Artist Placement Group (APG):
The individual and the organization.
A decade of Conceptual engineering (1976)
In 1966, the UK’s Artist Placement Group was established to integrate artists into businesses and organizations. To what extent does APG’s "Conceptual engineering" provide a historical reference for creative industries development today?
artdesigncafé | Creative Business & Entrepreneurship | Re-published 24 July 2010
This introduction to a series of reports of artist placements first appeared in Studio International, 191(980) March-April 1976, pp. 162-64.
Ten years ago the visionary, ongoing project prosaically called the Artist Placement Group was launched by John and Barbara [Steveni] Latham, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan. These founder members were joined soon afterwards by David Hall and Stuart Brisley.
The Artist Placement Group (APG) emerged during the middle of an optimistic decade at the moment when the notion that individuals and small groups could establish viable alternatives to existing institutions, or could subvert them by infiltration, was gaining ground. However, the Artist Placement Group is not really explicable in terms of the counter-culture of the sixties. It relates rather to the concept of a post-industrial society forecast in the writings of Daniel Bell: the exhaustion of political ideologies; the change from a goods-producing to a service economy; the pre-eminence of the professional and technical class; the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formulation; the control of technology; and the creation of new “intellectual technology”. [1]
The mid-sixties was also a period of increasing interaction between art and technology, artists and industry. This caused problems for the Artist Placement Group: many of its members’ initial difficulties in communicating their objectives stemmed from misconceptions that it was concerned with the promotion of “technological art” and that it was interested in perpetuating existing forms of industrial patronage of the arts. More recently the Artist Placement Group has found it necessary to combat the idea that it is a “community art” organisation, that it is an agency for “artist in residence” schemes, or that its aim is “help for the artist”. The Artist Placement Group’s concern was, and still is, the development of relationships between exceptional individuals (artists) and organisations. What interested the Artist Placement Group about industry was the number and powers of its organizations. In recent years the drift of power has been away from private firms towards central government, and the Artist Placement Group‘s attention has therefore has increasingly directed towards government departments. Another reason for the shift of interest was the practical inability of the Artist Placement Group, under pressure from the Arts Council for short-term results, to withstand the strain of prolonged negotiations with private firms who were themselves preoccupied with immediate economic issues.
Since its inception a large number of artists and non-artists have contributed to the work of the Artist Placement Group, and so it may seem invidious to single one out for particular attention. But in my view the Artist Placement Group enterprise is only fully comprehensible in the context of John Latham’s cosmology. Certainly in the mid-sixties a number of artists shared Latham’s preoccupation with time and the idea of structure in events, but it was John Latham who developed explicit linguistic formulations of the concepts, time-base and eventstructure which were to provide continuity of thought within the Artist Placement Group. Inevitably there is a considerable overlap between the set of ideas which constitutes the theoretical basis of the Artist Placement Group and those which inform John Latham’s practice as an artist. This fact has been a bone of contention with some critics, but it seems absurd to expect that one of the prime movers of an organisation will not be the source of a major part of its conceptual funding.
Reference:
[1] Daniel Bell. (1960). The End of ideology. (Glencoe, Illinois); (1974). The coming post-industrial society. (London: Heinemann).
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