Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

290 Brian Holmes
collective situations, beyond what was traditionally known as the art world.
The indeterminacy of the results, the impossibility of knowing whether we
are dealing with artists or activists, with aesthetic experimentation or political
organizing, is part of what is being sought in these activities.
FUTURES
Innumerable artist-activist collectives could have been described here, along
with other social movements, local and national contexts, inventions, and
consensus-breaking events; but I preferred to stick as closely as possible to
personal experience. What matters, at the end of the last century and the
beginning of this one, is the slow emergence of an experiential territory,
where artistic practices that have gained autonomy from the gallery-magazinemuseum
system and from the advertising industry can be directly connected
to attempts at social transformation. The urgency, today, is to reinforce that
territory with both words and acts, and to use it for further constructive projects
and experiments in subversion. The appropriation of expressive tools
from the information economy—from the schools, the training programs,
the workplace, and the practices of consumption—opens up an enormous
FIGURE 10.8. Steven Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble at the Free Range Grains installation,
2004. Kurtz and his group are under investigation by the FBI and state attorney general for alleged
bioterrorism. Photograph courtesy of Steve Barnes, Critical Art Ensemble.