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

notes to pages 170– 1
28 Ibid., p. 4.
29 See, for example, the audience response to Steveni’s APG presentation in
Art and Economics II, Apex Art, New York, February 2010.
30 Peter Fuller, ‘Subversion and APG’, Art and Artists magazine, December
1971, p. 20. Leslie Julius, managing director at Hille, later remarked that
one ‘cannot expect industry and commerce to put out money for art, if
the artists themselves are going to attack everything that industry and
commerce stand for . . . I am very resentful that all my intentions, which
I think are good intentions, should be undermined by the artist on a political
basis. . . . if a man wants to overthrow the capitalist system I don’t
see why, as a capitalist, I should provide him with the money to do it.’
(Interview with Peter Byrom [1975], in Dodd, Artists Placement Group
1966– 1976, p. 25.)
31 In Fuller’s eyes, Latham failed to realise ‘that anyone paid almost
double the wages of the workers, practising an abstruse bourgeois
ideology, and having constant access to the boardroom and its facilities
will automatically be aligned with the management, even if he did
get some degree of acceptance from the men’. (Fuller, ‘Subversion
and APG’, p. 22.)
32 For Brisley, artists were being asked to serve the needs of those who
control power and who create the circumstances for the production and
acquisition of profi t. See Stuart Brisley, ‘No it is Not On’, Studio International,
183:942, March 1972, pp. 95– 6 (his title puns on Latham’s term
‘noit’, discussed below).
33 Fuller, ‘Subversion and APG’, p. 22.
34 Ibid.
35 Latham, cited in John Walker, John Latham: The Incidental Person – His
Art and Ideas, London: Middlesex University Press, 1995, p. 100.
36 For a clear explanation of the ‘Delta unit’, see Walker, ‘APG: The Individual
and the Organisation’, pp. 162– 4. For a crushing dismissal of it
(and its role in APG’s ‘Report and Offer for Sale’), see Metzger, ‘A Critical
Look at Artist Placement Group’, p. 4.
37 Although APG was directly engaged with contemporary society and
industry, the objective of the group’s focus lay in the future, not with the
immediate present. This is why, John Walker explains, attacks on the
Hayward show were premature: it would not be possible to judge the
effi cacy of APG’s activities ‘until at least 1986’. (Walker, ‘APG: The
Individual and the Organisation’, p. 162.)
38 Latham, cited by Brisley, in ‘No it is Not On’, p. 96.
39 O+I Foundation, leafl et, undated, but after 1989; 9913/ 1/ 4, p. 8, in John
Walker papers, Tate Archive. ‘What IPs [Incidental Persons] would
bring to industry were longer- term perspectives, imagination, creativity,
visual skills, non- commercial values and inclusiveness. Their value to
industry could be compared to that of inventors and research scientists.’
335