PBS is running a great series on contemporary art, art:21, that’s rich with metaphor and insight into the creative process…the process we managers are supposed to be supporting, nurturing, protecting, enabling. But it struck me, during the segment on performance/scupture artist Janine Antoni, that discovery and creation are the greatest energies arts organizations have to draw from, and also the ones so easily crushed by our corporate metaphor.
The corporate metaphor we all seem to carry in our heads is about command and control, about best practices, about efficiencies, about escaping ‘crisis management’ and the burden of always ‘putting out fires’. Contrast that to Antoni’s discussion of tightrope walking, which she learned in the process of creating her work “Touch” (excuse the length of this quote, but it’s more than worth the space):
“So I practiced tightroping for about an hour a day and after about a week I started to feel like I’m now getting my balance. And as I was walking I started to notice that it wasn’t that I was getting more balanced, but that I was getting more comfortable with being out of balance. I would let the pendulum swing a little bit further and rather than getting nervous and overcompensating by leaning too much to one side I could compensate just enough. And I thought, I wish I could do that in my life when things are getting out of balance. You know when you have a hard day and one bad thing happens after another? I sort of learned that I could just breathe in and sort of set myself back up onto the rope.
“The other thing that was really fascinating is I started to learn the bottom of my feet in a way that I had never learned before. If the wire is just a millimeter to one side or the other I can feel it in my arms. I started to learn all kinds of things about the skeletal structure. About my sternum and my sacrum and how to keep them in balance. It was quite a beautiful process, learning to walk on the rope.”
What if, instead of trying so hard to control, contain, even out, and reduce conflict, we actually worked to become “more comfortable with being out of balance,” and used that energy to our advantage?
