You Are the Weather (detail), Roni Horn

Roni Horn is a contemporary artist who chips away at our certainties and presents a world which seems familiar yet turns out to be quite elusive.  It’s an experience to be commended to anyone who presumes to lead people or to understand the environment with which they are engaged.

An exhibition of her work is at Tate Modern.  It consists largely of sculpture and photography.  There is a great deal of repetition and variation on a theme and it’s easy to view the work quickly and think you have grasped it.  But it gets under your skin and eventually challenges your preconceptions, encouraging you to question perception itself.

The show culminates in a room containing 100 portraits of the same young woman who poses for Horn in hot springs at various locations in Iceland.  Each photo follows the same form.  The woman’s face and neck protrude from the water, filling the frame as she fixes her gaze on the viewer.  At first glance, it is the consistency you notice.  It carries through in the woman’s expression: still, contemplative, neutral.  Then, as you walk round the series, you become aware of changes in mood and emotion which are unsettling in their subtlety.  In some pictures there is anxiety or irritation, in others a faint smile.

One begins to experience the gulf between how we routinely process information and the depth and richness we can allow in if we give ourselves space and time.  For most of us, our default setting is to assimilate readily available information to form a quick judgment which gives us a basis for action.  We are driven to maintain the momentum of productivity, almost at any cost. You could see this impulse at play in the gallery in those who cantered past the works, barely stopping to apprehend them.

But what are we missing in the data that we exclude from consideration if we are always in this shoot-from-the-hip mode?  What do we lose in our appreciation of the people around us or our grasp of the competitive context in which we work.  Might we act differently if we give ourselves permission to read and feel more of the data which is the stuff of experience, to reflect on it before indulging the impulse to act?  I wonder what difference this might have made in the financial institutions which misread the risks in their investments and ostracised the people in their teams who expressed reservations.

Roni Horn coaxes us to distrust our certainties, to pause and find ways to look at things afresh.  One begins to feel energised, alive to new connections in the brain. I found myself constructing stories about the model and the artist.  I imagined them driving round Iceland from hot spring to hot spring: a growing sense of weariness on the part of the model as she submerges herself and assumes the pose at each new pool; the photographer recreating the image over and over, this time from afar with a telephoto lens, this time staring down from close by.

Notes on the wall from the artist suggest the variation in expression is explained simply by the model’s response to different climate conditions: sometimes cold and snowy, other times bright and sunny.

Who is to say whether she is right, whether I am misreading what I see?  She was there with the model.  But she had an interest in regarding the weather, rather than her own artistic demands, as the greater adversity for her model.  Like any leader, she tries to set our interpretation for us.  But we bridle against it.  We have our own version of reality.   The artist’s interpretation of the emotions conveyed by the model may be right.  But her reading is not accepted until decoded in the way she prefers by those receiving the message.   Meaning is created in the negotiation of the two.  When we create a message, we cannot control how it will be received.

A final thought is prompted by the title of the piece, You are the Weather.  This leads you to reflect on your own position as viewer or, perhaps, voyeur.  The model returns your gaze from every corner of the room – inscrutable yet somehow judging.  We are not mere spectators of the work, we participate in it.  Roni Horn has it that not only was the weather the main factor in the emotional states conveyed in the picture.  Somehow, as consumers of her art, as we gaze on her model, we assume responsibility for what the woman is put through.

So we are left with the thought that there is no fixed reality, out there beyond ourselves.  To observe it is to create it – and the more we make it the subject of our awareness, the more we change it because we are changed in the process and we are part of the process.  Business and organisations often operate with entirely different assumptions.  Our organisation charts convey internal structures which lay a beguiling sense of order and simplicity over the true complexity of how people relate to each other within and across teams.  And we imagine solid boundaries between our organisation and the world beyond, devising strategies for how we will engage with it, manipulate it.

If the current times tells us anything, it is that our reality is more of an improvisation than a structure which lends itself to directive plans.  It is emergent and unpredictable.  The challenge of leadership is to relinquish control and throw open the doors to interpretation.  The biggest risk in turbulent times is that we shut down creativity, constrain people’s ingenuity.  The task we must learn is how to release competing ways of seeing the world, yet coax them towards a unified purpose.  Roni Horn doesn’t offer answers.  But she helps us ask the right questions.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn is at Tate Modern until 25 May 2009.

Loch Lomond, Scotland

Book review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes non-fiction as if it were a work of poetry. A Field Guide to Getting Lost is part cultural history, part philosophy: a meditation on loss and being lost.

The meaning of these experiences – the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing – is different today than it was in the past.  19th century travellers thought nothing of being off course for days at a time; for us, anxiety sets in within minutes of losing our way.  People had the skills to navigate the natural landscape and with this came a sense of optimism about their ability to find their way and survive.  Today,  even those who walk in the wilderness lack this familiarity with the landscape and rely on mobile phones to get them out of trouble.

For Rebecca Solnit, to live this way is to miss something of the very essence of life: “Never to get lost is not to live.”  Indeed, her theme is less the hazards of getting lost and more a hymn to losing oneself – the life of discovery that comes with living with uncertainty.

One chapter explores the mythology of captives who come to embrace the culture that enslaves them.  Such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who went to America as a Spanish conquistador, one of only four survivors of a ship that landed in Florida in 1528.  He tried to travel west but he and his men gradually fell to illness and exposure, eventually being held for several years by Native Americans, escaping finally to reach not just his destination but also a respect and sympathy for the people he had initially come to conquer:

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been…  The terms in which to describe the extraordinary metamorphosis of the soul did not exist, at least for him.  He was among the first, and the first to come back and tell the tale, of Europeans lost in the Americas, and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.

The story pre-figures the American narrative of settler children who were captured by the Natives and became “adopted” by them.  Many of these – despite witnessing the murder of their families – became attached to their new culture and resisted attempts to “rescue” them, so far did they travel from their previous life, identity and values.

All this may seem distant, too, from contemporary life, but Solnit suggests that each of us routinely faces similar existential challenge – if, mostly, in less extreme form:

Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape.  Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them.  But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms.   There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.  These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in everyday life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were.  Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in everyday life.  Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists.  Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.  And some people travel far more than others.  There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far.  Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.

Towards the end of the book she relates, through the voice of a follower of Buddhism, the story of Turtle Man, who was blind and hustled a living selling chocolates around the streets of San Francisco.  When he would reach street corners, Turtle Man would shout out for help to cross the road – not knowing who was around and simply waiting for someone to show up.  The narrator imagines what it would be like to live with the only certainty that each day would bring barriers which you would need help to negotiate.  And he reflects that it might hold lessons for the rest of us:

It’s okay to become like Turtle Man, it’s okay sometimes to experience not knowing what to do next, to run into a barrier.  It’s okay to realize that life has a mysterious quality to it, it has an element of uncertainty, it’s okay to realize that we do need help, that calling out for help is a very generous act because it allows others to help us and it allows us to be helped.  Sometimes we’re offering help, and then this hostile world becomes a very different place.  It is a world where there is help being received and help being given, and in such a world this compelling urgent world according to me loses some of its urgency and desperation.  It’s not so necessary in a generous world, in a world where help is available, to be so adamant about the world according to me.

Rebecca Solnit describes herself as an activist.  In other words, she’s someone who is dissatisfied with the world as it is.  There’s an aura of loneliness, as well as solitude, which pervades this book.  Reflecting on the death of her friend, Marine, when they were both young women, she recognises that even in death Marine had made choices which opened her to experience in life and which could have ended differently, at a time when Solnit herself closed off options.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost disrupts the continuities which inform our sense of self.  To find our way in the world, we must not simply tolerate uncertainty, we should embrace it.  There’s discomfort and pain on this path, to be sure.  But there’s also magnaminity and ease with life.  For Solnit, to be open to loss is the only way to know what it is to be human.  Equally, it is impossible to experience loss and stay the same.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Available from Amazon.