Brian Holmes

Brian Holmes (1959, San Francisco) is a cultural critic who has worked with activists and artists in Europe and the Americas. He is interested primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practice. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. Holmes was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany in 1997. He is a member of the groups Deep Time Chicago and Compass, and a former member of the graphic arts group Ne pas plier from 1999 to 2001, and the French conceptual art group Bureau d'études. He is based in Chicago.

Publications

Books

• Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art & Politics in a Networked Era, Zagreb: Arkzin/What, How and for Whom, 2003, 294 pp.
• co-editor, Continental Drift, Zagreb: What, How and for Whom/WHW, and Zagreb: AGM, 2008, 35 pp. Catalogue. (Croatian)
• Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering, Autonomedia, 2008, 187 pp. [1]
• Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, and Zagreb: WHW, 2009, 414 pp.
• with Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, Volatile Smile, Nürnberg: Moderne Kunst, 2014, 182 pp. [2] [3]
• Driving the Golden Spike: The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space, Deep Time Chicago, 2016, 19 pp. Pamphlet.

Book chapters, essays

• "The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique", transversal 1 (2002).
  • "Der flexible Charakter. Für eine neue Kulturkritik", trans. Birgit Mennel, transversal 1 (2002). (German)
  • "La personalidad flexible. Por una nueva crítica cultural", trans. Marcelo Expósito, rev. Brian Holmes and Joaquín Barriendos, transversal 1 (2002). (Spanish)
  • "Fleksibilna ličnost: za novu kulturalnu kritiku", trans. Nataša Ilić, transversal 1 (2002). (Croatian)

• "The Potential Personality: Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control", in 3 escenarios, Las Palmas: CAAM, 2006, PDF.
  • "Personalidade potencial: trans–subjetividade na sociedade de controle", trans. Filipe Ferreira, Cadernos de Subjetividade 8:13, São Paulo: PUC-SP, Oct 2011, pp 194-205, PDF. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• "Further: Wisconsin and Dreamtimes West", in A Call to Farms: Continental Drift through the Radical Midwest Culture Corridor, Viroqua, WI: Heavy Duty Press, 2008, pp 35-37. [4]
• "Die Erfindung der Eventarbeit. Public Netbase in den 1990ern", in Vergessene Zukunft: radikale Netzkulturen in Europa, eds. Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, pp 119-123. (German)
• "Cartography With Your Feet: Workshop Proposal for “Beneath the University, the Commons”", in Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions, eds. Rozalinda Borcila, Bonnie Fortune and Sarah Ross, Wisconsin: White Wire, 2012. [5] [6]
• "Continental Drift 2011: Argentina / China", in Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions, eds. Rozalinda Borcila, Bonnie Fortune and Sarah Ross, Wisconsin: White Wire, 2012. [7] [8]
• "Tactical Television. Movement Media in the Nineties", Regarding Spectatorship, 2015.
• "Captive Sun", in Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2016. [9]

Interviews

• Tom Vandeputte, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, "Boundaries of Knowledge: Questions for Brian Holmes", 2015.
• Tünde Mariann Varga, "Political Ecology and Anthropocene Public Space: An Interview with Brian Holmes", Mezosfera, Budapest, Jun 2016.

Links

• Continental Drift, blog, until 2015
• Time To Change / Just Transition, 2021 video presentation
• Living Rivers
• Profile on EGS (archived)
• Live Your Models: Self-orientation and urban form in the next “spirit of capitalism”, keynote at the Former West: Art and Labor after the End of Work conference, Warsaw, 2015
• ARG
• Wikipedia