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

artificial hells
1976. Rather, the artist considers himself to have been testing out techniques
from performance in a social context, ‘to be a model for others to
use in different situations if it proved to have some virtue’. 51 He nevertheless
always includes the Peterlee placement in his exhibition
catalogues, listed as a ‘project’, rather than as a work of art; in other
words, it remains authored, but has an ambiguous status, because for
Brisley, the Peterlee archive has a social function, rather than an aesthetic
one. 52 As I will elaborate in the next chapter, the word ‘project’ has
subsequently come to replace ‘work of art’ as a descriptor for long- term
artistic undertakings in the social sphere. Brisley keeps apart two
domains that in subsequent decades many artists have attempted to map
onto each other, and the distinction he upholds (that nominalism is inadequate:
art is only art if it’s recognised beyond the frame of the artist) is
not a position shared by the more radical practitioners of participatory
art today.
APG’s activities go straight to the heart of contemporary debates
about the functionality of art, the desirability (or not) of it having social
goals, and the possibility of multiple modes of evaluation. It seems indisputable
that APG sought to give the artist more power within society,
rather than empowering workers on the lower rungs of the organisations
where placements were held. To this extent, its goals seem more perceptual
rather than social: to change the awareness of those working within
organisations, but not actually to galvanise insurrection. This much is
self- evident. However, it is arguably more productive to focus on APG’s
contribution to one of the largest problems concerning socially engaged
practice: the question of evaluation, and over what period of time such
judgements should be made.
Latham frequently asserted that the world needs to develop a new mode
of accountancy for art – hence the Delta unit, which relocated value away
from fi nance and onto ‘units of attention’ over time. And yet, in APG’s
later writings, we fi nd the group resorting to a monetary overestimation of
the artists’ contributions to society, such as valuing Ian Breakwell’s contribution
during his fi rst year at the DHSS to be £3.5 million. It seems telling
that this fi nancial calculation becomes the criterion of success, rather than a
conceptual or artistic value (even if artists like Brisley did not consider
their projects to be art). In 1977, Latham mischievously sent invoices for
‘services rendered’ to the British government – one for a million pounds on
behalf of APG and one for half a million pounds for his own services in
‘creating a successful C20th art movement’ – and proceeded to stop paying
taxes from that year on. Although the invoice was clearly a provocation,
his translation of artistic practice into monetary value seems hard to square
with APG’s determination to rethink conventional modes of accounting.
This tendency to focus on demonstrable outcomes persisted in APG’s
supporters as late as 1992, when The Journal of Art and Art Education ran an
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