Jobs and opps

Lucy Kimbell looks at how artists and arts organisations can work with businesses and the pros and cons of such collaborations.

Introduction

When you mention 'businesses' and 'artists' in the same breath, people usually think you are talking about sponsorship. However there seems to be a trend away from artists and arts organisations wanting sponsorship – business giving money or goods in kind to the arts – towards new ways for artists and artist organisations to work with commercial partners.

An example of the trend was the renaming of the UK organisation Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA) to Arts & Business (A&B). This demonstrated redefinition of the organisation's core activity – stimulating and supporting mutually beneficial partnerships between arts and business. A&B lists a number of activities as examples of how business and arts can work together, including arts-based training, arts clubs, social inclusion projects, residencies and art commissions.

Residency contexts

Artists and artists' groups undertake residencies in all kinds of contexts – prisons, government departments, research institutes, hospitals, factories, bus stations and offices, etc. Increasingly, there is a trend for artists to make business a residency context.

Many artists believe it will benefit a host company to work with them, but often find it hard to explain why, other than talking generally about bringing creativity into the organisation. Evidence from the world of business and management suggests they may be right. Creativity and the value of conceptual thinking are firmly on the business agenda.

Nature of engagement

Residencies can be troublesome – for the artist, host organisation and enabling arts organisations and funders. It is harder to define the impact and value of a residency compared to the other ways business and the arts work together.

Think of the visibility of a corporate art collection with its publications and sculptures and paintings in headquarters or offices, or consider the relatively easy-to-measure benefits of having employees involved in arts-based training or art clubs. The difficulty of working out the nature of the engagement and value to each party is one of the consistent themes that emerge across reviews of artists' residencies.

Residencies at InIVA

During the late 1990s, UK arts organisation InIVA developed a series of residencies, mostly in business contexts. Its approach was to free artists from the requirement to make a finished artwork by offering six weeks of research time. InIVA built on this experience by facilitating a Year of the Artist residency in 2000 by Michael Atavar at The Guardian in London.

For Rohini Malik Ohon, projects curator (education and research) at InIVA, one of the organisation's roles was to shelter Atavar from the newspaper's desire to have identifiable, discrete art objects as a result of the residency.

Explaining InIVA's approach, Rohini Malik Ohon has said:

"Through the Artist-in-Research programme we aim to create opportunities for artists to undertake paid research with no expectation of a finished piece of work, whereas I think for The Guardian there was that expectation. It was important for Michael that there was a dialogue with inIVA, giving him support as an artist, especially concerning the project's more process-based aspects. The Guardian also recognised that inIVA's input was important in this respect."

Expectations

Even if residency parties manage to balance the artist's needs to undertake research and host organisation's desire to have something tangible to show, there remains the issue of how the work produced fits into wider art practice.

Neal White of the artist group Soda, who did a Year of the Artist residency at pharmaceuticals company Pfizer has said:

"The context for the work at Pfizer is corporate commissions and a public placement as part of Year of the Artist. This means there is some intention of delivering something other than enabling the artist to make some work: an object or artefact, to add to a collection. Whether this work can contribute meaningfully to cutting-edge contemporary art practice is questionable, as it works within its specific context, and is only on view to a wider public under the organisation's strict controls."

Some difficulties that emerge in artists' residencies are to do with the nature of large organisations, according to InIVA's Rohini Malik Ohon:

"Michael Atavar's time at The Guardian was a complex and often contradictory experience, and he spent a lot of time negotiating relationships with staff, ranging from the editorial team to the buildings manager. The difficulties he experienced were probably to do with working in a large, hierarchical organisation geared to continuous daily production and tight deadlines. Also, there is still confusion about what artists do and what counts as 'work'."

There are other things that make residencies in large commercial environments challenging, according to Cinzia Hardy, Year of the Artist coordinator at Northern Arts:

"Business-based residencies are different because in this environment, the focus is on making money. This is a particular culture for the artist to come into, in which the artist is an extra – they're not the organisation's primary function. Some artists find this difficult if they have worked before with arts organisations, where the artist and their work is valued, making the process of negotiating easier."

Professional skills

A common theme in discussion about artists' residencies is a host organisation's surprise about how business-like artists can be. In some cases, artists lack the professional skills needed to manage a large project. This may mean that artists who have project management skills are more likely to be successful in being awarded a residency.

Neal White has commented:

"One of the reasons Pfizer was interested in Soda was because of my previous residency experience of working with scientists at the Human Genome Mapping Project UK Resource Centre. Another is that Soda's a company who can deliver software to deadlines and we understand business processes, including what change means for an organisation."

What is critical in the engagement of artists with commercial organisations is the need them to be clear about what they are doing and the nature of their engagement with business.

Building relationships

Artists must decide where to place themselves in relation to the organisation in which they are working: whether to be more or less critical, more or less professional, more or less self-determined.

One of these dimensions is the extent to which artists have a clear idea of what they want to make or how they want to work. At one end are the artists who want to produce particular pieces of work and at the other, those whose practice feeds off engagement with the context and people in it.

Discussions with artists suggest that once an organisation knows (and understands) an artist and their practice, a potential for collaborative projects emerges.

Richard Layzell is a UK artist who has developed his engagement with a commercial context from a residency model to creating a role for himself. After five years at the software company AIT, he became the company's 'visionaire' with his own budget.

"AIT see me as adding another dimension to the organisation's working life – adding visual and cultural things but also the unexpected. It broadens the dimensions of what being a software developer means. My involvement has contributed to the company's success through staff morale, retention and brand.

It's fair to say that nowadays I run the quarterly company meetings and help make them amusing and quirky events people want to come to. The way I measure success is when mild anarchy is accepted and people want more of it."

Defining collaboration

The term 'collaboration' raises the hackles of some and helps others understand things in a new way. Although many creative practices involve people working together, this is not necessarily the same as collaboration. A range of organisational forms enable working together, from artists' groups to partnerships or limited companies, to employment, to short-term informal groups created for a particular project.

Within business, collaboration has been a key subject in recent management thinking, as organisations find ways to innovate and create new products and services.

Partnerships with other organisations have become an increasingly important component of the business landscape as companies focus on their core competencies and build alliances to do the other things they need to do. Herein, perhaps, lies an opportunity for artists and arts organisations.

If residencies and placements are thought of as a collaboration, this can open up the discussion about what is actually going on over a period of time between an artist or artists' group and a business. Any collaboration needs to start with each party understanding each other's goals.

Some typical goals for business managers are:

• to increase shareholder or stakeholder value
• to stay in business or to grow the business

Goals for artists may be:

• to make new work or to do research in preparation for making new work
• to investigate and understand the world and engage critically with it, including for example, challenging the fundamentals of business.

Opportunities

A conventional approach by an artist or arts organisation to a business will invariably mention PR opportunities. But opportunities to engage are much broader. Consider some of the strategic pre-occupations nowadays within UK and international business:

• Innovation: how to develop new products and services to retain customers and increase profits.
• Change management: how to develop effective ways of working that increase employee and customer participation and satisfaction.
• Corporate responsibility: how to develop a sustainable business by engaging responsibly with a company's environmental and social context.
• Future strategy: how to work out what the future holds and what the business needs to do to be a successful business when it comes.

Issues

Looking at a business's goals and knowing their own means an artist has to address some implications and dilemmas:

• A business organisation is driven by value and relentless attempts to create it, manage it and leverage it. The artist may fundamentally object to helping a business extract value from a residency to to what an organisation does day-to-day.
• An artist may have or develop ideas of value to a business that it wants to exploit. How will the artist's ideas be protected so that s/he can also benefit from the residency?

The writer

Lucy Kimbell is an artist and management consultant.

In 2002 she helped programme the 'Ways of Working' study day for the Collaborative Arts Unit of the Arts Council of England. Recent commissions include Audit, Book Works 2002, the LIX Index 2002-3 Arts Council of England/Channel 4/Film and Video Umbrella, and The Most Beautiful Thing in the Gallery 2003, shown at New Art Gallery Walsall for the Bitparts Festival, curated by FACT.

www.lucykimbell.com

Publication credit

This article is an edited version of Lucy Kimbell's essay in Ways of Working: Placing Artists in Business Contexts, a CD-ROM published by the Arts Council of England, 2002, and drawn from the 'Ways of Working' study day organised by the Arts Council of England's.Collaborative Arts Unit.

Lucy Kimbell

Lucy Kimbell is an artist and management consultant.

In 2002 she helped programme the 'Ways of Working' study day for the Collaborative Arts Unit of the Arts Council of England. Recent commissions include Audit, Book Works 2002, the LIX Index 2002-3 Arts Council of England/Channel 4/Film and Video Umbrella, and The Most Beautiful Thing in the Gallery 2003, shown at New Art Gallery Walsall for the Bitparts Festival, curated by FACT.

www.lucykimbell.com

First published: a-n.co.uk April 2003