identity piece for jane

8/14/2019 Identity Piece for Jane

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Anita and Me: constructing

identity with a corporate icon

Ann Rippin

Department of ManagementGraduate School of Education 14 October

2009


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Introduction

Began with the question, where areorganisations?

Where do they live? Can they be said to live in us?What part do they form of our identities?


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Body Shop International


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Took as my case The Body Shop International Long relationship with it beginning as

impressionable adolescent in the 1970s

Decided to trace my relationship with it at threebiographical points


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Anita and Me

In myimpressionableadolescence

In my middleperiod in the 1990s

In my mature periodin the 2000s


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Project begins to spiral out of control early on Original intent was that there would be no paper but an

interlocking set of mini projects aimed at representing

the complexity of locating and (re)presentingorganisation

Uncontrollable amount of material generated

Like therapy?


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Our post-modern starting point

As organisations are shifting, fluid, fragmentary,temporary, transitory, contingent, incomplete etc

Representations of them must also be shifting, fluid,fragmentary, temporary, transitory, contingent,

incomplete etc

Approach is to use arts-based methods to a large extent


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Arts-based approaches

The research self is not separable from the lived self. Who

we are and what we can be, what we study are all tied to howa knowledge system disciplines its members and claims

authority over knowledge. We need concrete practicesthrough which we can construct ourselves as ethical subjects

engaged in ethical research even if that means challenging

the authority of a disciplines cherished models of

representation.Laurel Richardson (2003) Poetic Representation of Interviews in J. Gubrium & J. Holstein(eds) Postmodern Interviewing, Thousand Oaks/London, Sage: 187-201, 197.


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Bound together loosely around themes ofcommunion, pilgrimage, shrines, devotion,

sainthood and veneration, relics

The love affair


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Auto/biography Duo/biography

Writing critical biography of Anita through myown relationship with her

(egMy Judy Garland Life, Susie Boyt, 2008)

Major confusion over terms Liz Stanley Relationship that of a love affair


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Anita and Me again

Infatuation stage worshipfrom afar, growing up green,idealism, activism

Meeting the love object working through difficultiesof actually being together andmaking it work; picking upsocks from the bedroomfloor, loving despite thefaults, the split

Meeting again years later,inspecting the damage to theold lover.


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From Marcel Proust

But one whiff of kiwi-fruit lip-balm from Anita Roddicks Body Shop

and wham! Im back in the midst of the storm and stress

of over a decade ago. Im bewildered! Bewitched!

anhedonias bone-cold hand clutching my throat

like a mugger in the toils of the bed, believing Im Marcel Proust

giving birth to the bright-white labour of life-lived

Leontia Flynn (2008) Drives, London: Jonathon Cape: 26.


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My own effort

There is a temple in our hearts to

the girls we were and the women

we might have become

a temple stained dark pine green

to hide black mould


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Relics

Do I carry the original values of the BSI withinme?

Am I a keeper of the sliver of the true cross?Am I a reliquary?


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The shrines

Encountered bell shrinesin National Museum ofScotland when on

pilgrimage to TracyEmin retrospective, 2008

Early-medievalmarketing campaign to

whip up tourist/pilgrimage trade


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Shrines for iconic products

Carrot moisturiser Banana conditioner Peppermint foot lotion Dewberry perfume The goddess herself The BVM prototype


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Artists expand both the interpretation of the altarfor women and its visual aesthetic by transforming

aspects of its history, sometimes by appropriatingancient symbols and giving them a very

contemporary slant, or by inventing new symbolswhich are sacralized by enclosing them in the altars

frame.Kay Turner (1999) Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Womens Altars, London: Thamesand Hudson


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Making sense of all this

Fascinated by Tim Ingolds workon lines, traces, paths, zones ofentanglement

Possibility that my own identity isconstituted and continues to beconstituted in part by mycontinuing enmeshments with BSI

Corporate identity like individualidentity is product of threadscoming together

Approach fits the textile re-presentation


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the tissue is a texture

formed of myriad fine

threads tightly interlaced,

presenting all theappearance, to a casual

observer, of a coherent

continuous surface.Ingold, T. (2008) Bindings against boundaries:

entanglements of life in an open world,

Environment and Planning, 40, 1796-1810:

1806


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It is not, then, that organisms [or

organisations?] are entangled in

relations. Rather every organism

indeed every thing is in itself

an entanglement, a tissue of knotswhose constituent strands, as they

become tied up with other strands,

in other bundles, make up the

meshwork.

Ingold, T. (2008) Bindings againstboundaries: entanglements of life in an open

world,Environment and Planning, 40,

1796-1810: 1806


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The Santa Anita Quilt/altar piece

Decided to make an enormous baroquealtarpiece

Incorporating the themes of place, traces, linesof flight, zones of entanglement, enmeshment

etc.

Work in progress


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End with a rhetorical sweep

Within this tangle of interlaced trails,

continually ravelling here and

unravelling there, beings grow or issue

forth along the lines of their

relationships. This tangle is the texture

of the world. (p. 1807)

embodied we may be, but that body, I

contend, is not confined or bounded but

rather extends as it grows along themultiple paths of its entanglements in

the textured world. (p. 1808)


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Ive got you under my skin

identity piece for jane

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