Abstract
How Art Matters
It was visiting Rachel Whiteread’s House – 193 Grove Road, London E3 – that showed me how art matters. I had arrived by No.8 bus, alighting at the junction with Roman Road, and walking southwards, House was easy to spot, surrounded by circuiting people, walking widdershins or deasil, as though round a stone circle. They couldn’t go in, it was solid. Whiteread had filled the insides with locrete (a white pigmented, fast-setting concrete), then demolished the outer brickwork, to reveal a cast, an absent exterior gave way to a present interior. At least for a while. Some weeks after my visit the void was also demolished (January 1994), at the instigation of Counsellor Eric Flounders, chair of Bow Neighbourhood Council, who had written in letters to The Independent newspaper (November 1993) that House was ‘experimental nonsense’, a ‘monstrosity’ and ‘utter rubbish’. House was never intended to last, but this ending was premature. The pillories were relentless, yet so was praise, and both sustained its public resonance. Whiteread’s idea to ‘mummify the air of a room’ was a gesture, and like all good gestures it was neither self-sufficient as a movement-in-itself, nor derived from and warranted by an external end; its meaning came from agitating and then enduring the many inquiries into its existence, pithily embodied in the first piece of graffiti: ‘Wot for?’, followed a few days later by: ‘Why not?’.
John Davies, Rachel Whiteread’s House 3b, London, 1993 Artwork: © Rachel Whiteread. All rights reserved, DACS 2022. Photo: © John Davies.
Though attributed to Whiteread, House emerged from an assembly of ways of making and speaking, from prevailing protocols of intelligibility, collective and tertiary memory, and frames of visibility by which it, the artist, the commissioners (Artangel), the critics and journalists, and we the ambulating public who visited, were being organized (Rancière, 2007, pp. 73–74). It belonged to this multiplicity of contexts, yet without being contained by them, it hovered just out of reach, refusing the organization through which it, nevertheless, was given form.
By concerning itself with interiors, homeliness, presence, commerce, public space and identity House offers provocative ways of thinking about organization through art, ways that can be distilled into three aspects: art creates organizational forms; art organizes meaning by avoiding knowledge; and, art, organized as an art world, always seeks its own dissolution. I take each in turn.
Creating Organizational Form
Art uses organization as its palette and product, indeed of late explicitly so, prompting claims that art has taken an organizational turn (Bishop, 2012; Holm & Beyes, 2022). Instead of marble or watercolour, artists are using relations, and instead of making sculptures or paintings they imagine and create plans, visions, communities and distribution systems. As Holm and Beyes (2022) elaborate, by experimenting with alternative ways of relating (severing from networks, projects for common living, prototyping and hacking) and values (transparency, sufficiency, generosity, care) artists attempt to re-calibrate human/non-human relations. House was one such attempt: a domestic interior becomes a public one, a gathering space, though Whiteread suggested she had little sense of how people might gather. This uncertainty is not untypical.
As a general comment on art, Rancière (2007, p. 121) suggested that artists, though mired in both physis (productions) and aesthesis (economies of affect), can neither manage nor explain them. In attending intensely to process, art lacks any programmatic knowledge of outcomes. The organizational turn in art has accentuated this disciplined commitment to process above outcome. First by producing organizational structures that only loosely govern possible uses, and second, by challenging the idea of an individual creator. The artist is no longer the sole creator arranging mute materials and a passive audience in service to an idea. With organization being acknowledged as both material and subject, the artistic genesis, genius and fruition become collective phenomena, whether through creating experiences of surprise and illumination, or by incurring irritation, opposition and even destruction.
So what if organization studies also prioritized process above outcome? It is, after all, not to abandon outputs, indeed artworks like House show that experimenting with organizational form can be, ipso facto, immensely productive. House allowed the shape and structure of ideas to emerge from methodological moves and empirical experiments in placing which then found written form in commentaries and stories setting off further thinking. In contrast, to be guided by clear research questions, fixed literatures and established methods, is little more than pinning tails on a donkey, without a blindfold. Moreover, again like House, what if organization studies experimented a little more with the form of relations, congregations and communities through which it is organized? Writing as collectives, working in transdisciplinary teams through different media, morphing conferences into public exhibitions. Some of this already goes on, but can it become more explicit, and more the norm?
Art, Classification and Definition
A second aspect of thinking of organization through art is its urge to clarify without definitively explaining, stringing one perspective after another into, perhaps, meaningful patterns, without resolution. House is a good example. It suggested how houses had become assets upon whose foundations privatization fast became a sky-scraping social and political as well as economic dogma; it made a public spectacle of domestic intimacy by distilling and intensifying a private space; it refused the sanctuary and protection of a gallery and instead preferred to toy with its own legitimating sources; it organized itself. In offering these perspectives House did not resort to definitive knowledge claims, preferring instead to upset its own revelations and moderate its certainties by continuing to invite curiosity, continuing, even in its absence, to broach absurdity and uncertainty as readily as it did agreement and settlement; it was inherently open, generously giving of itself as a scene of dissensus (Rancière, 2007, p. 43). The more we the audience puzzled, the more it gave.
Art is especially good at offering perspective on organizational phenomena. Alongside Whiteread come many other artists considering organizational form: Jenny Saville and Marlene Dumas, for example, study the fluidity of identity and overlooked voices, Mona Hatoum studies domesticity and technology, Tania Bruguera studies power, Martin Kippenberger studied publicity (including of himself), Francis Alÿs studies topological borderlines, Theaster Gates studies neighbourhoods. Where art differs from organization studies is in attempting to understand organization before categories appear too certain of themselves. Here all art is, in some ontological way, taking organization as its subject because all art is provoked by the experience of being categorized.
Of course, artists are organized by categories and the analytic interpretations these entail. As Paul Klee remarked wryly, even the immediate perception of a patch of colour has a threefold distinction of hue, brightness and contour, which in turn invoke further categories of figuration, line and tone. This is natural: the human makes grammatical marks, ‘Hence orientation! Hence analysis!’ (Klee, 1973, p. 281). Mark making using the clarifying divisions and dualisms enabled by language is relished by artists: fantasy/reality (Cao Fei’s Utopia), frenzy/calm (Francis Bacon’s popes), on/off (Martin Creed’s work 227), hard/soft (Louise Bourgeois’ steel spider/Maman). Art refuses, however, to assume these categories are in any way categorical. In this spirit of refusal, House took hard organizational categories (inside/outside, private/public, absence/presence, domestic/civic, mute/vocal, unique/multiple, original/imitation, creative/routine) and made them shimmer, and so embodying the uneasy intimacy between meaning and organization. Rather than making knowledge claims, art (re)arranges their fabric, examining how they have been twisted, folded and faded by having stood too long in the light of organizationally fixed truths.
Might, then, organization studies exhibit similar critique, becoming aware of how categories organize the appearance of the phenomena it explains? Take understanding ‘grand challenges’ as an illustration. Who has identified these, and why, seem to be questions buried under a headlong rush to deliver headline-catching solutions, with little concern for the epistemological and anthropocentric assumptions riddling the attempt. Politics and ethics are acknowledged in the explanatory quest, yet only insofar as they already themselves organized to organize the acceptability of symptoms, prognoses and treatments, and only insofar as they attract legitimating publicity. Are we allowed to be suspicious of grand challenges? Aren’t grand challenges more an extension of Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden than they are attempts to radically re-think organization, and aren’t small challenges more beautiful, and are academics really at their best as activists and knights errant? Isn’t the thoughtlessness with which organization studies takes up the grand challenges a veritable exhibition of what Taussig (2015, p. 6) calls agribusiness writing: ‘It assumes the need for explanations, when what is at stake is why one is required, and what is explanation, and how do you do one.’ These are critical questions art might help us ask, would we let it.
Organizing the Art World
It is in conjuring critique that the third aspect of thinking organization through art dawns: the necessity that art contain and nurture its own dissolution. If art is defined by its refusal to be defined, it claims itself immune to organizational forces of which it is necessarily also a part. Hence the target of artistic organizational experiments becomes the art world itself: the global networks of personalities, works, artist stables, freeports, gallery brands, festivals, magazines, celebrity curators, personal investment advisors, online auctions, and museum agreements that coalesce in an ever-renewing spectacle of wealth. The art world makes the artist the subject of their own, thoroughbred distinction. They are organized through deliberately managed workflows and internationally coordinated publicity machinery dedicated to securing financial returns. Some (Agnes Martin) remain coolly indifferent, some (Jeff Koons) excel at being organized, some (Mike Kelley) survive by maintaining a self-loathing of the ‘self in a vitrine’, some (Barbara Kruger, Banksy, Damian Hirst, PAK) ironize the system into which they are thrown, making it the subject, many (like Whiteread) make the ‘long march’ from within, regardless. Each, in their own way, disturbs and derails the art world, but only to be re-appropriated by its voracious organizational capacity (an image of House, for example, appeared as branding on a Beck’s beer bottle, the brewer having been a corporate sponsor of new British art) requiring yet further efforts at negating their own production.
The rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is a recent case of the ambivalence art has for the art world. The tech-talk of autonomy from gallery systems, of direct producer–consumer relations, of democratic art being sanctioned in the (dis)embodied signature of individual genius, has been subsumed by an art world machinery only too keen to exploit this new market by espousing such values, continuing to make sure that aesthetic reputation and seriousness remain tithed to market valuation. In response, the job for art is to fragment, oppose, to rubbish or transform NFT’s, begin again and so keep fuelling the machinery of capital (commercial, symbolic, cultural) transfer. Art makes its organization explicit by continually negating it. Does organization studies do the same?
In this spirit, the puzzle for organization studies is to consider its own organization by becoming conscious of the markets for which it produces: the markets of bibliometric citation, rankings, practitioner relevance, guru status and notoriety, social media circulation, advice and consultancy. Perhaps organization studies can derail its own markets, while remaining alive to how these markets always re-emerge? Open access publishing, for example, once touted as an alternative to the stranglehold of global publishers, might, in an echo of NFTs, be becoming absorbed into publishers’ and bibliometric business models through the language of autonomy and community control.
What grounds these three aspects of art’s intimacy with organization is its delight in inventiveness that refuses to be cowed and owned by agreements, interests and allegiances. Art, said W. H. Auden, talking about poetry, makes nothing happen, which is the source of its freedom: rather than being answerable to something, art deals with the potential of nothing. It does not revolt, it considers. Sous les pavés, la plage, perhaps. But the beach is just more organization. Maybe it is better to keep to pavements, and build forms there, which hint at real possibilities, and which then hint at something yet more: nothing.
John Davies, No House 2c, London, 1994 (Works by Rachel Whiteread) Artwork © Rachel Whiteread. All rights reserved, DACS 2023. Photo: © John Davies.