(Just when you thought Neoism was no more...)
Neoist Interruptus and the Collapse of Originality Stephen Perkins 2005 Presented at the Collage As Cultural Practice Conference, University of Iowa, March 26th, Iowa City
My subject is a late 20th century international avant-garde movement known as the Neoist Cultural Conspiracy (Neoism for short), which I would argue is the last of the historic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Indeed, the Fluxus theorist Henry Flynt acknowledged Neoism (while being careful not to endorse it), as “a genuine Fluxus offshoot” in his 1990 article “Mutations of the Vanguard: Pre-Fluxus, During Fluxus, Late Fluxus.” Neoism, as the name suggests is a “new ism” that in the words of one Neoist consists of “a prefix & a suffix and nothing in between.” It is precisely this feature of Neoism as having “nothing in between” that has simultaneously allowed it to be constructed as an avant-garde movement, and at the same time to “fuck” with the idea of the avant-garde altogether. Indeed, some Neoists have stated that Neoism is “an attempt to create a situation where a definition of Neoism is impossible.”
http://.www.xexoxial.org/perkins/neoist_interruptus.pdf
