Rehearsing Organization: Art, eutopia, pre-enactment

Organization Studies · 2026 · Volume 47 · Issue 8

Abstract

In contemporary art, the question of organization, and of how to organize differently, has become a key concern, leading to a wide range of organizational experiments as material of art itself. In this paper, we investigate contemporary art’s organizational aesthetics by turning to the exhibition documenta fifteen as the hitherto most visible forum of art’s turn to alternative organization. We identify four modes of organizing – diagramming, hanging out, infrastructuring and archiving – performed and exhibited at the exhibition, and we develop the notion of pre-enactment as aesthetic register of reimagining and rehearsing organization. We then outline an understanding of organizational eutopianism as atmospheric, chronopolitical and resistant to assumptions of frictionless scaling and circulation

Keywords

aesthetics, alternative organization, art, atmosphere, chronopolitics, pre-enactment, prefiguration, time, utopia

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