Art at the boundaries

What uses do organizations have for art in their ordinary course of business? For cultural organizations like an art museum potential uses are clearly various, but what about for an educational organization? An industrial enterprise? A political entity?

The following three examples taken from around China highlight concerted efforts by different types of organizations to use art in pursuit of their core goals. They differ widely, so to compare them it is helpful to consider something that all social organizations, and indeed all living things have in common: boundaries.

At the basic level of a living cell, the boundary is a membrane which contains its parts and also allows for exchange with the environment. Fritjof Capra, an American scientist and early architect of systems theory, highlights this active role:

“Membranes are not only a universal characteristic of life, but also display the same type of structure throughout the living world…A membrane is very different from a cell wall. Whereas cell walls are rigid structures, membranes are always active, opening and closing continually, keeping certain substances out and letting others in.” (Quoted from his 2002 book The Hidden Connections)

Capra is discussing biological life, but systems thinking always invites comparisons between different levels of reality. Social organizations can also be said to be “alive” at least partly according to the degree to which their boundaries both delimit and perform exchange. In this case boundaries are composed of people interfacing with the outside: hiring personnel, collaborating with other organizations, exporting resources, discovering information etc. The challenge for an organization is to assure that these exchanges become continually more dynamic rather than more rigid by degrees.

Expanding fields of perception

The common strategy invoked for this is “networking”. If an enterprise seeks more diverse partnerships for example, paying dues to send colleagues to an industry conference may be justified. The problem is that taking advantage of networks requires prior knowledge of them. A more basic answer therefore is “perceiving”. Seemingly insignificant things overheard, tidbits of information, minor sensations and even subconscious disturbances constitute the kind of knowledge that makes networking possible.

There are many things organizations do to help sustain active perceiving on their boundaries. Workplace training, disseminating industry news, and of course creating environments that enable conversations among peers are some examples. However, these experiences tend to hone a narrow band of perceiving on familiar topics deemed pertinent. Art experiences in contrast have a special capacity to open new pathways of perception, exposing hitherto unsuspected kinds of information, memories, relationships and other connections.

Three examples

Take the case of Beijing’s Dandelion Middle School (蒲公英中学), where faculty and students for four years (2006-2009) infused their regular curriculum with an art program whose ostensible goal was to beautify the ramshackle campus. All outdoor surfaces of the school were potential spaces for transformation. An outside artist guided a program that included faculty discussions, classroom work, scavenging for materials in neighborhoods and markets, library and online research on subjects and topics, enlisting volunteers and outside participants, and manual creation of murals, mosaics and artworks in other media through organized effort as well as spontaneous activity. Zheng Hong, the school principal, summed up the experience: “This project has opened the mind and heart of teachers, students and myself at the Dandelion School.”

The Siemens Arts Program, which included several projects at Siemens facilities around China from 2000-2006, is an interesting case of an industrial enterprise making a concerted use of art. For the program, professional artists were asked to conceptualize and implement projects that engaged company employees on site. The company website explains, “employees are invited to perceive their work environment not only in terms of business, but also to experience its emotional, social and creative dimensions.” An example was a project guided by the artist Cao Fei, who asked employees at an Osram fluorescent lighting manufacturing facility to respond to the question “what are you doing here?” The project ran through the winter of 2005-2006, and resulted in a series of lighting installations created by employees exhibited in the dormitory area of the factory to the public, and a video which has since been screened at several international art venues including the Sydney Biennale.

Nations are the most iconic kind of social institutions, and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo is a great example of a national-level art experience coordinated to stimulate more dynamic perceiving at the boundary (i.e. the boundary between who or what is foreign and domestic). Twenty years into its progressive program of “opening up” China took the audacious step of bidding for the Expo, subsequently spending billions on site preparation and operations, relocating thousands of former residents, and mobilizing a vast network of personnel. For this, the nation got an event whose impact was and continues to be deep and wide, extending to the many officials for whom it was a decade-long experience, to the program organizers, staff and contractors for the 192 country exhibits, to the participants of the 20,000 separate cultural events, to the 80,000 volunteers and 70 million visitors, not to mention the masses of people who learned about or were affected by the expo second-hand. Without getting into a discussion of curatorial strengths, it is plain that the expo’s so-called “spiritual legacy” is potentially vast, i.e. the memories and associations it will continue to be producing in the minds of people. Commenting on this legacy Xu Bo, a former top minister at the Expo Bureau reflected last year: “I think that time will tell that respecting Chinese society’s understanding of the world, the Shanghai Expo was and will continue to be of inestimable importance.”

Open questions

These examples highlight several questions, including the crucial one: are the resources expended justified? Quantitative reviews of costs, revenues, number of participants, etc. are useful, as are qualitative assessments using surveys and other research tools, but ultimately every arts undertaking involves risk. Managing this risk is a matter of understanding what outcome is sufficient, allocating appropriate resources and choosing qualified partners.

To help understand what constitutes a sufficient outcome one might consider: just what sort of ‘perceptions’ might result that wouldn’t otherwise? One can only speculate, but designing successful programs is partly about getting to the heart of what an institution wants to be.

Lastly, the historic nature of these examples draws attention to the question: what is the longevity of these kinds of arts experiences? Certainly, some experiences remain brighter in our minds than others, and this longevity is part of the measure of how “good” is the project. On the other hand, all arts experiences gradually recede. Developing institutional cultures that implicitly value arts experiences provides the best assurance that active perceiving at the boundary is continually renewed. This need not entail staging the kinds of intensive interventions mentioned here. Highlighting local cultural activities in official communications, designating a key individual as “arts liaison”, hosting or participating in small creativity workshops — all these can play important roles in keeping an organization’s boundaries vital and awake.