Brian Holmes: "On the other side of the door – outside, if you like – is everyday life, where basically art tends to dissolve and become invisible, or it’s like a cherished memory that you occasionally share with other people."

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Art is a strongly vexed thing because art’s worth money. And it’s worth money because it has a signature. And not only that... it’s not as crude as that, because you can also say that art’s worth money because it has a kind of prestige based on how identifiable the decisions are in it, so we can find out how original it is. That’s how you can price it, by the original decisions. To make those decisions identifiable, the artist has to have chosen to do one thing and not other. To do that they have to be an artist, they have to be an individual.

Or, if they’re a collective, they have to operate as a collective that’s so rigorously controlled that you could say the collective has chosen to do this and not that. And then you can compare it to a whole set of things. That becomes a very evaluative approach where you would analyse the worth of anything in any kind of market by how much it’s comparable to and stands out from other things. Unfortunately that doesn’t have anything to do with collectivity in the sense of creating the basis of autonomy, by which I mean, creating shareable things that will help people to gain a footing in the world, from which they can determine their own experience, their own destiny. Art is continually being pushed away from this quest for collective autonomy.

At the same time, art is the word that we have for places where creation and invention take place. We know that in a complex society, language and images and imagination are some of the places where invention and creativity can happen the most frequently and fruitfully. So art is at a vexed pass, it’s caught between forces that push for its identification and evaluation, and very different desires seeking something that creates autonomy: a difference, other- ness, escape. Art as trap, art as liberation.

But it’s not like there’s an either/or. A lot of people are on the threshold. On one side of the door is the art world, where all those operations of evaluation take place. On the other side of the door – outside, if you like – is everyday life, where basically art tends to dissolve and become invisible, or it’s like a cherished memory that you occasionally share with other people. In the end most people are actually on the threshold. They’re going back and forth between these two things. They don’t go all the way into daily life as the pure unalloyed creation of collective autonomy, because when they do, they get completely lost as artists. Occasionally you meet them. You might run into this person and eventually you find out that they have all of these things to say about art and life, and you’d have never suspected because they didn’t give a sign. But when you stay on the threshold, you can instantly find the people who have lots to say... because they’re producing the signs. They have lots to say all the time, about signs which point away from where they are. It’s weird... but I think if you’re honest with yourself, you will probably have to admit that you’re living on this threshold. Maybe another place to start this conversation is what to do with that location, because it’s real.

– Brian Holmes from Combination Acts. Notes on Collective Practice in the Undercommons



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