Call for Papers

Does art placate? Satisfy the human sensorium? Inspire well-being in organizations? Or does it frustrate and agitate? How can we think these questions when contemporary art has left the gallery and its associated institutional and organizational infrastructure? Land art has been long practiced from at least the work of Robert Smithson and James Turrell, but we now recognize street graffiti, improvised urban theatre, sound walks and even cloud curating amongst other performances as spaces and times in which art can be practiced. On the other hand, art seems to have taken flight from space and time in recent years with non-fungible tokens, algorithms, midjourney image generators, and other AI led art practices.
 
Corporate business and parodic consultancy practices also blur the line between art and non-art, creating happenings that inhere in the everyday, seen but unseen, silently working away perhaps on our perceptions of reality. Staged car accidents, explosions, street repairs … a shoal of fish. Art seems to be everywhere and anything. But what is its organization and what contribution does it or can it make to organization? Can existing organization theory accommodate these new art practices? If the avant-garde is the mainstream waiting to happen, what new practices in organization might we expect from these new art practices? What lessons, even, for management and entrepreneurship (Guillet de Monthoux, 2023; Hjorth & Holt, 2016)?
 
In recent years art has also become associated with political protest and resistance – from Act Up to Extinction Rebellions’ Red Rebel Brigade (Demos, 2023; Marchart, 2019; McKee, 2017). From resistance to the arts of government, art has become legal trials and mock governments. Assembly artist Jonas Staal collaborates with legal scholars, for example, to stage performative trials to test the intergenerational climate justice embedded in national legal systems. The art collective Superflex repurposes abstract sculpture to redevelop desolate underwater infrastructure in co-creation with fish and sea life. Forensic Architecture enlists artistic techniques of modelling to recreate crime scenes that visualize the politicization of justice as a contribution to specific instances of political protests. The Inland collective seeks to establish rural economies that care for environmental restoration and a community’s long-term socio-economic wellbeing. Irena Haiduk’s ‘blind, non-aligned oral corporation’ Yugoexport updates ideas and practices of the self-managed factories and experimental clubs of the former Yugoslavia in order to explore more benign relations of labour, loyalty and solidarity. And 2022’s version of documenta in Kassel (Germany), broadly considered the most important contemporary art event, was curated by the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa and dedicated to arts practices from around the world and how they self-organize non-capitalist forms of cultural spaces and community practices (Beyes & Holm, 2023).
 
In short, art’s vaunted creativity is turned towards organization-creation. In organization studies, this development has been called ‘art’s organizational turn’ (Holm, 2019; Holm & Beyes, 2022; Holt, 2023); in art theory, ‘organizational aesthetics’ (Lütticken, 2023), or ‘organizational art’ (Staal, 2019).
 
This sub-theme is inspired by this remarkable development and seeks to bring together scholars of organization with artists and art theorists in order to take stock of such ‘organizational art’, to map its histories, practices, theorems and organizational forms, and to reflect on its implications for the study of organization. In these and many other examples, it is not just the art world that is at stake, but social systems at large. We want to invite EGOSians to relate processes of creation, creative action and organizational creativity, and specifically the organizational politics of creativity, back to the sphere of art. We seek to investigate art’s manifold engagements with questions of organization, organizing, organizationality and organization-creation, and to stage an encounter with contemporary art’s ‘organizational turn’ and organization studies’ long-standing interest in matters aesthetical, performative and political. From practices of participation to community engagement, from collectively run art spaces to activist and ecological movements, from alternative corporate forms to political parties, from organized networks to decentral autonomous organizations, artists are experimenting with forms and modes of organizing. Organizational concerns have become part of the work of art itself, less an object to be consumed than a process of exploration, with an aspiration towards broader societal reorganization and collective well-being.
 
Papers might explore, but are not limited to:

• Organizational art’s organizational forms, processes, practices and economies (from institutional, para-institutional to autonomous organizing; see Lütticken, 2023); forms of artistic co-creation, collaboration, and participation (e.g., Bishop, 2012; Kester, 2011; Wesseling & Cramer, 2022).

• Theories and understandings of organization as developed and appropriated in the art world.

• Organizational art’s politics of aesthetics (e.g., Beyes, 2010; Rancière, 2004; You, 2023).

• Organizational art’s practices and ethics of care and well-being (e.g., Groys, 2022; Millner & Coombs, 2021).

• Organizational art’s spatial, affective and atmospheric registers (e.g., Michels & Steyaert, 2017; O’Doherty, 2008).

• The role of materiality, infrastructure and technology in and for organizational art (e.g.. Cnossen & Bencherki, 2023; Gurionova, 2011; Lovink & Rossiter, 2018).

• Historical precursors of organizational art, e.g., from the Bauhaus to institutional critique and net culture (e.g. Bradley & Esche, 2007; Raunig & Ray, 2009).

• Contemporary art’s ‘chronopolitics’ and its temporalities of organizing (e.g., Demos, 2023; Rancière, 2011).

• Art’s performative and aesthetic methods as ways of studying and performing organization (e.g., Beyes & Steyaert, 2011; O’Doherty, 2013; O’Rourke, 2013).

References

• Beyes, T. (2010): “Uncontained: The art and politics of reconfiguring urban space.” Culture and Organization, 16(3), 229-246.

• Beyes, T., & Holm, D. V. (2023): “Contemporary Art as Collective Organizing (and its Contradictions).” Organization Studies, 44 (9), 1551-1554.
• Beyes, T., & Steyaert, C. (2011): “The ontological politics of artistic interventions: Implications for performing action research.” Action Research, 9(1), 100-115.
• Bishop, C. (2012): Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
• Bradley, W., & Esche, C. (eds.) (2007): Art and Social Change: A critical reader. London: Tate Publishing.
• Cnossen, B., & Bencherki, N. (2023): Artful Legitimacy: The Role of Materiality in Practices of Legitimation. Organization Studies, 44, 919-938.
• Demos, T.J. (2023): Radical Futurisms. London: Sternberg Press.
• Groys, B. (2022): Philosophy of Care. London: Verso.
• Guillet de Monthoux, P. (2023): Curating Capitalism. London: Sternberg Press.
• Gurionova, O. (2011): Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet. London: Routledge.
• Hjorth, D., & Holt, R. (2016): “It’s entrepreneurship, not enterprise: Ai Weiwei as entrepreneur.” Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 5, 50-54.
• Holm, D.V. (2019): “Between ‘Freedom as Autonomy’ and ‘Freedom as Potentiality.” Conjunctions, 6(1), 1-19.
• Holm, D. V., & Beyes, T. (2022): “How art becomes organization.” Organization Studies, 43(2), 227–245.
• Holt, R. (2023): “Why Art Matters for Organization Studies.” Organization Studies, 44(9), 1541-1545.
• Kester, G. (2011): The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Lovink, G., & Rossiter, N. (2018): Organization after Social Media. Colchester: Minor Compositions.
• Lütticken, S. (2023): Organizational Aesthetics: On Certain Practices and Genealogies. October (183), 17–49.
• Marchart, O. (2019): Conflictual Aesthetics. London: Sternberg Press.
• McKee, Y. (2017): Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition. New York, NY: Verso.
• Michels, C., & Steyaert, C. (2017): “By accident and by design: Composing affective atmospheres in an urban art intervention.” Organization, 24(1), 79-104.
• Millner, J., & Coombs, G. (eds.). (2021): Care Ethics and Art. London: Routledge.
• O’Doherty, D. P. (2008): “The Blur Sensation: Shadows of the Future.” Organization, 15(4), 535-561.
• O’Doherty, D. P. (2013): “Off-Road and Spaced-Out in the City: Organization and the Interruption of Topology.” Space and Culture, 16(2), 211-228.
• O'Rourke, K. (2013): Walking and mapping: Artists as cartographers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Rancière, J. (2004): The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London, UK: Continuum.
• Rancière, J. (2011): “In what time do we live?” In: M. Kuzma, P. Lafuente, & P. Osborne (eds.): The State of Things. London: Koenig Books, 11-37.
• Raunig, G., & Ray, G. (eds.) (2009): Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique. London, UK: Mayfly.
• Staal, J. (2019): Propaganda Art in the 21^st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Wesseling, J., & Cramer, F. (eds.) (2022): Making matters – a vocabulary for the collective arts. Amsterdam: Valiz.
• You, Mi (2022): What Politics? What Aesthetics? Reflections on documenta fifteen. E-flux journal # 131.
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