You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The paper explores the way being on the boundary with its shifting perspectives can serve as a position of creativity. Drawing on organisational theory and Jacques Derrida, the paper invokes a parallel between the creative act of the portrait painter and that of the consultant, culminating in the suggestion that the completed portrait constitutes a space not unlike that which David Armstrong has called the institution in the mind.
In an analysis of the portrait Madame de Senonnes by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, I suggest that the success of the creative process hinges on the way the painting becomes a space that emerges from and expresses the totality of the interactions between the artist and all the participants - the sitter, the commissioner of the painting and the beholder. The boundary position, from which the artist negotiates these different relations, I further suggest, can be seen as being constituted by two contradictory states: control and power on the one hand, and marginality and surrender on the other. It is the coalescence of these contradictory drives, which also exists in the consultant's position vis-à-vis the organisation, that informs the relation of the artist to his subject, and indeed to the other ‘participants’ in the painting and underlies the successful creation of the portrait, or the picture of the organisation.