Like deregulation and $50-million paintings, corporate art programs are a product of the 1980s. More than a thousand sprang up during the greed-and-glitter decade, and among these vehicles for corporate self-promotion First Bank System's stood out. The most ambitious model of art/life interaction ever instituted in a large-scale workplace, the Minneapolis-based bank's art program has been described by New Museum of Contemporary Art director Marcia Tucker as "absolutely unique, a paradigm for many museums." On January 1, First Bank System's program ended abruptly with the resignation of Lynne Sowder, the director/curator who's masterminded it since its inception in 1981.

A critically important experiment has been terminated. But what's at stake here is less a question of good guys and bad guys than a matter of power and symbols--and their frequently weird conjunction. Corporations' art-related activities may vary from amassing collections to sponsoring museum-organized exhibitions, but the purpose and meaning of such endeavors are always symbolic.

At FBS, where new management has recently been installed, the art program symbolized the old regime, as senior vice-president for corporate relations Chris Mahai acknowledged. For the employees the program seems to have symbolized their powerlessness. Ironically, by acquiring a collection now valued at more than twice the $5 million it cost, and garnering far more positive publicity than any other art program during the second half of the '80s, program staffers were wildly successful by conventional standards. The program's unconventional propensity for instigating controversy apparently made it a thorn in the side of the corporate body.

Through a network of programs such as "Controversy Corridor," "You Be the Curator" and, most recently, the "Employee Art Purchase" project, Sowder and her associate Nathan Braulick attempted to harness the critical spirit of contemporary art to create a brave, new corporate-world. The manifesto(!) they wrote declared FBS's department of visual arts to be "an organizational transformation tool, an agent of change which acts as a catalyst for the ongoing examination of this corporate culture. . . and the building of a community based on shared values and respected differences." Translating this modus operandi and world view into psychological terms, individual or institutional "personalities" are forged in the crucible of conflict, which was stimulated at FBS by controversial art and resolved (sometimes) through democratic processes. Although plans for the new and equally expensive art program at FBS haven't yet jelled, Mahai is clear that it will be characterized not by contention but by "harmony and unity."

FBS's art program began in 1981 as a way to shape a new corporate identity. Envisioning FBS as a "super-regional" bank offering all the latest banking services that deregulation would permit, FBS official Dennis Evans hired Minneapolis-based art consultant Lynne Sowder to acquire a contemporary collection that would function as an emblem of the fast-changing world of banking and an organizational development tool. Over four years she built a collection that would eventually include 320 of the most provocative works she could find by emerging and superstar artists, ranging from Barbara Kruger, Joel Peter Witkin, and Joseph Beuys to Minneapolis artists Dorit Cypis and Bruce Charlesworth. (During that time, FBS became the upper Midwest's biggest patron of regional artists.) By 1985, art was shown regularly in FBS's major metro banks and throughout the offices and three galleries of FBS's high-rise headquarters in downtown Minneapolis.

Although FBS's visual arts program was an unequivocal success in terms of the publicity generated and the collection's burgeoning value, Sowder began to notice some employees detested the art in FBS offices. Their hostility manifested itself in what she called "subtle and not so subtle acts of resistance" that included placing plants in front of artworks or repeatedly knocking wall-works askew. In 1986, she conducted a poll of FBS Twin Cities employees to which 1000--a whopping 28 per cent--responded. Twenty-five per cent of them liked the art FBS was buying and exhibiting; 69 per cent did not. Many of the latter group approved of the idea of an art collection, however, and 70 per cent of the survey population made use of the didactic materials intended to contextualize the art that was exhibited.

Sowder, working with Braulick, began to communicate with FBS employees. She conducted seminars about the art program with small groups and devised "Talkback," which provided a published forum for responses to artworks. Both of these programs encouraged employees to vent their spleen about the collection. The kind of art they tended to find offensive was either defined as "depressing" ("Put all the German artists in this category." Sowder remarked) or too evocative of highly charged sexual politics (a Jonathan Borofsky print about phallocentric male aggression, a porcine Cindy Sherman self-portrait). "Talkback" soon begat "Controversy Corridor," a public place to which an artwork was exiled when six employees decide it should be removed from its current location.

Although a sign posted in "Controversy Corridor" read, "FBS employees have asked for greater control of the art collection. Controversy Corridor provides just that," no work ever banished to "Controversy Corridor" has been sold. (Sowder currently works as FBS's consultant in their sale of the most controversial 20 per cent of the collection, because she believes it should not be exhibited without FBS's interactive "support system.") But the dialogue-oriented art program assumed, perestroika-fashion, a life of its own. Employees angrily pointed out that banished works frequently ended up in FBS gallery exhibitions. Sowder admits, "We were constantly tinkering with the idea of what it means to empower employees: our process was organic."

Sowder and Braulick also offered employees the opportunity to work within art projects specifically designed to empower them. Canadian videographer Norman Cohn spent 18 months in 1987 and 1988 collaborating with FBS employee-subjects on video portraits that were never intended to be seen except by those represented. (The Division of Visual Arts published a book called Bank: A Video Portrait Process, describing the project.) After heated discussion about her body-oriented work, artist Dorit Cypis was asked by employees of the Real Estate Banking Division to conduct a three-day workshop ultimately called "The 'Body' at the Bank." The participants discussed journals and autobiographical images, did physical exercises, and created photos and drawings about their relationships to their own bodies and workplaces. Cypis says that the workshop "was essentially about the recovery of lost power and the idea that power resides inside oneself, not in the corporation."

When considering FBS and its art programming, the leitmotiv of power is ubiquitous. What might actual employee power mean in connection with FBS's Visual Arts Division? Real power in this context is the power both to control the acquisition of art, and the presentation of that art. By the end of 1987, the art program was rapidly moving toward these goals, through programs that demanded teamwork and cooperation. "You Be the Curator" encouraged employees to organize exhibitions of work from the collection for the bank's public galleries, and "Employee Art Selection" encouraged employees to choose the art for their workspace. Most far-reaching in its implications was "Employee Art Purchase." For that project, two volunteer groups of employees spent several months and $100,000 of FBS's money on art for their newly renovated offices at the First Bank St. Paul Building.

Sowder structured the process so that the group members met with a psychologist-facilitator to discuss the roles art might play in their lives and to determine the selection criteria for the art that would be purchased. "It worked," she observed, "because we could give away our own power without having to give away control of the process." (The commission that is set to reevaluate the National Endowment for the Arts peer-panel grant selection process might learn from this.) Sowder confided that she had even fantasized about an employee-controlled art program that would obviate the need for her position.

Althougth the "Employee Art Purchase" project resulted in the acquisition of respectably conventional works (mostly prints by artists like Jennifer Bartlett and John Buck), the reliance on democratic process was genuinely radical--and possibly subversive--in this corporate milieu. "It's the process-oriented programs we formulated that the new management objected to, not the [controversial] work in the collection," Sowder noted. "Human resources and organizational development funds throughout the corporation--anything having to do with the process--have been slashed." (Mahai confirmed this.) Does allowing employees to make decisions about selecting art inspire demands for more input into corporate decisions of all kinds? Sowder suspects that this is the case, but diplomatically cautions that the relative brevity of the program precludes such conclusions. It is clear, however, that this is the heart of the matter.

Put another way, the paradoxical contradiction inherent in FBS's visual arts program is that the employees don't have unusual power outside the realm of the division of visual art. FBS's visual arts program became a lightning rod for discontent by simultaneously focusing attention on--and distracting attention from--the real problems at FBS. Not only has FBS been described by a museum educator who received a grant to study the art program's interactive methods as a "[typically] hierarchical, male-dominated, corporate environment," but it is clear that the 1980s has been among the most difficult decades for employees in the bank's 133-year history.

In conversation with a half-dozen, non-art division employees, all of whom chose to remain anonymous, a clear picture of FBS emerges. Until the 1980s it was an old-fashioned, regional bank emphasizing traditional services for all customers and unusual only for its history of philanthropic giving and the lengthy tenure of many employees. In the wealthy and surprisingly uncompetitive Twin Cities financial market, investment and corporate clients were beginning to respond to the allure of services offered by carpetbaggers such as Citibank, while consumers were responding to offers of credit cards from nonlocal banks.

Then-president Dennis Evans's aggressive strategy of responding to the competition was marked by acquisition and diversification, the selling of unprofitable branch banks, "streamlining" (deregulation allowed for the administrative merger of First Bank Minneapolis and First Bank St. Paul in 1986), and other policies likely to result in the loss of jobs. Even when Evans's strategy seemed to be succeeding during the go-go mid-1980s, worker anxiety was extremely high, according to a senior marketing executive who noted that "employees were scared and didn't know how or why changes were taking place. Outsiders with 'new skills', like Sowder and me, were brought in and we were told, 'You have to be the agents of change.'"

Evans resigned near the end of 1988, a month before the bank announced unprecedented losses of $300 million for the year and shortly after Cypis's workshop, which--she recalls--lost more than half its participants because "employees had just learned about big impending layoffs through the newspaper and were paranoid about anything having to do with the bank." As FBS downsizes, the reshuffling goes on; 600 of some 10,000 employees have been laid off since mid-November, and another 600 will go by September, according to Mahai.

What's an employee to do in such a situation? As with most corporations, few outlets for registering grievances are available; FBS is not unionized, nor have there been attempts to unionize it during the past 15 years, according to Mahai and FBS employees. Art surely became the scapegoat for structural inequities and a symbol of elitism in hard times. Consider the intensity of this wide-ranging and anonymous 1987 "Talkback" response to a Cheryl Laemmle painting of a conical wooden figure that many of us would regard as innocuous: "I have never really understood the bank's art program's objectives unless they are to make the employees feel stupid and uncultured because we cannot understand what these abstraction are all about . . ."

Sowder believes that top management only recently began to understand what the evolving objectives of the art program actually were: to provide employees with a forum, a place to articulate their discontents. Management's problems with the program should probably be regarded as the hallmark of its success. Sowder removed art from the realm of the trivial and invested it with fresh, nonsymbolic purpose. Or as marketing vice-president Pat Swindle remarked on her videotape interview with Norman Cohn, "What happens when those who have previously been silent discover their voices and in so doing realize the extent to which they are not aligned with prevailing authority?"