Foreword by Martin Ferro-Thomsen
Martin Ferro-Thomsen, MA, is an editor, mediator and writer. Learn more about ‘The Organisational Art Thin Book Summit’ at www.ferro.dk/academic/oa-summit.htm.

One day in November 2004, twenty artists, experts and researchers arrived at a remote farmstead, far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Here, near the foggy coastal town of Liseleje, Denmark, with its decrepit autumnal forests, they were to put together a book about themselves – in just three days. That was the task at hand with ‘The Organisational Art Thin Book Summit’ (organised by the research institute Learning Lab Denmark and artist Kent Hansen) which later was to generate substantial national media coverage.

For the unbiased reader it should be noted that ‘Organisational Art’ (OA), a term that was used tentatively at the summit, now has been introduced and adapted in several contexts. It seems to have found a life of its own. Not necessarily because it is a beautiful expression or even an accurate one – but rather because the phenomenon it describes is happening all over. OA is an art form that works together with non-artists in organisations (companies, institutions, communities, governments and NGOs), mainly to produce art – a far cry from the notorious ‘Arts & Business’ where ‘inspiration’ is traded for ‘cash’.

OA is about establishing art as a legitimate and even mundane resource and discipline among disciplines. OA seeks to advance both art and the organisation of human work/life by crossing the boundaries of the art institution. Basically, it’s all about thinking – and acting – outside the box.

And the ‘Thin Book’ itself? It was of course far from completed in the three all too short days. But an extremely detailed matrix and loads of thoughts and ideas were harvested from the minds of twenty creative people with very diverse backgrounds; such as from visual and conceptual art, philosophy, entrepreneurship, art criticism, organisational studies, practice oriented research, consultancy – and of course magic.

As one of the ‘summiteers’ aladin was asked to make a retrospective comment on the summit; more than a year after it ended. With his and several other contributions, the ‘Thin Book’ is growing fatter. As with all experiments there is no telling when it will be ripe for publication – but it is likely to be published under the Creative Commons license this year. Here is aladin – after the words.

After Words and Forward with Organisational Art!
aladin

Here are some ruminations more than a year on, need I mention bounded and qualified by my prejudices. I use the terms ‘art/s’ and ‘culture’ interchangeably.

ABOUT ORGANISATIONAL ART

One of my own prejudices is that I believe culture and art can be society’s truest mirror for (at its ‘best’) they can be instinctual, direct, ‘honest’ and have integrity of purpose. Not to say that there isn’t also ‘prominent’ art and culture which can sometimes blot the landscape and screw it up for the rest of us. By ‘the rest of us’ I mean everybody – as in my scheme of things we are all cultural practitioners and artists.

About ‘organisation’ I don’t feel any strong distinction between ‘it’/‘they’ and the rest of us. Not to be overly pedantic but at Liseleje my impression was anyway that we were defining the term quite widely. Sure, government departments and multinational companies are more readily identifiable as ‘organisations’ but artists and others increasingly adopt the cloak or methodology of ‘organisation’ for their purposes. Arguably, of course, the summit itself was a model of how artists can and do function as corporate bodies - and by the way, the ‘organisational practitioners’ there were somewhat in the minority. I am in the nomad, rainbow category myself as I am still traversing all available terrains. I would add that some of my colleagues postulated that my period in government in charge of developing London’s cultural strategy was a grand act of Organisational Art (OA) contained in the one corpus so to speak as I remained a practising artist for the whole of that period (2000-4).

At Liseleje we represented the tip of the iceberg in terms of the terrain ‘organisational art’. We each brought varied but equivalent knowledge and practical experience of the processes representing the nexus between art/culture and organisation. However, the greatest registry of OA transactions and possibilities existed outside our colloquium. In inaugurating a typology and inventory of practices and in our modest mission to illuminate and delineate, we are to some degree merely among the early ones. We fully expect this particular OA cohort (for there must be others?!) to be replenished as it joins in with and is joined by others and we care that this body of knowledge will grow and that the methodologies therein will likewise develop.

‘Organisation’, globally facing accountability pressures, increasingly finds that a formal engagement with cultural/arts practice under the rubric of ‘better governance’ or ‘social responsibility’ is the palatable option within an overall strategy to assuage detractors. Likewise, those from cultural/arts practice find this route a productive one for smuggling in alternative freight and the injection of other discourses, so OA in this respect can function somewhat like a Trojan Horse; also of course for a sector which is notoriously underfunded the pressure to survive is another impetus for these alliances which create a profile and resourcing for making art and culture.

However, OA has scope far beyond that of providing a public convenience/utility as described above. I was recently a speaker at an Arts and Leadership conclave at Copenhagen Business School where I had the pleasure of listening to the Lego/Novo Nordisk magnate Mads Øvlisen, who preceded me. Mads elaborated on Novo Nordisk’s history of bringing in arts and culture to the workplace; a major feature of this was the volume, quality and variety of artworks which were present in different spaces and also the presence of artists in residence. One of the things which struck me though was the separation between arts and organisation inherent in the approach – at least explicitly there seemed no possibility of swap over or merging of roles. Indeed, my frustration was that the Lego personnel were not enabled to become (‘the’) artists and vice versa – a straight switch.

The merging and swapping of roles are opportunities in waiting, inherent in any context where apparently unlike elements, processes and parties may be even temporarily cohabiting. OA can play a powerful role in actualising all this through its traffic of ‘ideas’ and ‘ownerships’.

OA is by any yardstick an intimate process; the very proximity of the parties to each other, up close and personal, obliges a relationship of relative exchange and trust. The degree of transparency and interweave I would suggest is amenable to becoming deeper. It’s not just that we are in a situation of accelerating democratisation and an impetus for enfranchisement across the continents – complex interdependence has created forced awakenings about the best way to manage societal processes. We are increasingly finding convergence and overlap in stakeholdings, and it is not that fanciful to see a future for Organisation and Arts where the stakeholders are the same. As neighbours and partners we share the planet with its resources real and virtual – sticking to ways where interests are compartmentalised is a charter for extinction or at the very least a short career. I think I know where my ‘tendencies’ lie – and OA creates a space where mutuality becomes visible and coherent and ultimately makes us all advocates for conjoined approaches.

Mind you – the sheer diversity of OA historically and prospectively mirrors the myriad paths, presences and practices elsewhere, in the wider world (notice I don’t say ‘real’ world!). OA is not an argument for blurring difference; not at all – it’s about creating better methodologies for differences to co-exist and new learnings to emerge from the brew.

But wait a minute – not to throw the baby out with the bath-water! Organisational Art is a vibrant space for production which can endlessly progress, adapt and be modified by or be derived from the whole panoply of contexts be they social, cultural, economic or whatever; definitely ‘indigenous’. So this Thin Book can permit itself to offer a smidgeon of recognition to that small confluence of disparate elements in Liseleje who are persisting in the right cause.

LOOKING BACK AT THE SUMMIT AND IN FRONT

We international summiteers had been inspired by Learning Lab Denamrk to drop all and fly into Copenhagen, whence a journey to a secluded location, near to a churning, wintry-grey ocean with the consistency and allure of concrete mixed with ice (at least it seemed that way to me). In between bouts of pool, gourmandise and conference fever we ostensibly grappled with the new discourses pertaining to organisational art.

Compressed into a few days, the intercourse between heterodoxies and eschatologies was never likely to easily yield mutually intelligible typologies, methodologies and so on. As it was I was continually plagued by a small voice in my head exclaiming ‘Ethnocentrism! Ethnocentrism!’ …

Our accelerated learning delivered some riches – a working process about iterative, open-ended, ongoing exchanges and the guts of a ‘Thin Book’ which could function as an imperfect, partial repository of our mappings and discoveries. We had agreed to disagree and so there was no pressure to create forced marriages between conflicting paradigms; I wonder if this manifests itself in the foregoing - the assemblage of chapters, sections and spaces.

Dialogues linger on and have outlasted the summit itself; my colleagues and myself remain fixed in our purpose, driven by our sensibilities to gouge out routes, intersections and landings, the sometimes incidental loci for further discussions. Some of us are avowed makers and catalysts of culture, others perhaps are practitioners of the arts of organisation; most I guess would be regarded as hybrids (not that ‘choice’ seems a possibility some times).

Perhaps predictably we were exercised in attempting to come up with definitions of ‘art’ and ‘organisation’; as regarding the term ‘organisational art’ (OA) – I felt acutely the shadow of Occidentalism. There were in any case MANY absent from the room; apart from practitioners from the so-called ‘developing world’, there were the putative legions whose existence is never amenable to signification and whose presence is impervious to critical theoretical radars. But our mandate as cartographers, free-climbing mountaineers and unconventioneers was as much to SHARE (through the ‘Thin Book’) our experiences with humility - particularly with those ‘outside of’ our ken and our visible territories - as it was to treat the results of our surveying expedition as a WORK IN PROGRESS and a process to which we were inviting ‘all the others’ to join us in taking ownership.

In actual fact, the year since the event has been rich with (international) activity from the Liseleje OA band – at the time of writing for example Barbara Steveni in the U.K. has been catapulting the subject into the centre ground (once again).

We look ahead to continuing to extend our respective practices and wish the ‘Thin Book’ a fecund passage not least because we cannot always afford to be solo travellers! I am investing the publication with some of my magic powers ... there is a hidden trail; will you find it?

February 2006

From the forthcoming ‘Organisational Art’ ed. Barry, Hansen and Ferro-Thomsen and by kind permission.

aladin works across practices and his body of work includes the interdisciplinary arts, magic, marketing, media and communications - and strategy consultancy through his vehicle alkhemi.

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