Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

6
Incidental People:
APG and Community Arts
The post- ’68 period in Britain saw the formation of two attempts to
rethink the artist’s role in society. The first was set in motion in 1966,
and its politics were contested within years of its inception: the Artist
Placement Group (APG), founded by the artist John Latham and his
then- partner Barbara Steveni, and which continued until 1989 when it
was renamed O+I. 1 The second is the community arts movement,
whose emergence in the UK forms part of an international push across
Europe and North America to democratise and facilitate lay creativity,
and to increase accessibility to the arts for less privileged audiences.
These developments represent two distinct poles of rethinking the
artist’s place in society in the late 1960s and 1970s: one in which the
artist undertakes a placement with a company or government body, and
one in which the individual artist assumes the role of facilitating creativity
among ‘everyday’ people. It should be noted that the academic
literature on both of these movements is scanty: the bulk of publications
on community arts tend to comprise reports and evaluations of
specific projects rather than a synthesised narrative; the APG have only
recently begun to be the focus of historical re- evaluation in the UK, in
part due to the death of John Latham in 2006 and the deposit of APG’s
archive at Tate in 2004 (at the time of writing still uncatalogued), but
also due to the interest of a younger generation of artists and curators
who see parallels between their own intervention- based activities and
those of APG. 2
I. The Formation of APG
APG is usually credited as the brainchild of John Latham (1921– 2006), a
mixed- media artist peripherally involved with Assemblage and Fluxus
during the 1960s. 3 He began making reliefs and assemblages from 1954
onwards, using the then new technology of spray paint; he also made
fi lms, actions, and participated in the Destruction in Art Symposium at the
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