple origins". Standing in loose continuity with Dada, Fluxus, and punk, Neoism treated identity itself as medium. Schisms followed - Anti-Neoism, Karen Eliot, Stewart Home's breakaway writings - and by the 1990s the network dissolved into legend.

Defining characteristics

• Collective, inhabitable signatures: shared pseudonyms like Monty Cantsin and Karen Eliot replace individual authorship
• Mail-art production: rubber-stamped photocopied flyers, collage, and cheap duplications circulated through the post
• Repetition and re-branding of the same motifs across many hands and media
• Self-contradictory manifestos and parodic "-ism" packaging used as artworks in themselves
• Documentation-as-work: performance, video, and event ephemera as the primary visual record

Key figures

• Istvan Kantor (1949-) — Founder who started Neoism in Montreal in 1979 and created the Monty Cantsin identity
• David Zack (1938-c. 1995) — Mail artist who helped spread the open Monty Cantsin identity
• Stewart Home (1962-) — Writer and artist who theorized Neoism and later split from the network

Example works

• Apartment Festivals — Neoist network (multiple origins) (1980-1998)
• Smile, the international magazine of multiple origins — Neoist network (multiple origins) (1980s)

Sources

• Neoism - Wikipedia encyclopedia

← Back to the catalog