Output details

The Artist as Leader

Made in response to ‘Cox Review of Creativity in Business’ 2005, ‘The Artist as Leader’ is an experimental documentary film that explores the role and the experience of creativity in culture using the concept of leadership. It poses questions such as ‘when is an artist the leader?’, ‘how does the artist’s critical thinking influence practices of leading?’ and ‘who can be leader in addressing new and emerging challenges in the social public sphere?’

The film was one of the outputs of an AHRC-funded action research project initiated by Anne Douglas from Gray's School of Art. Entitled ‘On the Edge’ its subject was an intensive residential laboratory in January 2008 with five artists, five policy makers and a number of provocateurs including the poet Jackie Kay, the director of the Jerwood foundation, the acting head of Creative Scotland, and representatives of the Scottish Government who developed the implications of ‘The Artist as Leader’.

The film did not just record the laboratory, but explored its themes in experimental uses of the moving image and language of film, communicating further questions and musings on this subject by the lab's participants through non-verbal means.

The finished film was shown to policy-makers and artists including Creative Scotland, Scottish Arts Council, Arts Council of England, Cultural Enterprise, British Council, Scottish Executive, and The Jerwood Foundation in May 2008. It was distributed with a report by Anne Douglas into ‘The Artist as Leader’, according to which ‘the film offers an important and rich perspective that is quite different from the report’ using the non-verbal language of film to analyse and contextualise the experiences of the lab's participants, to supplement their words and, importantly, to use the formal languages of the arts to reflect on their own role in leading other forms of engagement.