Manpower
Manpower
The Legacy of the Artist Placement Group
The practice of temporarily ‘placing’ artists in the worlds of government and business for research and other projects has greatly expanded since the 1990s. But it was the Artist Placement Group that began it all in the mid sixties in London. Lily van Ginneken examines the group’s legacy.When Barbara Steveni went out in the middle of the night to an industrial zone in a London suburb to gather scrap material, she did it as a kindness. Two guests of hers, the French Fluxus artists Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri, needed some material because they were participating in the Festival of Misfits at Gallery One in London. It was pitch black, but the factory on the terrain she was searching was alit with activity. At that moment Steveni realized that artists actually should be able to go into factories to participate in the production process, instead of picking up scrap outside.Her eureka moment led to the formation of the Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1966, which had the objective of ‘placing’ artists in British government institutes and industrial firms. The idea was that artists, as outsiders, could make a positive contribution to the organizations in which they were placed because of their totally different way of thinking and perceiving. At the same time, it was a way for them to break out of the ghetto of the artworld with its gallery system and museum politics. The APG initiative could have been conceived today, because nowadays quite a few artists are stepping out of the studio and investing their brainpower and manpower in society. Perhaps that’s why interest in the APG is growing. Barbara Steveni recently gave a lecture at Come Alive! No Movement without Archives, a theme day organized by Casco in Utrecht. At the beginning of this year Arnolfini presented a short documentary of APG material in Bristol, and not long ago Antony Hudek curated an exhibition inspired by the APG, The Incidental Person, for apex-art in New York. He selected artists for whom it makes no difference whether their actions are seen as art or as socially-oriented activities. In the meantime the museum world has also recognized the importance of the APG. Despite the group’s fundamental principle of specifically wanting to operate outside the art circuit, the respectable Tate in London included the APG archive in the Tate Archive Collection in 2004.
Chewed-Up Greenberg
The English artist Barbara Steveni formed the APG in 1966 together with her husband John Latham (1921-2006); they were joined by Jeffrey Shaw, Barry Flanagan, Stuart Brisley, David Hall, Anna Ridley & Maurice Agis and Ian McDonald Munro. Steveni studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, where she particularly excelled in drawing. In the early 60s she worked with assemblages, made performances, among others with Yoko Ono, and participated in events. Also because of her marriage (in 1951), she was part of an experimental, internationally-oriented group of artists around Latham, the majority of whom were connected with St. Martin’s School of Art. At the time, the school was especially famed for its sculpture department led by the influential teacher Anthony Caro, but the group around Latham favoured a more interdisciplinary approach. Alongside stimulator and promoter Steveni, the theorist of the APG was Latham. He is one of a number of remarkable postwar English artists. After serving in the British Navy during World War II, he took painting lessons at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and taught for a while at St. Martin’s, where he was popular with the students for his contrary behaviour and opposition to the artistic establishment. A famous example is the Still & Chew event, which he undertook with his students in 1966. The event was typical of his oeuvre, involving as it did a book. The book was always an important theme of his because it symbolizes thinking and can also form the occasion for profound controversies. In this case, it was the cult book of the times, Art and Culture by the American art critic Clement Greenberg, which Latham had borrowed from the school’s library for reasons that were not entirely innocent. He invited artists, critics and students to his home and asked them to each choose a page from Greenberg’s book and chew it to pieces. Then he put the collected pulp into a chemical substance, added yeast, and a month later it was a softly bubbling solution. When after one year the library urgently requested him to bring back the book, this duly occurred, in a suitable flask with a description of the contents. The next day he was fired from his teaching job. The flask and the accompanying documentation were stored in a leather case, which is now in the collection of the MoMA in New York.1
The Dutch Connection
Although the activities of Steveni and Latham largely escaped the notice of the Dutch artworld, there were a few links between London and Amsterdam, in particular the Project sigma and the Eventstructure Research Group (ERG) formed in 1967. The unorthodox Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi wanted to set up an international community under the name ‘sigma’ (a symbol in mathematics for everything, the sum, the whole), which would work on a cultural revolution in several centres throughout the world. In the Netherlands he had enlisted the support of Simon Vinkenoog, who established a sigma centre on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam and put together, as a sigma, a double issue of the magazine Randstad (11-12) in book form, under the title Manifesten Manifestaties (De Bezige Bij, 1966). In that issue, Trocchi among other things proposed a ‘super-categorical cultural organization’ which could for example act ‘as an international cultural engineering cooperative…. It may frequently be advisable, economically or otherwise, for sigma to encourage some established company to undertake this or that cultural project: that is to say, sigma will not necessarily wait passively to be consulted.’ The sigma associates, who typified the alternative cultural world of the 1960s, were called ‘cosmonauts’. It was an internationally diverse company of artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals. John Latham was also involved, and was even present at the inaugural gathering of Project sigma in June of 1964 in Oxfordshire.More or less inspired by John Latham’s ideas, the Eventstructure Research Group (ERG) was formed in 1967 in Amsterdam by the Australian-born artist Jeffrey Shaw. Shaw had studied at St. Martin’s in the mid sixties and been involved in the establishment of the APG in London. However, he soon questioned the effectiveness of the APG because he foresaw that the negotiations with the organizations would take up too much time and threaten to concentrate on financial issues. He withdrew from the APG and set up the ERG with Theo Botschuijver, Tjebbe van Tijen and others. Particularly in those first years, the ERG trademark consisted of events with inflated plastic objects, such as the famed three-meter-high tetrahedron, a three-dimensional triangular form with which you could walk on water.
Charm, Flair and Strategic Insight
The initiative that the APG took in 1966 to expand the potential of artists and introduce it into society at large makes one curious as to how the group actually went about this. An interview with Barbara Steveni (Utrecht, 14 March 2010) reveals that she approached it very pragmatically, using charm, flair, strategic insight and patience. Naturally, it was anything but simple, bringing artists who are geared to creating something, making something which does not yet exist, together with governments and businesses, who are primarily interested in having problems solved in a financially feasible manner. Getting both parties on the same track is no sinecure. Steveni explains that someone she knew had read in the Financial Times that a certain Sir Robert Adeane was chairman of the board for several important companies and had said: Why don’t you call him? Adeane immediately reacted positively, even offering to be on the board of the APG. Although at that point the group didn’t even have a board, in no time at all she managed to gather a number of influential people.One of the first companies she worked with was the British Steel Corporation. Quite a few artists were working in steel at the time, but what was important was that the company regularly financed art fairs. She proposed changing that policy: rather than giving money to an artist, bring an artist into the company. She suggested three artists, from amongst whom British Steel chose one. These were people she knew from her own circles who worked on the fringes of the traditional art disciplines and wanted to operate in a non-art context. ‘The canvas in the studio changed into the canvas of life,’ she explains.The chosen candidate was Garth Evans, who delved into the company’s labour relations and put his insights on paper. People at the Steel Federation were so impressed that they invited him for another two years. He journeyed to Port Talbot, one of the largest steel factories in Wales, where he had talks with apprentice workers. The result was a final report in which the personnel policy was called into question. ‘Context is half the work,’ was the APG’s starting point. There must be an engagement between the artist on the one side and a motivated, inviting host on the other. For an effective placement of artists in the non-artworld, the APG recommended a process-oriented, conceptual approach, stating that an artist’s contribution to society is art. And once an agreement had been reached on the project to be carried out, a contract should be drawn up, in which among other things it was established that the artist would be compensated like other members of the staff and must be able to operate independently. Steveni was inventive in finding points of contact with companies, such as the professional film department of British Airways. From that position, David Hall was able to film the special cloud formations above Gibraltar. The way in which Andrew Dipper filmed and photographed life on an oil tanker was well received at Esso Petroleum, and his approach was even recommended as an example at government departments. Artists like Ian Breakwell and Hugh Davies worked at the Department of Health and Social Security on projects that went on for years. Stuart Brisley went to Peterlee New Town, which had been built to put an end to the misery of the old mining town. Studying the old Peterlee for months, he collected an audio and visual archive of the history of living and working in this mining area for the inhabitants of the New Town. These are a few examples of the dozens of placements that the APG coordinated from the mid sixties to the mid eighties.
Changing Climate
While Steveni’s persistent approach ensured that the ideas of the APG were actually realized, John Latham provided them with a theoretical underpinning. He conceived the term ‘Incidental Person’ to indicate the individual who moved in non-art circles. Once the Incidental Person had access to affairs of public importance – the economy, the environment or governance – the IP was capable of providing answers to questions that had not yet been posed, he argued. For Latham, this approach tied in with theories based on the phenomenon of time that influenced all of his work and explained his conceptual attitude in the APG projects. This did not become really clear, however, until his placement at the Scottish Office’s Development Agency, which began in 1975.During an initial feasibility study he stumbled across a tremendous archive of aerial photographs. Particularly striking were the mounds of waste in the area to the west of Edinburgh. They looked like gigantic sculptures and had names such as Five Sisters, Niddrie Woman and Niddrie Heart. They had arisen in the second half of the 19th century, as a result of the extraction of oil from coal. Through oxidation, their colour had changed from a grey-blue to pinkish-red, and the area had a rich variety of plants and animals. Latham proposed that the mounds be kept as monuments to their era. For some time, however, there was talk of levelling them because the material could be put to good use in construction and road building. At the beginning of the eighties the commercial sector drew back, which meant that in any case the area of the Five Sisters was recognized as a national monument. Although the APG grew increasingly professional as an organization, also attempting to set up an international network, over the course of twenty years the situation changed considerably, both politically and artistically. The openness of the sixties and seventies disappeared, and within the group differences of opinion arose about the relationship between artistic theory and practice. Outside the group, people began to wonder about how the process-oriented approach of the APG should be judged in terms of art.
New Criteria
Nowadays the APG-aims of the 1960s seem to be developing into a new kind of practice. Some artists are now seeking out contacts with the non-artworld themselves and consciously operating on the terrain of other disciplines. Having a dialogue with society is more important for them than to keep holding onto their autonomy. In a certain sense they are undermining the structure of the artworld in this manner, even as they are mistrusted as non-experts when they operate on the terrain of other disciplines. Since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been adept at introducing all sorts of non-art situations into art. The artworld has always adapted with agility, ever since Marcel Duchamp presented his readymades in museum exhibitions. After all, artists indicate the direction, while art historians, critics, museums, galleries and collectors interpret, judge, follow and buy. But the other way around, when artists operate outside the artworld as a consequence of their ideas, things become more difficult. How does one react to that? Because the artworld’s focus still remains on the quality of the image, the autonomy of artists, it does not know how to deal with artists’ projects that take place outside of the traditional arena of art, and prefers to label them as forms of social work or activism.Now that we are in the 20th century, it is vital that the criteria finally be revised, so that the new practices of which the APG’s were a precursor can be better recognized and judged. What about if art institutes were to pay less attention to glorifying the self-image of students and if art critics were to stop concentrating on the quality of the image and investigate other criteria?2Barbara Steveni is contributing to this in her own way. In 1989 she founded O+I (Organisation and Imagination) as an independent agency to advise artists, do research and, through educational programmes and presentations such as I am an Archive, carry on the legacy of the APG in today’s world – because artists have an inspiring power to offer that society hardly takes advantage of. Lily van Ginneken is former director of Stroom Den Haag
Lily van Ginneken
