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

incidental people
article by Graham Stevens that also argued for the importance of APG’s
activities by listing the new museum in Peterlee as a direct result of Stuart
Brisley’s placement, the conservation of monumental industrial sites in
Scotland (by John Latham at the Scottish Offi ce), and two local resident
associations in Birmingham (developed by the fi lmmaker Roger Coward in
a Department of the Environment placement at Small Heath). 53 In short,
although APG rightly sought to redirect the value of art away from fi nancial
outcomes and concrete indicators, it ended up resorting to these in
order to justify public investment in the organisation. The latter was a sore
point: as a direct result of the exhibition ‘Inno70’, the Arts Council of Great
Britain withdrew its funding for APG on the basis that it was ‘more
concerned with social engineering than with straight art’. 54 To the chagrin
of Latham and Steveni, the Arts Council then took over the role of artist’s
placements, claiming in 1973 the sole governmental right to be funding
artists. 55
It is ironic that the UK government between 1997 and 2010 rendered the
Arts Council explicitly beholden to social engineering, using culture to
reinforce policies of social inclusion (see Chapter 1). APG’s argument that
artists can have long- term effects on society has been realised and acknowledged,
but perhaps not quite in ways that they imagined. The Delta unit
prefi gured New Labour’s preferred method of assessing cultural value
through a statistical analysis (audience demographics, marketing, visitor
fi gures, etc.) rather than the more diffi cult terrain of debating artistic quality.
APG could be said to have pre- empted the use of artists by management
consultancies, and to have ushered in the growth of the ‘creative industries’
as a dialogue between art and business in the wake of heavy industry, not
to mention the centrality of artist residency schemes to the regeneration of
inner cities. 56
The challenge, then, is to identify the specifi cally artistic achievements
of APG. Despite the highly administrative character of its practice, and the
quasi- corporate greyness in which all documentation surrounding the
project seems to be saturated, its achievements were primarily discursive
and theoretical. For example, it defi ned a new model of patronage organised
around the ‘open brief’, even if the power balance of this relationship
remained open to question. It contributed to a broader post- war effort to
demystify the creative process – replacing the term ‘artist’ with ‘Incidental
Person’ – even if this mystifi cation returned via the back door in the elusive
Delta unit to measure artistic effi cacy. It provided windows for open-
minded organisations to rethink their hierarchy and basic assumptions,
and in so doing was more provocative and adventurous than the ‘artist in
residence’ schemes subsequently offered by the Arts Council. Curatorially,
its contribution is central: the inclusion of a discussion space within
‘Inno70’, and APG’s subsequent decision not to use an exhibition format
but to present its projects through panel discussions throughout the 1970s,
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