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

notes to pages 176– 8
57 See for example APG’s Industrial Negative Symposium (Mermaid
Theatre, London, 1968), at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1971) and discussion
panels at the Hayward Gallery (1971) and Documenta 6 (1977), the latter
as part of Beuys’s 100 Days of the Free International University. Marcel
Broodthaers can be seen in some photographs their discussions (presumably
in Düsseldorf).
58 Breakwell, ‘From the Inside’, p. 6.
59 Steveni, interview with the author, London, 7 August 2009.
60 Walker, ‘APG: The Individual and the Organisation’, p. 162.
61 These points have been synthesised from a number of texts on community
art, including: Su Braden, Artists and People, London and New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; Malcolm Dickson (ed.), Art with People,
Sunderland: AN Publications, 1995; Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the
State: Storming the Citadels, London: Comedia, 1984; Charles Landry,
What a Way to Run a Railroad: An Analysis of Radical Failure, London:
Comedia, 1985.
62 This is in sharp contrast to the literature on community theatre. See for
example, Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as
Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge, 1992; James Harding and
Cindy Rosenthal (eds.), Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and Their
Legacies, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007; John Frick
(ed.), Theatre at the Margins: The Political, The Popular, The Personal,
The Profane, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.
63 I shall be leaning heavily on both Kelly and Landry in what follows, as
well as on interviews with various key fi gures involved in the UK
community arts movement and its funding: Ed Berman, Chris Cooper,
Bill Harpe, Bill McAlistair, Sally Morris, David Powell and Alan Tompkins.
64 Educational projects are not discussed in the art press, even if these projects
are by the same artists who exhibit in the gallery.
65 I am dating the emergence of the community arts movement to the late
1960s, but the Baldry Report (produced by the Arts Council Great Britain
in 1974) offers a timeline beginning in 1962 with the Traverse
Bookshop in Edinburgh, which expanded its activities to include a coffee
bar and a performance area to present small- scale experimental theatre
and mixed- media productions. See Community Arts: The Report of the
Community Arts Working Party, June 1974, London: Arts Council of Great
Britain, 1974, p. 36.
66 It would be fair to say that the majority of community arts projects were
organised by the educated middle classes rejecting their parents’ lifestyles
and value systems.
67 As Sally Morgan has argued: ‘Philosophically [the British community
arts movement] existed somewhere between Joseph Beuys’s proposition
that art and life had no edges, the Situationist position of Guy Debord,
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