Alice Rekab from Parity on Vimeo.
Most Business Schools have a rather indifferent, even ambivalent relationship with the Arts.
Is it for profit or not? Is it a thing that can be managed, contrived, manufactured? Does entertainment, performance, Art, Dance, Music, Film, Cinema, Videogames, even Sport, distill down to simple profit or loss? Is it mere business, a system or process? What about passion, belief, vocation?
The role of an artist-in-residence is more often not well understood. Some think the role is to produce work commissioned by the host. It is not. In our case the artist and the college were here to learn about each other and in so doing, reveal aspects of each other that may otherwise be overlooked. How does commerce appear to the artist? An artist is an entrepreneur of sorts so might empathise with other entrepreneurs, but what is artistic about cost accounting, consultancy, financial technology?
A utilitarian view of the Arts is often adopted. Art and artistic performance can be captured or rendered into commodity forms like images, recordings, copies. These things can become objectified, become sought after objects of desire. But the production of art itself, the creative act, does not typically lends itself to being controlled, managed or manufactured.
The consumption of Art too is equally uncertain.
The experience of Art involves encounter.
The creative artistic act is confronting.
Art is puzzling, it challenges us to think, rather than seeks to produce consensus or efficiency or profit.
The University, like Art, holds a privileged place in society. Like Art, the University it is not so much a property as it is a state of mind. Consider this quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.
"The real University... has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist in any specific location. It's a state of mind which is regenerated through the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself." p 143Founded on the values of the enlightenment (the Age of Reason) the University as an idea is the belief in and responsibility for education, for science itself, for preserving and generating new knowledge.
"The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phaedrus said, is always Socrates' old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it's revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that." p 145Yes there are paintings in the halls, statues in the grounds, art expressed through the design of landscapes, buildings, and machines. Universities, even Business Schools, are used to display, as containers for Art. But the paintings on our walls become invisible over time, they fade into the background.
The Louis le Brocquy tapestry "Brendan The Navigator" that covers the high wall about the fireplace of the entrance atrium at UCD's Blackrock campus had become invisible. The deliberate green-gold graduation fills what would otherwise be a vast white space. That was until Alice saw within its depiction an allegory of trade and commerce. Saint Brendan's journey to the New World was a navigational and logistical triumph but one inspired by a trade of ideas and the desire to explore. It represents exploration, revealing the unknown, encountering the new. It was a making a connections between the New and the Old World. Commerce is trade, most often of things but also of ideas.
