”In occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: “Did you do that?” “No,” Picasso replied, “you did” (The Guardian, 26/3/09)
Theme and justification
In this special issue, we invite authors to ask: how do the arts, artists and artistic work leverage paradoxes to attract popular attention while also going against prevailing opinion, providing a necessary critique to the embedded power of the status quo, uncovering new possibilities for expression? Paradox theory has emerged as a significant presence in management and organization studies and as a lens inspiring connections with other theories. Paradox refers to persistent and mutually constituting oppositions inherent to organizing (Smith & Lewis, 2011) that translate into undecidable trade-off decisions (Berti & Cunha, 2023). These contradictions may be generative or dysfunctional (Cunha et al., 2022, Gaim, Clegg, & Cunha., 2021) but can also be sources of novelty and synergy for organizations (Smith & Lewis, 2022).
Nevertheless, paradox is more than a managerial problem or a stepping-stone to innovation. Its etymological meaning (para-doxa, or existing at the same time or in parallel with existing opinion) points to its potential for challenging taken-for-granted views of the world, as a form of resistance to these (Luhmann, 1995). Power often confronts people with absurdly paradoxical demands and situations, especially those relatively less advantageously positioned in established circuits of power (Clegg, 2023; Berti & Simpson, 2021; Cunha et al., 2022; Gaim, Clegg, Cunha, and Berti, 2022).
We invite authors to submit their work on the arts, artists, power, paradox as a phenomenon and paradox work as a process, focusing on the heuristic potential of paradox as a way of revealing and challenging the status quo, through all the techniques of resistance, such as irony (Badham & Santiago, 2023). Previous work has explored the presence of tensions, contradictions and paradoxes in the creation and management of artistic organizations (Cunha et al., 2019) but the deliberate artistic uses of diverse artistic media to leverage paradox in organizing that engages as it resists a status quo is the concern of this special issue. Assuming the various arts as forms of organizing (Chandler, 2020), we aim to explore their paradoxical role in overturning the past, subverting the present and imagining a different world, all without being so marginalized as to be dismissed in their reception. Historically major figures such as Caravaggio and Coltrane have played this role of reframing oeuvres and relations of power, raising questions as to whether art born in struggle, resistance and disruption is necessarily bound to become mainstream and institutionalized (think of punk or house music as contemporary examples, or jazz and rock n’ roll in earlier times, the 1920s and 1950s, respectively).
Authors are welcome to explore how artistic expression, in its multiple forms, uses paradox as a way of entertaining, informing and criticizing social relations, processes and ideological contradictions and paradoxes. For instance, art must navigate the tension between engaging and challenging its audience; between provoking and promoting society. Overall, we aim to study how artists use artistic tools (ideas, traditions, expectations), to engage systems of communication through subverting them. Recent examples could be the use of metaphors in lyrics, as well as “performances” such as that created by a young Russian that showed up for voting during the invasion of Ukraine dressed like Iron Man.
There is a long tradition of resistance through the arts encompassing literature such as the works of Kafka, Borges or Hasek (Fleming & Sewell, 2002), in the theatre of Beckett and Ionesco (Breuer, 1993; Wellwarth, 1962), in protest songs (Esteve-Faubel, Martin & Esteve-Faubel, 2019; Friedman, 2013), in the use of irony and political satire (Fischione, 2020; Brock, 2018), in the migrant shop floor poetry of the worker poets of contemporary China (Goodman, 2021; Van Crevel, 2019), in the work of Banksy as insider-outsider (Cunha, Clegg, Berti, Rego & Simpson, 2021). Art is inscribed in not only the materialities that artists produce, elites display and dealers trade but resides in any work that uses creativity as a means of confronting power if only because doing so requires imagination. Stilling imagination, ironing out difference and producing endless repetition of orthodoxy is hegemony’s preferred mode.
With this special issue we seek to expand our knowledge of the role of the arts in making paradoxical, in being against doxa, criticizing and resisting, accepting inconsistencies to uncover absurdities, exalting the powerful to expose their ridicule (Rosen, 1988). The intersection of paradox theory, power and the arts offer considerable scope for students of political power and its organization.
We would expect work around questions such as but not limited to:
- What motivates artists to go “paradoxal”?
- How is protest paradoxical rather than direct and explicit?
- How are the arts organized to confront power that cannot be confronted?
- When art is organized or disorganized, what are the implications of each for resistance?
- How do ‘everyday people’ create subversive forms of resistance that do not boomerang back on them?
- How are artistic protests effectively organized and when and how do they backfire?
- When does paradoxa become part of the system?
- What contextually inscribed processes and practices influence the use of which artistic expressions?
- How is paradox performative in the arts?
- Is “paradoxa” oblique or can it be direct?
- Can art participate in resistance without becoming purely didactic?
Our overall objective is to produce a collection of works at the intersection of the arts, power, organization and paradox that will be enjoyable as artistic work should be, “paradoxal” and thus respectfully disrespectful of existing work, while being rich in theory as good academic work ought to be.
