Artist Placement Group (APG) (1992)
Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
artdesigncafé | Creative Business & Entrepreneurship | Published 05 December 2010
This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Artist Placement Group (APG)
The Artist Placement Group is a visionary project launched in 1966 by the British artists John Latham, Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan. Others joined later, including David Hall and Stuart Brisley. The function of APG— which was funded for a time by the Arts Council— was to act as a mediating mechanism between artists and non-art organizations, specifically to “place” artists for specific periods within industries, businesses, universities, government departments, etc. The aim was to resolve the alienation of artists from society by placing them within the centres of power. As “incidental persons” whose insights encompassed the needs of the whole of society, artists were judged capable of transcending the short-term goals and divisions of existing organizations. Placements were to be undertaken not primarily to generate art objects but in order to achieve social change. Sculptures, films and so forth were produced but APG artists were expected to enter organizations without any preconceptions about end results so that the work undertaken was a response to specific contexts.
An APG exhibition took place at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 and many other shows and public meetings were held in Britain and in Europe during the ’70s. APG has aroused much adverse criticism in the art press but it did arrange a number of successful placements and the idea of artist placement has become commonplace in the British artworld. Since the 1960s, APG has functioned sporadically, i.e. whenever finance was available. Recently, a new name has been adopted: O+I (Organisation and Imagination).
See also Artist-in-Residence, Community Art.
References and further reading
> John Walker. “APG: the individual and the organisation, a decade of conceptual engineering”. Studio International, 191 (980), March-April 1976, pp. 162-72.
> Barbara Steveni. “Artist Placement: APG 1966-83”. Aspects, (24), 1983, pp. 5-7.
> Barbara Steveni. “Will art influence history?”. AND Journal of Art & Art Education, (9), 1986, pp. 14-21.
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