Brian Holmes (2003), 'Artistic Autonomy and the communication society', Nettime, Oct 26; conference paper for Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, London.


The idea of artistic autonomy appears as a strange paradox given the history of conceptual arts practice of the 1960s and 70s aiming to undermine autonomy, and perhaps in particular the formalist discourse of Greenberg and 'deconstructing the totality of the white male Kantian subject' (Holmes, 2003). Brian Holmes, although recognising that the issue is not a precondition for arts practice per se, does think that arts practice engaged with politics wrests on the ability to make free decisions. The issues are somewhat confirmed by examining the word itself. Drawing upon the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, Holmes points out that 'Autos' means self and 'nomos' means law: 'Autonomy means giving yourself your own law' (2003). Given individuals operate in a social context, any attempt to follow laws is a collective and complex problem. For Holmes, 'in this way, collective autonomy  becomes a question both of individual or small-group artistic production, and of large-scale cultural policy. [... what the Bureau d'Etudes calls] "the deconstruction and reconstruction of complex machines." This is the way that artistic practices can affect reality.' (2003) he cites the work of Jack Lang with his slogan: 'La culture, c'est les poˇtes, plus l'ˇlectricitˇ (Culture is the poets, plus electricity)' in turn evoking Lenin, at the Congress of Soviets in 1920: 'Communism is Soviet power, plus the electrification of the entire country.'(2003) To Holmes, this is an indication of the power of creativity to turn energy into creative labour. In the context of the event at the Tate Modern (in which Holmes is speaking) the irony of its former use as a electric power plant proves the point: 
'It's a mausoleum, a tomb, which the party cadres of New Labour have turned into a tourist attraction, a kind of crystal palace of globalization. It can be illuminated, electrified in its turn: so the tomb of the working class is made into a glittering artwork. Poetry meets electricity.' (2003) 
Furthermore, the list of its corporate sponsors further proves the point (British Telecom, Bloomberg and British Petroleum not least) making the Tate thoroughly stitched into the financial core of 'transnational state capitalism'. 

The importance of all this for Holmes is to rethink the tactics of experimental and politicised artistic practice given the values of transnational state capitalism have thoroughly permeated the art world, 'not only through the commodity form, but also and even primarily, through the artists' adoption of management techniques and branded subjectivities' (2003). He is thinking of techno-collectives like etoy and their pseudo corporate organisation and marketing techniques - what Holmes calls 'neomanagement' and the opportunism of the 'flexible personality' (2003). Previous oppositional tactics expressing a critique of the institution of art have been incorporated. so what other spaces are there outside of arts traditional spaces? The internet to him is also an 'integrative system' acting as an ideological state apparatus: 'it hails you, it connects to you and gives you an IP number; it interpellates you into Imperial ideology.' (2003) In the light of this, new forms of class antagonism are required. He is thinking of new organizational forms, like the research network developed by Multiplicity, his own engagements with cross-border solidarity movements, like Kein Mensch ist illegal, and his collaborations with Bureau d'ˇtudes. But he remains skeptical asking: 'What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option? Or are we not becoming what we believe we are resisting?' (this is from the paper 'The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance', from the 'Geography - and the Politics of Mobility' symposium in Vienna). 

At this point in time artistic resistance is now entangled in 
the networks. Thus Eric Kluitenberg, in 'Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde/The Negative Dialectics of the Net' writes: 'In this paradoxical environment, dominant discourses of social, political and economic power can be challenged at the level of the representational systems they employ. The classical avant-gardes provide a repository of ideas, tactics and strategies that are now played out in a radically enlarged context; no longer the context of art itself, but that of the network society.' (2002)
For Brian Holmes this offers hope for a resistance based on self-organisation and cultural production that lies outside the frameworks of the marketplace and 'the spheres of privilege which are insured by contemporary capitalism' (also from 'revenge of the concept').

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wake of modernity:

'In Old Norse, "vaku" or "vak" meant a hole in the ice. Subsequently, in its transformation into wake, 'vaku' came to refer to the stretch of smooth water left behind a moving ship, a ship moving perhaps through icy waters, an ice-breaker perhaps. Already the metaphor of wake begins to awaken us to art's experience of practice within contemporary culture; for practice does indeed find itself in arctic conditions, condemned to occupy the icy hole, to be in the freezing wake left by the engine of modernity, preserved in ice by the culture itself. And maybe this hole, art's hole, also names your Museum as that which holds art at arm's length at the culture's frozen margins: there art might be represented as a brass monkey, up to its waist in the icy waters, impotent, but still chattering.' (Phillipson, 1989: 13)