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

artificial hells
company publicity’, wrote Caroline Tisdall in the Guardian. 23 ‘One is
immediately struck by the atmosphere that has been created here. It is the
atmosphere of the boardroom, of “top- level” managerial meetings’, opined
Guy Brett in The Times. 24 For Nigel Gosling, writing in the Observer, ‘The
gallery displays various subjects held up for non- commercial analysis –
town- planning, hospital treatment, mining, shipping, etc. – besides live
samples of boardroom discussion which must strike fear rather than hope
in any innocent breast.’ 25 It is striking that all three newspaper critics focus
on the exhibition’s bureaucratic atmosphere, a corporate variant on what
Benjamin Buchloh subsequently termed conceptual art’s ‘aesthetic of
administration’. 26 This atmosphere prompted anxiety because it seemed
insuffi ciently distanced from the political conservatism that the corporate
world connoted; indeed, it seemed to signal collaboration with – or capitulation
to – the managerial, rather than critical distance towards it. This is
certainly how the artist Gustav Metzger responded to ‘Inno70’: for him, the
problem of the Hayward show was less aesthetic than ideological, being
symptomatic of APG’s operation in shamelessly attempting ‘to penetrate
the richest powers in the land – the giant industrial corporations’. 27 He was
repelled by the exhibition for trying to steer two mutually opposed groups
together into dialogue (young artists and powerful corporations) and
taking what he called ‘The Middle Way’, since ‘The history of the twentieth
century has shown that this always leads to the Right.’ 28
The most searing (and politically informed) critique of APG’s show
was by the Marxist critic Peter Fuller. His arguments are useful to rehearse
here since they recur in contemporary debates about APG and its relation
to the corporate world. 29 Fuller, on the one hand, noted that the premise of
APG’s placements should be recognised as impressive: getting companies
to agree to sponsor artists who were there explicitly to work against the
profi t motive was no small achievement, and he admitted that this agreement
alone must surely ‘make some impact on the conventional criteria by
which decisions are made in large fi rms’. 30 On the other hand, he felt that
APG were naive to place an artist in an organisation and declare him automatically
to be a free agent. 31 For Fuller, the system of collaboration
proposed between APG and corporations was fl awed from the start since
power relations were stacked against the artist. He cites the experience of
Brisley, who argued against APG’s management- level approach and their
contractual promise not to harm the host companies, which removed the
artist’s right to fi nd fault. 32 Fuller takes glee in relaying the following
dialogue: ‘Latham admits to having no knowledge of Marx – “I’ve never
read him”, he says. His wife, Barbara, is even more illuminating on this
point: “I am very interested in all that Russian thing . . . my father was a
Russian. Trotsky, did you say. No, I don’t know him; who is Trotsky
anyway?” ’ 33 Fuller’s point is not that artists should have a working knowledge
of Marx and Trotsky, but that Latham and Steveni were too ready to
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