177: Organization & Imagination - What Happens When Actvist Artists Take Root in the System

Bill Cleveland: 00:00:01

Hey there. What happens when artists are embedded inside the systems that run the world?

You know, hospitals, railroads, steel mills, shipping companies, government ministries. You get the picture. From the center for the Study of Art and Community.

This is Art is Change, a chronicle of art and social change, where activists, artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

ts who, beginning in the late: 1960

In this episode, we're going to hear about how artists embedded themselves inside mega corporations and government agencies, often producing confusion, resistance, revelation, and occasionally profound organizational insight. And why artists may function best not at the edges of society, but deep inside the system shaping public life.

How attention, metaphor and observation can help institutions become more self aware and better run. And why imagination inside organizations is often disruptive, inconvenient, and deeply necessary. Part 1 Once Upon a Time so here's the thing.

By the late: 1960

Because artists, she believed, weren't ornaments for society. They were a form of intelligence that society had stranded offshore.

Here she is in: 2017

Barbara Stevini: 00:03:21

Artist Placement Group came out of this notion.

When I got lost in the factories on the outer circular road, most of the industries were shut down, but I went to collect some material and I found myself in these factories and I thought, why aren't we here? And that was my eureka moment. I had this idea that there was a new role for artists.

What would we have to do if we were in these dirty contexts of commerce, industry and government?

Bill Cleveland: 00:03:52

She and fellow artist John Latham, along with a rotating cast of accomplices and fellow travelers, founded something called Apart Artists Placement Groups, which sounds, frankly, like another government agency or a minor progressive rock band. But APG had a radical proposition.

What if you placed artists inside systems not to adorn them or entertain them or brand them, but to complicate them.

Not to make pretty murals in the lobby, not to run a workshop for stressed out middle managers, but to function almost like conceptual smugglers, incidental persons, as Latham called them. People licensed to notice what everyone else had agreed not to see.

Making her pitch, Barbara learned quickly that if you use the word artist, people heard something ornamental, something optional, something that could be added later if there was time and a budget. So she changed the language. She talked about research. She talked about long term thinking.

She framed the artist as someone whose job was not to confirm what already worked, but to notice what the system itself could not see from the inside. She made a strategic move that proved essential.

She proposed temporary placements, bounded, reversible and low risk enough to lower the stakes for the host institution, but long enough to allow something real to happen. Most importantly and most audaciously, she insisted on parity. The artist would be paid at a professional level. The artist would have access.

The artist would not be tucked away. Without that, the whole idea would collapse into symbolism.

Part 2 Not here to solve problems as APG was finding its feet, Tony Benn, the government Minister of Technology and later Secretary of State for Industry, was an avid supporter of the artist placement effort.

ation with Barbara Stavini in: 2008

Barbara Stevini: 00:06:35

You referred, I recall, to an artist as an engineer in concept, which moved artists out of the studio into these so called dirty contexts of commerce and such. What directions can we hope to influence?

Tony Benn: 00:06:52

Well, I remember you came with this proposal that artists should work in industry and in departments, and I was excited by that for a number of reasons. First of all, because you pointed out that an artist gave a totally different perception of what was going on.

And this not only gave an artist a new idea of what was going on, but also gave the bureaucratic hierarchy an idea that there was something more about what they were doing than they themselves realized. If you look back over history, the real revolutionaries are the engineers.

If you do that in a mechanistic way, you obliterate the human relations and the mechanics, fundamental conceptions which an artist brings to it. An artist sees it in a wholly different way from the way it's seen by people who do it.

And yet the people who do it, when they see how the artist sees it, get excited by the nature of their work. All the really interesting things in life are where two disciplines interact.

Bill Cleveland: 00:07:52

Now, this may sound a bit pie in the Sky. But in the end, these people actually did this.

An artist was embedded with British European Airways filming cloud formations over Gibraltar across Europe. Think about that for a second. A corporation says, yes, come aboard our planes and film clouds.

No deliverable dashboard, no branding strategy, no innovation metrics, just the possibility that paying attention differently might matter. And maybe the strangest thing was, sometimes it did.

Not always in neat, measurable ways, but in ways organizations later realized had altered how they saw themselves and how they managed themselves. Which is harder to quantify and probably more important.

Another APG artist, Ian Breakwell, embedded with British Rail and made a film called the Journey.

Another artist entered British Steel and, instead of studying blast furnaces or productivity charts, spent time interviewing apprentices, which sounds almost embarrassingly simple until you realize large institutions often know astonishingly little about the interior lives of the people keeping them alive. The APG artists kept surfacing this kind of thing.

Not through management consulting, not through policy reports, but through creative aesthetic attention.

In the shipping placement with ocean fleets, George Levantes observed the strange psychological weather aboard tankers and cargo ships, the isolation, ritual, exhaustion, the floating social order of people trapped together at sea for long stretches of time. On an Esso oil tanker, artist Andrew Dipper did not produce a conventional artwork. No, he lived the life of the ship. He observed. He asked questions.

One of those questions was disarmingly practical. The crew's bar happened to be located directly above the engine room.

Given this, in an emergency, the people responsible for the ship's operation might not be in a position to respond effectively. It was the kind of observation that no one inside the system had raised.

Other placements uncovered similar organizational blind spots that no one inside the system had learned to notice anymore.

Patterns of communication, human fatigue, the emotional consequences of bureaucratic design, the difference between official procedures and lived reality. Sometimes the outcome was practical, sometimes philosophical, sometimes just unsettling.

But again and again, organizations discovered that artists were capable of revealing the hidden culture of a system back to itself. Barbara Stevini understood something many institutions still don't. Real imagination is inconvenient, bothersome, even disturbing.

It slows things down. It asks annoying questions. It notices human leakage around the edges of systems designed for efficiency.

And APG didn't stop at railroads and ships and steel mills. John Latham embedded himself in a hospital intensive care unit.

And this is where APG starts to move beyond quirky art history and into something much deeper.

Because once you place an artist inside an ICU or a rail system or a government department, people begin behaving differently, simply because Somebody is paying attention to the dimensions of life that the institution itself has edited. Relationships, time, fear, routine, memory, how authority actually moves through a room.

The artists were not there to solve problems in the conventional sense. They were there to increase consciousness inside the system. And oddly enough, systems that become more conscious of themselves often function better.

But beneath the eccentricity, there was something deadly serious. APG believed the artist outsider status was not a weakness, it was an asset.

They believed that artists could bring alternative ways of seeing and thinking into organizations.

And honestly, if you look around right now, collapsing trust, bureaucracies that can't imagine their way out of a catastrophe, systems optimized to death. It's hard not to think that they were onto something, because this wasn't really about art.

It was about perception, which of course is often what art is about. About whether institutions are capable of self reflection.

favorite APG moments came in: 1971

And that description doesn't begin to capture the weirdness the artist essentially moved into the gallery. Images and other documentation from industrial artists placements were placed among ongoing interviews with executives and government officials.

The gallery became less an exhibition than a temporary embassy between incompatible worlds. Art people, industrialists, civil servants, everybody trying to understand what exactly was happening. And then, inevitably came the backlash.

In: 1972

Instead of retreating back into the art world, she negotiated what became known as the Whitehall Memorandum, which facilitated formal support for artist placements within UK government institutions. Think about the audacity of that woman.

Artists in the early: 1970

y. Here is Barbara Stavini in: 2008

Barbara Stevini: 00:16:05

Engagement Principles for an effective form of association of artists with organizational structures

1. that context is half the work

2. that the function of the medium of art is determined not so much by the factual or concrete object as by the process and levels of attention to which the work aims

3. that the proper contribution of art to society is art that society is starved of an important ingredient if creative individuals are kept out of the working parts of governments, organizations and institutions

4. that the status of the artists within organizations must necessarily be in line with other professional persons engaged within the organisation

5. that the status of the artists within organisations is independent, bound by invitation rather than instructions from authority within the organisation and

6. that for optimum results, the position of the artists within an organization should, in the first stages at least, facilitate a form of cross referencing between Departments

7. that the artist brief remains open. Negotiations are contingent upon both participants having this understanding and a mutual confidence.

This requires intelligence and strength in art and a reciprocal response from administrations.

I add, in the context of the greed economics of the day, that the artists and host organizations question with rigour their motivation for engagement.

Tony Benn's questions he lists when addressing people in institutions with power apply equally here to artists when considering engaging and working with a potential hosting organisation. What power have you got? Where did you get it from, and in whose interest do you use it, and to whom are you accountable, and how do we get rid of it?

Bill Cleveland: 00:17:51

By the mid-: 1970

Most people saw toxic leftovers from coal mining. Latham saw giant inadvertent earth sculptures.

He proposed preserving them as artworks and marking them with beacons, which sounds kind of ridiculous until you realize we now routinely preserve industrial ruins as cultural memory.

Again and again, APG was wandering into the future wearing muddy boots, and this is the part of the story that matters now, because if you strip away the archival photos and the beautiful British art school eccentricity, what APG and later Organization and Imagination were really arguing was that artists belong inside the systems shaping public life, not downstream, not after the fact, not as decorators of policy decisions already made inside at the table, complicating the conversation before the concrete dries.

rations in Minneapolis in the: 1990

Into poet David White being invited into major corporations not to write slogans but to ask destabilizing human questions about meaning, fear, work, identity and attention. Which is very close to what Barbara Stevini was doing all along. Different language, different clothes, same essential maneuver.

Insert somebody trained in metaphor into systems dominated by instrumental logic.

Artists inside public health, artists in climate science collaboratives, artists inside prisons, transit systems, neighborhood development, corporations, immigration, work, conflict transformation.

Language changes, the funding structures change, the PowerPoint decks become more sophisticated, but the underlying proposition remains gloriously unstable. What happens when somebody trained in metaphor enters a system trained in structure and control?

ganization and Imagination in: 1989

A partnership, attention, a negotiation. Because organizations without imagination become very stiff, and imagination without organization just evaporates. The tension is still with us.

And maybe that's the real takeaway from all this. Not that artists should become management consultants with, you know, more attractive scarves.

Not that every institution suddenly needs an Artist in residence program stapled onto the annual report, but that Barbara Stavini and APG were wrestling with a question that feels even more urgent now than it did 50 years ago. Can large systems still learn?

Because everywhere we look in the 21st century, governments, media systems, universities, public health agencies, technology, platforms, democracy itself, we're watching institutions optimized for efficiency, scale, speed, extraction and control. But many of them have lost the capacity for reflection. They process information endlessly while struggling to manifest meaning.

And that's where these disruptive old experiments suddenly stop feeling historical. They start feeling diagnostic, remedial, maybe even restorative. There's a lot to ponder from all this. For me, there are three things I'm taking away.

First, artists are not valuable because they make institutions look creative or more shiny. They're valuable because they help institutions perceive themselves more honestly.

APG understood that metaphor, observation, listening and attention are not decorative. They're forms of civic intelligence. And in an era flooded with data and starved for wisdom, that matters enormously.

Second, imagination inside institutions will almost always feel bothersome, inconvenient. You know, it slows things down. It complicates certainty.

It asks questions and exposes contradictions most organizations would prefer not to address or keep hidden and yet without that friction, systems calcify. They lose permeability, they lose empathy. Eventually they lose their legitimacy.

The question is not whether institutions can afford imagination, it's whether they can survive without it. And finally, the challenge now is much larger than the one APG faced.

Because today, artists entering systems are not just confronting bureaucracy, they're confronting surveillance economies, algorithmic governance, political polarization, collapsing trust, ecological instability, and institutions increasingly pressured to become become performative, defensive, and risk averse. That's quite a combo. Which means the old APG question still hangs in the air.

Can somebody trained in metaphor still enter systems trained in control and remain human?

Barbara Stavini believed the answer was yes, but only if artists remain slightly unruly, slightly difficult, capable of seeing what the rest of the room has agreed not to see. Maybe that's not peripheral to democracy in the 21st century. Maybe it's absolutely, unequivocally essential. Thank the gods for the quirky and unruly.

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Artist Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscapes spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson.

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