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

incidental people
dismiss the usual ways of looking at society and verbalising political ideas
despite having no real knowledge of what these involve (‘one would have
thought that for anyone intent on transforming capitalism, and imposing
an alternative value structure not based on the commercial premise, or the
“profi t motive”, at least a minimal knowledge of Marxist theory would
have been obligatory’). 34
Fuller has a point, but completely misunderstands Latham’s idiosyncratic
artistic thinking, which was akin to a total cosmology. For Latham,
the artist as Incidental Person transcends party politics and ‘takes the stand
of a third ideological position which is off the plane of their obvious collision
areas’. 35 Latham’s thinking was informed by two scientists he had met
in the mid 1950s, Clive Gregory and Anita Kohsen, who invited him to be
a founding member of their project, the Institute for the Study of Mental
Images; in parallel with them he developed his own complex, rather longwinded
system for understanding the world. Like Gregory and Kohsen,
Latham believed that human confl icts arose through an absence of an overarching
theory of mankind, which they set about producing by identifying
common features across multiple disciplines; one of the central ideas to
emerge from this was a theory of ‘event- structure’, in which the ‘least
event’ is the minimum unit of existence. Another key idea for Latham was
the ‘Delta unit’ (∆), a new way to measure human development, and moreover
to determine the value of a work of art, by measuring its importance not
in monetary terms but through the degree of awareness it produces (from
unconsciousness to the most heightened state) over a sustained period. 36 This
idea was key to APG, since the organisation as a whole was committed to the
long- term effects of artistic intervention in society, rather than seeking short-
term demonstrable goals. 37 For Latham, the mysterious dynamism of the
Delta unit could surpass in a new great social force both capitalism and
socialism, which he derided as ‘mere stratifi ed habits of thought that have
little to do with change’. 38 In order to convey these inversions of conventional
thinking, Latham devised a specifi c vocabulary: ‘books’ became
‘skoob’, ‘noit’ reversed the suffi x normally used to denote abstractions (‘-
tion’), while the word ‘artist’ was replaced by the unromantic and contingent
category of ‘Incidental Person’. As a new cultural term, Steveni later
explained, the Incidental Person ‘applies particularly to those in whom
specifi c formulative abilities are apparent. It indicates a broader area of practice
(e.g. “multimedia”) and a specifi c concern with “art in context” rather
than with “painting”, “sculpture”, and so on.’ 39 As such, the Incidental
Person seems to presage the job description of many contemporary artists
who undertake projects in the social sphere and are required to deploy a
broad range of social skills that go beyond the production of objects for visual
consumption. The replacement of heavy industry by a service economy has
also allowed APG to seem a forerunner of recent attempts to remodel the
fl exible worker along artistic lines (as discussed in Chapter 1).
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