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Smiles,: File, Vile, Bile, Vague, Etc.
Smiles,: File, Vile, Bile, Vague, Etc.
http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/SMILEs.html
SMILEs,
FILE, VILE, BILE, VAGUE, ETC..
Sometime between February & April of 1984, Stewart Home started a magazine called "SMILE". In it, he
encouraged everyone to call their magazine SMILE. Sometime around then, he learned of the "8th
International Neoist Apartment Festival" happening in London from an ad placed by Reinhardt U. Sevol in
a London-based Performance Art magazine. He responded to the ad. He'd just completed the 2nd issue of
SMILE in April or May so he went to the HQ for the festival & showed it to the Neoists & Non-Neoists
assembled there.
All history is contended by conflicting memories from varied sources, often with ulterior motives unknown to
the people who encounter their stories. Since my original writing of this introductory text, I received a
critical email from Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor) & a more friendly 'pedantic' one from Ae Phor (formerly
known as Monty Cantsin (Pete Horobin)). The original telling (no longer in the paragraph above or
elsewhere in this introduction) was partially based on the following statement by Home in Lightworks #19 in
which he claimed:
"Toward the end of April I came into contact with Pete Horobin, the Scottish Neoist. He told me about the
Monty Cantsin "open pop-star" concept. An American called David Zack had made up the name in 1977. A
Latvian musician, Maris Kidzin," [actually Maris Kundzins] "took on the name, and he and Zack mailed out
postcards that asked other artists to use the Cantsin persona when they wished to take on the identity of a
pop star. By the time I came across the name, I was the only one using it. As it tied in with my White Colours
and Smile projects, I did my best to encourage more people to take on the name."
Now, Stewart was just point-blank vindictively lying there. Istvan Kantor was extremely active primarily
under the name Monty Cantsin but Stewart didn't like him so he cut him out of the history. Kundzins'
connection to the name was marginal, at best. Pete & I (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE) had both used
the name Monty Cantsin.
It was my impression that since Reinhardt moved to Paris before APT 8 even started & since it was Monty
Cantsin (Pete Horobin) who greeted me in London when I arrived before the APT Fest that it was mainly
Pete who was the organizer. Who should be given primary credit for organizing the festival is a subject that I
won't give a 'definitive' answer to at the moment, if ever.
Given that Stewart's idea of calling multiple magazines SMILE conceptually coincided with the Neoist idea
of people using the collective identity of Monty Cantsin & doing 'everything' in the name of Neoism, the
Neoists immediately adopted SMILE as a Neoist magazine & began promoting it far & wide through the
Mail Art network that most Neoists, except the young Stewart, were very active in. I wrote an explanation of
Monty Cantsin & SMILE in a call for participation in a proposed all-transparencies assembling SMILE to
be put together a year later in 1985. This English explanation was translated into German, Italian, & Farsi,
& distributed internationally.
Lest this website be misunderstood, it is NOT a listing of Neoist magazines. There were Neoist publications
before SMILE & there have been non-SMILE Neoist publications contemporaneous with SMILE & not every
SMILE was necessarily Neoist. There was "NEO" (later "ORGAN"), 1979-1984, from the untiring
originator, agitator, & organizer of Neoism Monty Cantsin (Istvan Kantor) Amen! - & David Zack's
"NEO-NOOZE", 1983, etc..
What Stewart was probably unaware of when he created SMILE was the lineage that a magazine name
ending in "ILE" connected to the Mail Art network would automatically be a part of: viz: the lineage of
FILE to VILE to BILE. FILE, a publication produced by General Idea in Toronto, had taken their name as
an anagram of the well-known photo-journalism magazine LIFE & had mimiced its look too. Sometime
around all this, (in November of 1979) Tom Vague, in England, also created a magazine called VAGUE which
mimiced VOGUE. I include VAGUE in here not because it was a SMILE project but because it was done in a
similar spirit as (in a sense) the 'next step' in the FILE-VILE-BILE lineage (& is also the longest-lasting of all
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SMILEs
http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/SMILEs.html
these projects). But what eventually made SMILE unique in this lineage was its multiple editorship &
multiple points of origin.
While much of the above is commonly acknowledged in Mail Art history, one important precursor is usually
left out: the Charlie Manson record called "LIE" that took its name & look from the LIFE magazine article
about Manson. Below is my personal chronology of LIFE to LIE & FILE to VILE to BILE to VAGUE to
SMILE, etc.. In the initial stages of this archiving, at least, most of the images provided are covers of
magazines in my own archive. A few images are taken from online. I don't have any issues of BILE & I only
have middle-era issues of VAGUE so my knowledge there is sketchy. Clicking on the index links &/or the
thumbnail images will take you to separate pages where the images are larger & where there may be further
explanation &/or more scanned pages (eventually).
In 1992, Simon Ford curated an exhibit of SMILE magazines at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
The catalog was called "SMILE CLASSIFIED" & included a chronology of SMILEs previously published as
"SMILE History Lesson" by Mark Pawson. In some instances I disagree with this chronology, in others I
consulted it. Either way, Mark's "History Lesson" was an excellent one that only a deeply involved Mail
Artist could've produced at the time. While I was in correspondence with most of the editors of SMILE & its
variants, I had somewhat lost interest in it by the early 1990s, if not sooner. I wasn't in touch with Erica
Smith, who did LIMES, &, no doubt, some others. I believe that this website is probably the most complete
online resource regarding the SMILEs but I'm also sure that I'll have to continue to update it as I realize that
I've missed many things.
My chronology's being written in 2015, there're bound to be some mistakes. There're probably also some
misattributions. In at least one case, I don't remember where the SMILE originated from. I welcome
corrections & missing links sent to the email address listed near the bottom of this page.
Some of these publications show smoke damage. That dates them as having been acquired by me before early
1985 when my apartment in South BalTimOre was set fire to by an arsonist. Also included in this chronology
are reviews about or relevant to SMILE in places other than SMILE. Otherwise, things that I don't know
enough about to place chronologically + ephemera will be (or are) placed at the end of the list.
As with all of my websites, this one's in-progress & will probably never be 'finished'. I'm completely
burnt-out on creating it at the moment. Given that I'm using software that's at least 18 years old to make it
& that that means that even for individual pages I tax the memory of the faux Mac OS 9 that the software
runs on, even getting as far as I will by the time I upload this will be quite labor-intensive.
Aftere posting the 1st version of this online, I was informed in a March 22, 2015 email from Florian Cramer,
the great Neoist scholar, that "In addition to the SMILE issues listed on your pages, there was a whole series
of SMILE magazines published by an British industrial music/culture group (called something like Academy
23 - ?!?) in the 1990s, and a number of SMILE magazines published in Spain around the same time. I do not
have any issues of those. In the early/mid-nineties, a German discordianist called Michael Liermann also
published a SMILE issue." That's all news to me so there's obviously far more out there than I'm aware of.
For the sake of my archiving, it would be great to have more information about the afore-mentioned.
SMILE listings that aren't accompanied by an image are taken from Mark Pawson's "SMILE History
Lesson" & either aren't in my collection or aren't recognizable as being in my collection from Mark's
description.
Some people will, quite accurately, accuse me of treacherously undermining the GREAT CONFUSION &
historification-resistance of Neoism by clarifying some of the many origin-&-dating-pranks of the issues
below. What can I say? I'm a natural-born contrarian - maybe - or maybe I just think it's time to revive some
strong scholarly standards that I sometimes see withering away.
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1976, summer VILE Volume 1, Number 2 / Volume 2, Number 1 - San Francisco, USA William John Gaglione & Anna Banana
1977, summer VILE Volume 3, Number 2 - San Francisco, USA - Anna Banana &
William John Gaglione
1978 VILE #6 Fe-Mail-Art - San Francisco, USA - William John Gaglione & Anna
Banana
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SMILEs
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1984.07 proposal for Transparent SMILE - Monty Cantsin performing with White
Colours - BalTimOre, US@ - Monty Cantsin (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE)
1984 SMILE, xerox 1 - Woking, England - Stewart Home & Mark Pawson
1984 SMILE, xerox 2, ritual - Woking, England - Stewart Home & Eugenie Vincent
1984 SMILE, xerox editions - Woking, England - Stewart Home
1984.10 SMILE 6 (unreleased) Tim Ore issue - Woking, England / BalTimOre, US@ Tim Ore (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE) & Monty Cantsin (Stewart Home)
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1985.03 SMILE 7 - London, England - Monty Cantsin (Stewart Home) & Monty Cantsin
(Pete Horobin)
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1985 SMILE Neoist Music Anthology - Montral, Canada - Monty Cantsin (Istvan
Kantor)
1985.09 Transparent SMILE - Monty Cantsin performing with White Colours BalTimOre, US@ - Monty Cantsin (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE)
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1986 "Death is the spectacle of oppression" T-Shirt - BalTimOre, USA - John Berndt
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1986.12 SMILE - Dundee, Scotland - DATA ATTIC (Pete Horobin) + David Zack &
Snowhite Young
1986 SMILE - Firenze, Italy - Karen Eliot / Monty Cantsin (John Berndt)
1986 SMILE CONGRESS - London, England - Mark Pawson
1986 SMILE portraits - London, England - Mark Pawson + Ben Allen + Pete Horobin + Stewart Home
1986? SMILE 23.1 - England - Pete Scott
1986? SMILE - England - D. Tiffen / A. James
1986? SMILE - England - Andy Semple
1986/1987? LISME - Amsterdam, Netherlands - Monty Cantsin (Arthur Berkhoff)
1987 (winter 1986/1987) review of SMILEs in Lightworks #18 - Birmingham, MI, USA Charlton Burch
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1987.10 review of Neoism & SMILE in New Art Examiner - Washington, DC, USA Grant Kester
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1988.10 Perpetual Motion #24 SMILE - Brooklyn, USA - Circle Arts (Matty Jankowski)
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1988 SMILE Commodity Issue - Raleigh, USA - Karen Eliot (Brian Gentry)
1988 SMILE - BalTimOre, USA - Karen Eliot / Monty Cantsin (John Berndt)
1989 (winter 1988/1989) Stewart Home's "To tell the Truth?" article in Lightworks #19 Birmingham, MI, USA - Charlton Burch
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1989 SMILE 3 - BalTimOre, USA Karen Eliot / Monty Cantsin (John Berndt)
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1991.07.12.Victoria & Albert Museum invite to SMILE show - London, England - Simon
Ford
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1992.01 SMILE 030/19855 - Hamburg, Germany - Karen Eliot & Lt. Murnau (Daniel
Braunschweig & Florian Cramer)
1992.03.20 SMILE CLASSIFIED - Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England - Simon
Ford
1992.06 SMILE The Anatomy of Neoism (redacted) in German - Berlin, Germany Monty Cantsin (Florian Cramer)
1992.07.28 SMILE The Anatomy of Neoism in English (less redacted than the German
version) - Amherst, USA - Karen Eliot (Florian Cramer)
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1992 SMILE Presence and Space - Amherst, USA - Alice & Ilsa (Florian Cramer)
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1992 SMILE Rhetoric is Pornography - Amherst, USA - John Kennedy & Karen F. Eliot,
Karen Eliot, Monty Cantsin (Florian Cramer)
1993 SMILE issue 100 - Amherst, USA - Monty Cantsin (Florian Cramer)
1993? SMILE the rhetoric of neoism - Berlin, Germany - Alice, Jason, & Ilsa (Florian
Cramer)
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1994 SMILE Broadly - BalTimOre, USA & Brooklyn, USA via Berlin, Germany - Dr.
Emil Steiner (David Cole + "Blaster" Al Ackerman + Florian Cramer)
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***********************************
dark side
dunno
ephemera
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tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
idioideo at verizon dot net
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