O

ART RGANISATIONAL
Martin Ferr
Ferro-
o-Thomsen
-Thomsen

A Study of Art at Work in Organisations

PUBLICATION
(

ferro.dk UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN APRIL|2005

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

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

Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary,

Random House 1996, manipulation

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.

1
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.

2
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

3
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) one-
person 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.

4
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

5
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- and-
Business’, 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),

6
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

7
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.

8
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.

9
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.

10
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

3
According to a private e- mail from Patrick Mathieu (11.2.2005), who is a consultant working with Local
Access.
4
Cf. Barnes 1998.

11
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 non-
objective 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
Yanal mentions the five most influential attacks, but concludes that the theory has not been refuted.
6
See Sartwell 1998, where he defines ‘art world’ similarly to Danto/Dickie.

12
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 .

7
See Cravagna 2001 for more reading on this subject.
8
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.

13
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- in-
residence programme can be found in Art and innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist- in-
Residence 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.

14
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- and-
Business 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.

11
The evaluation is accessible online at www.lld.dk/consortia/thecreativealliance/files/nyxpdf.
12
For a thorough mapping of the Arts- and- Business field, please refer to Darsø 2004.

15
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

16
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 decision-
making 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).

17
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 ‘trigger-
time’.
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.

18
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).

20
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.

20
A strategy they actually adopted with success. Another trait from the business world, which they
appropriated, is an advisory committee, including non- artist members.

21
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):

Allied Polymer Group Artist Placement Group

Capital value is… Money Accumulated experience
Success is measured… Financially By ‘units of attention’ 21 and the
general level of awareness induced
The ultimate goal is… Profit for stakeholders To increase the quality of life and
level of meaning
The product is... Useful goods ‘Useless’ art works - generates new
insights, ideas, imagery
The time- base is… Short- term policies Long- term aims
Seeks to satisfy… Specific markets The needs of society as a whole
Individuals are… Fixed within hierarchical Independent beings and capable of
organisational structures operating at any level within
organisations
The use of available Be maximised Be maximised
resources should…
Economy is defined in… Financial terms 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.

21
Latham’s expression for an artwork, which he sees as something that attracts attention.

22
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).

23
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.”

24
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 decision-
making. 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).

25
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

26
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.

27
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 re-
designating 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.

28
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.

29
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.

30
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 present-
and- 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.

31
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.

32
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:

33
“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

34
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.

35
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 TV-
station or a biogas production unit. Several of their projects carry on within self-
sustainable 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.
30
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.

36
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.
32
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’.

37
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 2001:3-
4): (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

34
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.

38
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 problem-
solving 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 self-

governing 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

39
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 (2001-
2002) – 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 ‘spirit-
35
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.

40
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 TV-
station 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.

41
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 ill-
will 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.

42
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.

43
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).

44
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 semi-
stereotypical 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.

45
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.

46
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

47
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).

48
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.

49
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.

50
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).

51
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.

48
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).

52
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*).

53
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).

54
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.
51
“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”.

55
‘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 top-
management 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).

56
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.

57
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

54
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).

58
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.

59
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

60
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).

61
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

62
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

63
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

60
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.

64
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).

67
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).

63
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.

68
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

69
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 .

66
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*).

70
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.
70
“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.

71
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.

72
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 anti-
art 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.

73
“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,

74
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

75
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 re-
emerged 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

76
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).

77
Peter Weibel (ed.): Kontext Kunst, DuMont Buchverlag, Köln, 1994, ISBN: 3- 7701- 3327- 7.

77
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 avant-
garde project, which has relevance for our investigation 78 :

78
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.

78
“[…] 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

79
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 time-
honoured 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

81
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, practice-
oriented, 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 non-
artists 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).
79
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.

84
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

85
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.

80
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’.

87
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 avant-
garde. 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: 0219-
5054, 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 Art-
and 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 cultural-
aesthetic ‘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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