Week 9: Orgacom

Hi Again,

This Tuesday is yet another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Orgacom, a group located between Istanbul & Amsterdam.

Orgacom (a combination of the words ‘ORGAnization’ and ‘COMmunication’) aims to develop and introduce new roles for art within businesses and non-profit-organizations.

Orgacom is primarily concerned with visualizing the culture of companies and groups through contemporary art. Through this visualization, Orgacom encourages companies and organizations to reflect on their group culture in a nontraditional manner. Through creating images that express the specific culture in which participants are involved, Orgacom wants to encourage them to reconsider the various roles art can play in their lives.

Though employees of companies are often highly educated and interested in culture, the images and ideas relevant to their experiences within business life are rarely found in the most visible artworlds. Orgacom has chosen the experiences of people in companies as a subject. This choice may result in the discovery of new themes, new methods of presenting art, a new audience, and may even make the development of a new vocabulary of images possible. Or, given the dramatic disparities in the power relations between art and business, it may lead to art becoming still more vulnerable to co-optation by so-called creative capitalism.

What makes Orgacom’s plausible artworld compelling is that it boldly challenges the assumptions of both activist artists (for whom the group’s practice is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy) and of more market-based practitioners (who basically want no truck with the collective “experiences” and identities of wage laborers, except in their capacity as art lovers).