Reluctant leaders

For the first time in 2010/11, the Clore Leadership programme intake included a dedicated ‘Artist Fellow’. This title provoked a number of questions: What does it mean for an artist to be a leader? How does leadership manifest itself in the things artists do? How can we rethink the role of an artist in the context of the need for leadership? Selected as that Artist Fellow, I wanted to unravel what exactly ‘artist as leader’ might mean. For many of my artist colleagues the idea does not scan. Some even consider it laughable, almost as if the words sit in opposition to each other.

An important precursor to my investigations was the work of Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle: they undertook a three-year research project called ‘The Artist as Leader’ from 2006 to 2008 and published their findings in 2009. One of the conclusions of their research is about “The need to publicly recognise where artists are leading, and have led, through practice; highlighting the relevance of their leadership to wider cultural, social, environmental and economic development.”¹ This ‘need’ was the founding principle for the seven interviews that formed the basis of my own research project.

If you are a leader it presumes that you know where you are going

Most artists are ‘portfolio people’, which is to say that they work with a range of different individuals and organisations in a variety of contexts. As Charles Handy says in ‘The Elephant and the Flea’: “…portfolio people are seldom in a position to run any sizeable organisation. We do trade power for influence”².

If artists are leaders, then surely one of the main ways in which that leadership is revealed is through the effect of influence. Although it is true that artists are in positions of executive authority and identifiable leadership roles in the conventional sense, across culture, from my perspective, leadership is resolutely not (necessarily) a position in an organisation, and definitely not (necessarily) the head of an organisation. The aim of the interviews was to bring together a series of inspiring examples that would collectively interrogate the idea of the artist leader. Although the limited scope of the study did not allow for a comprehensive survey, there was an attempt to visit artists in different kinds of situations: artist collectives, artist-run institutions, artists in community-based practices, and artists working with business and in education.

In almost all cases, the interviewees were reluctant, or even opposed, to using the term ‘artist leader’ without considerable clarification. Although many of them recognised that they are exercising a form of leadership, most eschew the term for themselves. Part of the problem is that many do not like the inescapable popular definition of the term leader as ‘one who issues commands’. This is seen as irreconcilable with much of what interviewees reflect their art practice to be about, often seeking to interrogate structures of power.

Presented with an expanded notion of leadership as “a creative behaviour that is conscious and intentional about change”, interviewees were generally more willing to see what they were doing in terms of a leadership agenda but remained sceptical as to the value of a term that had to be re-imagined before it could effectively mean something.

But if we are to understand leadership as a matter of affect and not intention – judging leadership by impact rather than as a titled position of authority – then we need a way to recognise the impact that artists have through the range of modes with which they operate. It is precisely because artists find value in doubting the terms of ‘conventional leadership’ that they make inspiring leaders.

Like many of the other interviewees, Cornelia Parker was reluctant to be considered a leader: “It sends a chill through my heart because I do not want to be a leader. A leader presumes that you are in authority, that there is something you can teach, that there is a path that you can lead people on.” She continues: “I like being lost. If you are a leader it presumes that you know where you are going.”

A lot of Parker’s work presents itself as counterintuitive about the act of creation. Squashing, exploding, ripping apart, Parker uses destruction and deconstruction as part of her creative process. This flips on its head the idea of what creation might be and has formed a new vocabulary of creativity. In this sense, Parker has led the field in contemporary art. When presented with this reading of her work, she says: “Perhaps I should be leader backwards – redael.” Although Parker makes this statement in a light-hearted and jokey way, this idea of doing leadership backwards, of being a redael, may hint at a new way in which we can understand what artist as leader might mean. Perhaps redael can act as a metaphor for a form of leadership, which is on the one hand visionary, inspiring, influential and innovative, and at the same time questioning, interrogative, plural and doubting.

While the argument for the power of creativity is being made across business and social sectors, it is important that those directly involved in arts practices do not lose influence through the disavowal of a set of terms that have come to mean something limiting in certain contexts. As the politics of identity (especially the terms of sexuality and race) proved in the second half of the twentieth century, it is only through the reclaiming of language that you take hold of meaning and effect change. It is when terms are forced to resignify that they are put to work for a different agenda.

Interviewees
Field Theory, an artist collective based in Melbourne, Australia, who came together to support each other and the wider sector.
First Draft, a long-standing artist-run initiative in Sydney which is run by a rotating board of eight practising artistic directors.
Masato Nakamura, an artist based in Tokyo who has recently set up an ambitious new model for an arts centre called 3331 Chioyda.
Richard Layzell and Richard Hicks, who collaborated as artist and businessman respectively at AIT software company for seven years.
Kate Love, Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, who trained as a painter and has worked for a number of art colleges.
Cornelia Parker, sculptor and installation artist who has exhibited internationally at many of the world’s major art institutions.
David Wilson, Founder and Director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles.
For the unedited recorded interviews or to read the highlights go to www.a-n.co.uk/artist_as_leader

Joshua Sofaer is an artist based in London.
www.joshuasofaer.com
www.rootedintheearth.co.uk