Organisational Art

O ART

Martin Ferr Ferroo-Thomsen -Thomsen

RGANISATIONAL

( PUBLICATION

A Study of Art at Work in Organisations

ferro.dk

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

APRIL|2005

ORGANISATIONAL ART - A Study of Art at Work in Organisations -

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, Random House 1996, manipulation

BY MARTIN FERRO- THOMSEN (ferro@c.dk) // APRIL 2005 // SUPERVISOR: ANNE RING PETERSEN DANSK KANDIDATAFHANDLING // INSTITUT FOR NORDISKE STUDIER OG SPROGVIDENSKAB FACULTY OF HUMANITIES // UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

It is legal to copy and distribute this paper in its current form. A digital version is available from www.ferro.dk. Pictures are reproduced with permission from the artists. Use of any content outside this context requires special permission. Used fonts are ID:00 and ID:03

by E- Types and Learning Lab Denmark. A special thanks to The Creative Alliance at Learning Lab Denmark for accommodating this project and believing in it from the very beginning. This thesis is also published in print by Videnskabsbutikken (The Science Shop) and is available from www.videnskabsbutikken.dk - ISBN: 87- 91337- 43- 7.

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0 0_CONTENT 1 INTRODUCTION 3 Composition and Intention 4 Two Examples of Organisational Art 7 Institutional Theory of Art 11 Arts- and- Business 13 2 JOHN LATHAM & ARTIST PLACEMENT GROUP 16 Time, Event and Knowledge 18 Cosmology, Industry and Policy 19 The Incidental Person 23 Big Breather and Scottish Office Placement 26 3 INDUSTRIES OF VISION BY DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION 33 People and Partners 35 Phases 37 3.2 Process and Exchange 45 3.3 The Scope of Art 50 Rules, Authority and Games 53 Heterotopia 55 3.4 Organisational Culture and Learning 58 Building the Helping Relationship 58 Art as a Helping Hand 60 Sustainable Change? 62 4 TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ORGANISATIONAL ART 67 Social Engagement 67 Concept and Discourse 73 Site- Specificity and Context 75 5 CONCLUSION 81 6 REMARKS ON METHOD 83 7 ABSTRACT 89 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY 91 9 APPENDIX 96 Academic evaluation of this thesis LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AI: Appreciative Inquiry • APG: Artist Placement Group • di: democratic innovation • IOV: Industry of Vision • LK: Lauritz Knudsen Inc. • OA: Organisational Art • PC: Process Consultation * indicates that the citation is translated from Danish. Citations without page numbers sometimes indicate an online text.

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1 1_INTRODUCTION ‘Organisational Art’ (OA) is a tentative title that designates art projects by contemporary artists, who work together with non- artistic organisations (such as companies, institutions, communities, governments and NGOs) to produce art that in one way or another evolves around organisational issues. OA can tentatively be described as socially engaged, conceptual, discursive, site- specific and contextual.

This investigation is a journey into combined forms of art and organisation. In recent years we have witnessed a higher degree of direct interaction and exchange between art and organisation, two fields that both have undergone drastic changes, socially and structurally. The artist is no longer only a producer of aesthetic objects and organisations are not only interacting with the art world by patronage, sponsorship and acquiring art works for the office.

In recent years there has been a general decrease in government arts funding. At the same time the upsurge of people who enter the art world and neighbouring creative industries makes competition for funding increasingly harder and looking for funding from the private sector and endowments has become an obvious response.

Globalisation has forced organisations to think along unconventional lines to survive. To accommodate societal trends and attract an able workforce, organisations have grown a greater awareness of cultural and social issues. Branding is important to compete in a global economy and association with anything that is considered cutting- edge or sexy is of interest to organisations. This has furthered dialogue between art and organisation, also for companies and artists that are more interested in partnership than success from scandal. In general, the call for creative people is growing, whether this might mean a visionary leader or an artist ‘guised’ as a manager.

The work of art has become increasingly difficult to separate from other cultural products. Innovation, above all, is at centre stage. This is not just due to growing

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commoditisation of art but also that innovation is no longer just an artistic prerogative.

Light speed technological advances and a general understanding of the importance of innovation have led to widespread appreciation of heterogeneity and pushing boundaries, both on individual and societal levels (Østergaard 1999). Today the work of art is comparable to a cultural- aesthetic service, which takes the form of organising, negotiating, coordinating, researching and promoting. The artist has become a critical provider of such services; performing as a facilitator, educator, coordinator and even a bureaucrat (Kwon 2002).

To some, this may sound as the realisation of the historical art avant- garde’s project, where art has finally been integrated in the ‘praxis of life’ rather than being confined to a subsystem in society. However, any avant- garde would dissolve its project by achieving it, which means that if art was finally integrated fully in society it would become transparent (cf. Bürger 1984). Given the strong reactions that novel ‘social’ art forms have caused, this is hardly the case. The oldest question in the art discourse, ‘Is it art?’, is being posed more frequently than ever and this is also happening in the emerging cross field of art and organisation. However, as we shall see when we arrive at our final destination, there is in OA a connection to the historical avant- garde in relation namely to their ambition to advance society. But OA’s methods are far more mundane than their avant- garde predecessors’: Ultimately OA is about cooperation and exchange, rather than just change.

Composition and Intention I first became aware that something was ‘going on’ in the cross- field of art and organisation when I in the spring of 2003 met Kent Hansen and his (at the time) oneperson artist organisation ‘democratic innovation’ (always written with lower case letters). I was attending a course at University of Copenhagen about organisational theory and communication that included a three month internship. I wanted to work directly with art and culture and I came across this, to me, rather strange artist who had replaced his paint brushes with a laptop, and his studio with an office located vis- à- vis a design agency. He worked primarily interdisciplinary, that is, with other artists and together with companies, consultants, researchers and other non- artist partners in art projects, which often focused on social issues.

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Namely his project Industries of Vision was strongly centred on collaborative processes with a strange mix of other artists and people that, at least traditionally, had no appreciation of contemporary art – such as managers and employees in two manufacturing companies in the province. The tangible art work in the traditional sense was suspended in favour of an ‘artefact’ that seemed secondary to the art process itself.

To me this was all refreshing, although it seemed to ‘short- circuit’ many of the traditional concepts of art as I knew it, mainly concerning the art object and its context, the artist subject and the traditional circulation of art.

When I took my exam in the mentioned course, I learned that organisational theory alone could not describe this art form – which perhaps wasn’t so surprising – but I also found that I actually still didn’t fully understand what was going on and that there wasn’t much knowledge to be found on this phenomenon. This, I thought, was a good starting point for any thesis, so why not make it mine?

This investigation does not aim just to discuss whether or not the projects in question are art, but is in favour of a more pragmatic approach, that goes one step further and asks ‘What happens when they call it art?’. Embedded in the question is the assumption that calling something art generates effects that also go beyond the artwork. An important word is ‘they’. By this I refer to what happens when the artists call their work art and when the hosting organisations call it art. I believe that the interpretive intersections and splits between these two ‘theys’ form an important part of the artwork’s effects, this work either being an idea, process or artefact. In some of the projects we shall see that not calling it art also is among the adopted strategies.

Although there exists no ‘art police’, dealing with art addresses the issue of coherence with centuries of described art practice. Thus, another aim is to examine how OA articulates and possibly furthers trajectories from the history of art.

This investigation is not an authoritative account of something called OA. OA is rather to be considered a discursive ‘vector’ that, hopefully, will achieve its significance along the way. To capture the essence of OA, I have had to get involved face- to- face with several of these artists since there often was only little documentation to rely on. Thus, this thesis can be viewed as a permutation of fundamental research and various existing material, sometimes hard to come by.

As always with contemporary art, there are no chromium- plated methods or readymade bodies of theory that I can easily adopt. This is even more pronounced with OA that

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stands with one foot in the art institution and the other in a given organisational field.

This means that I will abandon a singular mode of inquiry in favour of a more dialogical and attentive approach, which is better able to comply with the ambiguous nature of this artistic form. Furthermore, as I believe that one cannot fully understand the impact of these art projects solely from an art historical or - theoretical perspective, I will include supplementary perspectives when possible, such as from social science and organisational theory.

This investigation has its main emphasis on contemporary art but will go as far back as the sixties, as crucial parts of today’s framework for OA was laid out then. In this introductory chapter, after mentioning two examples of OA, outlining a useable definition of ‘art’ in relation to our journey and differentiating OA from ‘Arts- andBusiness’, I will make an in- depth account of the British ‘Artist Placement Group’ (founded 1966) and the artist John Latham (chapter 2). He coined the concept of the artist as an ‘Incidental Person’, which describes an unprecedented way of interacting with organisations. To my knowledge, neither the group nor Latham have been thoroughly introduced in a Danish context and are still widely and unjustly unappreciated, especially outside the UK. Next follows a large case study (chapter 3) of before mentioned Industries of Vision (2001), where I make use of both art- and organisational theory. In this art project, a group of artists collaborated with staff in two manufacturing companies to explore the potentials of the interplay between art and organisation. I find it to be one of the most interesting projects in recent time, which is why I have chosen to emphasise it in this investigation. This is the first time this project has been treated thoroughly in academia, both in Denmark and abroad.

Finally I will outline a theoretical framework for OA (chapter 4) by sampling relevant theory from the art historical discourse and attune it to the treated OA projects. I will then arrive at my final conclusion (chapter 5), which is followed by a few reflections on this thesis’ method (chapter 6),

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Two Examples of Organisational Art Henrik Schrat: The Appearance of Fantasy Henrik Schrat is a German artist who often works interdisciplinary and is concerned with the exchange of economic- and cultural value, which he at times stands on its head. For instance in the project Feeding Back (2002) where he deployed a ‘manager- in- residence’ at Slade School of Fine Art in London as a reversal of the concept of ‘artist- in- residence’; this project he also described in one of his intermittent comic book productions (The Pink Suit, 2003).

In his project The Appearance of Fantasy (completed 2000) he worked together with Dresdner Bank in Germany to make an installation in the large trading room of Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Through Kulturstiftung Dresden of Dresdner Bank (an art/culture department), he presented the idea to the influential Chairman of the bank who liked it and recommended it to the Chairman of the stock exchange that agreed to the project, presumably because they needed some “decoration in the trading room” (Schrat 2000:218).

The Appearance of Fantasy, Henrik Schrat, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, 2000 (courtesy of the artist).

Schrat’s idea was to cover 160 sq. m. of empty wall with 68 panels covered with used candy wrappers; he would need some 50,000 pieces to do the job. The bank coordinated the collecting with their 1,200 branches all over Germany, which made it a nation- wide project. The artist had agreed to donate part of the installation to an auction as a way of

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transferring the accumulated cultural value – represented by the wrappers – back into money. This made the bank’s press office frame the project as a ‘charity project’ in folders and press releases, which the artists resisted. But eventually it was communicated to his satisfaction as an art project, and people started mailing candy wrappers from all over the country. The installation was present in the trading room as a work in progress from January 2000 and was completed five months later with a grand opening where people normally unaccustomed to the trading room came to see the piece.

The installation bears resemblance to Jackson Pollock’s all- over painting and Gerhard Richter’s 1024 Colors. In its context it looks similar to the exchange monitors with their numbers, which obviously signify economic value. And at the same time the contrast is significant, as the work is produced from detritus, that is, bits and pieces that are normally considered to be of low or no value. However, the number of wrappers in itself seems to add value to the installation, just as a sufficiently large number of insignificantly small shares can have incredible value.

The panels look similar to the dots on a TV screen, only here it is composed by ‘analog’ components. It brings to mind the fact that the market these days exchange value constantly and that this value never has physical form. The chaotic image on the ‘TV screen’ (‘nothing is on’) can easily be seen as a critical comment to the apparent rationality of stock exchange that in reality is far from rational.

How many people does it take to eat 50,000 pieces of candy? Certainly more than a few.

All their contributions, the costs of 50,000 pieces of candy and the huge amount of work that went into gluing the wrappers onto the panels add further and concrete value to the installation. It also makes it a collaborative work above all, probably with the highest number of ‘co- creators’ ever seen for an artwork.

In the many bank branches special containers were positioned, which functioned as ‘value changers’ 1 where you could ‘deposit’ your candy paper. The installation makes visible the flow of value from the cultural field (‘human’ and colourful – as the candy and the consumers) to the economic field (digital and anaemic – as the monitors). As such the ‘host’ organisation of this work is not just the bank and the stock exchange but actually the entire (German) market with its consumers, traders and producers.

Before the installation was begun, Schrat did a number of interviews with people knowledgeable about stock exchange, and here he learned that, at least in Germany, the 1

Cf. Ventura 2001.

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word ‘fantasy’ (‘Phantasie’) is used to describe speculative hopes and room for imaginative dealing (Resche 2001). Schrat points towards the curious fact that there still exists such a place as a trading room when all trade happens virtually though phones and computers: “Here, a shape is found to materialize the flow of virtual money” and he also calls that shape an “altar” (Schrat 2000:216). Following these thoughts, the trade room becomes similar to a ‘church’ and consumerism would be the constituted ‘religion’.

Local Access: Simulation Local Access (French: ‘Accès Local’) is a French artist group founded in 1998 that develops collaborative art projects in non- artistic contexts. They are devoted to adding “existential value” 2 to the average work life by applying “artistic methods to non- artistic purposes, and non- artistic methods to artistic purposes”. For this purpose, they have since 2001 been working with various partners on a tool they call Simulation (see illustration).

Simulation, Local Access, one- day seminar, prototype #2, drawing after real situation, 2004 (Mathias Delfau for Local Access).

Simulation is a system that allows for a homogenous group of people to discuss a specific issue around a table where everyone is plugged into a console with headphones.

It enables them via a dial to choose who they listen to but not who they talk to. This means that they can’t interrupt a conversation (but it is possible to ‘eavesdrop’), they can’t listen to everything and they can’t impose a specific point of view onto anyone. A 2 All quotes and information about Local Access and Simulation is found at www.acces- local.com and in a leaflet ‘Simulation – exclusive listening system’ printed by Local Access.

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member of the group selects conversations that are transcribed directly and video projected on the wall for everyone to see.

In the course of a day a group of people, e.g. a department from a company, meet around the system and go through a five- step protocol where a facilitator asks them to imagine various scenarios that are designed specifically for that group relating to tasks they are presently facing. By signalling across the table, people ‘link up’ and talk/listen through the system, allowing multiple simultaneous conversations around the same table without interference, as the sound in the headphones drown the other conversations in the room.

The system challenge and subvert normal group hierarchies in a safe and agreed upon environment with so- called “productive disturbance”, such as disorientation and blurring of roles. As such it simulates turbulent situations in a group or company’s existence, especially when threatened by new or complex situations. It is often when threatened that the core values and identity of a group surface. In Simulation however, what would normally be considered dangerous in a company becomes a mutual experience for the group, often positive and rewarding, where the group’s identity is strengthened.

“They won’t leave without problems, they’ll leave with problems of higher quality”, Local Access states about the experience. This experience is described by participants as comparable to a great art experience, although Simulation normally is not articulated as art, which is done to avoid disturbance from outdated or false appreciations of contemporary art.

This strategy is common to OA artists. Often ‘art’ makes unbiased people think of something that has to do with painting or sculpture, crazy ideas and fun. To avoid these expectations, an artist can choose to not call his work ‘art’ or to call it something else, as we shall see soon with the Artist Placement Group and John Latham, who used ‘Incidental Person’ to describe their new artist role. Another strategy is to utilise the possibilities that such expectations enable, which is done successfully in Industries of Vision.

Simulation is constantly being developed; each new prototype is more advanced than its predecessor. Every time it is put to use in a workshop, the developers learn more of its potential and at the same time it opens up for a more in- depth understanding of group dynamics and values, similarities and differences between art and organisation. It has been exhibited in artistic spaces and used with several groups from companies, such as Orange and the Fischer Brewery.

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In the latter a sales division was through Simulation quickly made aware of a mistaken strategy. Further collaboration with several workshops has led to a change in direction and ultimately the company’s sales have gone up by 4% in a period where the market has gone down by 11% 3 .

Simulation is based on a seemingly simple idea that surfaces and articulates complex issues. This was also the case with Schat’s project, and as it will be demonstrated throughout this investigation, it is a frequent trait of OA.

Institutional Theory of Art As we go along, we have to have a clear idea of what is meant by saying ‘art’ to establish a common frame of mind where misunderstandings are less apt to occur. Therefore, I will shortly outline a useable definition of this somewhat troublesome term. One of the reasons why it causes problems is that it is simply not clearly defined or, perhaps rather, over- defined. This is also the impression one gets from studying various encyclopaedias, where it soon becomes clear that the efforts to define ‘art’ are happening on a continuing basis 4 .

However, there is one important definition of the term that suits our project, known as ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’, a theory that defines art by relational property rather than material property. In an article under the same title, Robert J. Yanal (1998) gives a good overview of the main attempts to define the theory. Historically it stems from efforts to explain the paradox of how two physically and aesthetically identical objects become different, when one of them is labelled art. Two obvious examples are Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes.

The first response is from the founder of the theory, Arthur Danto, who in 1964 wrote: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (all citations from Yanal 1998).

By mentioning artistic theory, Danto refers to “artrelevant predicates”, which unfortunately raises another problem, namely of who is capable of predicating. Danto replies that only an artist is able to determine if a certain predicate is art- relevant – which

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According to a private e- mail from Patrick Mathieu (11.2.2005), who is a consultant working with Local Access.

4 Cf. Barnes 1998.

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in turn offers the problem of what ‘artist’ means. And why would one bother with predicates if a simple annunciation is all it takes to make something art?

The theory was adopted and perfected by George Dickie. He drew into detail the fact that it is the decisions of persons, mostly but not only artists, that turn objects into art. This led to the following definition by Dickie (1974): “A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).”

There are two important issues to note in this definition: (1) It is value- neutral and (2) it addresses the conferral of status by someone on behalf of the art world (actually, as we shall see soon, (2) annuls (1), since there in the word ‘someone’ is presented a nonobjective perspective that ultimately cannot be value- neutral).

Dickie acknowledges, that there exists no formal authority that decides who is a member of the institution, the art world. He does however say, that there are “core personnel” (mainly artists, curators and critics) who are the ones most capable of making the conferral (similar to a university that bestows a title on a person), but he continues: “every person who sees himself as a member of the artworld is thereby a member”.

It should now be clear that we have arrived at a circular definition of ‘art’, especially since dealing with the family of art concepts (art, artist, artwork etc.) must be defined in relation to each other.

So, are we back to square one then? I think not. Although circular and open to several attacks 5 , I find the theory very useful for our project. Mainly because there by ‘art world’ is implied the existence of a body of ‘expertise’ in matters of art and at the same time it is not a static concept, but defined as ‘convention’ 6 . Anyone can call anything ‘art’ at any time, but it only enters the art institution if someone capable confers it to a gallery or approves it by some other action.

It is noteworthy that conferral today often is dependent on a work’s innovative character (or use of context), which is why ‘convention’ becomes a practice that in the case of art also embeds the ambition to renew itself. Apart from the often maintained examples of artists that for years unjustly have been ‘left out in the cold’, that is, unappreciated by the art institution in their time, the Institutional Theory of Art works in practice because it 5 6

Yanal mentions the five most influential attacks, but concludes that the theory has not been refuted.

See Sartwell 1998, where he defines ‘art world’ similarly to Danto/Dickie.

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facilitates a professional treatment of the use of ‘art’. Anyone with a serious ambition to become an artist are dependent on some form of conferral at all times, which is why they will only call their work ‘art’ if they truly believe it qualifies as art.

This in turn addresses the nature of the institution itself, whose judgement above was labelled ‘value- neutral’ in essence. This, however, is hardly the case, which history has shown us time and again, one example being the unappreciated artist, who shortly before or after his death, is restored to glory. Another example is in extreme political environments, such as The Nazi Regime where now famous artists were labelled ‘degenerates’.

This is why artists have engaged in what formally is called ‘Institutional Critique’, which addresses the fact that the institution of art represents the central locus of power in the cultural field, historically in the form of the museum but later as a cultural- social abstraction or network. The critique serves both to advance the institution but also to demonstrate its shortcomings 7 . I will return to discussions on OA’s relation to the art institution throughout the thesis.

Arts- and- Business Let us now consider a neighbouring field to OA where interdisciplinary projects make use of artful approaches that are ‘applied’ to organisational environments – but without entering the art institution. In the so- called ‘Arts- and- Business’ field, possibly named after the agency ‘Arts & Business’ in the UK (also known as simply ‘A&B’), business have gone beyond mere patronage. Unlike most governments that have cut back on arts funding 8 , the private sector often considers sponsoring the arts a good investment with lots of return both in terms of money, benefits and spin- off.

A current example is the food and soap company Unilever’s sponsorship of the ‘Unilever Series’ at Tate Modern, a continuing programme of commissions worth £1.25 m. over five years. Apart from their name in the title, Unilever gets free access for staff and client parties, the right to advertise their sponsorship and run spin- off educational and social programmes. They even conducted an exhaustive audit to make sure they got proper value for their money, which concluded that they got £1.5 in value for £1 spent 9 .

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See Cravagna 2001 for more reading on this subject.

See for example: Douglas McLennan: ‘The End of Arts Funding?’, Newsweek Web Exclusive, 29 May 2003.

9 Farah Nayeri: ‘Europe's Corporate Art Sponsors Seek More Bang for Their Bucks’, Bloomberg, 4 March, Bloomberg.com.

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It is important to notice the plural form of ‘arts’ in this field, which indicates a wide range of disciplines, such as music, theatre, film and photography and not just what is normally referred to as ‘fine’ or ‘contemporary’ art.

For more than twenty years A&B have helped “business people support the arts & the arts inspire business people” 10 . This happens via some of the following models: 1. One model is what is called the ‘arts- based consultant’ where an ‘artist’ (such as a musician, film director, actor, storyteller, painter etc.) enters a company or institution and engages the employees in various types of inspirational or even transformational processes, using his artistic methods and capabilities. The solo violinist Miha Pogacnic is an example of an arts- based business consultant; more than twenty years ago he started playing classical masterpieces in offices around the world. Through decomposition he inspires mainly business people to better understand the musical piece he plays and, at best, their work/life (cf. Darsø 2004:93- 94).

2. Another model is corporate arts and development programmes where employees are taught by an ‘artist’ to ‘access the arts’, as it is often called, by painting, photographing, sculpting etc. themselves. Project ‘Catalyst’ at Unilever is a good example of such a programme where many ‘artists’ (actors, poets, clowns, comedians, cooks, painters etc.) are employed in the company for various tasks. For more than four years employees have been offered to take salsa- classes, writing- and photography courses, etc. and the idea is that by doing so the employees discover their creative potential which in turn makes them more engaged and inspired employees. So far the programme has been a success for both management and employees (Darsø 2004:109- 111).

3. A third model is the so- called ‘artist- in- residence’ model, where various types of artists are paid to stay for a longer period of time in an organisation and work in or with the organisation on certain tasks, such as decorating the environment, designing a sculpture on- site or simply working on their own. The most thorough account of an artist- inresidence programme can be found in Art and innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist- inResidence Program, (ed. Craig Harris 1999). Here Xerox paired various visual artists with in- house researchers to do joint projects. Another example is the agency ‘NyX’ in 10

www.aandb.org.uk.

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Copenhagen that ran the ‘InnovationsAlliancer2004’ programme, where 20 ‘artists’ (film directors, actors, sculptors etc.) were paired with 20 companies for 20 days – the programme was recently evaluated as successful by Learning Lab Denmark 11 . As we shall see with chapter 2, the concept of artist- in- residence is a diluted version of Artist Placement Group's ‘placement’.

These are some of the most prevalent models but the list is in no way conclusive. Just as well as Salvador Dali did window decorations for a fee, I believe that the Arts- andBusiness models of exchange are legitimate in their own right and that most times both businesses and artists benefit from it; which also could help explain why this field seems to be growing steadily 12 .

However, Arts- and- Business projects are rarely conferred to the institution of art and are therefore not of interest to our investigation. Especially the instrumental idea of ‘use’ or ‘application’ of art (methods) is counter to the emergent nature of OA and the nature of art itself. Naturally there are several overlaps between the two fields and an artist could easily be part of both; I even believe that some OA artists benefit from this general interest in the art(s). But it should now be clear that this in an investigation in art and organisation and not in Arts- and- Business.

We now move on to explore one of the first examples in modern time where art is successfully integrated in organisational practice: John Latham and Artist Placement Group.

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The evaluation is accessible online at www.lld.dk/consortia/thecreativealliance/files/nyxpdf.

For a thorough mapping of the Arts- and- Business field, please refer to Darsø 2004.

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2 2_JOHN LATHAM & ARTIST PLACEMENT GROUP “In the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.”

W. Heisenberg (Physics and Philosophy: The Revolutions in Modern Science, London: Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 161; cited from Walker 1995:19)

‘Artist Placement Group’ (today called ‘O+I’) were in the 60’s some of the first artists in modern time to leave their studios to work in organisational environments. They developed a comprehensive framework for artist ‘placements’ in organisations, which today is echoed in many contemporary OA projects. In the following I will give a rich account of this framework with specific emphasis on the artist John Latham, who worked with the group to develop the framework.

Artist Placement Group (often referred to as simply ‘APG’) was founded in 1966 in Britain by artists John Latham, Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan and was soon joined by Stuart Brisley, David Hall, and Ian MacDonald Munro. As artists they were quite different but they were united by their common goal: Placing art in non- art contexts, such as government departments and industry. Over the years the number of artists associated with APG grew and some left. The placements count numerous artists with diverse backgrounds and organisations in several countries, such as British Airways, British Rail, British Steel, Esso Petroleum, The Department of Health, The Department of the Environment and The Scottish Office in England; and NRW Germany and Institutes of Design in Norway, Holland and Spain.

APG believed that the contemporary artist had become isolated in his studio and, more generally, in the art institution, which was accessible mainly to biased spectators, counting perhaps only a few percent of society. Why was art not a legitimate and equal match to other ‘conventional’ disciplines and professions? Part of the answer was that the potential audience of any artists was only reachable though the private gallery and the public museum, but being exhibited here happened only for few successful artists.

This led to ‘ghetto- tendencies’ that made it almost impossible for an ‘outsider’ to

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appreciate what was going on ‘inside’ – and in many cases probably even vice versa. This mutual lack of understanding and appreciation was a vicious spiral that APG aimed to change.

Parallel with the development of these ideas ran the well- known currents of the sixties; democratic urges and idealistic awareness made artists question their role in society and paved the way for new approaches in art: “Individualism, self- expression and ‘art about art’ began to be replaced in their practice by collaboration, social relevance, process and context and the whole panoply of galleries, dealers and the art market was deemed antithetical.” (Harding 1995)

In this climate it seemed everything could happen and looking back some might say it almost did. John Latham (b. 1921) is still largely unknown outside England despite the fact that supporters rate him equal to both Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys (he met the latter on several occasions). This is perhaps mainly due to his efforts to merge science and art and, together with APG, to (re)establish art as a factor in the decisionmaking bodies of society. In combination, this makes his oeuvre hard to comprehend from purely an art historical and –theoretical perspective. Time and again he has been subject to neglect, ignorance and even suppression from critics, curators and arts agencies.

Even so, his and APG’s work has received growing recognition through the years, recently culminating in Tate Britain’s acquisition of APG’s records archive (2005) 13 . Also, what we today know as ‘artist- in- residencies’ is by APG and knowledgeable writers claimed to be a diluted and short- term adaptation of APG’s in- depth concept of ‘placement’.

Furthermore, Latham has left behind a legacy to younger generations of artists; most notably what today is known as ‘time- based art’ and the lesser known ‘event- structure’, where art is seen not so much as a matter of space, colour and shape but more as an event that happens through a given amount of time.

The lack of appreciation and understanding has had the unfortunate consequence that documentation is either lacking or hard to get hold of today (at least in a Danish context) 14 . One fortunate exception is John Latham: The incidental person – his art and ideas by art critic and art historian John A. Walker (1995). This comprehensive monograph is inclusive in its scope and together with articles provided to me by Barbara Steveni and 13

The acquisition was celebrated 23 March 2005 with a one- day symposium at the Tate where also Latham and many of the original and current members were present: ‘Art and Social Intervention: The Incidental Person’. Read further at http://www.tate.org.uk/learning/artistsinfocus/apg/bibliography.htm.

14 A very recent bibliography was put together for the above mentioned Tate event (follow the link above).

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various internet articles it has been possible for me to gather the knowledge to write this chapter.

In the following I will try not to repeat the mistake by making a thin account of Latham’s art and ideas, since without the latter the former cannot be comprehended fully.

However, as I am mainly concerned with his work in and with organisations, my emphasis will be on Latham’s concepts of event- structure and time- base, his cosmology and finally his contribution to APG and their placement framework. This means that I will leave out central parts of his work, such as his figurative paintings, book reliefs, happenings, installations and practically all of his writing 15 .

Time, Event and Knowledge To Latham, art production is a matter of ordering events in time, rather than ordering material in space 16 . He had begun his artistic career as a talented expressive and partly figurative oil painter influenced mainly by the Greek painter El Greco (1541- 1614). In 1954 several defining events occurred that changed Latham’s work and his view on art and society. This year he had bought a spray paint gun for domestic purposes but as a favour to two close scientist friends, he agreed to paint a Halloween mural in their house using the paint gun. It became a revelation to him. Unlike his normal tools of the trade, the spray gun was capable of making paint marks that was almost infinitely small. The resultant image was a direct outcome of the time that the trigger was pressed. It had a purely abstract nature without any temporality, other than that of the signified ‘triggertime’.

Latham had discovered a simple way that a fundamental unit of time, which he called ‘a least event’ 17 , could be represented visually as one ‘dot’ (‘a quantum- of- mark’) that at the same time signified a minimum of creative activity. A white canvas with black spray paint easily resembled an inverted star cloud, symbolising the cosmos. Thus, Latham viewed the canvas as ‘ground zero’, the equivalent of the completely empty void in cosmos before all events, a state similar to that before the Big Bang 18 . This state Latham had seen mirrored in Robert Rauschenberg’s white monochromes, which he saw as art’s 15 I refer to Walker 1995 for a full, chronological account on Latham’s oeuvre. Here, a very central text by Latham, ‘Time- Base and Determination in Events’, is reprinted as an appendix.

16 I will use past tense in much of the writing on Latham to mark the historical distance, even though he in the time of writing fortunately is very much alive.

17 “Time’s equivalent of a fundamental particle” (Walker 1995:20).

18 A theory stemming from 1927 but highly relevant at the time of the Cold War as the theory hypothesises that Universe at a certain point will return to the state before the Big Bang.

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reduction to an absolute nothing. To him, art and science had converged and this promised opportunities of a new departure, where the two fields would walk hand in hand (cf. Walker 1995:20- 22).

Latham believed that we cannot rely on history and science alone to advance humanity, simply because these fields alone are not able to describe reality: Science too is fallible (shown by the fact that established propositions have been overruled by competing theories or empirical discoveries throughout history) and the future is never exactly the same as the past. From this follows that humanity always will have to act in a state of incomplete knowledge and uncertainty – where we also have to rely on feelings, instincts and intuition (ibid.:24).

This is why Latham ‘targeted’ mostly encyclopaedias and dictionaries when creating his famous book reliefs and later his controversial ‘Skoob Towers’ (‘Skoob’ is ‘books’ spelled backwards), which were towers build from books that were burned in public spaces.

Books are knowledge in congested form, but in contrast life is fluent and changing – which for instance is revealed by the fact that reference books constantly has to be updated due to the “mutability of language and knowledge” (ibid.:103).

Latham has continued to develop his theory in his art and writing. It would be too comprehensive to go into detail with everything here. What is important for our investigation is the way Latham’s 1954- discovery reveals the potentiality in the artist role. In a paper from 1975 he cites the philosopher Bertrand Russel for saying “What we need is a language which shall copy nature” (cited from Walker 1995:24). To Latham, spray gun painting was such a language because it simulated the natural process of evolution in cosmos, where layers of spray paint represent the different stages of awareness and knowledge. As we shall see, the discovery was evidence of the powerful artistic position that he and APG would develop under the name ‘The Incidental Person’: “It was the artist’s intuition and insight that was responsible for this discovery, therefore the artist’s special function was to achieve states of knowing and awareness that did not depend on familiarisation with vast quantities of accumulated knowledge […]” (Walker 1995:24).

Cosmology, Industry and Policy Latham’s focus on time and event is a condition for artist’s placements in organisations as it allows for an art production that is linked to processes rather than artefacts. In many ways the APG framework is inseparable from the epistemological and societal ideas of John Latham – often referred to as a ‘cosmology’ due to their comprehensive 19

nature, aiming to change art’s position in society – and ultimately to change society itself for the better.

In short, Latham contended that we experience only one reality but we then accumulate and describe our knowledge about this reality within a wide range of disciplines and fields, such as in science and religion, which in turn only are able to account for limited descriptions of the same reality. The specialisation within disciplines only strengthens this overall division, as so- called experts are forced to stay within their ‘own’ field to achieve a high level of knowledge, making them ‘illiterate’ to a more holistic – or cosmological – description of the world. According to Latham the divided state of knowledge has led to a severe crisis that “plague humanity” (Walker 1995:2), a crisis where art would be key to a solution. As we saw, he viewed art as superior to spoken language but also as the best medium to disseminate his theory of time/event, which he maintained would provide a common basis for humanity to understand reality as a whole.

The artist was the type of person that could bridge the divisionary gaps due to his or hers Archimedean position in society, both inside and ‘outside’ at the same time and able to see patterns of coherence across divided fields. This was the case both on a universal, societal level, but also locally in an organisational placement where they were able (and by contract allowed) to transcend departments and hierarchies as no other employee and perhaps even manager could.

This way Latham and APG could circumvent the artist’s outsider position and turn it into an advantage – and furthermore they would begin to establish artists as a direct part of the decision- making bodies of society.

According to Latham, these bodies – such as in industry, government departments and the media – were concerned mostly with a short and limited time- horizon, which failed to comply with “human development and purpose” (Steveni 2002) – which in turn was reduced to a matter of economics and expedience in the form of gross national product and equally short- sighted monetary indicators.

To Latham art was a special kind of cognition and art works a device for comprehending and understanding cosmos. It follows that art works should have a didactic form that would allow the audience to reproduce the learning it contained 19 . Thus, the new role of art, as he and APG envisioned it, would help society to see humanity in the clarity of 19 Walker uses the word ‘traps’ of art that captures the spectator and his judgements of the world – and enlightens him (Walker 1995:42).

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longer- term perspectives and would function as a more advanced system of accounting for human development.

Latham’s work Offer for Sale from 1974, accurately describes the nature of the art world versus the ‘organisational’ world (in this case mainly business and government departments), using the particular language of accountancy to outline some of the dichotomies inherent in the two fields. At a show at ‘The Gallery’ (an alternative art space at the time), Latham devised a three- pronged display unit featuring photostats with reproductions of two documents. Both documents were entitled ‘Offer for sale’ and issued by organisations with the initials ‘APG’.

Offer for Sale, John Latham, installed at The Gallery, 1974 (courtesy of the artist/O+I).

The idea of using certain non- artistic rhetoric to describe art came from an advice APG got from their first attempts of setting up placements in industry, suggesting they should mimic language and manner familiar to people from the corporate sector 20 .

Before the show at The Gallery, Latham had come across a written commercial offer from a group of companies, called Allied Polymer Group (abbreviated ‘APG’), that offered to sell shares and outlined a list of benefits concerning capital, directors, bankers, policy etc.

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A strategy they actually adopted with success. Another trait from the business world, which they appropriated, is an advisory committee, including non- artist members.

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It was this document that he had matched point by point in an alternative art- version and presented side by side with the original. In the following table, I have described the character of the two oppositional organisations and their respective fields (cf. Walker 1995:128):

Capital value is…

Success is measured…

Allied Polymer Group Money Financially

The ultimate goal is…

Profit for stakeholders

The product is...

Useful goods

The time- base is…

Seeks to satisfy…

Individuals are…

Short- term policies Specific markets Fixed within hierarchical organisational structures

The use of available Be maximised resources should…

Financial terms Economy is defined in…

Artist Placement Group Accumulated experience By ‘units of attention’ 21 and the general level of awareness induced To increase the quality of life and level of meaning ‘Useless’ art works - generates new insights, ideas, imagery Long- term aims The needs of society as a whole Independent beings and capable of operating at any level within organisations Be maximised Economy of expression

This work can be seen both as an account of the enormous gap between the two fields, suggesting that they could never meet; but also as an invitation to the corporate sector and an attempt to meet them on their grounds by speaking their language. The nearly total lack of common ground provides a weighty argument for exploring any possibility of working together as the potentiality of mutual learning and benefit is huge on both sides.

I do not believe that any business person, today or in the 70’s, would fully agree with Latham, nor would all artists; but one should not forget the somewhat polemic nature of the piece. A lot has happened since 1974: Today ‘soft’ expressions – such as ethics (caring about a company’s social and environmental context); sustainability (adopting longer sighted solutions) – are part of many business people’s vocabulary, although it could be maintained that the business world in general still has a lot to learn on these matters.

Also, there is a greater appreciation of value as something other than just cash; flat and open structures are often preferred to hierarchical and fixed ones and there is a greater focus on an employee as an individual rather than just a piece in a machinery.

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Latham’s expression for an artwork, which he sees as something that attracts attention.

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However, I believe the contrasts outlined in Latham’s work are able to identify many of the potential conflicts that can arise in joint ventures between art and organisation, then as today. This will also be evident in chapter 3 about Industries of Vision.

The Incidental Person So, in what exactly, lay this potential for mutual learning – and how was it at all possible for artists to enter the realm of organisational life without making ‘devastating’ compromises? In 1966 APG issued a report on possible benefits for artists who worked with organisations. They were: Access to materials, machines and new technologies and in some cases even patronage from the host organisation (Walker 1995:98). At this early point, the art object was still of main concern to APG. This was soon changed as their ambitions grew when realising what possibilities the concept of placement really possessed.

In 1972, due to some brilliant lobbying from Barbara Steveni, who took care of the contract work with host organisations, APG managed to have a Civil Service Memorandum issued: “Their intention is not that of the traditional relationship of patronage. Rather, they seek to have an artist in the day- to- day work of an organisation. The latter may be expected to benefit in a variety of ways. These may vary from contributions to the creation of some concrete objects to new ideas about work methods. Generally, APG’s aim is an attempt to bridge the gap between artists and people at work so that each may gain from the other’s perspective and approaches to an activity” (cited from Walker 1995:98).

This memorandum was of crucial importance to APG and their placements in the government as it was circulated to departments as a recommendation. The artist was seen as simply a kind of person with certain abilities, such as creativity, formation and insight, and someone who could contribute with longer- term perspectives. The memorandum was also groundbreaking in establishing the artist as a professional outside the art world. This was of vital importance, not least to Latham who wanted to make a distinction between the traditional role of the artists and this new one, as this could help settle with laymen’s false appreciation of the contemporary artist (as a wild genius or starry- eyed dreamer that would be either dangerous or useless in an organisational environment).

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Thus Latham coined the alternative terms ‘Conceptual Engineer’ and notably ‘Incidental Person’. By ‘incidental’ the unbiased and independent nature of the artist is stressed. S/he was from the beginning of a placement more or less unfamiliar with the organisational environment and thus able to respond to this from an unbiased and more objective perspective. The artist’s ambition to ‘meet the needs of society as a whole’ should ideally make him or her able to withstand contrasting organisational policies or agendas that might compromise his or her work. However, there are always compromises when working in collaboration and perhaps even more so when the working partners have totally different backgrounds. To get artistic ideas realised and also avoid being pushed aside, the artistic proposal had to encompass realistic ideas for implementation. Still, the artist was not guaranteed that the organisation would accommodate even the best of ideas, as will be evident shortly, when I account for Latham’s placement at the Scottish Office.

I believe this is a general problem within the practice of Organisational Art. One could ask why it is not stated in the contract that management must implement whatever the artist comes up with (within reason naturally). APG even stated in their contracts that they would not subvert organisation, but as any art project is ultimately an experiment, no reasonable company would agree beforehand to financially endorse the outcome without stating a clear limit. But how to lay out a budget for the outcome of an experiment that has no clear boundaries?

One thing that is hard not to admire by APG is the persistency and durability of their schemes. In a paper from 1980 – fourteen years after the group’s origin – Latham and Steveni summed up APG’s placement framework in six guidelines for an “effective form of association of artists with organisational structures” (Latham & Steveni 1980:1): 1. “The context is half the work.”

2. “The function of medium in art is determined not so much by that factual object, as by the process and the levels of attention to which the work aims.”

3. “That the proper contribution of art to society is art.”

4. “That the status of artists within organisations must necessarily be in line with other professional persons, engaged within the organisation.”

5. “That the status of the artist within organisations is independent, bound by invitation rather than by instructions from authority within the organisations, department, company, to those of the long- term objectives of the whole of society.”

6. “That, for optimum results, the position of the artist within an organisation (in the initial stages at least) should facilitate a form of cross- referencing between departments.”

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Especially the first guideline has proven to be one of the most durable principles of APG and many artists since. It can be viewed as an extension of the invitation, I mentioned earlier: The artists do not just want to be invited into the organisation; they also invite the company into the art – resulting in an equal platform for collaboration. To create such a platform, APG normally went by following steps when setting up a placement: - First, the artist and organisation met for at short initial period with no predictable outcome on either side, called ‘The Open Brief’ (cf. guideline 5).

- Then the artist did at least a month of research within the organisation (‘The Feasibility Study’) to identify possible areas to work on (cf. guideline 6). Arguably an incidental person was in a position to achieve a synthesis across departments, disciplines and hierarchical levels that any middle- manager, specialist or civil servant would find hard to match. This obviously reflected Latham’s cosmology in a microcosmic setting but on a concrete level it was very important that both the professional and incidental status of the artist was supported by respectively top- management or government. Otherwise the artist’s proposal would be more or less impossible to realise (cf. Walker 1995:134) 22 .

- Finally, if the artist and organisation agreed on those areas, they signed a contract ideally of one year’s duration or more. The artist was paid as a member of staff and was accordingly involved in the day to day work at all relevant levels, including decisionmaking. This would entail thorough commitment on both sides, and also accredit the artist profession as equal to those of any regular type of employee (cf. guideline 4).

The length of the placement was important to APG, as a longer time- base would make it more likely that in- depth collaboration and mutual learning would take place.

As stated in the second guideline, the artistic work in the placements had high focus on the process and the context and not so much on the art object. This was not unlike Conceptual Art, which flourished from the 60’s and on, and its notion of the ‘dematerialised art object’ (see also chapter 4). The organisational practice was made subject to artistic inquiry and thus subject matter in the art itself. When reading the somewhat dialectical guideline 3, it becomes clear in what way the placements are different from many of the interaction models of today’s Arts- and- Business.

22

Walker continues: “Artists may be able to gain entry to powerful institutions but this does not mean that they immediately gain access to power itself. However, in the long- term they may be able to influence policy making and how public money is spent” (Walker 1995:134).

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Learning from APG it becomes clear how powerful an artist position can be, when it is released from its obligation to make art for arts sake only and doing so by making objects only. Today this may seem less controversial but it is still far from a matter of course. In the following two examples, I will illustrate how Latham was able to work both in and out of the art institution and utilise the art trajectory as a catalyst in new experiments.

Big Breather and Scottish Office Placement

Big Breather, John Latham, second version, installed at Imperial College, London, 1973 (photo: courtesy of the artist/O+I).

In the 70’s Latham was preoccupied with works about environmental issues and ecology.

His work from 1973, Big Breather, is one example (an earlier version was made in 1972).

The work is designed to demonstrate the moon’s gravitational pull on earth – or as Latham put it: “the breathing of the earth/moon” (Walker 1995:126). The installation was basically an enormous pair of bellows that was placed in an upright position and mounted on a float on top of a slim wooden column containing water that represented

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one square foot of the sea’s surface. The water would move up and down as a result of the gravitational pull and thereby inflate/deflate the bellows twice a day.

The installation (up to ten m. high when fully inflated) would emit a low sound similar to a sigh, suggesting an organism breathing. That organism could be interpreted in several ways (is it Mother Earth or Pan?), as could the sigh (is it pleased or is it dying?). The organic features contrasted the installation’s mechanical appearance and its robot- like persistence – which further thematized pollution and unconscious exploitation of nature.

However, given the physical size of the installation, the viewer would probably turn the question upside- down: Does the machine have a heart?

The first version of Big Breather was developed with the help of a designer and made of Perspex, but collapsed under the weight. The second revised version was made with the help of the Managing Director of a Chester firm and erected on the campus of Imperial College, London (which housed the Science Department of London University and was just across the road from The Gallery). So both the development was significant because of its interdisciplinary makeup, as were the site and context of the second version: Scientists and students were invited to reflect upon questions of nature’s resources and humanity’s use of them.

Big Breather was also a working model of a much larger sea- sited structure, which could harvest and transform the natural power of the tide. In 1975- 76, Latham undertook a five months placement at the Scottish Office’s planning department in Edinburgh. Here it was agreed that he should give an artists’ perspective on issues of derelict land and also work with their Graphics Department – which in their view was the closest thing to art in the organisation.

After at least a century of coal and oil mining, big heaps of waste and shale, called ‘bings’, were piled up in the districts of West Lothian near Edinburgh. Their scope was enormous, actually some of the largest manmade formations on earth. Removing them would be both problematic and costly.

Latham entered the department as an Incidental Person and was able to move around freely, do his research and make connections to other organisations with interest in the heaps. He chose five sites to document. He was impressed by their magnitude and also their shape, which he considered ‘accidental’ as they were not designed to be structures of any particular shape. To Latham, this shape was “unconscious” (Walker 1995:131) and reminded him of automatism where formative concerns are absent in the act of creating.

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He thus submitted a report in which he argued that the heaps should be preserved as a monument, “honouring a century of anonymous work” (ibid.) since the workers now were gone and forgotten.

(1) Niddrie Woman, John Latham, Scottish Office Placement, aerial view of man- made spoil tips of shale from the early oil industry, West Lothian, 1975 (courtesy of the artist/O+I). (1) Venus of Willendorf, c.

24,000- 22,000 BC, limestone.

During his research, Latham had come across aerial photos of two sites that revealed an interesting formation seen from above. He discovered the shape of a female torso and a torn out heart next to her. Recalling Duchamp’s readymade, Latham suggested redesignating the two sites ‘works of art’. As such they would be protected from both damage and possible unsuitable commercial exploitation in the future. He named the sites Niddrie Woman 23 and mentioned a similarity with the carving of Venus of Willendorf, “a comparable re- appearance” he thought (ibid.).

The Venus was found by an archaeologist in the soil (actually ‘loess’, a sort of clay) in 1908 and by some believed to be a representation of ‘Earth Mother’ from the Greek mythology. By “comparable” Latham refers to both to the physical likeness and the symbolic similarities: Niddrie Woman emerged in the process of mining the resources hidden in the ground and it seems only likely that it should be an image of the Earth Mother that emerged from that process.

23

Niddrie is a large area on the east side of Edinburgh.

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What in the public view was considered a disfiguration of the landscape, Latham thought could be transformed into attractions comparable to the Egyptian pyramids, and he proposed that huge sculptures should be erected on the heap tops to further the idea and make them more inviting. Sculpture parks were successful attractions in other countries. He even made an elaborated design and model of such a monument, which was to be build onsite from recycled material, some twenty m. high with a platform on top. Like beacons they would be placed on the summits, not farther from each other than the people standing on top could see the adjacent monument. In practical terms, Latham’s suggestion was “eminently sensible, practical and, compared to the cost of removing the heaps, economical” (ibid.:132) as Walker states it. Latham even supplied an overall financial estimate to prove this.

However, the work was never realised, although Latham tried for years to make it happen 24 . In a recent report on what is labelled ‘industrial heritage’, ‘The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions’ states that “A special opportunity has arisen with West Lothian’s unique legacy of 36 oil shale ‘bings’.

Although many of these have been reworked […] two of the bings survive intact. In recognition of their industrial heritage value, and their distinctive contribution to the urban landscape, these have now been protected as scheduled ancient monuments.” 25

So at least in part the work’s idea was eventually realised, although not with Latham (but, who knows, maybe with indirect inspiration from him). One can always discuss how important the physical side of a work as conceptual as this is. Without any visible transformation however, such as building the beacon monuments, the public would probably have a hard time buying into the idea – and with them also the responsible department.

The second part of The Scottish Office placement was about urban renewal in the Glasgow area that had endured industrial decline and urban decay on a large scale.

Latham’s solution was again aided by aerial photographs of the site. He proposed a package of initiatives for cultivating the nearby sea region by linking four major industries: fish rearing, marine technology, steel manufacturing and electricity generation. Part of the idea was to farm fish on platforms warmed with water from a 24

Two possible reasons: According to Walker, it is difficult to gain support for large monuments in Britain.

Furthermore, in his research Latham found out that landowners who profit from the sale of the shale are a cartel. They would surely not be interested in preservation (Walker, 1995:132- 134). According to Steveni, Latham was successful in having another site, Five Sisters, declared “National Heritage” (Steveni 2003).

25 www.symonds- group.com/services/environ_eng/publications/casestudies%5Ccasestudy3.pdf, p. 4.

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nearby nuclear power station (Steveni 2003). This ambitious idea could surely only have come from an Incidental Person. Latham tried to deploy the tidal energy principle from Big Breather but soon realised that the cost efficiency was weak and he discarded the idea. He also devised a plan to use an existing TV- network to increase visual communication and involve local people and artists. None of the ideas were implemented.

The placement at Scottish Office is a clear example of what happens when a department asks an artist for advice, and then choose not to back it up. It may be that Latham’s ideas were considered too radical at the time and one does not have to know much about governmental bureaucracy to know that there is a long way from even a good idea to a decisive action, no matter how much goodwill is present.

One direct outcome was an exhibition at the Tate Gallery (1976), documenting his placement and proposals. It could seem that Latham had more success in the art gallery, which was part of the traditional art circulation system that he and APG tried to go beyond. But just like anyone else, they were forced to work from spaces where possibilities presented themselves and this was most often art places, a museum or gallery.

Though, in 1970- 71, APG had convincingly challenged the notion of the gallery in a two year long ‘exhibition in time’, called ‘INNO 70: Art and Economics’ that should document realised placements. The exhibition culminated at a public show at the large Hayward Gallery, which turned out somewhat unconventional as the artists had decided to live at the gallery as a ‘sculpture’. ‘Installations’ of board rooms were devised, where business people, government representatives and artists would debate questions of ethical and economic value and the new role of artists in society. The discussions were videoed and relayed to monitors placed around the large gallery.

The show received quite a lot of media interest and led to mixed reactions in the public.

The idea of literally ‘populating’ the art gallery with people and everyday artefacts was in line with APG’s principles but it also provoked the conventional art institution and its supporters. Immediately after the Hayward show, the seeding funding, which APG until then had received from the Arts Council, was withdrawn. It was then they decided to focus on government departments for future placements as they believed it would be more natural there to work with longer- term perspectives and get more influence.

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The Scottish Office placement was one of many placements where several were more successfully implemented than Latham’s 26 . The reason why I chose this placement is that it shows how it is possible for artists to be both pragmatic and artistic at the same time and that the two does not have to be opposites. A good example is when Latham abandons his Big Breather concept because it is not efficient enough in terms of generating economic value, even though a possible scenario of, say, 50 gigantic ‘breathers’ along the shore might have been priceless in terms of artistic value. Another is his preoccupation with making Niddrie Woman economically sound, where he at the same time uses the history of art as a foundation for his work (automatism, the readymade and the Venus). If a geologist was to make the same claims as Latham, he would have an even harder time being successful, as his suggestion would not add artistic value to the preservation of the heaps.

The placement also shows how powerful the detached position of the Incidental Person can be – at multiple levels. The ability to apply a distanced vantage point on matters proved to be important both when working across departments but also when adopting a bird’s eye perspective on things, via the aerial shots. If the huge beacons had become a reality, one would be able, physically, to experience a similar position of being presentand- distanced at the same time: As the beacons would be identical, one could see people on the adjacent tower’s platform and get the sensation of ‘seeing oneself from outside’.

Through time APG has endured massive criticism on their position. Non- artists have accused them for hypocrisy when claiming to be apolitical: How can they not have a political standpoint when their aim is to advance society? Artists have accused them of selling out their professional autonomy: If they promise not to damage an organisation, how can they act freely or even criticise?

Arguably questions of this nature will always be raised when someone is trying to create new positions that transcends framework within existing systems. The system will only be able to recognise what it knows and act accordingly. What the system does not recognise it will naturally try to suppress. This does not necessarily make the above questions irrelevant, but it bears witness to the massive resistance APG was up against when engaging in domains that are considered political.

In regard to compromise and restrictions to the artistic position, it must be kept in mind that any context poses complications and restrictions – the idea that an artist in his 26

Steveni 2003 provides a helpful insight in her account of several placements.

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studio or a writer in his attic are beyond mundane influence is a well- maintained illusion.

Of course it is also an important question of degrees of freedom but it must be remembered that many art works are produced under heavy restrictions, political, financial, social or self- chosen. APG’s position is not without compromise but if the “price of maintaining absolute ideological purity and artistic integrity is social isolation and powerlessness” (Walker 1995:101) as Walker puts it, it is a price worth paying as long as it is outdone by the mutual learning for both organisation and artist.

As APG states, they are not an employment agency (Steveni & Latham 1980:2), which means they do no want to trade the artistic potential to something other than art, even though they make a great effort to transform the artist role into something more ‘edible’ to society (although apparently not always edible enough). But that transformation is itself motivated first and foremost by artistic arguments that have holistic and societal concerns embedded in them as a second nature (and ultimately financial as well; artists too have to eat). The history and tradition of art is echoed in Latham and APG’s work and serves both as a foundation and as a platform for a takeoff towards new horizons.

Walker puts it like this: “The schemes generated [by Latham] may seem a far cry from conventional notions of fine art but the history of modernism has repeatedly shown that art is not a fixed, ahistorical concept but, on the contrary, it is subject to change and redefinition” (Walker 1995:134).

In 1989, APG changed their name to ‘O+I’ (‘Organisation and Imagination’ or ‘nought plus one’) because they thought the concept of placement had been appropriated and diluted beyond recognition by competing arts agencies. Today they keep working according to their original beliefs with Barbara Steveni (as Executive Director) and an aging Latham, artists Gemma Nesbitt and Sarah Wedderburn as directors. Change and redefinition takes time and one can only admire the persistence of these artists and the durability of their ideas. Today it is almost four decades since APG was founded and it seems that their framework is echoed in many OA projects. Whether this is due to direct influence or not, one can only speculate; however, I do not believe they would be content with having changed artistic practice only.

We will now fast- forward into recent time, to the art scene of the late nineties and Industries of Vision.

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3 3_INDUSTRIES OF VISION

BY DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION

“The most peculiar thing about work life, as I see it, is that as soon as you put on your working clothes, you say goodbye to your democratic rights.”

Kent Hansen (Andersen & Hansen 2001:109*)

Welcome to the art scene of the late nineties. Almost anything seemed possible back in the sixties and the same certainly applies for the last decade of the millennium. One of the first to stick his neck out and try to describe the nineties’ art was French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud. His books Relational Aesthetics (1998) and Postproduction (2000) were adopted with light speed by anyone trying to understand so- called ‘socially engaged’ art.

He uses the (flea) market as the dominant metaphor to describe art in the nineties, as it represents a collective form composed of “multiple individual signs”; it is the “locus of a reorganization of past production”; and, finally, “it embodies and makes material the flows and relationships” (Bourriaud 2000:22).

Bourriaud contends that economic globalisation has spiralled our existence into abstraction and turned everyday functions of life into products of consumption. The role of art, he argues, is to re- materialise and thereby restore these processes, not simply as objects but as “mediums of experience” (ibid.) to be lived. Thus, art is a matter of interhuman exchange: “a formal arrangement that generates relationships between people, or be born of a social process” (ibid.:26). This is the essence of art as Relational Aesthetics.

As in the sixties and with APG there is an immense focus on process rather than object.

According to Miwon Kwon, the contemporary artist role has undergone a drastic change from a producer of aesthetic objects to a cultural- aesthetic service provider, whose real ‘commodity’ is his/hers performance as a facilitator, educator, coordinator or even bureaucrat (Kwon 2002:51).

This view is supported in the prophetic article ‘Art Futures’ by Anthony Davies and Simon Ford in Art Monthly (1999). They describe the art world of the late nineties like this:

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“While many artists, cultural commentators and public institutions were 'blurring boundaries', promoting 'the everyday' and 'accessing broader audiences', the business community was busy assessing the economic potential of cross sector activities and partnerships. It was the convergence of these sectors (principally business and culture) that changed the role of public institutions, the education system, and other institutions associated with art” (Davies & Ford 1999).

This is roughly the climate of the nineties’ international art world, in the sometimes overexcited words of a few informed writers. I will return to Bourriaud and Kwon in chapter 4. We now turn to a more modest and less obvious place for art creation, namely two medium- sized manufacturing companies in Denmark.

Industries of Vision, Kent Hansen (design and photo), people and partners of IOV, proposal for the front page to the catalogue of IOV, 2001.

People and Partners Industries of Vision (IOV) (Da.: ‘Visionsindustri’) was a Danish art project by the artist organisation ‘democratic innovation’ (di) and was carried out during 1998- 2001. It included several partners, notably Danish artist groups Superflex and N55, staff in the two manufacturing companies LK and Basta in West Zealand, Denmark. It was the first of its kind in Denmark and its overall goal was to explore the potentials of the interplay between art and organisation in a Danish context. I have chosen this case because it

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without question is one of the most interesting Danish OA projects and also the best documented cases I have come across so far.

My case study is especially based on a sixteen page ‘evaluation’ memorandum 27 issued by di and two workplace consultant agencies that were involved in the project. The findings of the project were exhibited 29 Sept.–25 Nov. 2001 at the regional art museum, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum, where a catalogue was issued for the exhibit (Andersen & Hansen 2001), which also is very helpful. Further documentation is media mentions, di’s website 28 , two private interviews with Kent Hansen and a comprehensive article he wrote on his practice in relation to IOV (Hansen 2004).

Since the documentation is quite substantial, I will have to leave some of it out.

Nevertheless, I will try to provide sufficient data for the reader to make his or her own judgements, especially since the most of the available material at present only is available in Danish. I will try to keep an equal focus on both organisational and artistic matters; since this project is both recent and well- documented, it represents a unique chance to apply both perspectives.

My approach will start with a relatively unbiased reading of the relevant data and gradually engage in a more fathoming interpretation with inclusion of relevant theory to throw findings into relief.

This will entail a thorough introduction to the people and phases of IOV (pp. 35- 44), followed by a section about the processes of exchange (3.2), a section about the artistic practice at play (3.3) and a concluding section about organisational culture and learning (3.4).

As IOV was done in a collaborative setting, addressing authorship is problematic because ultimately every single participant has a share in the project. However, I have chosen to focus on Kent Hansen as he was the initiator and present in every single phase of the project, from beginning to end, and as such the central mind behind its framework and concept. I will also have to favour the part of IOV that took part in LK as it went the furthest.

Let us now look at the different people and partners in the project:

27

‘Visionsindustri – notat om resultaterne af en kunstnerisk udviklingsproces på to virksomheder’ (Eng.: ‘Industries of Vision – Note on the results of an artistic development process in two companies’, di et al 2001).

28 www.democratic- innovation.org.

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KENT HANSEN (b. 1962) is educated as a visual artist in The Funen Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Copenhagen in the early 90’s. His initial position as somewhat an ‘outsider’ gave him an impression of the Copenhagen art scene as a loosely connected organisation, which he begun to comment on artistically. This work, combined with a thought from his youth that democratic rights to a degree are suspended when someone enters a company, led him to work directly with organisations.

SUPERFLEX (established c. 1993) is an artist group based in Copenhagen, which includes members Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. Superflex is registered as a shareholding company and is engaged in interdisciplinary projects mostly with partners from outside the art world, such as researchers or economists. Each project is called a ‘tool’ and can be both abstract, like a virtual city, or concrete, as an internet TVstation or a biogas production unit. Several of their projects carry on within selfsustainable organisations, finding their own partners and audiences. The tool- metaphor could imply the idea of something that needs adjusting and many of Superflex’s projects focus on social and economic inequalities in local contexts around the world. Unlike di, they have a quite distinct public profile as they normally use the prefix ‘Super’ when naming a project and always make use of the three ‘Supercolors’: orange, black and white 29 .

N55 (established c. 1994) is a Copenhagen- based non- commercial artist commune with members Rikke Luther, Ion Sørvin, Cecilia Wendt and Ingvil Hareide Aarbakke who work and live together. They share economy, professionally as well as privately, and are financed primarily by exhibitions, grants and educational work. N55 produce a variety of concepts and so- called ‘things’ – ranging from dynamic tables and chairs to movable houses and small factories and machines – mostly built from a few recognisable modular components. The N55 products are implemented in local everyday situations around the world in collaboration with different persons and institutions. N55 contend that society consists of power concentrations that affect and restrict individual rights. With their methods and products, N55 tries to find ways of living with as small and as visible power concentrations as possible 30 .

29

Superflex’s official website is at www.superflex.dk.

N55’s official website is at www.n55.dk. Another artist, Joachim Hamou, took part in IOV and made a documentary about it. I have not been able to treat his work in my investigation but it is available from Kent Hansen.

30

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LAURITZ KNUDSEN Ltd. (LK) (established in 1893) is a Danish “development- oriented company, who provides material and knowledge to all electrical- based installations in housing, office, commercial and public buildings both nationally and internationally.” 31 At the time when IOV was carried out, they were located in Ringsted (65 km. SW of Copenhagen), employed 650 people and were part of the international Lexel group. They had recently merged two departments and were restructured in 13 production groups, which had caused complaints from the employees, who didn’t feel that management were communicating sufficiently enough (despite several attempts to do so, mainly through forms of written information). Thus, LK was eager to try out alternative ways of communicating with their employees.

BASTA Ltd. was traditionally a Danish bicycle lock and - lamps manufacturer. In 2000 they merged with Dutch Axa Stenman and they now deliver bicycle accessories worldwide. In the merger process, much of the original culture of the Danish production factory disappeared and with IOV they were hoping to recreate a teamwork culture where it also would be fun to go to work (Andersen & Hansen 2001:101). At the time of IOV, Basta was situated in Korsør (110 km. WSW of Copenhagen) and employed some 60- 65 people. In this period it was decided to shut down all production in Denmark and dismiss most of the employees.

Phases IOV included three major phases of varying form and intensity 32 : Phase 1_Initiation and Design (1998- 2000) For IOV, the first turf was cut in late 1998 when Kent Hansen and project coordinator Gitte Holm from Institute of Technology (one of two workplace consultant agencies that was involved in IOV) were brought together as a result of an offshoot from a previous project to diminish monotonous repetitive work in factories (‘The EGA- project’ 33 ). The idea of IOV came about as a mutual interest in exploring the possibilities of how to integrate artistic practice and company organisation – with a mutual benefit that extended beyond mere payment for the artist and ‘entertainment’ for the company. The final project design 31

Quoted from the LK website www.lk.dk.

The tree- phase division is done by me and serves to provide an overview.

33 EGA stands for ‘Ensidigt Gentaget Arbejde’ (Danish), which simply means ‘monotonous repetitive work’.

32

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emerged in an open dialogue process, where BST- Sorø (the other consultant agency) handled company contact and di the artist contact. From the first step on, an informal and open dialogue took place, involving partners and potential participants, about the project design in particular and the interplay between art and business in general.

Then followed a series of meetings where the partners got to know each other and they made a lot of efforts trying to concretise expectations of possible outcomes: Was this to be an art project, an organisational development project, a competence development project etc., and how were ownership and partner roles to be defined?

As it turned out, it was mostly the companies (and thus the involved consultants) that wanted a semi- fixed project description, as it would give them an idea of the overall goal, the various phases and how and when to expect results. The final project design that emerged was, contrasting the odd partner constellation, quite traditional with emphasis on the process and the unidentified potential rooted herein 34 . The project management was shared between Kent Hansen and Gitte Holm and additionally a steering committee was appointed, counting representatives from the companies and the museum together with representatives from trade unions and the county who had an interest in the concept of the project and its regional rooting. They were also part of an attempt to give IOV a regional resonance and perhaps stir up some debate.

According to the memorandum about IOV, there were three overall aims (di et al 2001:34): (1) Establish a ‘communication space’ in LK and Basta, which would free up resources and development potential; (2) create a grounding to help the companies diminish monotonous repetitive work further; and (3) gather knowledge that can serve as foundation for a model of the interplay between labour, art and culture.

However, it must be emphasised that the active project work in the companies began with a ‘tabula rasa’. Essentially the way of framing the project with the three overall goals was adopted in the process of fundraising and approaching companies.

According to Kent Hansen, this design was deliberately abandoned for an open and emergent approach where the participants set the agenda together with the artists (stated in a private interview 2.11.2004). As such there was no agenda for the ‘art

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In the memorandum about IOV (di et al 2001:13) it is stated that Superflex and N55 found the predefined project schedule too rigid and that they would have liked to involve top management and stakeholders instead of just employees. Employees on their side generally found both the preparation phase and the creational phase (in the active project phase) too long and ‘unproductive’. Part of these circumstances is due to mere practicalities. The superior reason, however, has to do with artist’s needs for some flexibility and companies need for some control, read further in 3.2.

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making’ and the employees were never presented with the specific aims above. They were only briefed in general terms and the project was not presented as a problemsolving initiative as such, although there naturally were expectations from the managements that it would have a positive effect.

As the memorandum, which is one of the most valuable sources of information about the process, sticks to these three goals, I will have to partly include this structure, even though it was not articulated directly in the process. This may sound confusing, but it bears strong evidence of how different language games are at play in one setting where unlike cultures actually meet and collaborate. This will be treated more comprehensively in 3.3.

Phase 2_Active Project Work (Oct. 2000 - May 2001) Conclusively it was decided to pair Superflex with LK and N55 with Basta. Kent Hansen took part in both pairings, practically as well as artistically.

SUPERFLEX AND LK: LK had recently undergone a restructuring, resulting in 13 selfgoverning production groups and a steering committee. Now, with IOV, they were hoping to get inspiration on how to strengthen the flow of communication and experience across group thresholds. From LK the steering committee, a volunteer representative from each production group and a personnel manager took part in IOV. Administrative personnel and top management did not take part in the active project work but were naturally kept posted.

As a preparation a few meetings were held. Here, various expectations were harmonised, a group of employees learned to operate video equipment and the project was renamed Superkontakt (Eng.: ‘Super- contact’ and/or ‘Super- switch’, a name which plays on both social interaction and the LK product).

Prior to the second phase, Kent Hansen had made a budget for how much time the participants would spend, and this budget was approved. However, the remaining workers would have to ‘cover’ for their colleague’s absence on the shop floor. This meant that they felt they had to justify their participation to their non- participating colleagues.

This could sometimes be hard and the situation undoubtedly entailed some unforeseen

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dissonances – especially since tangible results were a long time in the making: Much talk and little visible action hardly makes it up for justification in a factory context 35 .

The active phase was lead off with a project day revolving around the question: “Why should we talk to each other at LK?” which opened a discussion on the significance of various types of talking. Later the participants were given a disposable camera each and were asked to illustrate these reflections with snapshots of conditions that strengthened or weakened communication. Afterwards they came up with ideas to make communication more efficient, ideas of which almost all were integrated in the final prototype concept in March 2001, after 4- 5 meetings with Superflex.

(1) The Wise Oak (2001) - digital collage, a proposal (courtesy of Kent Hansen). (2) The Wise Oak (20012002) – full scale mock- up, prototype for final proposal, installed at LK. The first version was placed up in the air because of space- problems and was designed to resemble a typical Danish holiday cottage. The proposal was discarded because the employees did not like it; they thought it looked like a house from a children’s program on TV (‘Bamse og Kylling’). The second version was build by artists and employees for the museum exhibit and afterwards installed for a few months in the factory space as documentation of the preceding process (courtesy of Kent Hansen).

This prototype concept was The Wise Oak that was designed to meet the values and needs of the participants. The house was supposed to be a communication- , archive- and experience- ‘house’. The name suggests a space, where there is time and room for reflection (unlike the hectic shop floor) as under a big oak tree. Placed on a platform somewhere central in the company, it would contain a PC for broadcasting in- house radio, meeting room, storage of materials, anonymous idea- bank and more. The room was to be soundproof in order to keep the factory noise out, which in turn also would keep the conversations inside confidential. On the outside would be placed a ‘spirit35

The artists have admitted to this weakness, cf. private interview with Kent Hansen 2.11.2004 and di et al 2001:9. A solution would be to design the meetings around a more tangible formation process with visible output.

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barometer’ (showing the mood of a group), info displays, shared notice boards and a flagpole for ‘hoist a flag’ (for calling in meetings). The radio broadcast was to be transmitted through the company’s internal PC- network and could be received around the factory. This idea was nearby as Superflex previously had launched an internet TVstation 36 . A part time technician would take care of the more technical side of things.

Furthermore it was suggested that a number of headsets were provided so colleagues could talk to each other across distance in the vast production halls. This would also increase the feeling of security amongst the night shift, as they often worked alone and far apart.

As a whole, The Wise Oak was designed to convey and express anything in the organisational environment, which was hard to present on the existing intranet and written forms of communication.

The Wise Oak was presented to the executive management for them to decide the level of implementation and integration. Although they found the concept interesting and with great potential regarding communication, culture and teamwork, they chose not to implement it in the present form and wanted to consult their HRM- group on how to proceed. It was settled that employees and artists should make a mock- up of the concept to present at the upcoming museum exhibit. After the museum, the mock- up was installed at the factory along with video and documentation of its making. Here it also served as a (retrospective) legitimisation of the ‘absent’ workers achievement. After this “the developed ideas and concepts were shelved” (Hansen 2004:10). Thus, The Wise Oak was never fully realised as intended. This will be discussed further in 3.3.

N55 AND BASTA: The Danish branch of Basta had at the time of IOV undergone several restructurings under which the original team spirit had suffered. With IOV they expected to improve internal communication and cooperation amongst staff members. All members of the company partook in one way or another, including the Managing Director and administrative personnel.

Like in Superkontakt, there was a period with initial meetings, introductions and a video course for employees. A special room in the company was selected where N55 established a communication room using their modular concept system called ‘Public things’. It has a very distinct design and expression and can be utilised in various ways according to context and purpose. In this case, the room featured a public notice board, 36

www.superchannel.org.

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PC with Internet connection, stereo for listening to music, a mattress for resting and more.

Project- room for Industries of Vision, N55, Basta factory, Korsør, 2000 (photo: Kent Hansen).

A project day kicked off the actual creational phase where the entire production was shut down. This came almost as a shock to some and led to a general atmosphere of resentment since it had nothing to do with what people normally did. In general this illwill disappeared during the day, probably because it featured workshops on tasks the participants had come up with themselves. One persistent adversary was ‘Frank’, who complained out loud – until he was given a video camera. As it turned out, he was an amateur photographer. This was characteristic for the Basta- project where employees worked with their private hobbies: developing a webpage; cooking/eating for everyone; developing a bicycle that thirty people could ride at once; and, finally, laying out a garden.

All groups continued working on their tasks and met about four times after, but were then dissolved as a result of the company’s decision to shut down production in Denmark and dismiss the majority of the employees. Even so there are signs of positive results from the project: The communication room was immediately accepted and used daily by a large number of employees. Also, the groups had produced sketches, descriptions and a CD- ROM that documented their work.

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According to Kent Hansen, the Basta- part of the project showed perhaps even greater potential than in LK (interview 2.11.2004), in particular because work and leisure were integrated as much as it was.

Phase 3_Museum exhibition (28 September - 25 November 2001.)

One may ask why the exhibition was located at an art museum. Why not a village hall or a labour union? Since the project went under the title ‘art project’ and since part of its intention was to stir a debate in the region, the art museum was an obvious choice as it also has special access for the media and the public.

As opposed to a traditional art museum exhibit, where artworks of varying shape and size are put on display, this exhibit had more the characteristics of documentation 37 . It featured wall sheets, a full- scale model of The Wise Oak, documents and videos. Several LK participants contributed in making the mock- up, which could be seen as a way to open up the otherwise exclusive art space to non- artists.

‘Basta Project’, Industries of Vision, N55, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum 2001 (photo: Kent Hansen).

However, the artists still had the final say as experts in the art institutional context; N55 had alone decided to organise their documentation in such a way that it appeared ‘wrapped up’; an ironic comment to the decision to shut down production and thereby their part of IOV. A decision somewhat unusual seen in the light of their efforts to keep 37

See Nielsen 2001 for an adequate first- person account on the IOV exhibition.

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power concentrations at a minimum and also somewhat belittling of the non- artist’s contributions to what ultimately was a collaborative effort 38 . Of course, the context was now a different one and perhaps N55 had used the material to demonstrate their point by a simple power demonstration.

open office for democratic innovation, democratic innovation, documentation of the process and concept for Industries of Vision and meeting room, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum 2001 (photo: Kent Hansen).

In the exhibition space di had set up an ‘open office’, complete with several documents and wall sheets that documented the multifarious aspects of IOV. A specially made conference table invited to conversations among museum guests, participants and artists to conversations on the project’s theme. As the debaters would scribble on the centrally placed whiteboard, a system would immediately project their writings on to the wall and the Internet. The table was designed with an unconventional shape that allowed no one to be placed more central than others. Outside the museum, di had placed parking lot for democratic innovation, a portable parking space which sought to open up the museum space further by extending it to the public realm.

The exhibition shared characteristics with APG’s exhibition at the Hayward gallery, which encapsulate many of the same ideas about opening up the art institution for non- artists’ contributions/participation.

38 According to Kent Hansen some of Basta’s employees were disappointed with N55’s decision to ‘go solo’ in relation to the exhibition (private interview 2.11.2004).

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3.2 PROCESS AND EXCHANGE In this section I will look closer into the processes at work in IOV. As I didn’t learn about IOV before 2003, I will have to rely on the existing documentation and sometimes semistereotypical notions of how ‘production companies are’.

As suggested in John Latham’s Offer for Sale, artist culture and the culture of companies are, if not opposites, then at least radically different. In a typical manufacturing company, time is something that is invested in what is expected to be tangible and preferably profitable results, following strict and rational routines. Planning and control are chief principles and strong and well- founded arguments are needed to set these aside. There is a strong separation between work and leisure.

The typical artist works with a, often venturous, creational process until it ends and does not follow a prescheduled workday. S/he is motivated by epistemological insight and the desire to develop his or her practice further and hence, the tangible result may become secondary – as does profit. Openness and spontaneity are chief principles and the distinction between work and leisure makes less or no sense here 39 .

In the case of fundamentally different cultures, the gap between them often provide a hotbed for speculation about what people ‘on the other side’ are like. IOV was no exception. As it turned out, preconceptions were at play amongst the employees, both about art itself and the artist role 40 . The average employee had a quite conventional understanding of art and several had difficulties realising that not all art had to be a painting or sculpture. From the outset, N55 was very articulate about their way of working and this way, they challenged the Basta- members. At LK it was a widespread opinion that the different art appreciations in their group caused confusion. An advanced view on art, however, inspired some employees to see artistic or creative potential in their own life and work (di et al 2001:13).

After meeting the artists the employee’s impression of the artists was however mainly positive: “The artists are different; they are peculiar and live in another world. They think differently. What they do has to be fun and untraditional. They are freed from agendas and meet the company in 39

These typologies are a distillation made from the memorandum (p. 9) and the general impressions that are stated directly and indirectly in the documentation of IOV. See also Meisiek 2004.

40 Probably there were similar preconceptions that went the other way but it is fair to assume that more people from the artist community have been employed in a company than vice- versa.

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an open and equal dialogue. The artists are not management’s instrument; they don’t want to do something with [or 'to'] us – except cooperate” (di et al 2001:13*).

These expectations gave the artist more leeway for doing their work; they were not considered as ‘dangerous’ accomplices of the management, rather they were seen as playful and gifted allies that with attention to the employees needs could improve the workplace somehow. Their informal ‘eye- to- eye’ approach was also highly regarded as it contrasted to the more top- down and text- based communication that a factory management is accustomed to use. This overall goodwill made the employees feel secure enough to share private thoughts and experiences, which in turn opened up for reflections about the relationship between work and leisure and why the two were separated. Especially at Basta, with N55’s ‘family’ approach (cooking, socialising and growing a garden) it was possible to change the accent of the workplace environment into something more free and easy, making employees feel more ‘at home’ 41 . The small size of the company and the obliging- ness of the Managing Director was an additional support but the same achievement would probably be less likely if standard business consultant procedures were deployed 42 .

Naturally did culture ‘clashes’ happen in IOV. Especially the differing perceptions of time led to frustrations on both sides, notably when closing time put an end to a collaborative process and the artists wanted to carry on. Amongst the employees the artists were considered ‘always’ to be late or no- shows. Even though this wasn’t more true about the artists than the employees themselves, and the artist phoned in if they were late (di et al 2001:13), it tells a lot about the power of prejudice.

The issue of different views on money also surfaced in one of the factories. Part of one participant’s normal role was to be aware of budgets and expenses, and this proved to be counterproductive to the artistic process, especially in the early stages where ideas and visions only can be too narrow. Bringing up rational cost- benefit questions here will effectively shut down any brainstorming process. The effect was furthered by the fact that the person had an advanced position in the factory. This also addresses the issue of 41

According to Edgar Schein (and Freud), this approach makes sense: “As Freud pointed out long ago, one of the models we bring to any new group situation is our own model of family, the group in which we spent most of our early life. Thus, the rules that we learned from our own parents for dealing with them and with our siblings are often our initial model for dealing with authority and peer relationships in a new group” (Schein 2004:124).

42 There are examples of smaller companies run by a strong ‘father- figure’ and who consider themselves a ‘family’ but this was not the case in Basta before IOV.

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how organisational hierarchies are short- circuited by the flatter order of (ideally) eyelevel collaboration; which will be dealt with later.

Another ‘clash’ was related to working concrete contra abstract. As already stated, the need for tangible results was important to the employees. This is reflected in the memorandum where the concrete and visible act of doing and making is favoured to the more abstract discussions (di et al 2001:10- 12). The latter was most successful when integrated with practical tasks, and here lies part of the strength of IOV – in its ability to do both. It was often when working on something tangible that more abstract discussions were ‘triggered’. Some examples: When the LK employees took pictures of their workplace it provided for a different discussion, as words were transferred into pictures. When employees at Basta started to build a website for their own use, discussions about layout, items and menus, their needs and values surfaced. Also, at Basta, growing a garden and cooking a meal was not normal parts of the factory and naturally the surprising juxtaposition of the private and professional domain provided a topic for discussions.

Finally, the bicycle is a natural link between the domains (people use a bike to- and- from work) and an obvious thing to work on, considering Basta’s product, and as such very well- chosen. That so many people could ride it at once helped further and strengthen the team- spirit, which also could have provided for some positive public exposure, as it was decided to compete in a local race.

Some of the less successful tasks included video- recording, partly because the employees didn’t feel comfortable to film colleagues at work as they felt they should help out instead. Furthermore, as mentioned, working on The Wise Oak was often considered too abstract by the LK employees. Even though they could see the point of the final concept and found it inspiring, they thought that the whole project was too ambitious. They would have preferred something more down to earth that would return tangible results earlier on in the working process.

Where artists rarely operate with success- parameters – as these naturally will influence the creative process that is sought to be kept as open as possible – they are paramount to a production company. As mentioned, the memorandum asses IOV in relation to the stated three goals (di et al 2001:14- 16) and concludes that ‘communication spaces’ successfully were established. In result as well as process, IOV created a basis for

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development and realisation of the employees’ creative and professional resources, allowing for the “informal, spontaneous and uncontrollable” (ibid.:15*) to emerge. Quite importantly, the note clearly emphasises the importance of a thorough support and implementation of the IOV suggestions. If management fails to meet the enlarged involvement of the employees – such as by giving them more responsibility and influence – the potentialities of this involvement will soon disappear and the developed artefacts will loose their meaning 43 .

Secondly, the task of diminishing monotonous repetitive work had not been addressed directly in any of the companies, which once again goes to exemplify that the artist did not work according to these goals. However, a job rotation programme, that before IOV had been met with strong resistance, was deployed at Basta, possibly as a consequence of IOV (ibid.:15).

Finally, in relation to IOV’s potential as a model for future interplay between work, art and culture, the memorandum sums up a very precise recipe for collaboration. Among the more important issues are respecting the nature of the unlike partners, that is, the company’s need for a certain level of control and planning – and at the same time the artist’s need for transcending framework and “working in the moment” (ibid.:16). The memorandum notes the inherent paradox, that this fundamental difference, which often causes intense frustrations to arise, at the same time forms the basis of the creativity and innovation that the companies ask for – and thus a condition for a successful collaboration between art and organisation. It also states the importance of all partners being directly involved in laying out the project design. Finally it notes, perhaps not surprisingly, that the artist’s main strength lies in designing concepts and tools to meet formulated needs; a different case was the implementation and anchoring of these, which they only gave little consideration 44 .

Conclusively, there is evidence of transferral from one cultural domain to another.

Generally speaking, the employees of mainly LK gained a higher awareness of the similarities between their work and art. They learned that something is created every day and consequently creativity is important – even though they don’t make art. They also learned that sometimes it simply takes time to reach to the ideal solution and one 43

At this point the authors didn’t know if LK was going to implement The Wise Oak. Unfortunately one can only assume that their last prediction was correct.

44 According to Kent Hansen this was probably due to the fact that “the artists were unacquainted with the strategies and methods of business economics and unfamiliar with the specific organizational reality” (Hansen 2004:11).

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shouldn’t give up because of lacking immediate progress. Finally, they learned to pay more attention to the present moment and immediate needs (ibid.:10).

Even though we will never know the long- term durability of these insights, it is important to know how exactly they were achieved. In the following I will look into the theoretical background underlying Kent Hansen’s practice.

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3.3 THE SCOPE OF ART “The art institution gets the political function of representing all matters which actually can not have representational significance within the political system of democracy, and possibly never will have. In business organisations the multiplicity of life- forms are present also. Business organisations too have to cope with the social realities of the organizational members and thereby as well an extending degree of socialization and individualization processes in which the members (re)define their roles” (Hansen 2004:4) 45 .

In this section I will focus on the theoretical framework behind Kent Hansen’s art practice.

Like Latham, he has chosen a path where theory and practice goes together and correspondence between the two is paramount. This is evident in his academic- style article ‘Cross- entry to transaction – A theoretical outline of practical experience in relation to art in a business context’ (Hansen 2004) 46 .

In the above citation, Kent Hansen makes an intriguing comparison between the art institution and organisations. While democratic developments in Western society put emphasis on the full potential of human nature this awareness was not immediately reflected in the way work was organised, leading to a strong division between work and leisure. Along the way, more holistic views on workforce have been adopted in organisational practice, but the heritage from industrial thought is still echoed in especially factories, where the integration between labour and leisure is extremely low (as was also the case in LK and Basta).

When an organisational system does not allow the presence of a particular (sub- ) culture, natural conflicts arise. Recent examples could be when an organisation introduces restrictive no- smoking policies that forces smokers to stand outside on the street or when Western companies have no space or tolerance for Muslim practice, such as wearing a scarf, praying or fasting. More subtle conflicts exist in any workplace every time an employee feels that his individual dispositions conflict with the dominant culture.

Can artists help improve the workplace for individuals and create spaces within the organisational structure that allow for cultural plurality, individuality and creativity? As we have seen with IOV, the interdisciplinary makeup of collaborative art practice seems to make it possible to transfer value, which to some extent opens the minds of 45

For the matter of political representation, Kent Hansen draws on an article by Russian/German art historian Boris Groys: ‘Kunsten i demokratiets tid’ (Eng.: ‘Art in the Time of Democracy’) (Groys, 1994).

46 The article exists in a longer unpublished Danish version under the title ‘Overtræk’, (Eng.: ‘Overdraft’). The article gives a unique insight into an artistic practice, and is both retrospective – mainly in relation to IOV – and prospective, that is, pointing forward as a sort of poetics.

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employees. If art is a mere practice among other practices, it needs to have a distinct character. We have seen how APG developed a very precise framework for their art practice. Kent Hansen defines his this way: “By disclaiming the image of the artist as a ‘sovereign subject of creativity’ and autonomous art as a general norm, contemporary art makes it possible to establish artistic creation as a social activity within different contexts, i.e. in the organization of business and working life. But at the same time the artist retains relations with contemporary ‘rules of the game’ in a public art discourse” (Hansen, 2004:7).

As APG, Kent Hansen abandons autonomy to enter the social context, but his position is only semi- detached from the general art discourse. According to Hansen this is possible by establishing ‘The Scope of Art’ 47 – which he denotes ‘{K}’, where K stands for ‘art’ (Da.: ‘Kunst’). This frame is established in the organisational environment by announcing that from this point and on the participants will be making art.

This may sound a bit too conceptual but as we saw with the IOV participants, who had strong expectations to the artistic side of the project, this annunciation is actually very powerful. The shop floor is still there but people, procedures, ideas and items are now also part of a sphere loaded with imaginative tension and new possibilities. Essentially {K} ‘enchants’ the environment and tones down the daily reality without setting it aside.

(1) Picture of the employee 'Frank', with a 'spin- off' object he made from found production parts, Basta factory, Korsør, 2000 (photo: Kent Hansen). (2) Rubin's Vase, is it a vase or two faces? The figure illustrates a chiastic shift between form and negative form.

At LK, {K} was dubbed Superkontakt to alter the normal workspace and mark that something completely different was taking place. What before was just items with specific purposes could now be something else, namely art. Kent Hansen refers to this as 47 Defined as “a temporal, special and mental frame […] for and by a specific group […] engaged in art creation” (Hansen 2004:11).

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a chiastic 48 relation and illustrates the concept by the example of the child with her teddy bear who gives ‘life’ to the toy through play – without suspending the physical world.

Sigmund Freud writes of a similar connection between the child’s playing and this ability to shift between the real world and an imagined one. According to Freud (1907), the opposite of playing is not seriousness – but reality. In the game of play, the child creates her own imaginary world by re- contextualising the tangible objects, but still not setting the real world aside as illusory. These objects serve as support for the imaginary world and can be seen as transitional objects that occupy both worlds.

Following this, neither the concrete nor the imagined world become illusory in the {K} – they simply co- exist as a field of vibrating tension, creating a third place that is not art nor company, but a synthesis of both.

The main motive of establishing {K} is providing a space for co- creation between artists, managers and employees. To do so, a ‘teddy bear’ is needed as a centre of attention, although it cannot from the beginning look like a ‘teddy bear’ (or anything else for that matter, as it would influence the flow of the process). Kent Hansen calls it a ‘working artefact’: “an artefact, which does not carry any pre- defined meaning, allowing it’s meaning to be dis- covered [sic] through prototyping and with proposals appearing within ‘the scope of art’” (Hansen 2004:16). Normal parts from the production were preferred in making the working artefact (as well as spin- off objects). It is a peculiar expression. By ‘working’ is suggested that the artefact is subject to continuous change but also that the artefact works with the group by reverberating its composite expression in dialogue with its creators/users. It serves as a ‘conversation piece’ 49 in the making: though the dialogue, which it initiates, meaning and experience are articulated and made visible.

As stated in the memorandum about IOV, the artists’ strength lay in designing concepts and tools to meet formulated needs of the organisation. Embedded in this observation is the importance of working on- site and collaboratively: To come up with a working design, the artists must interpret needs and values of the employees through research and interaction with them in their organisational context.

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Cf. the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet: ‘chi’ (denoted ‘X’). In this case ‘chiastic’ (originally an adjective describing a syntactical type) points to something that criss- cross back and forth between two positions.

49 “Something (as a novel or unusual object) that stimulates conversation” (Merriam- Webster Online Dictionary, www.m- w.com).

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In Superkontakt, The Wise Oak was a working artefact. It emerged from the collaborative processes of talking about communication and the need for a meeting room. A continuous brainstorming process was combined with attempts to consolidate discoveries in to more thorough concepts, procedures and artefacts. This way the first prototype of The Wise Oak came about. It was discarded (dis- covered, hidden) by the employees and by doing so they revealed and found out more about themselves; that is, their dispositions, tastes and opinions about how they are represented in the organisation. These observations and reflections were integrated further into the work in progress as it took shape.

The formation normally starts with a ‘random’ stroke, based on the artist’s experience and sensibility, and carries on by a (in theory infinite) succession of chiastic shifts on all levels until the form is complete. This happens when it makes a circular closure, somehow containing all the shifts and forms of the process that now exist as a vibrant unity; like a painting with several layers of paint that lie as texture underneath each other and (although covered) signify earlier stages of formation. When engaging in a dialogue with the final work, the viewer should be able to sense traces of the formation process and to a certain extent ‘repeat’ it by backtracking.

Rules, Authorities and Games In his article, Kent Hansen does not address the issue of who is capable of establishing {K}. The answer must be that only an artist holds the proper authority to make this annunciation. Surely, it wouldn’t work, if the employees spontaneously decided to lay down their tools and from then on make ‘art’.

In the context of conventional organisational development, this authority would be similar to, say, that of a consultant or manager who can initiate an internal development project as a transition between status quo and a new, supposedly better, reality.

With this in mind, it becomes clear, why it was beneficial that IOV was done in collaboration with the workplace consultancy 50 and received initial support from the management: It establishes further credibility around the artist that is important for him or her when establishing the {K}. Some might claim that artistic credibility should suffice, however, given the different art appreciations at play in IOV, additional credibility from

50 One of them stated that “What we did in relation to the companies was to argue for the process in this and why the methods, the artists use, are beneficial and good” (Andersen & Hansen 2001: 27*).

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other (and to employees perhaps more comprehensible) practices would only contribute further in making the project successful. This is furthermore in line with the aims of any interdisciplinary collaboration; making people and resources work for a common good.

The shift in perception and behaviour following the establishment of {K} is comparable to when a lawn suddenly is announced to be a soccer field; trees become goal posts and people must act to very specific rules. The ball is the centre of attention, the ‘magic’ item that transforms the lawn into a field of play.

Going back to Hansen’s statement about ‘rules of the game’ it could look as if there is an inherent conflict in relation to his efforts not to be a ‘sovereign subject of creativity’.

Following the soccer- analogy, the artist would have to be both a player and a referee since the game in question (art) is more or less unknown to the unbiased player (the employee or manager). How is this possible and what game is really being played?

There are several issues we need to consider to answer this question. Kent Hansen makes extensive use of the term ‘discourse’ in describing his practice; which is not unusual to OA. It is difficult to find an accurate definition of the current use of discourse, as they are many and conflicting, but in general terms it means a certain way of talking about and understanding (parts of) the world. But there is also a performative aspect in discursive practice as it does not just describe things, it does things: By talking about the world we create coherence in the world (cf. Grant et al 2004:3). This equally applies within organisational settings: “Organizations exist only in so far as their members create them through discourse. This is not to claim that organizations are ‘nothing but’ discourse, but rather that discourse is the principle means by which organization members create a coherent social reality that frames their sense of who they are” (Murphy and Clair 1997, p.181; cited from Grant et al 2004:3).

The social aspect of language and its tool- like character was perhaps most convincingly treated by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s in his late philosophy, from where I will introduce a few of the main concepts. In Philosophical Investigations (1953) he defines the use of language as a matter of following certain rules in social contexts (§199). These rules are organised in what he calls a “language game”, which’s meaning lies in its use (§197).

What is important in relation to our investigation is that one cannot have a private language (§202, §243) and that rules are not considered as fixed but are defined as “customs” (§199).

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Going back to our game of art/soccer, Wittgenstein’s terminology may help us: Kent Hansen cannot play his ‘game’ alone and it is clear that he has no interest in this. To avoid doing so, he must either make the rules of the game comprehensible to potential players or find someone who already knows them. In IOV he does both; Superflex and N55 are familiar with the rules of the art discourse. The employees only know some of the basic moves and much of their knowledge are obsolete; but they rapidly learn more as the project progresses.

Just as with Wittgenstein’s rules of language, the rules of the art discourse are not fixed as, say, soccer rules but rather they have the status of convention 51 . In the case of the art discourse, it is part of the convention that the convention continuously should be advanced (as it is the case with language that constantly evolves) 52 . This is how Kent Hansen is able to achieve his middle- position: As a playmaker rather than a referee, as someone who understands the art game well and keeps it going. His position is still the one of the expert, but it should be kept in mind that he is only an expert on art – the employees are experts on their jobs and their lives and they always outnumber the artists. Thus, given the fact that IOV is half art and half organisation, Kent Hansen is not sovereign, nor is he autonomous.

A crude simplification of Wittgenstein tells us that the meaning of language is using it.

With his expanded view on language, it is nearby to say that the meaning of the interdisciplinary art game in organisations is simply playing it with people to see where it goes. Bourriaud puts it similarly like this: "Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence” (Bourriaud 1998:11).

Heterotopia Despite the fact that from an art perspective there are no concrete expectations to the outcome of IOV, there are overall expectations of social improvement. In his article, Kent Hansen talks about “heterotopias” (Hansen 2004:17), which are spaces within an otherwise uniform social system that allows for heterogeneity.

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“A: usage or custom especially in social matters” - “B: a rule of conduct or behaviour” - “C: a practice in bidding or playing that conveys information between partners in a card game (as bridge)” - “D: an established technique, practice, or device (as in literature or the theater)” (Merriam- Webster Online, www.m- w.com).

52 Cf. Bürger 2002:8*: “Since what we have become used to calling the end of the historical avant- garde movements, the dissolving impulse has transformed: it knows it is dependent on what it turns against”.

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‘Heterotopia’ is actually a term from pathology 53 that is used by Michel Foucault to describe “a kind of effectively enacted utopias” (Foucault 1967). To our investigation it is important to note that, according to Foucault, all cultures manifest heterotopias that each has a precise and determined function. Heterotopias function in relation to their context and at the same time they mark a culturally definable space unlike any other; they act as microcosms reflecting larger cultural patterns or social orders. Finally, some heterotopias require rites of passage while others appear to be publicly accessible but “hide curious exclusions” (ibid.).

Foucault also calls heterotopia a “counter- site” and it is particularly as such Kent Hansen uses the term; as a space in the organisation that puts up ‘resistance’ towards the dominant space and order. It is in these in- between spaces – both in a concrete and abstract meaning – new organisational perspectives can be developed though creativity and imagination.

In a top- down organisation, heterotopias are logically perceived as dangerous, as they make way for disorder and counter- organisational perspectives. In a rationalised organisational environment, such as that of a manufacturing company, heterotopias are threatened.

Going back to the case of IOV, knowing what we now know, it becomes apparent, that by initiating {K}, the artists legitimise and strengthens heterotopias in the company culture.

Suddenly employees are allowed openly and articulated to play around with ideas of a better workplace and even counter- productive thoughts. In this perspective The Wise Oak can be viewed as a manifestation of and a ‘stronghold’ for such a heterotopia.

Following Foucault it is not unlikely that The Wise Oak, if implemented as planned, could be seen as a thorn in the side of management. Even though it seemingly is publicly accessible, it would probably not be appropriate for, say, The Chief Executive to enter the ‘tree house’ when five workers were in there. As The Wise Oak was mainly based on the values of the employees and middle- management, the space it defines would mostly be seen as ‘their’ microcosm; a representation of their social characteristics.

However, thorn or no thorn, the attitude of the top- management is a crucial factor as heterotopias are inevitable in all cultures. Thus it would be counter logical for topmanagement to try to suppress heterotopias in the company culture. A more productive and rewarding action would be to support the cultural multiplicity of the company by 53 Which means “misplacement or displacement, as of an organ” or “the formation of tissue in a part where its presence is abnormal” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, Random House 1996).

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recognising and allowing the presence of heterotopia and its manifestations. However, the reason for the strong work/leisure division in both LK and Basta is probably a direct result of this continuous suppression rooted in the heritage from industrial management schemes.

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3.4 ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND LEARNING “I don’t think you can change culture if you make a project [like IOV]. I wouldn’t say that – nor would I, back then. Or if I did say it, back then, it was because I didn’t know better”.

Kent Hansen in a private interview 2.11.2004*

There are several similarities between IOV and an organisational development project 54 . I believe it is relevant here to draw on theory of process consultation and organisational theory because this project is as much about organisation as art. We have talked about how value is conveyed from the artistic realm but we have yet to investigate how this value is obtained and integrated in the organisational environment. Thus, in the following I will compare the artistic approach with relevant concepts from organisational studies to see how their schemes are translated into the organisational environment. As my objective is not to discuss this theory, I have chosen to stick mostly to one central scholar on the subject, Edgar H. Schein.

Building the Helping Relationship In his book from 1999, Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship, Schein revisits the process consultation (PC) method. It is apparent that is holds many similarities with the approaches adopted by the IOV artists. It is unlikely that the artists are PC experts, but it is possible that the involved consultants gave advice and direction that contained elements of the PC method. However, it is also just as likely that the artists, given their strong focus on processes and their amenable attitude towards the employees, came naturally to the final approaches.

Schein views PC “as a philosophy of ‘helping’, and a technology or methodology of how to be helpful” (Schein 1999:xi), where the ‘philosophy’ is mainly based on the assumption that “one can only help a human system to help itself” (ibid.:1). The reason why he revisits his theory thirty years after his fist book, Process Consultation (Addison- Wesley, 1969), is because he is frustrated that PC generally is being used in an instrumental way

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Cf. “Organization development is typically defined as a planned organization- wide program, but its component parts are usually activities that the consultant carries out with individuals or groups” (Schein 1999:3).

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with no real appreciation or understanding of the philosophy behind it. Thus, he starts by defining two major consultation concepts and compares them with PC 55 : The Expertise Model is where the consultant sells information and expertise to the client (the part that needs help), which he is unable to provide for himself. The danger with this model is that the client is often not able to make a correct self- diagnosis of his needs or communicate these needs correctly – and therefore the consultant will most likely provide solutions for the wrong problem. In this model the client empowers the client to a great extent (by giving away power) and this often tempts the consultant to sell whatever he knows he is good at.

The PC- alternative to this model is to immediately involve both the client and the consultant – the ‘helper’ – in a period of “joint diagnosis” (ibid.:9, his italics). Since neither the client nor the consultant knows enough at this early point of initial contact to define the needed expertise, it is important for the consultant to “access his ignorance”, as Schein calls it (ibid.:11), about the organisational reality. Simultaneously, the client will learn for himself how to diagnose, and this is crucial as “the problems will stay longer solved and be solved more effectively if the organization learns to solve those problems itself” (ibid.:9, his italics).

Another major consultation concept is The Doctor- Patient Model, which is when an organisation decides to bring in a consultant for a ‘check- up’ to see if there are any areas that could be functioning more efficient. This method gives even more power to the consultant, as he or she has to diagnose, prescribe and administer a cure. This often leads to great frustration on the part of both the client and the consultant, even though they have consented to the consultant- client relationship: The client finds the consultant’s suggestions and recommendations irrelevant or even offensive, and the consultant experiences to have his report shelved or belittled (ibid.: 13).

The problem with the Doctor- Patient Model lies mainly in the assumption that the consultant can get accurate diagnostic information on his own. The department that is to be checked for ‘illness’ is most likely reluctant to give the kind of information that the consultant needs, it will probably even hide any damaging details, especially if the organisational climate is filled with distrust and insecurity. Furthermore, the client is probably unwilling to oblige to the prescribed actions, as the client and the consultant 55 These concepts are in line with the employees’ perception of the typical consultant but also the artists’ who does not view themselves as consultants.

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haven’t build up a common diagnostic frame of reference: “They are not dealing with a common reality [in the organisation]” (ibid.:14). This also leads to another prevalent problem; that the client simply isn’t able to make the recommended changes.

The PC- alternative to this otherwise popular model in contemporary consultation is a combination of joint diagnosis, as we saw before, and “passing on to the client the consultant’s diagnostic and problem- solving skills” (ibid.:15, his italics) in order for the client to learn to see the problem for himself and be actively involved in finding a solution. The ultimate purpose of PC is to create a communication channel “to permit joint diagnosis and joint problem solving” (ibid.:17).

Conclusively, we can define the PC model: “Process Consultation is the creation of a relationship with the client that permits the client to perceive, understand, and act on the process events that occur in the client’s internal and external environment in order to improve the situation as defined by the client” (ibid.:20).

To this should be added that the PC model engages in ‘double- loop learning’ (learning how to learn), where the other two models only bring about single- loop (adaptive) learning. Thus, PC aims to “increase the client system’s capacity for learning so that it can in the future fix its own problems” (ibid.:19, his italics).

Art as a Helping Hand How does all this relate to IOV? – First of all, the concept of ‘helping’ is very central to IOV; we have already seen that Superflex, N55 and democratic innovation are motivated by a social and ethical conscience, which ultimately is about helping people one way or another. The very concepts they developed in their respective projects are designed to help the most people in the organisation; to make their work run more smoothly by strengthening communication and team spirit, and create spaces that allow for more spontaneity and ‘play’.

Secondly, the very approach adopted by the artists were based on active inquiry 56 and dialogue 57 , where they were ‘accessing their ignorance’ about the companies and at the 56

“Active inquiry is more than good listening. It involves understanding the psychological dynamics involved when someone seeks help and understanding the impact of different kinds of questions on the mental and emotional process of the client” (Schein 1999:59).

57 “Dialogue can be thought of as a form of conversation that makes it possible, even likely, for participants to become aware of some of the hidden and tacit assumptions that derive from our cultural learning, our

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same time, encouraging the employees to reflect on the overall theme of communication 58 and illustrate the ‘organisational reality’ with video and disposable cameras. Here it should be mentioned as a positive ‘side effect’, that the employees has access to the artists – whom we know they were curious about beforehand – and in this process they learned a lot about contemporary artist’s methods and way of life, this way accessing their own ignorance about the art world. I call it a side effect because this scenario most likely is not that common in the case of consultants, who are probably not valued by factory employees in general.

Thirdly, by empowering the employees and thus giving them ownership of what the projects actually was about and should look like, the artists encouraged the employees to make their own diagnosis. In this respect The Wise Oak concept can be viewed as the solution to the issues that the employees have pointed out in their joint diagnosis.

Because of this process’ high level of self- reflection, double- loop learning sometimes occurred 59 . Since it to a large extent is based on their ideas, the employees will know how to use The Wise Oak concept – this way ‘helping themselves’ after the artists have left the project.

According to the workplace consultants that took part in IOV it was only due to Kent Hansen that it was even considered including the employees in the process (Andersen & Hansen 2001:25). When addressing general problems like team spirit and communication everyone in an organisation are bound to be affected; following this it makes sense to involve as many as possible in a bottom- up approach that focus on the ‘end users’ as it was the case in IOV. However, there are some inherent issues with the bottom- up approach in this case: Since the ‘problem’ owners ultimately are the top- managers of LK it would have been wise to include them more in the processes, preferably in closed group sessions as they probably would be too dominant if included in the employees’ group. Since they pay expenses and decide whether or not to implement the suggested concepts, it is vital that they understand to the fullest how and why the final concepts came about and that they feel language, and our psychological makeup” (Schein 1999:201). I believe this sums up quite accurately, what the artists ultimately were aiming at with the group conversations.

58 Also note that the first thing the artists did was to establish channels of communication – at Basta quite literally so, where N55 set up their communication room.

59 As already shown, it was a general tendency that IOV started a reflection process on the side of the employees: They learned to utilise their own creativity in the workplace, and started to see how they could benefit from transferral of concepts and ideas between leisure and work (cf. di et al 2001:12).

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some degree of ownership of it. Shelving the suggested concept, as it happened at LK, is unfortunate as it belittles the ideas and engagement of the employees – which is the exact opposite to the intended effect imagined by IOV. It is questionable to what extent artists in general possess problem solving skills in an organisational environment – and thus, whether they actually are able to make diagnoses. But this is one point, where the PC comparison falls short: The artists do not enter the companies as consultants, and the employees do not see them as such. They are not merely problem fixers; rather than solving problems, they are expected to add new value to the organisation. Instead of passing on problem solving skills they make it legit for the employees to share their ideas of a better workplace and at the same time they ‘open the eyes’ of the involved people, by presenting them with alternative life- and work forms in contrasts to the prevailing organisational reality. The artists leave the employees with their new experiences and perspectives that have prepared them to think and act differently in the organisation – and possibly beyond. To this end, The Wise Oak, if implemented as suggested, could be viewed as both a documentation and reminder of this transition, which it also would serve to sustain and legitimise in the organisation after the project formally is ended.

Sustainable Change?

Since we do not know whether the artistic concepts of IOV in the long run would sustain in the organisational culture, we can only speculate and hypothesise, drawing on relevant theory and experiences gained so far. On organisational culture, Schein’s principal work is Organisational Culture and Leadership (third edition 2004). Here he defines the culture of a group as a: “[…] pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” (Schein 2004:17, his italics).

There is a natural paradox here, as culture by its members is sought to be relatively stable and change to be dynamic. So in order for sustainable change to take place, there must be an incentive for the members of a group to recognise the need for change. This

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is called ‘unfreezing’ and consists of three factors, which to a certain degree has to be present for a group to develop any motivation to change. They are: 1. “enough disconfirming data to cause serious discomfort and disequilibrium”, 2. “the connection of the disconfirming data to important goals and ideals, causing anxiety and/or guilt” and 3. “enough psychological safety, in the sense of being able to see a possibility of solving the problem and learning something new without loss of identity or integrity” (ibid.:320, his italics).

By ‘disconfirming data’ is meant “items of information that show the organization that some of its goals are not being met or some of its processes are not accomplishing what they are supposed to” (ibid.:321). This information is usually symptomatic; it does not necessarily tell the organisation what the underlying problem is, rather is serves to make organisation members realise that they need to change for the organisation to survive.

Therefore it must be stressed that the disconfirmation threatens fundamental goals and ideals of the organisation. According to Schein, this is normally done best by a visionary leader, as “the vision sometimes serves the function of providing the psychological safety that permits the organization to move forward” (ibid.:323).

The process of unfreezing can be observed in IOV, although with reservations and modifications. It is clear that the two organisations were aware of some tendencies that needed to change for the workplace to improve, respectively related to monotonous repetitive work, communication and teamwork spirit. But it is not clear if these tendencies qualify as disconfirming data that ultimately threatened the survival of the organisation.

At the project day at LK, however, it became clear to all participants how important communication is – and given the fact that they unsuccessfully had tried to improve communication, it should be apparent to most participants, that something had to be done about this – although it was not articulated directly.

As for the psychological safety, I have already described the level of trust that the employees had in the artists, and although working with them was often seen as frustrating, I have shown that the employees were able to learn and change without losing identity and integrity; actually the project work only seemed to support both.

Even though the artists do not see themselves as leaders, they have definitely helped the employees to some strong visions of a better workplace, as we saw in the relation to the {K}. It is probably these visions and the inspiration from the artists, rather than any

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disconfirming information that appeared to be rather vague, that would help unfreeze the organisation.

“Once an organization has been unfrozen, the change process proceeds along a number of different lines that reflect either new learning, through trial and error based on scanning the environment broadly, or imitation of role models, based on psychological identification with the role models. In either case, the essence of the new learning is usually some cognitive redefinition of some of the core concepts in the assumption set” (ibid.:325).

Focusing on LK, where the project ran the longest, and assuming that the company was unfrozen, this citation almost literally describes what went on in IOV: In the project work the employees adopted new learning though trial and error, both concretely (using cameras, building artefacts with known factory material put together in new ways etc.) and more abstractly in terms of working with artists’ methods and concepts, stretching the limits of their imagination.

It would not be correct to directly say that artists were perceived as role models, as the artists’ way of life, language and work generally were too far from the average employee 60 . However, and as far as ‘role model’ means “a person whose behavior in a particular role is imitated by others” 61 , it is clear that working with the artists inspired new behaviour and thoughts on the side of the employees; as much as they were frustrated or even anxious, they were also impressed and taken with the ‘free life’ that art production entailed.

The record of IOV shows, as was briefly mentioned earlier, that there were signs of an emerging cognitive shift in basic assumptions: “One of the [LK] employees expresses it like this; she has learned to see the art in her own work and in the world around her. Something is created each day and when the daily problems need solving there is also a need for creativity. Furthermore, the employees believe that some of the gained experiences can be used in the way the self- governing groups work. Among other things there is recognition of the fact that certain things take time and that one shouldn’t quit just because a visible result doesn’t appear right away” (di et al 2001:10*).

With the available material, I have no way of knowing the exact nature of the basic assumptions in LK at the time, but it seems that the above quotation bear witness of small a shift in the employee’s perception of the nature of work. According to Schein people are able to learn something through imitation that “do not really fit into our

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Throughout the documentation of IOV it is obvious that the employees at no point consider becoming artists themselves, that is, live and work like they do.

61 Merriam- Webster Online, www.m- w.com.

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personality or our ongoing relationships” and that they often revert to their old behaviour when the role model no longer is available (Schein 2004:327). Thus, learning to ‘scan’ the organisational environment becomes essential as it makes people better able to develop their own, personalised solutions (ibid.:328). I believe that this is the case in IOV where scanning were done quite literally with cameras, discussions and the like and the developed solutions came about only through a high level of personalised participant involvement.

Even so, there is still one last step in any given change process, and this is ‘refreezing’: “This refers to the necessity for the new behaviour and set of cognitions to be reinforced, to produce once- again confirming data. […] As soon as confirming data from important environmental sources are produced, the new beliefs and values gradually stabilize, become internalized, and, if they continue to work, become taken- for- granted assumptions […]” (ibid.:328).

In the case of IOV this would mean that the solutions would have to be a success in terms of solving or improving the ‘tasks’ that it set out ‘to solve’; communication and team spirit would have to improve, the negative effects of monotonous work diminish and finally that the newfound artistic learning would supplement work in a positive way. If this confirming data was verified and acknowledged by top- management over time, it may indeed have been possible for IOV to positively change the accent of the culture of the two companies.

As mentioned, the artist approach is not centred on problems but rather the opposite, imagination and visions – which is why the above comparison does not hold water all the way. IOV’s high focus on positive dialogue has many similarities with ‘transformative dialogue’ within the organisational studies discourse that is about co- creating “new worlds”: “Transformative dialogue is essentially aimed at facilitating the collaborative construction of new realities. Needed in the dialogue are what might be called imaginary moments in which participants join in developing visions of common good” (Grant et al 2004:55).

This is a very accurate description of the dialogical process in the {K} and is in line with the overall goal of IOV as both an art and organisation project. The emphasis on positivity is stressed in perhaps the most central concepts within transformative dialogue, ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ (AI), which 65

“[…] is a method to transform the capacity of human systems for positive change by deliberately focusing on positive experiences and hopeful futures. […] AI claims that organizations are not problems to be solved but are ‘centers of infinite relational capacity, alive with infinite imagination, open, indeterminate, and ultimately – in terms of the future – a mystery” (Grant et al 2004:55).

This is not the place of an exhaustive treatment of the similarities between AI and IOV, but the comparison is obvious. What is interesting here is the very practical approach to ‘better worlds’ that IOV and AI have in common. As we saw with heterotopias in IOV a better world does necessarily have to be utopian in the sense ‘unreachable’ or ‘illusionary’. Certainly, imagining utopia adds energy and value to the near and immediate reality and enables one to stretch the boundaries of a given position – at least on an imaginary level.

Still, it will be important to see how OA deals with ‘utopia’ and possibly redefines it. This will be treated in the following chapter, which outlines a framework for OA.

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4 4_TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR ORGANISATIONAL ART

Throughout our investigation we have come across a number of central issues that are relevant to OA. The most important traits – socially engaged, conceptual, discursive, site- specific and contextual – will be treated in this chapter.

Social Engagement It is not hard to see the social perspectives in the treated OA projects; both in their focus on collaboration across boundaries of departments, institutions and professions and in the way they address issues of social relevance. Notably Bourriaud with his Relational Aesthetics has described the framework of this novel way of working directly with a public audience as participants in a community. It is in this special position that art has its democratic potential to change society, empowering individuals through dialogue and interaction. But as Claire Bishop notes in her article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (2004) the quality of that public is rarely addressed in Relational Aesthetics.

Arguably, a relational art work (exemplified by works of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick), which claims to be for ‘everyone’ but is exhibited in traditional art places, allegedly open to ‘everyone’, are in effect only accessible for like- minded people accustomed to attending galleries and museum. Sticking to exhibitions in conventional art places means accepting a high degree of social limitations for the artist, as we also saw with APG, and furthermore it means being restricted to addressing mainly ‘art- lovers’, which effectively is a minor group in society that for a large part already have similar world- views 62 .

We have already seen strategies to challenge the exclusiveness of the art space; APG’s Hayward show and Kent Hansen’s way of ‘opening up’ Vestsjællands Museum – inviting employees to build the exhibition, using the space as a discussion forum, broadcasting on the internet and including part of the public space outside as part of the show.

62 Bishop cites Salz: ”[…] theoretically anyone can come in [to an art gallery]. How come they don’t?

Somehow the art world seems to secrete an invisible enzyme that repels outsiders” (Bishop 2004:68).

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However, these strategies mainly serve to demonstrate the artists’ awareness of the problem of exclusiveness, as I believe it is clear that the opposite movement – moving the locus for art into the public (organisational) context – has proven far more effective.

Bishop’s observation takes her deeper into a discussion of what democracy is and finds that it is not defined by consensus, but rather the opposite, namely contestation or antagonism from exclusions in mainstream culture: “a democratic society is one in which relations of conflicts are sustained, not erased” (Bishop 2004:66). She goes on to say, that for an art work engaging a social context, there has to be a clear awareness of where this context begins and ends (ibid.:72).

This is a point where OA has an advantage in its social engagement since an organisation is a clearly demarcated social context. An artist setting up a project here is able to research and interview the people s/he wishes to address and can work accordingly with how this dialogue is facilitated. In accordance with Bishop, maintaining heterotopias within a dominant culture is actually a democratic action per se, as is allowing for voices from all departmental levels to be heard and taken into account.

Arguably art concerned with social issues is likely to be compared with the avant- garde movements of the twentieth century and their struggle to effectively realise some form of social utopia. Let us consider how OA is related to the theory of the avant- garde.

Probably the most authoritative treatment on this subject is found in German scholar Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant- garde (1984). Bürger considers the aim of the historical avant- garde, that is, mainly Dada and Surrealism 63 , as a project of self- criticism of art’s role in bourgeois society 64 as notably aestheticism 65 (Bürger 1984:17). Due to art’s institutional autonomy and its concurrence with the autonomy of the artwork’s content within aestheticism, art has lost its ability to influence society. It has been separated from the “praxis of life” as a “sub system” in bourgeois society without political or social impact: “The concept of ‘art as institution’ as used here refers to the productive and distributive apparatus and also to the ideas of art that prevail at a given time and that determine the reception of works. The avant- garde turns against both— the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy” (Ibid.:22).

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And partly also Russian avant- garde after the October revolution, Italian Futurism and German Expressionism (Bürger 1984:109).

64 Which in our investigation is translatable with capitalist society.

65 Art as preoccupied only with beauty and formal issues without a moral or political message.

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The ‘attack’ of the avant- garde is not directed at the content of the art work: “Rather it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that works have as does the particular content” (ibid.:49). This is essentially the project of the historical avant- garde. Burger goes on to explain how this project was carried out in relation to three main areas related to the autonomous institution of art: purpose or function, production and reception.

The first area is problematic as the avant- garde dissolves its project by achieving it: “For an art that has been reintegrated into the praxis of life, not even the absence of a social purpose can be indicated, as was still possible in Aestheticism. When art and the praxis of life are one, when the praxis is aesthetic and art is practical, art’s purpose can no longer be discovered, because the existence of two distinct spheres (art and the praxis of life) that is constitutive of the concept of purpose or intended use has come to an end” (ibid.:51).

As for the second area, autonomous production of art is the act of an individual, often incarnated in the figure of the genius. The response was the following: “In its most extreme manifestations, the avant- garde’s reply to this is not the collective as the subject of production but the radical negation of individual creation” (ibid.:51).

Bürger exemplifies this strategy with Duchamp’s signing of mass produced objects (normally the signature goes to prove that an artefact is the work of an individual).

However, this provocation only last a short while and is also unrepeatable. In the course of time the historical avant- garde has failed to negate art, as it itself has become art (ibid.:52).

For the third area, reception, negation was also the strategy. By eliminating the distinction between producer and recipient, art as a separate sphere would cease to exist. Bürger mentions Tzara’s recipes for poetry and Bretons’ automatic writing as examples. He reminds us of Bretons’ demand that poetry should be practiced (“pratiquer la poesie”, ibid. 53), from which follows that producer and recipient no longer exist: “All that remains is the individual who uses poetry as an instrument for living one’s life as best one can” (ibid.).

Bürger concludes that the project of the historical avant- garde (negation of the determinations essential to autonomous art) has not occurred as of yet, and presumably

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cannot occur within bourgeois society 66 . This leads him to pose the following question that is important to our investigation: “[…] one will need to ask whether a sublation of the autonomy status can be desirable at all, whether the distance between art and the praxis of life is not requisite for that free space within which alternatives to what exists become conceivable” (Bürger 1984:54).

In a recent essay Bürger (2002) takes up once again the question of the avant- garde, this time in relation to German artist Joseph Beuys (1921- 1986). Here he argues against the prevailing tendency to make avant- garde movements and modernity synonymous, and advocates for Breton’s ‘poetic practice’ as a suited substitution. To demonstrate how vanguard strategies in contemporary art are possible without negating the institution of art, he brings up Beuys, whose position he defines as a ‘ridgewalker’ (Da.: “grænsegænger”).

Beuys is often referred to as one of the most important figures of European art in the twentieth century. He formulates his project as utopian: “a basic idea for renewal of the social wholeness that leads to the social sculpture” (cited from Bürger 2002:18*). By ‘social sculpture’ he refers to a collaborative project produced by the creative involvement of people in a given community: “[…] our task is to discover a new form of social order which would be able to put into effect a different use of human faculties, of human work and productive power, and which can go beyond the way in which these forces are organized and utilized both in private capitalism and in centralized and state- controlled communism... And we have to discover that we can be something other than pluralized, and split up into parts and factions. We have to find ways of sticking together and cooperating.” 67

Beuys’ art appreciation was democratic, in the sense that it essentially should be for and by everyone. He saw creativity as a capacity inherent and hidden in every human, which is what he meant by saying ‘everyone is an artist’ – rather than everybody should start painting or sculpting.

According to Bürger, Beuys was aware that the project of the avant- garde was bound to fail, but still he saw that his role as an artist was to ‘pass on the torch’; an ambiguity that is present in many aspects of his work 68 .

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Other than as a “false sublation of autonomous art”, such as pulp fiction or commodity aesthetics (Bürger 1984:54).

67 From Difesa della Natura (Defense of Nature), compiled by Lucrezia De Domizio, (Il Quadrante Edizoni, Torino, Italy, 1988) p. 75, http://bockleygallery.com/css/ss_source/ss_html/ss_jb_natura.html.

68 Another example: “I really have nothing at all to do with art – and this is my only chance to contribute to it” (cited from Bürger 2001:18*).

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Despite this awareness, Beuys seeks to cause an actual change of attitude in society (a new relationship to sensory perception, subject matter, thinking and metaphysics).

According to Bürger, however, this is not possible within the institutional confinements of art because the alteration of the habits of perception and sight since Aestheticism has been nothing more than an empty phrase that does not relate to real experience. Thus, Beuys had to leave the institution of art, but he cannot abandon it entirely without repeating the failure of the historical avant- garde 69 .

Thus he chooses a middle- position by expanding the boundaries by crossing them back and forth. This is his position as a ‘ridgewalker’ whereby he seeks to maintain a utopian project within the realm of the possible 70 . To do so, he devises a novel art appreciation, “a totalised concept of art”: “All questions of humanity can only be questions of formation” (cited from Bürger 2002:19*).

In his article Bürger asks for more room for ambiguity in the theoretical framework of the avant- garde and less room for dichotomist judgements on art as autonomous or not 71 .

This could help our investigation, as I believe the positions of both Latham and Hansen are similar to Beuys’.

John A. Walker calls Latham “the last avant- gardist” since Beuys died (Walker 1995:159).

Although he with his cosmology actually had devised a new (utopian) framework for a society, he was not subversive against the art institution in his quest to realise it, even though he and APG saw the institution as limiting to art’s full potential. Like Beuys he sought a middle- position with as little limitation as possible by transcending the boundaries of the art institution, but he does so without attacking the institution itself. It seems that he had realised that the institution itself is necessary, both as a space against which he defines his own position, but also as an unconditional space for seminal developments in art, as Bürger suggests. It must also be kept in mind that the basis for the power immanent in the ‘incidental person’ position stemmed exactly from the artist’s position as an ‘outsider’ in society.

It is probable that it was from within the art institution that Latham achieved an adequately detached position to do his societal analysis, which made him sound the alarm for change. To achieve this change, however, he had to get in a position to do so, namely outside the seclusion of the institution. But he was not doctrinal at any point, as 69

This would arguably result in false sublation once again.

“I have not left art out of sight at any point. Art is above all what I aim to achieve. We have not achieved art yet” (Burger 2002:19).

71 One could argue that he is partly responsible for this dichotomisation.

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it was clear with his placement at the Scottish Office where he went to great lengths to accommodate the context in which he was working. Although he tried to advance society in what he did and said, it was not by command but by suggestion or invitation, which is another trait Latham shares with Beuys 72 .

In the catalogue for IOV Kent Hansen states, that his project “is not avant- garde, it is cooperation” (Andersen & Hansen 2001:20). Like Latham, he distances himself from the historical avant- garde project but is still (on occasion) suspending his autonomy to gain access to social environments where new opportunities arise, also for art making. As we saw with the analogy from Wittgenstein’s language game (which is ruled by ‘customs’), the ‘rules of the public art discourse’ as Hansen calls them – which might be considered equivalent to dispositions in the art institution – are governed by a special logic that thrives partly on self- critique. This critique is however not to be understood as subversive but rather progressive in the sense that the art institution is advanced by exchange across its borders.

Bourriaud touches upon the status of utopia and avant- garde in his writings where he makes the following distinction: “[Historical avant- garde] Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modelling possible universes” (Bourriaud 1998:13). The chance for art in the present history is simply “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution” (ibid., his italics), which he calls “Dolce utopia” 73 ; sweet and gentle utopia.

Any emergent approach is counter to a predefined ideology. In OA any talk of utopia 74 is linked to the positive ideas of a new, realistic future, which is in fact reachable in time and space. Foucault defined heterotopias as ‘effectively enacted utopias’ and Hansen talks of “local utopia” 75 . With an appreciative discursive approach, utopia is effectively ‘translated’ into a matter of visionary and imaginary potential that empowers individuals

72 Beuys puts it this way: “So when I come out of my laboratory, or my workshop, or whatever I want to call the place where I am trying to produce something, or to get something done, or to effect a collaboration with other people as a whole community of workers, I can't simply declare that you have to believe in what I have done, or that what I have done is a quality product simply because it happens to be my product; I can't even declare that it has any particular qualities at all. All I can do is to take advantage of the possibility or to accept the duty of showing people what I have done, and then I have to ask them whether or not it is useful” (same as footnote 67). Like Latham Beuys was very interested in developments in science and he partly saw his work as a type of ‘research’.

73 A term coined by the artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) (cf. Bourriaud 1998:14).

74 Merriam- Webster Online Dictionary states that ‘utopia’ is defined as: (A) “an imaginary and indefinitely remote place”, (B) “a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions”, or (C) “an impractical scheme for social improvement.”

75 In a private interview 23.04.2004.

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to transcend boundaries of the here and now, at least by ‘daydreaming’. And the idea is, of course, that when they ‘wake up’ they will try to realise their dreams.

Social engagement is connected with ethical issues and we have touched upon the issue of articulation: How an OA project is articulated (as art or not or as something else) in order to avoid mistaken conceptions of what is going to happen within the frame of the project. We have also seen how OA makes use of non- artistic rhetoric to communicate more efficiently with their non- art partners. These are common characteristics in any interdisciplinary setting and are not to be mistaken with the concept of mimicry that is part of today’s art scene.

A good example for being sceptical about (subversive) mimicry is provided by the artist group ‘The Yes Men’ who assimilates parts of major organisations’ identity, notably WTO and George Bush’s administration, to deploy counterstrategies against them, primarily by smudging their public image 76 .

A more interesting and positive form of ‘mimicry’ is the way artists adopt concepts from management practice in their work (e.g. Liam Gillick and Carey Young) and the way they organise themselves as shareholding companies (e.g. Superflex) with advisory boards (e.g. APG) and websites. It blurs the boundaries of what is corporation and what is art and shows that cultural value too can be distributed and organised with traditional economic schemes, which in turn makes exchange between the economic and cultural field easier.

Concept and Discourse A comprehensive and recent treatise on Conceptual Art is Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art (1998). Here Godfrey develops an inclusive theoretical framework for Conceptual Art that is sympathetic to earlier characterisations (as made by Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lucy Lippard and ‘Art & Language’). According to Godfrey, conceptual strategies are highly present in today’s art although historically the art form had its apogee in 1966- 72. The questions it raises were also anticipated by Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the antiart gestures of Dadaism (1916 and onwards). In a state of crisis, Conceptual Art served to open up Modernist art to philosophy, linguistics, social science and popular culture, when it itself had become a refined and hermetic discourse (ibid.:15). He defines the art form this way: 76

See www.theyesmen.org.

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“Conceptual art is not about forms or materials, but about ideas and meanings. It cannot be defined in terms of any medium or style, but rather by the way it questions what art is. In particular, Conceptual art challenges the traditional status of the art object as unique, collectable or saleable” (Godfrey 1998:4).

Conceptual Art works demand a more active response from the viewer because of their often unconventional composition of form and language. Sometimes, he argues, the work even truly exists in the spectators participating mind only: It puts forth a surprising constellation of artefacts, media and language that pose the question of the nature of art and requests: ‘Imagine this as an art piece in its own right’. Thus, the reception of the Conceptual Art work takes its outset in the viewers doubt (‘is this art?’) but carries on in a process of imagination (‘what if it is art?’); a process in principle limitless, with repercussions that extend beyond the object of art and lives on in the mind and life of the spectator.

Godfrey argues that a Conceptual Art work normally will resist characterisation from typology and points to their reflexive nature as “a state of continual self- critique” (ibid.:12). Still, he ventures to suggest four general forms that a Conceptual Art work may be comprised of: 1. a readymade; which is “an object from the outside world which is claimed or proposed as art, thus denying both the uniqueness of the art object and the necessity for the artist’s hand”; 2. an intervention; “in which some image, text or thing is placed in an unexpected context, thus drawing attention to that context”; 3. documentation; “where the actual art work, concept or action, can only be presented by the evidence of notes, maps, charts or, most frequently, photographs”; and 4. words; “where the concept, proposition or investigation is presented in the form of language” (ibid.:7).

Following Godfrey’s characterisations, it is not difficult to see many traits from Conceptual Art in OA: from Latham’s and APG’s focus on process and idea to Schrat’s intervention with litter as value. Practically all of the above mentioned forms are present in a project such as IOV. Going back to its exhibit at the museum, its display of assembled readymade ‘factory material’ (1+2); its status as documentation consisting of video, notes and photographs (3); and its extensive use of presentation in the form of language (4) – all are forms that relate to Conceptual Art. However, it seems that IOV goes further by also introducing conceptual forms in the actual process of collaborative creation. By introducing the {K}, non- artist participants are invited to join a reflective process about the nature of art, which, according to the above,

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normally would take place when a completed object/concept/statement is presented to them. Here, the concept is presented earlier in the form of a working artefact, but still it has the same aim: to question the conventions of art and challenge the participant’s appreciation of what art is.

We have now arrived at what might be called the discursive nature of OA. Throughout our investigation we have come across OA’s emphasis on language as perhaps the most important medium to present the concepts of art both in the making and reception of art. It is through dialogue that this art form achieves its impact, whether it happens directly, as with Local Access’ Simulation, or on a more distributed level, such as with the dialogue Henrik Schrat facilitates with his request for candy paper in the branches of Dresdner Bank. Discourse is perhaps the single most important part of the OA work, as it is through conversation that new meaning and insight is achieved: How else would Latham ‘transform’ heaps of rubbish into a readymade sculpture; how else would Schrat influence people’s understanding of value; and how else would Kent Hansen make employees imagine a better workplace?

It is also through discourse that any gained insight from the OA project is embedded in the organisation, both via narratives of ‘what happened’ and also by more abstract conversations about how the new learning sets organisational matters in a different perspective. OA projects as conversation pieces can hardly be stressed enough.

Finally, it is through discourse that OA achieves its self- reflexive nature in questioning conventional art appreciations and advances the boundaries of what art can be. This was obvious in the chapter about IOV where we used Wittgenstein’s language game as a model that describes how a system expands its boundaries through inherently advancing its conventions/customs. Here it is worth noting that almost any account of Conceptual Art, including Godfrey’s, has mentioned Wittgenstein as an important source of inspiration.

Site- Specificity and Context In her recent book One place after Another – Site- specific Art and Locational Identity (2002) Miwon Kwon addresses the issue of site- specificity in contemporary art. She argues that ‘site’ has undergone several shifts in perception and reception in art making since the late 1960’s – from “an agglomeration of the actual physical attributes of a

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particular location” (Kwon 2002:3) to “a discursive vector—ungrounded, fluid, virtual” (ibid.:29): “[…] current forms of site- oriented art, which readily take up social issues (often inspired by them), and which routinely engage the collaborative participation of audience groups for the conceptualization and production of the work, are seen as a means to strengthen art’s capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of contemporary life with greater impact and meaning” (ibid.:30).

As we saw earlier, Kwon defines the artist role as a cultural- aesthetic service provider, whose real ‘commodity’ is his/hers performance as a facilitator, educator, coordinator or even bureaucrat. This definition is not far from the descriptions of artist roles we have come across in our investigation. Local Access works with facilitation, di with learning and coordination and certainly APG can be viewed as (novel) types of bureaucrats.

Stressing performance rather than production also seems very much in line with OA, as does the attempt to make art a capacity to penetrate socio- political organisation of life with meaning. Whether it is Latham’s cosmology, Hansen’s concern about democracy at work or Schrat’s eye- opening value- games; meaning is at centre stage. The artist has reemerged as a “progenitor of meaning” (ibid.:51), as Kwon puts it.

This raises the question about ‘author’ that I addressed mainly in relation to IOV. How and why is it that artists ‘know better’? First of all, it is worthwhile contemplating the status of ‘meaning’ in modern life. Apart from the judgements we make ourselves as individuals, we are constantly bombarded by media, commercials, politicians, intellectuals, experts and peers that try to affect our opinions about what meaning is.

Perhaps the strongest learning, which stems from the information society, is that information is not information until it is useful for someone, and meaning is not meaning until it makes sense for an individual.

I would argue that OA artists work with ‘meaning for the individual’. Working with social issues in one particular social context has the potentiality of achieving just that type of meaning. Inviting to collaboration with participants/audience, as OA does, is particularly effective; the participants in the organisation work with issues from their own lives, enhancing identification, engagement and ownership during and after the process (cf. ibid.:96). But the OA artists do not only serve as coordinators, they represent a different perspective due to their semi- detached ‘outsider’ position (as we saw for example with the Incidental Person) which often is made effective through the introduction of

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conversation pieces (such as the working artefact) that ultimately are integrated in the organisation, as a concept, experience or artefact.

According to Kwon, artists are (still) perceived as ‘authentic’ due to the singularity (uniqueness) of their projects but also since their labour supposedly is more detached from capitalist forces (ibid.:53,97). The authenticity is also connected to what was identified as heterotopia in relation to IOV: “Certainly, site- specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed histories, help provide greater visibility to marginalized groups and issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of ‘minor’ places so far ignored by the dominant culture” (ibid.:53).

As it should already be clear, Kwon operates with a partly ‘unhinged’ or ‘de- territorialised’ definition of site, which includes three competing paradigms: phenomenological, social/institutional and discursive (ibid.:30). At first sight, the second seems closest to OA but in fact all three are relevant as we have seen for example in IOV, which works with the physical space and found material in the organisation, the social and institutional dispositions of the factories and its employees, and, finally, the discursive potential of the organisational corporeity.

Let us consider how the matter of context is significant to OA. I will here draw on Cecilie Høgsbro Østergaard’s article ‘Framing and Being Framed: Kunst, Kontekst og Tautologi’ (1999) that sums up discussions on the influential ‘Contextual Art’ of the nineties, which was introduced by German professor/curator Peter Weibel in a large exhibition and equally comprehensive catalogue under the title Kontext Kunst 77 .

The term Contextual Art designates a contemporary art form, which is struggling for art’s re- anchoring in reality; a rehabilitation of an art that articulates the manifestation of reality through art. The aim is not a not- yet- realised utopian reality but is rather related to the actual space of here and now. Thus the artist becomes a “scientist of daily life” (Østergaard 1999:401) who explores the area between scientific, artistic and social reality; either by concrete fieldwork or by introducing his or hers personal daily life in the art institution through an autobiographical gesture. Finally, there are many artistic attempts to deconstruct the art institution; either by ‘exposing’ it as a socioeconomic power discourse or moving the place of aesthetic experience and avant- garde radicalism to non- aesthetic contexts (ibid.:401- 2).

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Peter Weibel (ed.): Kontext Kunst, DuMont Buchverlag, Köln, 1994, ISBN: 3- 7701- 3327- 7.

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Contextual Art is further described as heavily influenced by Cultural Studies, which is one of the reasons it is characterised by analytic strategies and reflection rather than subversion. It builds on a conception of reality that is social, communicative and dialogical, rather than trying to unmask a hidden truth. It does however seek to represent free interspaces (described very similar to Foucault’s heterotopias) in the dominant systems of society. Østergaard goes on to describe how the notion of context has changed radically in recent years. Traditionally there was a very clear distinction, within both aesthetic studies and the art itself, between text (work) and context, where the latter was seen as merely a given and often historical circumstance. The work, thus, was a result of its context and achieved its significance through it, as the work was viewed as representational for a historical period (ibid.:404).

However, during the twentieth century this normative and canonical reading of artworks have been criticized increasingly and the parameter for artistic quality changed: Where it used to be based on a given work’s similarity with canonized works, artistic quality changed into being measured by a work’s innovative quality; that is, how it was radically different from other works. Even later again, the possibility of art to renew itself was seriously doubted and thus, the significance of context was foregrounded. This shift was equally furthered by the critique of autonomy and aestheticism that questioned authorial intention and inner value of the art work (ibid.:405).

Thus, the interest has focused increasingly more on the framing of a given art project, that is, the context surrounding it, which it more or less consciously relates to. This context is in itself not less complex than the work; on the contrary, their relation is unstable and interdependent as the work might become context itself. Focus on the context has in the art world been more or less synonymous with institutional critique, as it is in the institution that standards of value, meaning and truth are defined in relation to a contemporary context (ibid.:406). Østergaard has by now arrived in a position from where she can define one ‘branch’ of Contextual Art that seeks to complete the avantgarde project, which has relevance for our investigation 78 :

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Actually Østergaard goes on to characterise Contextual Art as an art form in conflict with itself in its avant- garde aspirations vs. its inherent critique of the same. She concludes that the art form can be characterised as tautological. To include this viewpoint in this investigation, however, would be going too far, as I am still positively are trying to outline a framework for OA.

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“[…] the art must connect itself to life by articulating (the political) and institutional reality, where connecting to reality becomes identical with crossing and breaking out; out of aesthetical barriers, artistic and institutional autonomy and self- reference. And where the artwork is seen as a tool for making visible the invisible, as a manifestation of hidden intentions that are not subjective, subconscious, but social and institutional” (ibid.:408*).

It is clear that Contextual Art, as it is outlined above, in many ways appears quite similar to OA. Latham/APG’s axiom ‘context is half the work’ can hardly be overestimated in any account of an OA project. The whole point of stepping out of the conventional art institution is to gain influence through direct involvement with non- artistic people in non- art contexts. The artist as a scientist of real life makes sense to OA, although its aim is not art institutional critique only (apart from trying to expand its limits, as we have seen); rather OA’s critique is directed at society and its institution(s) – the organisation of human life. And this critique is mainly constructive or indirect, as it is articulated mostly as suggestions.

The relation between art and context in OA is as such more complicated than in Contextual Art. It is clear that there are several contexts present in an OA project, with relations that are equally ‘unstable and interdependent’.

The above figure shows the various levels and contexts present in an OA project. At the first level (the ‘circle’) is the art project itself that involves parts of the organisation (participants and subject matter). At the second level (‘the rectangle’) is the organisation as such, where large parts may be left untouched by the project. The third level is ‘outside’ the organisation and/or the projects. It may be concrete as for instance the local

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environment, in which the organisation is embedded, or more abstract as ‘the manufacturing industry’, ‘private sector’ or ‘society’.

I have shown the divisions as dotted lines to illustrate that to a large extent the boundaries are imaginary or institutional and flow/exchange goes on across them constantly. Recalling the discursive nature of OA, one might ague that all contexts are present at all levels through articulation.

Another irrefutable context is the art institution and its discourse, which formally may exist ‘outside’ but actually is present at all levels. Even for the most refusing art practice that actively tries to escape the institution, it is present as ‘positive absence’ (as Sartre perhaps would phrase it), that is, it imposes its judgements negatively through the artists’ attempt to avoid them. Kent Hansen seems aware of this as he articulates the institution in the core of his project (‘now we are making art’) for him and his co- creators to deal with its presence directly, both positively and critically.

We have now arrived at my final conclusion, which will be followed by a few reflections on this investigation’s way of approaching its subject.

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5 5_CONCLUSION “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”

Robert Filliou, Fluxus artist (cited from Lucy R. Lippard: ‘Bargains’ in Inventory: The Work of Christine Hill & Volksboutique, Hatje/Cantz, 2003)

We have reached the end of our investigation, which should not be considered as a closure, but rather, as with any good travelling experience, an opening for further exploration. I hope to have shown how something, which might be called OA, through artistic practice and discourse addresses social issues by collaboration on- site in organisational contexts.

Organisation, in its widest definition, seems to encompass all aspects of human life, a ‘slice of life’, whether ‘organisation’ means trying to survive as a group in a globalised economy or to create coherence in the chaotic reality that meets us after hours. Chaos is itself part of any organisation and it is obvious that organising with outdated industrial schemes and top- down control is not the way ahead. Creativity and the ability to deal with ambiguity are necessary skills and learning from and with art is a nearby solution.

More direct art experience and influence is needed in society, which is why exchange (with the art world) might be preferred instead of the notorious outcry for (often unspecified) change. But often art drowns in the roar from new media, commercial hype and mainstream politics. Art needs more effective platforms and it seems that timehonoured art spaces alone do not have what it takes to penetrate the public spectacle.

If one half of an OA project is organisational matter and context, the other half is the complementing art. In combination, a new synthesised platform is created that enables direct interaction and exchange with less troublesome mediation and disturbing intermediaries from art institutional hold. However, the institution is not suspended; rather it is sought advanced by ‘ridgewalking’ in the outskirts of its vicinity. The heritage from Beuys and his social sculpture, Breton’s pratiquer la poesie and Latham’s Incidental Person is evident in today’s OA. Organisational platforms for art creation present problems of their own. Lack of common ground, common language and common art appreciations make exchange and learning frictional and the possibility of losing institutional status are still something artists have

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to deal with on an ongoing basis. However, when an OA project is successful it seems obvious why art and the organisation of human life should not be separated, as Filliou’s statement above also testifies to.

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6 6_REMARKS ON METHOD In this chapter I will elaborate on the approach taken on in this investigation. It can be described as unbiased, practiceoriented, inductive and discursive.

As stated in the beginning, my investigation has taken its metaphorical form from the journey and has from the beginning been driven by my curiosity. The reason for departure came from a sense that ‘something was going on’ in the world of art and organisation and it was actually not more defined than that, apart from the negative definitions my shortcomings conveyed (e.g. ‘I know this is not a painting; I do not know what it is’). These were mainly concerned with the status of the art object (be it process or artefact), its production and circulation inside and outside the art institution. Another shortcoming was to comprehend how OA was placed within the trajectories of art; it simply looked like nothing I knew at the point of departure.

My first ‘destination’ was to get familiar with the semi- unknown area in front of me, to fill out the white parts of the already charted area that I knew of, which in this case was democratic innovation and IOV. Thus, the first thing I wrote was the matching case study, which I took on with an unbiased approach, trying to see and understand the project and its parts in their own right. What was paramount to me was not to enter this study with a preconceived idea of what IOV might be about or, worse, make use of a predetermined theoretical discourse.

My second ‘destination’ was to find out about more OA artists out there. So I allied myself with The Creative Alliance at Learning Lab Denmark and a group of artists that we believed could qualify as OA artist, to do a so- called ‘Thin- Book Summit’. This is a concept developed by The Creative Alliance, where a group of 10- 25 leading experts on a given field meet to produce a book about their own practice in the course of a few days. The main purpose is quickly to provide timely knowledge about an emerging field instead of having to wait for a thoroughbred academic publication, which often is years in the making. A secondary objective is of course to meet these people face- to- face and work directly together with them.

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This concept seemed perfect for mapmaking purposes. Together with Kent Hansen, Philippe Mairesse from Local Access (France), Henrik Schrat (Germany) and Teike Asselbergs from ‘Orgacom’ (Holland) we put together a list of roughly 50 people we thought suited for such a summit, including artists and artist groups together with nonartists that worked in the field. From this list – mainly derived from the artists’ personal networks but also including the most interesting people we could simply think of – we chose what we thought to be the best mix of about thirty people that had in- depth experience with working in and together with organisations.

This selection process in many ways resembled curatorial practice although we made sure to include non- artists such as philosophers, art critics, curators, consultants and business people to reflect reality. They full list was: aladin, Cultural Agent, Artist, Magician etc. (UK) - Aleksandra Mir, Artist (US/SE) - Barbara U. Schmidt / Manuela Barth, Artists, Laracroftism (DE) - Barnaby Drabble, Artist/Curator (UK/SW) - Carey Young, Artist (UK) - David Barry, Professor, TCA/LLD (DK/US) - Edi Rama, Artist and Mayor of Tirana (Albania) - Gitte Holm, Consultant, Institute of Technology (DK) - Gavin Wade, Artist/Curator (UK) - Henrik Schrat, Artist (DE) - Hilde Bollen, Consortium Coordinator, TCA/LLD (DK/B) - John O'Neil, Founder of Intel (US) - Karolin Timm, Siemens Arts Program (DE) - Kent Hansen, Artist, democratic innovation (DK) - Lars Grambye, Critic and Director of Malmö Konsthal (DK/SE) - Lise Autogena, Artist (UK/DK) - Lotte Darsø, Research Director, TCA/LLD (DK) - Lucy Kimbell, Artist (UK) - Martin Ferro- Thomsen, Assistant Project Manager, TCA/LLD (DK) - O+I, Artist group (UK) - Orgacom, Artist group (NE) - Patrick Mathieu, Consultant (FR) - Philippe Mairesse, Artist, Local Access (FR) Pier Luigi Sacco, Economist/Academic (IT) - public work, Artist group (UK/DE) - Reinigungsgesellschaf, Artist group (DE) - Scott Rigby, Artist/Curator (US) - Susanne Kandrup, Entrepreneur etc., TCA/LLD (DK) - Søren Friis Møller, Centre for Art & Leadership, Copenhagen Business School (DK).

Of course this many people are not alike and they all relate differently to the outline of OA. It should also be mentioned that although we did quite a thorough research into possible people, this list is in no way conclusive or even adequate, which also became obvious at the summit, where additional people were mentioned (it was also noted that our list was composed by people from mainly Europe and USA). From the 30 people list, 21 people agreed to take on the challenge and arrived in a semi- secluded conference centre in Liseleje, Denmark, late autumn 2004 79 .

My approach is practice- oriented and inspired by hermeneutics, particularly in the tradition of Hans- Georg Gadamer. Gadamer conceives understanding and interpretation as a practice- oriented mode of insight, “that has its own rationality irreducible to any simple rule or set of rules, that cannot be directly taught, and that is always oriented to the particular case at hand” (Malpas 2003).

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For a first- person account on this summit, please refer to Ferro- Thomsen 2004. I am unable to tell more about the content of the Thin Book, as it is currently undergoing final production. It should be available 2005 from www.lld.dk.

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The objective is to found a basis for understanding, which is not established by a method or a set of rules, as these are considered limiting to dialogical and practical interpretation. This is of particular interest to my investigation, which partly has the character of foundational research in its aim to understand novel art forms more or less unaccounted for. Thus, it has been my clear ambition from the beginning only to draw on theoretical knowledge when such knowledge could advance the comprehension of the subject or object in question and made sense in the context. This is also in line with the hermeneutical understanding of ‘truth’ as “the emergence of things into unconcealment” (ibid.).

When engaging in face- to- face studies of/with people in a given field, as I have, I inevitably face challenges similar to those anthropologists encounter in field studies.

Naturally any approach that claims to be unbiased or objective is threatened by the position and cognitive fabric of who ever makes such claim. In my case, however, ignorance combined with an amendable attitude went a long way, although the degree of my biased- ness decreased from the minute I decided to go ahead with this project.

Yet, this is not counter to my ambition of being as objective as possible, as it is anticipated in the self- reflexive nature of hermeneutic practice.

According to Gadamer, one is de facto always biased due to one’s ‘situatedness’ in the world. Part of the hermeneutic approach is therefore to interpret the interpreter while interpreting, allowing for prejudices to be revised in the process. This is referred to as the ‘hermeneutic circle’, which is driven by an “anticipation of completeness” (ibid.), which in principal could go on for ever – or, realistically, till the completion of the learning journey.

In practice this means that I have revised my judgements innumerable times in the process of trying to understand OA and has thereby constantly objectified my standpoint as far as possible, within my context.

The OA Thin Book Summit gave me valuable insight and it was actually not until this point that I came to realise the importance of the Artist Placement Group, although I at the time knew of them. This method of expanding one’s knowledge and understanding by a constant process of inclusion and exclusion can be called inductive; an approach that tries to develop a definition of OA from singular cases – and not the other way around.

Each time I learned about another case, the definition would have to stand the test and if

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it failed either the art project was not an OA project or the definition would have to be revised.

Adopting a term without precise content with the intention to investigate something presently ‘unknown’ may also be called a discursive approach to definition. I have made use of art history and - theory, organisational theory and social science to make a sounding board for the process of definition, which ultimately has revolved mainly around a few actual art projects. The discursive element has also been highly visible during my investigation, when discussing with artists and researchers the justification for such a title and its meaning.

For the sake of clarity, I should again stress that the objective of this thesis is not to make an authoritative account of something called OA; rather OA is the mere title of this thesis and its subject. If someone in the future chooses to use this term it should be done in a cautious manner and together with further incentives to define it. The art world already has plenty of terms to deal with.

One large shortcoming in my investigation has been the lack of time and opportunity to do a field study before, under and after a relevant OA project. This should also be part of any attempt to take the term OA further. It is notably the impact on organisations over time which in this respect has been hard to account for. Arguably I could have done more interviews with employees and managers of LK and Basta, but given the distance in time and the fact that the IOV memorandum was based on a substantial amount of interviews, I have reasoned that it would be a lost cause, especially because none of the projects were fully realised.

That long term involvement renders sustainable changes in the organisational environment more probable, is a contention that is supported by APG and also suggested

by Kent Hansen’s project, but in the treated projects it is not demonstrated adequately. In one discussion I had with a colleague, trying to explain the difference between an afternoon performance by an arts- based consultant and a thoroughbred long- term OA project, it made her think of how the attraction of a beautiful woman is gradually increased by the amount of clothes she takes off. Following this analogy, intercourse and pregnancy would be the desirable outcome of a successful OA project 80 . As such, the length of time- base and level of integration/exchange is by common sense deemed to be long/high.

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In fact ‘Sex with Strangers’ was a popular title suggestion for the Thin Book at the OA Summit.

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‘Organisational Art’ is a term owed to David Barry from the Creative Alliance at Learning Lab Denmark. I adopted it for this investigation at a time where it really had no specific content, other than art projects within the field of mainly Arts- and- Business that were somehow complicated and didn’t fit any label. I took over the term and made it the working title of my project and since then it survived many attempts on its life, so presumably it can’t be completely misplaced. Of course it faces all the inadequacies of any new term in the meeting with a multifarious and contingent reality. However, I chose to keep it both for practical reasons and simply because no suited alternatives ever surfaced while I was working on this project.

The reason why I find ‘Organisational Art’ suited as a title is of course that it has both ‘organisation’ and ‘art’ in it, and as such makes a very descriptive title. One might argue, and some have, that the title suggests a subordination of art in relation to organisation.

However, since ‘art’ is the noun and ‘organisational’ is the adjective, I read the title as designating art projects with organisational valeur, that is, art that somehow is preoccupied with organisational matters.

I prefer the use of ‘organisation’ rather than ‘business’, mainly to distinguish the field of inquiry from the sometimes ‘messy’ field of Arts- and- Business but also since ‘organisation’ has (etymological) emphasis on something ‘organic’ and ‘business’ indicates ‘money’ 81 . ‘Organisation’ covers private, public and non- profit organisations, as well as ‘community’ and ‘group’. In addition, the ‘practice’ of organising is familiar to both companies and artists and a coincidence in language, although the nature of what is being organised usually is something completely different.

Currently ‘organisation’ is being used to describe almost any event that contains more than one person in a given length of time. This expanded use, along with its etymological history, allows for any participant or spectator to see an OA project as a microcosmic reflection of society as a whole.

I have partly refrained from relating OA to recent trends and terms in the art world (with the exceptions such as a few well- defined terms, such as Contextual Art, Conceptual Art and Relational Aesthetics) mainly because most of them are only tentatively defined or too wide in their scope. However, for anyone who seeks further knowledge on OA related art projects I refer to the following three recent and thorough publications that all try to 81 Symptomatically, I have heard several OA artists speak of Arts- and- Business as something that is just about ‘money’.

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outline tendencies (interventions, corporate mimicry and dialogue) in contemporary art outside the conventional museum and gallery system: Remarks on Interventive Tendencies: Meetings Between Different Economies in Contemporary Art edited by Jakobsen, Larsen & Superflex (2001); Corporate Mentality by Aleksandra Mir (2003) and Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art by Grant H. Kester (2004).

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7 7_ABSTRACT This investigation is about Organisational Art (OA), which is a tentative title of an art form that works together with organisations (companies, institutions, communities, governments and NGOs) to produce art. This is most often done together with non- artist members of the organisation and on- site in their social context. OA is characterised as socially engaged, conceptual, discursive, site- specific and contextual. It is argued that OA seeks to advance both art and the organisation of human work/life by crossing the boundaries of the art institution – and thereby expanding it without suspending it.

The thesis takes its historical outset with ‘Artist Placement Group’ (formed in 1966), a British art group that developed an unprecedented framework for placing artists in organisational environments to circumvent the restraints of the art institution, ultimately to achieve influence on the decision- making bodies of society. Perhaps the most influential artist of the group is British artist John Latham, who is introduced at length as an example of how an otherwise uncompromising artistic practice was integrated in an organisational environment, where some level of compromise often is a condition for success. ‘The Incidental Person’ was the name of this new artist role that was able to transcend boundaries in organisations to create coherence and synergy across professions and hierarchies. This was partly possible due to the artists’ detachment from the praxis of life, which s/he aimed to surmount.

The investigation continues with a large case study of the Danish art project Industries of Vision (2001) by artist Kent Hansen (democratic innovation). It includes artist groups Superflex and N55 and manufacturing companies LK and Basta and aims to facilitate mutual learning through interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, consultants and staff.

In the framing of the project a space for art making is established by the artists (called ‘The Scope of Art’). Here a ‘working artefact’ serves as the pivotal point for joint creation of a practical utopia (‘heterotopia’) in the organisational context. The case study makes use of both art- and organisational theory.

The thesis concludes with an outline of a framework for OA that is derived from contemporary theory of mainly Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), Conceptual Art (Godfrey), Site- Specific Art (Kwon) and Contextual Art (Weibel/Østergaard). It also addresses similarities with the theory of the historical avant- garde art (Bürger), where

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the main similarity is OA’s aim to integrate art with the praxis of life in society, although OA’s methods are more mundane and appreciative than those of the historical avantgarde. It is argued that this integration cannot effectively happen only via the conventional institutional spaces of art, the museum and gallery. This is the main reason for engaging in organisational contexts, as well as the achievement of an eyelevel platform for exchange with society. This exchange is seen as an important democratic factor to facilitate a higher appreciation of creativity and understanding of how to cope with ambiguity in society.

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8 8_BIBLIOGRAPHY ANDERSEN, Christine Buhl & HANSEN, Kent (ed.)

2001 Visionsindustri, Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum and Informations Forlag, ISBN: 87- 7514- 061- 6 BISHOP, Claire 2004 ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in OCTOBER Magazine, Fall 2004, pp.

51- 79, MIT Press BOURRIAUD, Nicolas 1998 Relational Aesthetics, Les presses de reel, English version 2002 BOURRIAUD, Nicolas 2000 Postproduction – Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Lucas & Sternberg, New York, 2002 version, ISBN: 0- 9711193- 0- 9 BARNES, Anette 1998 ‘Definition of Art’, in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press BÜRGER, Peter 1984 Theory of the Avant- Garde, University of Minnesota, 1984, eighth printing, 1996, translated from Theorie der Avantgarde, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1974 BÜRGER, Peter 2002 ‘Avantgardisten efter avantgardernes endeligt: Joseph Beuys’ in Passepartout – skrifter for kunsthistorie, issue 19, on ‘[neo]Avantgarde’, translated from ‘Der Avantgardist nach dem Ende der Avantgarden: Joseph Beuys’ in Bürger: Das Altern der Moderne, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 2001 CRAVAGNA, Christian (Ed.) 2001 The Museum as Arena. Artists on Institutional Critique, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, ISBN: 3- 88375- 478- 1 DARSØ, Lotte 2004 Artful Creation: Learning- Tales of Arts- in- Business, Samfundslitteratur, ISBN: 87- 593- 1109- 6 DAVIES, Anthony & FORD, Simon 1999 ‘Art Futures’, in Art Monthly (223), February, pp. 9- 11, also available from www.infopool.org.uk/artfut.htm

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DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION, BST Sorø & Technological Institute, Worklife 2001 ‘Visionsindustri – notat om resultaterne af en kunstnerisk udviklingsproces på to virksomheder’ (Eng.: ‘Note on Industries of Vision’), July 2001. Online at www.demokratisk- innovation.dk/visionsindustrinotat.pdf (Danish only) FERRO- THOMSEN, Martin 2004 ‘Eksperimentet i Liseleje’ (Eng.: ‘The Experiment in Liseleje’) in the Danish Newspaper Politiken 12.12.2004. A translated version is available from www.lld.dk/oa FOUCAULT, Michel 1967 ‘Of other spaces’, lecture, first published in 1984. English online version is here: http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html FREUD, Sigmund 1907 ‘Der Dichter und das Phantasieren’, Gesamelte Werke VII, pp. 213- 223 GODFREY, Tony 1998 Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press Limited, London, ISBN: 0- 7148- 3388- 6 GRANT, David et al (ed.)

2004 The Sage Handbook of Organisational Discourse, Sage Publications Ltd. GROYS, Boris 1994 ‘Kunsten i demokratiets tid’, Dagbladet Information, 23 May 1994 HANSEN, Kent 2004 ‘Cross- entry to transaction - A theoretical outline of practical experience in relation to art in a business context’, conference paper presented at ‘Organising Authenticity: A new perspective on artists in residence’ at Bramstrup Knowledge Center, Denmark, 6 June 2004 HARDING, David 1995 ‘Memories and vagaries’, found at www.davidharding.org/article05/index.php, also published in Malcolm Dickson (ed.): Art with people, AN Publication, ISBN: 0- 907730- 23- x HARRIS, Craig (ed.)

1999 Art and innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist- in- Residence Program, MIT, ISBN: 0- 262- 08275- 6 JAKOBSEN, Henrik Plenge; LARSEN, Lars Bang & SUPERFLEX (ed.)

2001 Remarks on Interventive Tendencies – Meetings between different economies in contemporary art, Borgen, ISBN: 87- 21- 01624- 0 KESTER, Grant H. 2004 Conversation Pieces – Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, ISBN: 0- 520- 23839- 7

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KWON, Miwon 2002 One place after another – Site- specific art and locational identity, The MIT Press, ISBN: 0- 262- 11265- 5 LATHAM, John & STEVENI, Barbara 1980 ‘Art as social strategy in institutions and organisation – with the Artist Placement Group (APG) London’, text submitted to Zentrum für Kulturforschung in Bonn 1980. The six guidelines are also mentioned in full length in Steveni 2003 MALPAS, Jeff 2003 ‘Hans- Georg Gadamer’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), online at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/gadamer MEISIEK, Stefan 2004 ‘Walk with Me’ in Learning Lab Denmark Quarterly, issue 4/4, p.20, online at www.lld.dk/publications/quarterlyonline/2004- issue4/walkwithme/en MIR, Aleksandra 2003 Corporate Mentality, Lukas & Sternberg, New York, ISBN: 0- 9911193- 1- 7 NIELSEN, Julie Damgaard 2001 ‘Visionsindustri – Kunstnere og erhvervsliv‘, web- published 20 November 2001 at www.kopenhagen.dk/indeximage/visionsindustri.htm RESCHE, Max 2001 ‘About Primers, Hooks and Keyboards’, interview with Henrik Schrat, excerpt, 30 May 2001, www.henrikschrat.de SARTWELL, Crispin 1998 ‘Art World’, in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press SCHEIN, Edgar H. 1999 Process Consultation Revisited: Building the Helping Relationship, Addison Wesley Publishing Company SCHEIN, Edgar H. 2004 Organisational Culture and Leadership, Jossey- Bass, Third edition SCHRAT, Henrik 2000 ‘The appearance of fantasy’, in Mir 2003, p. 214- 219 STEVENI, Barbara 2003 ‘Repositioning the Artist in the Decision- Making Processes of Society’, found at www.interrupt- symposia.org/articles. Another version of this article is printed in focas – Forum on Contemporary Art & Society, 2002, ISSN: 02195054, pp. 172- 195

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VENTURA, Holger Kube 2001 ‘Punish No- one, Educate Many - Reflections on lack of taste, value images and art as a value changer’, August 2001, found at www.henrikschrat.de WALKER, John A. 1995 John Latham: The Incidental Person – His Art and Ideas, Middlesex University Press, 1995, ISBN: 1- 898253- 02- 1 WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig 1953 Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishers Inc., Massachusetts, second edition 1958, reprint 1999 YANAL, Robert J. 1998 ‘The Institutional Theory of Art’ in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed.

Michael Kelly, Oxford University Press, also available from http://homepage.mac.com/ryanal/Philosophy/Yanalcv.html ØSTERGAARD, Cecilie Høgsbro 1999 ‘Framing and Being Framed: Kunst, Kontekst og Tautologi’, in Kunstteori: Positioner i en nutidig kunstdebat, ed. Christensen, Michelsen & Wamberg, Borgen, first edition, second impression 2002, ISBN: 87- 21- 01127- 3

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9 9_APPENDIX Academic evaluation of Organisational Art: A Study of Art at Work in Organisations

By Anne Ring Petersen, PhD., senior lecturer, University of Copenhagen (Institute for Artand Culture, dept. of Modern Culture) and Per Seeberg Friis, external examiner.

Date: 17 May 2005.

This thesis is a study of the recent year's co- operation between artists and companies.

On the one hand, Martin Ferro- Thomsen (after this MFT) understands this growing phenomenon against a background of developments within the field of art: A decrease in the public art subsidy has made more artists look towards the private sector. At the same time some of the radical artistic strategies from the 1960's has encouraged artists to develop projects that are about co- operation and exchange and centred on process; which clearly differs from conventional forms of art in the public and corporate space: sculptural or visual decoration. Today an artistic project can take the form of a culturalaesthetic ‘service', which involves organising, co- operation, negotiation, research and idea development, and where the mere concretisation of the exchange and co- operation between the artists and the involved participants in a project is secondary to the process and the cognitions and the possible change in social behaviour, which it makes possible for the directly involved participants.

On the other hand, MFT understands the phenomenon in the light of the growing competition that companies are forced into as a result of globalisation. It has made it necessary for the organisations to profile themselves via branding and innovation.

Internally in the organisation it demands new thinking and the ability to attract creatively thinking employees – or to develop them by own hand. This is where a number of companies, at home and abroad, in the later years have seen possibilities in engaging artists to do a project, rather than hiring an advisory consultant; a project which involves both ordinary employees and managers in a mutual exploration of the organisation's problems and unexploited potential.

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These very dissimilar projects all have in common that they bring together artistic and corporate strategies and unite players from the art world and the business life around a project, which is based on co- operation and dialogue in the organisation, and – and this must be stressed – subsequently is presented and documented in an exhibition and thereby achieves a reflexive framing by an art institution. The thesis describes the project with the well- chosen umbrella term 'Organisational Art' (after this OA), a term which also serves the function to separate the field from the more compromising and instrumental field which in Great Britain is called Arts- and- Business and which entirely services the companies with inspiration (e.g. art- and dance workshops for the employees) where projects do not reflect back into the institutions of art where they can nourish the continuous critique of the notion of art and artist.

The thesis lays the main emphasis on the newest art, but also involves the 1960's where a crucial part of the foundation for today's OA was laid out; above all John Latham from the British pioneer group within the field, Artist Placement Group. From here MFT moves on to a very well- chosen case: the Danish 'Industries of Vision' (1998- 2001) by the artist Kent Hansen's art organisation 'democratic innovation'. The project brought together the artist groups Superflex and N55 and the companies LK and Basta, and was documented at Vestsjællands Kunstmuseum (En: West- Zealand Art Museum) afterwards.

Following this case MFT develops a theory of OA. In absolute compliance with the double nature of OA, he first draws upon the organisational theory and points out the remarkable similarities between Edgar H. Schein's description of the working process in the so- called process consultation and the working methods that the OA artists use.

Secondly, and via contemporary art theories, he pins down the aspect of art in OA: Nicolas Bourriaud's theory of relational aesthetics, Peter Bürger's avant- garde theory, the ideas underlying contextual art and, finally, Miwon Kwon's distinctions between various types of site- specificity and her reflections about how the artists today have changed their role and often work as mediators and project- coordinators.

The thesis must be characterised as a pioneering work which meets the scientific standards of thorough research and accuracy. As one of the first, the thesis maps a newly developed field, about which only extremely sparse literature has been available until now. The text is well set- out and characterised by both a breadth of view and a thorough

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level of detail knowledge of the present material. It is written in an accessible language, so the thesis also holds great qualities as a communication piece.

MFT has worked himself within the environment for several years, among other things as one of the originators of a large conference in 2004. This has enabled him to gather information from central players and obtain access to important sources and communicate them to a larger circle of people, to whom they otherwise would be unattainable. The personal involvement marks the thesis in the form of a strong engagement, which renders the text dynamic because the involvement has stimulated the critical- discursive judgement, rather than restricting it. The methodical reflections, especially in regard to Gadamer's hermeneutics, could however have been more elaborate and it does not seem appropriate that they are placed in the end as an appendix after the conclusion.

As a foundational research project, the thesis reaches a high level. It is not a mere registration of completed projects, although is does manage to mention a large number of artists within the field. If anything, it gives the field a theoretical superstructure. On the basis of thorough and well- informed analyses, above all of Latham and Industries of Vision and supported by carefully selected elements from organisational theory and art theory, MFT reaches the articulation of an independent and original theory of which traits define OA as an artistic field or genre. He also describes with great precision and fine distinction which expectations one could have to this art form, at which points OA has taken on traits from organisational culture and at which points the phenomenon differs.

Furthermore, he describes the difference between OA and related but more traditional artistic phenomena, such as contextual art which also works critical- analytical with the work's context. With this, MFT advances the understanding of the mixed phenomenon OA a great deal, and this is done in a way which equally might enlighten readers from both the art world and the corporate sector.

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