ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Brisley felt that the machinery painting project had begun to confuse his
identity as an artist, since ‘one was actually moving away from art more
into a kind of potentially collective situation’, while the information board
incident led him to feel caught in a ‘permanent conflict’ between ‘factory
and management’. 14 Despite the modesty of these interventions, Brisley
argues that the placement at Hille went on to inform his work in setting up
an Artists’ Union (1972 onwards), and impacted upon his protest- based
performances of the 1970s. It also had the effect of distancing Brisley politically
from APG’s efforts, which he felt to be too enamoured with
management (rather than workers), and whose structure he perceived to be
‘a tightly knit, highly autocratic family business, with a poor record of
human relations’. 15
II. Exhibiting Process: ‘Inno70’
Such long- term, process- based placements do not lend themselves easily to
exhibition display. It is a testimony to APG’s ambition and faith in future
outcomes that Steveni managed to secure funding for an APG exhibition at
the Hayward Gallery in 1968, a year before the first placements had even
taken place. The exhibition, titled ‘Inno70’, but also known as ‘Art and
Economics’, was held 2– 23 December 1971 and intended to show the
achievements of the preceding two years, regardless of the point at which
the placements had arrived. 16 According to institutional lore, it was the
worst attended exhibition in the Hayward’s history.
The contents of ‘Inno70’ were decided by the artists in collaboration
with the organisations hosting them. The Hayward’s exterior windows
contained posters for the show with the prominent slogan ‘FOR SALE
Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1’. 17 Inside the gallery entrance
were copies of Latham’s ‘Report and Offer for Sale’, a parodic business
report about APG, available for consultation on a table. Inside, three types
of exhibition space could be discerned: displays reporting on placement
activities, single- room installations, and an interactive discussion zone
called ‘The Sculpture’. Several galleries were filled with blown- up photographs
showing various stages of the associations to date, alongside
videotaped interviews and discussions between artists and representatives
of industry, business, government and education, relayed on monitors scattered
throughout the Hayward. Alongside these were a handful of works
produced by the artists: a film by Andrew Dipper, made while on board a
ship during his placement with Esso, and a fibre sculpture by Leonard
Hessing, made during his placement with ICI Fibres. 18 Only the sculptor
Garth Evans presented his placement as an installation occupying an entire
gallery: he gathered together samples of steel components from every steel
mill in the UK (which looked not unlike sculptures by Anthony Caro), and
invited other artists to rearrange these objects over the course of the
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