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

artificial hells
yet the driving force behind the placements was Barbara Steveni, whose
persistence in chasing organisations cannot be underestimated. 8 Many
more letters were sent out than replies received; by the time of the Hayward
show in 1971, only six placements had been established after over 100 letters
of approach. 9
APG’s slogan was ‘the context is half the work’, an idea in tune with the
post- studio tendencies of art in the later 1960s, and indebted to earlier
works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings of 1951 (a series of
glossy monochrome canvases that refl ect shadows and light in the gallery)
and to John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952, a ‘silent’ performance in which peripheral
sound becomes the composition’s content). However, instead of pulling
the audience into the work, as Rauschenberg and Cage had done, APG
operated on the inverse principle of pushing the artist out into society. The
idea of artists working with business and industry was a familiar tendency
during the late ’60s. Early APG documents reference examples in Europe
as comparative models: in France, the Groupe Recherche d’Art Visuel
(GRAV, discussed in Chapter 3), who were sponsored by industrialists
interested in the exploitation of techniques and visual phenomena; in
Holland, the Philips electricity company worked directly with an artist to
make robot art; in Italy, competitions were sponsored by Esso and Pirelli;
while in Britain, various sculptors were working in new materials that
demanded close collaboration with steelworks (Eduardo Paolozzi), nickel
laboratories (John Hosking) and glass fi bre manufacturers (Phillip King).
In the US, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), set up in 1966 by
the Bell Labs scientist Billy Klüver in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg,
aimed to bring science to the service of artistic innovation, while on
the West coast in the same year, curator Maurice Tuchman established the
Art and Technology programme at LACMA. 10 APG differed from all of
these models in its heavily theorised underpinnings, and in not basing the
placements around sponsorship or using collaboration as a way to gain
access to new technology. Science and industry were not at the service of
art, but rather, the two domains were to confront each other ideologically.
From today’s perspective, it is tempting to suggest that the tacit agenda for
each placement was for art to have a positive, humanising effect upon
industry through the inherent creativity of artists and their relative ignorance
of business conventions, but Steveni maintains that this was not the
case. Outcomes were not determined in advance, and entirely depended
on the individual artist in a given context; this was what APG called the
‘open brief’. 11 Nevertheless, some artists were clearly more politicised
than others, and this was refl ected in their decisions to work either on the
shop fl oor or in the management of a given company. Latham himself
claimed to be beyond party politics, which he derided as a ‘form of
sectional interest civil war’. 12
First- hand immersion in an industrial workplace could nevertheless
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