Posts Tagged ‘art in the workplace’
I wasn’t expecting to think about death today: Rachel Howard paintings at work
Visiting a workplace in pristine Piccadilly offices I didn’t expect to find two architectural sized paintings by Rachel Howard (though the building needed them) any more than I had planned to be thinking about death just before starting my days work. And there in the lobby these enormous paintings confront me. It’s not quite that I have to look at them, lots of people are choosing to hurry by, but they do seem to project the visual alternative of a shout, almost calling out to be viewed, and though it feels like the wrong thing for a visitor to do, I take a slight detour in order to go over and give them some of the attention they demand.
I think one of them was shown with other suicide paintings at the Haunch of Venison exhibition “How to Disappear Completely” in 2008. They look like they were painted by gravity, showing no gesture other than the direction lines of the flow of paint, that in its high gloss and varnish still looks wet. These abstract images are far from ‘abstract’ in the formal sense, in that they seem so strongly symbolical of the gravity-like ineluctabilty of death. Well, I think something like that was the artist’s intention.
I get up close to check for evidence of the artist’s touch and whilst finding none I cannot help attempting to reconstruct the conditions of their making, which is an invisible ‘touch’ of sorts perhaps, the paint being a record of the artists performance even without the subtleties of touch or brush stroke. There is something beautiful in the fluidity of the paint, I guess on canvas, but even signs of that have been obliterated by the thick opacity of the household paint. These paintings are a confrontation rather than invitation. I have the sense of being presented with a stark fact. In death there is no justice, it just is.
At the Blain/Southern website I find that
Howard grew up on a farm in County Durham and attended a Quaker school, the questions that unsettled her childhood and troubled her in adolescence (“If God made me, then who made God?”) remain anchored in her work. “I am petrified of death,” she explains, “I can accept that I will rot and putrefy, but it’s the idea that I will no longer love, paint or think that chills me”. Rachel Howard does not believe in God. But she believes in life – in living, and she believes in art – in painting. It is this faith that shines through her work, and imbues her art with a quality that Joachim Pissarro has declared “sublime” according to Kant’s Critique of Judgement: “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence, provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.” Howard’s work is total and limitless in its refined glossy abstraction: it allows us to grasp a part of human existence that can not be seen but only felt.
Abstract painting and maths
The Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick has a number of abstract paintings on the walls. One of them is painted directly onto the wall.
This magnificent work by Ian Davenport entitled Everything, is the result of pouring paint (via a syringe) from the top of the wall, one stripe at a time. The colours run down the wall and form little pools on the ledge below.
Following a predetermined system Davenport seems to combine both control and chance, the colours taking the path set for them, yet sometimes meeting and mixing with others, their specific forms allowed rather than delineated.
There are smaller paintings than this, some of theme equally concerned with the process of painting, and with the “deliberately accidental”, Callum Innes‘s words for the process he adopts of dividing the canvas into two, painting a quarter with a flat colour leaving the other quarter exposed, and then taking the same colour and applying it to the other half of the canvas before “unpainting” it by rubbing it off with turpentine, leaving a ghost of the original colour.
Down the corridor from this painting is almost its opposite. A painting that has little interest in ghosts of paint, or even in paint that is flatly applied. Gillian Ayres‘ paint stands a couple of inches off the surface of the canvas, thick and physically present.
Apparently the mathematicians here are fond of the abstract paintings, and are surprised when we are surprised by that. “After all” they say “we are used to working with abstract concepts”
Art in the University workplace
I have written from time to time about art in the workplace, keen as I have become, to see good paintings there, pleased on the odd occasion that I find some, and fascinated by the responses of workers.
Why I haven’t thought before about art on display in those particular workplaces called universities I don’t know, especially as there are often galleries associated with them, and also that the buildings are sometimes open to the public. In Nottingham the Lakeside Gallery is part of the University of Nottingham and The Bonington Gallery is in the School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University. It is not so long since I visited the Whitworth, at Manchester University and the other day I was introduced to the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery in the Parkinson Building of Leeds University.
They have some lovely abstract paintings, including work by John Hoyland, Terry Frost (one that I think is particularly good), Victor Vaserely, Victor Pasmore and Trevor Bell.
I have many times been on the campus of Warwick University but never realised that there was art to be seen there, not only at the Mead Gallery, but also on the walls in the University buildings. Click here for an excellent introductory online exhibition.
There is a lot wrong with psychometrics
I blogged recently about a USA survey of over 800 employees, working for companies with art collections, finding that
- 78% of employees surveyed agreed workplace art helps reduce stress.
- 94% agreed it enhances the work environment.
- 84% agreed it was evidence of their employer’s interest in improving the quality of life in and out of the workplace.
- 64% agreed it increases creativity and productivity.
- 67% agreed it enhances morale.
- 82% indicated that art is important in the work environment.
- 73% wanted more art in their workplace, claiming it helps make them feel more ‘motivated’ and ‘inspired.’
and I observed that a problem with this method is that it cannot measure unconscious effects. There is also the issue of sample size, but we won’t go into that just now.
Then I got thinking about other “measures of mind” that follow a similar method for data collection: the survey, or questionnaire, with Likert items: those so called psychometric tests, or personality tests beloved by organisations, and that HR professionals seem to believe in so readily like 16PF, OPQ, MBTI etc,etc,etc.
Surely they are fundementally flawed in that they are based on self report, having no units of measurement and no true zeros. Falling a long way short of being scientific tests, I wonder whether they offer us any useful information at all.
The one that I see used most for learning and development purposes is the Myers Briggs Type Inventory or MBTI. Once we get over the fact that it is scientifically unsound, we might think rather about its practical usefulness. Some companies spend a fortune on MBTI and the workshops usually get high enjoyment scores on evaluation surveys (also very dodgy instruments). Yet when I attempt to measure actual usefulness in the workplace I struggle. After all, once you have “identified” your “type”, what can you really do with this “knowledge” that actually makes a difference to anything? Verdict – highly enjoyable (for some) but not very useful.
The Cult of Personality Testing by Annie Murphy Paul is subtitled “How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves”
She goes a step further than just wondering whether they have any practical value. She shows convincingly that they are downright misleading and potentially damaging.
Art in the workplace may or may not be beneficial, its effects are difficult to measure. However, unlike psychometric testing, I am sure that at least it does no harm.
Surveying opinions about art in the workplace
A survey carried out in the USA in 2003, of over 800 employees, working for 32 companies with art collections found that
- 78% of employees surveyed agreed workplace art helps reduce stress.
- 94% agreed it enhances the work environment.
- 84% agreed it was evidence of their employer’s interest in improving the quality of life in and out of the workplace.
- 64% agreed it increases creativity and productivity.
- 67% agreed it enhances morale.
- 82% indicated that art is important in the work environment.
- 73% wanted more art in their workplace, claiming it helps make them feel more ‘motivated’ and ‘inspired.’
I propose to survey some opinions myself, using the same categories as Likert items. I don’t have access to 32 companies, though I do know a few that have (fairly modest) art collections.
By Gillian Ayres, seen in a workplace recently
By Gillian Ayres, also seen in a workplace recently
A problem with this method is that it cannot measure unconscious effects. (I remember once being surveyed about recognising certain adverts. I did not recognise them at all. I had seen them, and I knew that I had seen them, but I had no idea what was being advertised. I guess my scores would have looked negative on the effectiveness of those adverts. It was only later that I realised that I had started to buy the product featured in one of them).
Is art good for the workplace?
I found an argument here that art is good for the workplace in that it “helps businesses address several key challenges, such as reducing stress, increasing creativity and productivity, enhancing morale, broadening employee appreciation of diversity, as well as encouraging discussions and expression of opinions”. Well, that was according to a USA survey in 2003 of over 800 people working for 32 companies that have workplace art collections.
I see quite a lot of original art (artists proofs at least) in workplaces, and I sometimes pluck up courage to ask people what difference it makes to them (encouraging discussions and expression of opinions). I get a variety of responses, quite a lot are negative. Less than a week ago I got “my five-year old child could do that” in relation to the Terry Frost Screenprint on the right of this set. The one that I think is the strongest and the most interesting.
Terry Frost Screenprints
I asked him what ‘that’ specifically he had in mind and he said “just paint a blue circle on a red piece of card”. Someone else pointed out that it was a screenprint and he seemed to become slightly more interested in it. But we had already changed the subject. What I wanted to know was what difference it made to him (if any) but what we got talking about was whether it was any good.
Gillian Ayres in the meeting room
In a workplace recently, walking past a room where there was a meeting going on, I saw out of the corner of my eye, artist proofs by Gillian Ayres on the wall. I considered interrupting the meeting to take a look. I also wanted to ask the group whether they had noticed the art, and what difference it made to their meeting. Instead, I determined to go in early next day and see the work before anyone else could get in there.
I couldn’t help it! A bit like Gillian Ayres whos says she paints because “One can’t bloody help it”, nice little video of her here saying that and other things too.
corporate decor?
When the four foot square painting is in the house it dominates the space, which works against it being decorative
When it’s in a bigger space it no longer dominates. In fact it looks quite small…and decorative.
I like Bob Nickas’s expression in the book Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting, when he refers to paintings I think of as big, six foot for example (I am only 5′ 6″ tall) as “modest in size”. Four foot square easily fits that category.
It’s all relative.
I quite like the idea of art for the workplace (where this photo is taken- my painting superimposed). Then you call it ‘corporate decor’ and I think it’s terrible!
The Myth Of Tomorrow – Taro Okamoto (via Tokyobling’s Blog) and public art and Henry Moore
This wonderful blog seems to have provoked a lot of interest.
Public art gets walked by seems to be one of the themes (it doesn’t have to be very public for that to happen. In a workplace near me there is a lot of good art on the walls by important UK artists – largely ignored, see previous blog).
In the comments section of the Myth Of Tomorrow blog there is a piece by Visartstudio including a good story about a Henry Moore sculpture in Toronto
…works that have become significant have done so by digging into our psychological reality and insinuating itself by a process of educating the imagination. Case in point The Archer by Henry Moore in Toronto Nathan Phillips square was supported by the extensive collection of Moore donation to the AGO… More significantly a pop song
Down By The Henry Moore – Murray McLauchlan (1974) summed up Toronto’s relationship to this now significant piece of art. So much so when it alleged removal was used in the first day with out art protest, the controversy drew near 100,000 people into Nathan Phillips square. Digging a bit deeper the art fit the square and became a cultural anchor that suited the site and the Toronto’s city Hall building and has become a bench mark of how Torontonians felt about there city, there future and themselves…
I was in Castleford UK other weekend, at a dance competition in the Civic Hall, and in front of the building is a piece of public art, a Henry Moore sculpture. It is unmistakably Henry Moore so in the pouring rain I wandered across the grass to get a better view.
Henry Moore Draped Reclining Figure 1952-53 © Copyright David Pickersgill and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
© Copyright David Pickersgill and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
I knew that Moore was born in the Wakefield area, but not that it was actually Castleford. The piece also serves as a memorial.
