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

notes to pages 165– 7
Lawson, Julie Lawson (then secretary to Roland Penrose), Michael
Compton (curator at Tate), and the Swiss collector Bernard Bertinger as
chairman. (Interview with Barbara Steveni by Melanie Roberts, 22 June
1998, National Sound Archive, British Library, Tape 8.)
6 Letter from G. F. R. Barclay (departmental head at the Civil Service) to
other government departments asking if they were interested in working
with APG. January 1973; John Walker papers, Tate Archive: 9913/ 1/ 4,
p. 5.
7 Evans recounts that he became involved in APG ‘by the back door’,
since the British Steel Corporation decided to act on Steveni’s invitation
by establishing a one- year fellowship for an artist, to run alongside
other fellowships for industry, engineering, and so on. The fellowship
was sought by open call, thereby avoiding the intermediary negotiations
of APG. (Evans, interview with the author, New York, 22
September 2009.)
8 Latham viewed artists as pre- eminently suitable personnel within companies
because they already operate on a longer time- base than other groups
in society, are skilled in handling conceptually unfamiliar material, and
are noted for their independence and their creativity.
9 Stuart Brisley, interview with the author, London, 7 August 2009. Steveni,
who confesses to not taking no for an answer, places the overall ratio a
little higher, with around one in ten letters receiving some kind of
response.
10 The festival ‘9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering’, the exhibition ‘Some
More Beginnings’ and the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 are the most prominent
milestones of EAT’s achievements. Highlights of the Art and
Technology programme included James Turrell and Robert Irwin experimenting
with sensory deprivation chambers and ganzfeld spaces, the
latter being formative for the development of Turrell’s installation work
in the 1970s and 1980s.
11 The open brief is one in which there is no expectation that the artist will
produce results.
12 Latham, cited in John Walker, ‘APG: The Individual and the Organisation,
A Decade of Conceptual Engineering’, Studio International, 191:980,
March–April 1976, p. 162.
13 Brisley maintains that he painted the factory equipment according to the
workers’ suggestions less as a work of art than as a device for stirring up
the idea that they were able to infl uence their surroundings. (Naveen
Khan, ‘Artists on the Shop Floor’, Arts Guardian, 2 August 1971.) He also
recalls that the noticeboard scheme was swiftly co- opted by the management
who took control of the noticeboards to disseminate information to
employees. (Brisley, interview with the author, London, 7 August 2009.)
See also Brisley, interview by Melanie Roberts, September/ October
1996, National Sound Archive, British Library.
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