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

incidental people
Breakwell’s experience – being part of an interdisciplinary research team
– is exceptional in the panorama of APG placements, where the artist is
more usually a lone individual. 44 It also differed from other placements in
having a mandate to directly improve the object of research. Although the
hospitals in question were unhappy with his APG placement, Breakwell
went on to a second phase of collaboration with the DHSS, devising the
Reminiscence Aids Project, which was eventually implemented with the
help of the charity Age Concern in 1981. 45
Another well- known placement from the later 1970s, which anticipates
the last decade’s infatuation with archival art, is Stuart Brisley’s
History Within Living Memory for Peterlee New Town, one of eight ‘new
towns’ planned after the Second World War to deal with housing shortages
in impoverished areas. 46 Despite his political disagreements with
APG, Brisley leapt at the opportunity to work in a northern mining
community. 47 When he arrived there in 1976– 77, new housing had been
allocated to people from the surrounding villages, but Peterlee itself was
a town without history. Faced with a dearth of culture and community,
Brisley set about producing an archive of photographs and interviews
with the local populace, constructing a history for the town from 1900 to
the date of his arrival, 1976, which he defi ned as the period of ‘living
memory’. 48 Signifi cantly, one of the models for this project came from
community arts: the Hackney Writers Workshop, in East London, in
which non- professional writers produced their own history through individual
life stories. 49
Brisley worked with a retired and disabled former stone mason (Mr
Parker) to mediate his idea to the immediate community; he secured for
him a paid position within Peterlee’s Social Development department,
together with fi ve women who were trained to use recording equipment
and undertake the interviews that would form the basis of the archive. This
constituted the fi rst phase of the project; the second was to commission the
Sociology Department of Durham University to write a history of Peterlee
Development Corporation (PDC); and the third phase was to organise a
series of community workshops, by which the local populace could place
questions directly to the PDC. 50 The latter two phases were abandoned in
1978 when Peterlee’s administration was handed over to Easington District
Council; what remained was a heritage centre rather than a living archive,
albeit one with over 2,000 photos and over 100 interviews. Unlike the
‘archival impulse’ of much contemporary art, in which an accumulation of
oral histories, documents and photographs are amassed into an aestheticised
display for the general public, Brisley’s project was conceived for a
specifi c constituency as an expression of their heritage.
Signifi cantly, Brisley today is adamant that what he produced in
Peterlee is an archive, and not a work of art – even though he exhibited
it at the Northern Arts Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, during Autumn
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