ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
anticipate the ‘discursive platform’ as a contemporary exhibition strategy,
and the symposium as a viable way to present non- object- and processbased
art. 57 Even if APG’s intention to confront business with another
system of thinking was idealistic (and perhaps ultimately rather toothless),
its work with government departments was more successful; in both
instances, the artists could provoke conflict within each context if so
desired; indeed, the best placements produced, in the words of Ian Breakwell,
‘abrasive mutual debate’. 58
In sum, what needs to be appreciated today is APG’s determination to
provide a new post- studio framework for artistic production, for providing
opportunities for long- term, in- depth interdisciplinary research, for
rethinking the function of the exhibition from show- room to locus of
debate, for its desire to put two different ideological value systems into
constant tension, and for its aspiration to set in motion a long- term evaluative
framework for both art and research. More than any other artists’
project of the 1970s, APG asks whether it is better for art to be engaged
with society even if this means compromise, or to maintain ideological
purity at the expense of social isolation and powerlessness. These questions
are more intellectual than affective – it’s unlikely that they will
prompt many pulses to accelerate – but they harbinger broader changes
in art and the economy since the 1970s. The political naiveties of APG
are therefore inextricable from its achievements as an artistic provocation.
It is only because APG lacked an identifiable (party) political
John Latham and Joseph Beuys at the conference ‘Streitgesprache: Pragmatismus gegen
Idealismus’ (Discussion: Pragmatism Versus Idealism), Kunstverein Bonn, 1978
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