1. society

Artist-in-residence work as détournement and constructed situations:
Theorizing art interventions in organizations
Alexander Styhre^ & Jonas Fröberg*
^Dept. of Business Administration
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
*Artistic Director
Teater Spira,
Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
Arts management and arts intervention projects have received some scholarly attention in
organization studies recently. Aesthetics, creativity, and art is frequently advanced as the key
to a competitive industry in the future and artists and their competencies are consequently
addressed as an untapped resource in the contemporary economy. The lack of robust theories
capable of explaining how artists and art can contribute to industry and public sector
organizations remain a concern in this field of research. This paper introduces the concepts of
détournement and constructed situations, part of the methodology developed by the activist
group Situationist International in the 1958-1972 period to counteract what they referred to as
the society of the spectacle. These two concepts are used to examine an artists-in-residence
project in Swedish manufacturing industry and it is suggested artists-in-residence are creating
a liminal space promoting “creative abrasion” that can lead to useful outcomes. The paper
thus both contributes with a theoretical model and an illustration of how it can be applied to
an actual case.
Keywords: Arts management, Artists-in-residence, Situationist International, Détournement,
Constructed situations
Introduction
Arts management and the uses of art and artists in managerial activities has been a source of
increased interests (Adler, 2011; Barry and Miesiek, 2010; Macnaughton, 2007; Monthoux,
Gustafsson, and Sjöstrand, 2007; Adler, 2006; Monthoux, 2004; García, 2004; Gibson, 2002;
Chong, 2000). In contemporary economy, dominated by aesthetics, creativity, and style, the
arts and artistic competencies play a more central role in creating and constituting economic
value (Townley, Beech, and McKinlay, 2009; Postrel, 2003; Howkins, 2002; Caves, 2000).
Artists-in-residence projects is for instance one such arena where regular organizations and
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workplaces hosts an artist that engage in some kind of collaborative work together with the
organization’s members (Styhre and Eriksson, 2008; Harris, 1995). While artists-in-residence
and other examples of artistic interventions have been organized for a longer period of time,
such collaborations are still under-theorized in organization studies. While artists-in-residence
and other examples of artistic interventions have been organized for a longer period of time,
such collaborations are still undertheorized in organization studies. The artists are brought
into organizations to open you for new ways of thinking and interacting and they are therefore
not part of the regular standard operation procedures in the workplace. But neither do they
conduct conventional art work. The artists-in-residence are in what van Gennep (1960) and
eventually Turner (1969) calls a “liminal position,” betwixt and between the arts worlds and
the world of industry and public sector organization. This site of liminality is where genuine
entrepreneurial activities take place, in a space being created to actively escape taken for
granted beliefs regarding how the work is to be organized and accomplished. The
entrepreneurial spaces opened up by artists-in-residence still needs to be anchored in a
theoretical integrated model to make sense, and ultimately to be justified by both the
community of artists and industry representatives. This paper introduces the work methods
and terminology of the Situational International movement being active in the period of 1958
to 1972 when it was dissolved. The Situational International was a loosely coupled network of
artists, activists, and theorists that jointly wanted to counteract what Guy Debord, the
movements foremost theorists and leader called the “society of the spectacle” (Debord, 1977),
a mass-consumption society wherein humans are increasingly taking the role of passive
spectators rather than active agents. The activists of the Situational International developed
methodologies and terms for how to intervene into the everyday life and the urban settings to
make people aware of their life conditions. Terms such as détournement, dérive, and
constructed situations here served as different methods—the “design thinking and skills” (that
Adler, 2011: 214 calls for)—to accomplish new creative ways of thinking to call attention to
the passivity imposed on members of society in the contemporary era. These methods and
terms are helpful in understanding the liminal spaces developed by artists-in-residence and are
helpful in theorizing what artists in fact are capable of accomplishing. Especially the two key
terms of détournement and constructed situations are useful in theorizing the collaborative
work between artists and industry representatives.
The remainder of this paper is structured accordingly: First, the Situationist
International and their program to serve as an active force vis-à-vis the society of the
2
spectacle is discussed. Second, the artists-in-residence program being in place in Sweden
since 2002 is introduced. Third, a particular case of an artists-in-residence project will be
discussed to demonstrate how détournement and constructed situations can be used in actual
collaborative work in industry. Finally, some practical and theoretical implications are
addressed.
The Situational International and its program
The Situationist International was funded in 1958 and dissolved in 1972. The group included
artists, activists, and theorists that all aimed at counteracting the increased passivity of the
post-World War II period, the era of mass-consumption and mass-communication. The
situationists wanted to return at the French social and Marxist theorists Henri Lefebvre speaks
of as “everyday life” (see also de Certeau, 1984), defined as “whatever remains after one has
eliminated all specialized activities” (Debord, 1981: 69). The quotidian and mundane
elements of life was thus targeted by the situationists from the beginning; life can only change
from the bottom up when individuals gain the insight that they may change their lives
precisely where they stand. The situationists’ various activities, campaigns, and events were
grounded in its intellectual leader Guy Debord’s (1977) theorizing about what was referred to
as the society of the spectacle. In Debord’s (1981: 73) view, classical capitalism was
concerned not to waste time that could be devoted to “production, accumulation, saving”—
“time equals money,” as Benjamin Franklin once famously put it. At what Debord speaks of
as “an unexpected turn of events in modern capitalism,” consumption needs to be increased;
the supply needs its demands, and consequently there is a strong emphasis on consumption
and entertainment as principal constitutive elements of the society. Debord’s view of the
society of the spectacle is filled with grandiose terms and formulations that easily obscure the
underlying message, that in the late-modern capitalist regime of production, consumption and
spectacle are institutionalized as social pillars that renders the members of society passive
recipients of messages and images. “In Debord’s scathing critique and analysis, modern
consumer society is seen as the accumulation of images and the domination of images in
modern life,” Barnard (2004. 106) says. He continues:
People have become divorced from authentic experience, are passive spectators of
their own lives and no longer communicate or participate in the society of the
spectacle . . . for Debord, the spectacle has thoroughly penetrated everyday life.
The illusory and the real, the fragmented and unified experience of human life,
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are experienced as something separated, distanced and passive. (Barnard, 2004.
107)
In this new life situation, where humans are increasingly alienated from their everyday life
world and its mundane and quotidian practices, structured around the cycle of production and
consumption, the situationists play an active role to increase awareness and critical thinking.
The most well-known term in the situationists’ vocabulary is perhaps détournement, a term
defined as “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (Knabb, 1981: 55).
“The French word détournement means diversion, deflection, turning aside from the normal
course or purpose (often with an illicit connotation),” Knabb (1981: 371) adds. Perhaps the
term is after all defined best in the secondary literature on the situationists. Kaufman (2006:
35) says that détournement is a form of “diversion, misappropriation, seduction,” influenced
by the French writer Lautréamont, a forerunner to the surrealist movement and the author of
Les chants de Maldodor, one of the most curious books in the modern literature. Barnard
(2004. 107) argues that détournement is “the ironic ‘rearrangement of pre-existing elements.’”
Wark (2009: 145-146) speaks of détournement as “a diversion, a detour, a seduction, a
plagiarism, an appropriation, even perhaps a hijacking” when images and messages are placed
in a new settings or context. Détournement thus means that one take a message and place it in
a new situation wherein the message is overturned and acquire new meanings. The more
recent phenomenon of Ad-busters, using commercial images and messages to turn them
against themselves, is a fine example of what the situationists called détournement. Nike’s
slogan Just do it is translated into Just don’t by the Ad-buster activists, and the original
meaning is inverted (http://adbusters.deviantart.com/art/Nike-just-don-t-19571136). As Wark
(2009: 145-146) makes clear, détournement is not just a matter of appropriating an images but
“to appropriate the power of appropriation itself.” Wark explains:
Détournement as a critical practice is the opposite of quotation, of an authority
invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now a
fragment torn away from its conditions of production, from its own movement,
and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the
precise option that it constituted within that framework. (Wark, 2009: 146)
Seen in this view, détournement is, Wark (2009: 151) suggests, a non-ideological practice to
the extent that it “restores collective social authority to meaning-making.” Meaning is not
only instituted “from the top” in order to support and legitimize social beliefs but meaning it
what is collectively accomplished and maintained. Nike’s slogan aimed at capturing the
energy and effort of athletes, all of its alleged vitalism and force, is displaced by the blunt
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refusal of such qualities, a form of resistance displayed by Herman Melville’s Bartleby the
scrivener silently undermining any instructions by refusing to do what he is being told to do
(see e.g., Doel, 2009: 1057). Consequently Wark (2009) suggests that détournement is the
exact opposite of what Foucault (1972) speaks of as statements or enunciations, the utterance
based on the authority of a discourse (say, political science or psychoanalysis), but serves as a
form of “anti-statement”: For Situationists, “the very act of un-authorised appropriation is the
truth content of détournement,” Wark (2009: 151) summarizes.
The second key concept in the situationist vocabulary being of interest when
understanding arts interventions and artist-in-residence programs is situations. Being perhaps
less widely recognized as the term détournement, situations are the elementary constitutive
activities of everyday life in the contemporary society. In one of the editorials in the
situationists’ journal, the concept of situation is brought to attention: “Since man is product of
situations he goes though, it is essential to create human situations. Since the individual is
defined by his situation, he wants the power to create situations worthy of his desires”
(Editorial, 1964, cited in Barnard, 2004: 112). Barnard (2004) continues: “As such, situations
provide a model for new forms of working and living. They engage people in participatory
acts of creativity that are not governed by external demands. They become arenas of selfdirected activity that fulfill individual and collective needs.” The situationists aimed at
providing “constructed situations” wherein art and culture are used to “invent new passions”
outside of the production-consumption matrix of the society of the spectacle. This places art
and culture as a central social resource to be actively used in de-familiarizing everyday life.
“Instead of merely translating and representing life, art and culture are used to extent life’s
boundaries in order to create new situations of creative resistance to the spectacle,” Barnard
(2004. 112) says.
However, Barnard (2004. 112) warns, constructed situations is a
complicated practice as they may also confuse groups and communities. At the same time, art
and culture is what have the capacity to entice new perspectives on everyday life. The
situationists thus introduced two powerful methodologies and concepts: The practices of
détournement, the overturning of inherited and assumed meanings of images and phrases, and
constructed situations, the creation of sites and encounters where people are invited to
actively question their life situation or perceive it differently. The theoretical work articulated
by primarily Guy Debord is written in a traditional critical theory discourse anchored in
Marxists thinking, but when being complemented by active uses of art and aesthetic, the
situationists were capable of providing a more comprehensive tool-box for social critique.
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Naomi Klein’s (2000) best-selling critique of the consumer society and her discussions of
e.g., the Ad-buster moment from the early years of the new millennium needs to be
understand against the work of situationists three to four decades earlier. The success of
“street art” such as the British artists Banksy, actively undermining the images of e.g., British
police officers by placing them in unexpected and humorous situations, is also evidence of the
relevance of arts interventions and art’s capacity to actively criticize and de-familiarize the
everyday life.
Artists-in-residence programs are, contrary to e.g., the work of Ad-busters or
Banksy, not emerging as an underground activity but are rather designed to create meaningful
and mutually rewarding collaborations across the art world-industry divide. Artists-inresidence programs are therefore not inherently subversive but are on the contrary serving as
shared grounds where industry representatives and artists can open up for new ways of
thinking and collaborating. To bring in the terminology of the situationists into the study of
artists-in-residence projects thus means that terms that were originally formulated in an
antagonist setting is now being used in a more value-neutral sense of the term wherein
détournement and constructed situations are tools in the hand of the artists collaborating with
professional and occupational groups. Such an appropriation of critical terms may be
cumbersome in some quarters but if we assume that the value of a term lies in its use
(Wittgenstein, 1953), in its performativity (Pickering, 1993), the transfer or transposition
(Friese and Clarke, 2012) of these two situationist terms to a new setting testifies to their
relevance of meaning today in the late-modern society. In the following, the case of an artistin-residence program taking place in a multinational manufacturing firm in the vehicles
industry will demonstrate how the terms détournement and constructed situations can be used
to understand when artists intervene into the everyday work life of the operators. Even though
the artist-in-residence in our case by and large perceive his project as a failure based on what
he regards as lack of support from top management—a key prerequisite for any artist-inresidence project—and the skeptical attitude shown by the operators both during the project
and after its termination, many operators were willing to participate in the writing project
initiated by the artists. While the process was complicated, some very fruitful collaborations
emerged in the project.
Artists-in-residence in the vehicle industry
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Background
Since 2002, the organization Skådebanan, later renamed TIlLLT in 2009, has organized
artists-in-residence projects in collaboration between industry and public sector organizations
and practicing artists. During more than a decade, more than 80 such projects have been
organized but only once has a project been terminated because of difficulties to collaborate
between the artists and members of the participating organization. The project runs for eight
months and includes a number of phases, and the basic idea is that an artist is using his or her
competence and experiences to organize a joint project of relevance for the organization. The
organization pays a fee (approximately 30,000 Euros) for the project whereof the highest cost
is the salary for the artist but also some coordination costs are paid to TILLT. TILLT has the
responsibility for negotiating and selling artists-in-residence projects and conducts the
“match-making” between artists and organizations; being able to understand the needs,
demands, and expectations and what artists that may have the capacity to respond to such
demands is a key competence hosted by TILLT. More recently, TILLT and similar
organizations working in e.g., Denmark, the Netherlands, and Spain have been given much
attention from the European commission as being part of the strengthening of Europe as an
economic zone with great innovative capacities and as being at the forefront of creative
thinking. TILLT is also part of various international research projects in the field of arts
management.
The setting
An actor and playwright, John Bergström (a pseudonym) was invited to participate in an
artists-in-residence project in a vehicle manufacturing company in 2006. John decided that he
wanted to engage the operators in a writing project that preferably should lead to the
publication of a book where the operators would tell their story about the nature of everyday
work life on the factory floor. Sweden, for many years governed by the Social Democrats, has
a long tradition where employeers, unions, the worker community, and academic researchers
collaborates, and the ambition to “give voice” to people working in the manufacturing
industry must therefore be understood against this idiosyncratic Swedish history. In the
beginning of the new millennium, manufacturing industry was no longer treated with same
degree of veneration and many neoliberal media pundits and economists spoke of the need to
revitalize Swedish industry and the inevitable off-shoring and outsourcing of manufacturing
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industry work to the Baltic States, China, and South East Asia. In 2006, the Social Democrats
lost the election and a right-wing government led by the conservative party took office. In
many ways, despite its undisputed importance for the Swedish economy and its welfare
systems, manufacturing, concentrated in the Western part of the Sweden was gradually
perceived as an antiquated form of production, associated with the first decades of the PostWorld War II period. Soon enough, popular media implied, Sweden will just rely on creative
industries based on aesthetic and creative competence and know-how. In both popular media
and in political circles, manufacturing industry was no longer at the center of attention. When
the Swedish automotive company SAAB (owned by the Dutch company Spyker Cars) went
bankrupt after a long and painful process in the fall of 2011, the right-wing government did
little to prevent this outcome and time and again ministers declared that the decline of
Swedish automotive industry was an inevitable shift from allegedly “old manufacturing
paradigm” to “new creative industries.” In contrast, when a multinational pharmaceutical
company decided to close down much of its research work in one of its sites in the Stockholm
region a few months later, various members of the cabinet were eager to make alarmist
declarations regarding the declining competitiveness of Swedish society.
John started to work in factory for four weeks to understand what the everyday
work was like. The operators were friendly and helped John master at least a few elementary
work processes. After the apprentice period, the artistic activities were supposed to start. John
wanted to offer an alternative view of the operators’ work life and invited a group of operators
to participate in a writing project. Being experienced from using writing as a method for selfexpression from previous projects among e.g., adolescents, John hoped to be able to engage
the operators in the project. Such aspirations quickly come to an end when one of the
operators stood up during one of the first meetings and publically and with great contempt
declared that he would not be part of “writing a damn book!” In general, many of the
operators were either hostile towards John’s project or somewhat skeptic but he nevertheless
managed to recruit a small group of operators that was intrigued by his ideas. This small
group wrote texts and commented on them, went to the theatre, and engaged in conversation
regarding the nature of work. During the process, John started to receive small notes and
poems jotted down by some of the operators that had previously declined to participate but
now wanted to be part of the process “undercover.” Many of these texts testified to the ordeal
of everyday work life in the factory, the ennui of monotonous and repetitive work, the loss of
faith in top management and their concerns for the operators work situation, and the endemic
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and tedious sexism encountered by some of the women on everyday basis. The texts were
filled with melancholia and a sense of belonging to a social community not being represented
by anyone in the political system or in media and public discussions. Just as John initially
proposed, there was a great need for some of the operators to be given the opportunity to
express themselves. Over time and as the project proceeded, John collected such texts.
Eventually the project was terminated and John perceived it basically as a
failure as the company representative hosting the artist-in-residence project did not really
collaborate as with him planned and because many of the operators refused to participate.
After the project was terminated and reported to the company, one of the operators agreed to
read some of the texts as part of a theatrical performance organized by John and his theatre
company. In 2008 and 2009 John and his newfound partner, a former operator, toured Sweden
and received positive reviews in the press. In 2011, a book was published with the title
“We’re not writing no damn book!” (Vi skall inte skriva någon jävla bok! in Swedish),
entitled after the hostile declaration of one of the operators a few years earlier. One may
perhaps say that John lost the war but won the peace. The manufacturing company has
however been quite distanced from his work all the way through and even refused to
contribute to the funding of the publishing of the book.
Examining the artist-in-residence project
John’s project in collaboration with the recalcitrant operators in the manufacturing company
contains some of the elements introduced by the situationists. First, the concept of
détournment means to overturn a certain concept, image, or practice in order to reveal its
underlying or assumed ideologies. Nike’s insistence on “just doing it,” i.e., to be an
enterprising and successful agent in the contemporary era, preferably equipped by shoes or
garments provided by Nike, it overturned and rendered as a staunch refusal to both consume
and to endorse such ideologies of entrepreneurialism and competitiveness. Writing has always
been the privilege of authorities and influential groups (Hoffman, 1989; Dallery, 1989;
Goody, 1986; Ong, 1986; Innes, [1950]1972). People working with writing as their principal
activity can, in sharp contrast with the noisy shop floors in manufacturing industry, demand
silent and peaceful workplaces. “Silence is the prerogative of the elite. They live in silent
surroundings and work in quiet atmospheres,” Kaulingfreks (2010: 45) notes (see also
Bijsterveld, 2008: 38). The written text, pace Plato, is more credible than the spoken word and
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the reason for tyrants and dictators burning books is that the written word is inscribed sub
species aeternis—once in print, always in print. Few practices are so closely associated with
the middle classes and the intellectuals as writing; writing is a privilege, a way of life, a form
of subjectification (Deleuze, 1997; Blanchot, 1982) that can never be fully displaced by the
spoken word. When John introduced the idea of writing about the everyday work life
experiences on the shop floor, it is a form of détournement of the bourgeoisie and scholarly
privilege of “writing the self” but it also created a significant amount of stress among some of
the operators. Having spend significant periods of their working life in manufacturing work,
many of them were perhaps not ready to fully apprehend the idea of becoming writers. The
détournement of writing the self as a general possibility rather than a specific privilege
eventually proved to be only partially successful as many of the operators’ refused to
participate and only a handful endorsed the projects in public.
Second, the artists-in-residence project served to provide constructed situation
wherein the operators but also top management and the artist himself were encountering their
own ambitions, assumptions, worries, and fears, in short where what Alfred Schutz (1962:
231) referred to as “the social world as taken for granted” is put into question. Individual
operators in the manufacturing company may have been writing prior to John’s arrival, and
some of them started to do so after the ideas of writing a book was presented, while other
operators refused to participate altogether. In either situation, the artist-in-residence served the
role of defining a shared space and to construct a situation where a proposal (e.g., to be part of
a writing project) may be accepted, negotiated, or rejected. Such constructed situations, as
Barnard (2004) emphasizes, may be quite stressful or even perceived as intimidating as the
comfort zone of the social world as taken for granted is gradually put into question or destabilized. The operator standing up to declare his refusal to participate may for instance have
extensive experience from e.g., grammar school when struggling to work with written texts
and remembers all too well how teachers and classmates may have been critical or even
condescending towards his attempts to express himself. Given such experiences, it is little
wonder that there is strong sense of refusing to undergo the same procedure anew. But the
operators may also have assumed that the role of John as the artist-in-residence would take on
the role of a teacher or tutor, some kind of authority “correcting” and “editing texts,” rather
than being an interlocutor and a partner in giving voice to what has previously been
inarticulate. Constructed situations are thus not of necessity liberating and in a short-term
perspective inherently rewarding but they may be equally perceived as problematic and
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stressful as they serve to undermine taken for granted beliefs and worldviews. In analogy, the
Just Do It slogan is expressed in a familiar marketing vocabulary that overflows with
enthusiasm over what you and I are in fact capable of accomplishing, but its overturned
version, the Just Don’t is more complicated as it is regressive and does not point in any
direction in its refusal to instruct its reader—“Just don’t what?,” one may ask yourself. The
combination of the détournment (the shift from a positive to a negative message) and the
constructed situation (the encountering of the Ad-buster billboard or image) presuppose one
another. A constructed situation is by definition including détournment, and détournment
without an accompanying constructed situation becomes impotent; they are part of the same
process and presuppose one another.
Discussion
In artists-in-residence programs, artists are brought into new settings where they are expected
to interact with new categories of collaborators. What these artists produce in such settings is
not art per se, at least not if the definition proposed by Luhmann (2000) where art is the
further differentiation of an autopoetic art system and where art is always of necessity a new
combination of art codes, is adhered to. Artists produce arts in their own domains of work or
in collaboration with other artists. On the contrary, in artists-in-residence programs, it is the
artist himself or herself and his or her competence that is being explored. Leonard-Barton
(1995) uses the term “creative abrasion” in a innovation management setting to denote the at
least minimum of tension between different domains of expertise needed to produce
innovative and creative thinking. All successful artists-in-residence projects is based on the
capacity to mutually create such creative abrasion, a form of creative tension that produce
new ideas and new ways of thinking. Artists-in-residence is not simply a matter of “putting art
into work” but to explore and exploit the artistic know-how of the participating artists in order
to open up for new collaborative relations.
The actual collaborative process between artists and professional and occupational communities has been relatively overlooked in the arts management literature. In order
to develop an analytical theoretical model of artists-in-residence programs, the vocabulary
and methodology of the Situationist International has introduced. The situationists nourished
the ambition to wake up the silent majority from its slumber through various campaigns and
events, to counteract the passivity of the mass-consumption society where individuals are
11
increasingly assigned the role of spectators and consumers rather than active and enterprising
agents. Although one may have a great deal of sympathy with such counterculture movements
and ambitions, they are often embedded in art worlds (in Becker’s [1982] phrasing) and
student cultures that exist and flourishes outside of industry and public sector organization.
Artists-in–residence programs, in contrast, are immediate, actual long-term collaborations
between artists and members of organizations located in workplaces and on shop-floors, in
clinics, wardens, and in offices. Artists-in–residence programs are to some extent designed
and promoted to accomplish certain instrumental goals but at the same time they are expected
to accommodate and promote unexpected outcomes and learning. Despite the differences
between
the
situationists’
activities
and
artists-in–residence
programs,
the
concept/methodologies of détournement and constructed situations are helpful when
theorizing (see e.g., Swedberg, 2012) what actually happens in artists-in-residence programs.
Artists generally just do not let their collaborators in organizations participate in regular art
production but instead make use of their skills and know-how to make the actors put into
question and criticize their work life situation or entice them to come up with creative
solutions to perceived problems. In the case of John’s use of writing exercises, the operators
were invited to give expression to their work life experiences because such an activity would
potentially both be perceived as meaningful for the operators and because it could help
unearth some of the concerns and challenges in the workplace rarely addressed in
conversations and during formal meetings. The combination of the détournement of the
writing of the self genre and the constructed situation provided the operators with the
opportunity to participate in a collective activity that could lead to many outcomes. The
combination of détournement, the active overturning or playing with a specific symbolic
order, and constructed situations, the mise-en-scène and staging of particular activities being
part of an artistic project, are two elementary processes in any artist-in-residence project.
Artists don’t produce art but neither do they just add an element to the regular production in
organizations; they are located in a liminal space, a space betwixt and between production and
consumption, that they construct for their collaborators and themselves. Similar to the
situationists, the artists’ principal concern is how to invite and entice the public (in the case of
the situationists) and the collaborators (in the case of artists) to actively de-familiarize and
criticize everyday life.
This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on arts management and arts
interventions by stressing the need for developing a comprehensive theoretical framework
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enabling an understanding of how art and artists can play an active role in both maintaining
and changing organizations. Second, the paper introduces and advocates the situationists’ two
concepts or methodologies of détournement and constructed situations, two procedures for
creating liminality in the workspace, domains where other norms and rules apply than those
structuring the regular workday. Third, the paper provides an empirical illustration of how an
actual artists-in-residence project in a Swedish manufacturing company both led to conflicts
and controversies but also innovative and unexpected outcomes. Further research studying
actual artists-in-residence programs is most welcome and needed. There is a substantial
amount of texts published praising art and arts management without providing empirical
evidence of the actual benefits of using arts in the workplace. In many cases, art is just
assumed to be rewarding and appreciated but such statements needs to lend themselves to
empirical testing. The more than 10 years of experience from working with artists-inresidence projects in Sweden and the approximately 80 projects being organized indicates an
interests in bringing together artists and industry and public sector organizations but there is
still a shortage of detailed accounts of how these projects emerge and evolve over time.
Conclusion
This paper has introduced the situationists’ concepts of détournment and constructed
situations and has argued that these terms are useful in understanding how artists-in-residence
are capable of creating a shared liminal space where the artists’ know-how and the
practitioners’ expertise and experience intersect and mutually fertilize one another. Too much
writing on arts management and arts interventions are concerned to sing the praise of the arts
as some kind of untapped resource in organizations (see e.g., Adler, 2011), and there is a
cumbersome shortage of detailed, ethnographic account of actual artists-in-residence
programs. Such studies in situ demand some theoretical framing and the activist work of the
situationist aimed at encouraging self-reflexivity and critical thinking in a population is
helpful inasmuch as it is based on the idea of active participation. No artists-in-residence can
accomplish very much without the collaborative efforts of the organization members and
similarly the situationsts’ various events would fall flat if they were not attended to. However,
while the situationsts were activist, operating outside of regular organizational fields, artistsin-residence are part of companies’ and public sector organizations’ change programs and one
must not neglect the difference between these two forms of arts interventions. Under all
conditions, more studies or arts management projects and more theorizing of the field is
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welcome. If arts, style, aesthetics and creativity are the new principal production factors in the
new millennium (Postrel, 2003; Howkins, 2002), students of organizations and management
practice need to develop solid and robust theories capable of explaining and predicting the
actual use of such social resources.
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