The Artist Placement Group (APG) was founded in London in 1966 by John Latham and Barbara Steveni. Until it was dissolved in the late-1980s, APG brokered some twenty placements of artists within various industrial companies and government departments, resulting in works such as Ian Breakwell’s innovative yet controversial films about Rampton and Broadmoor psychiatric hospitals in the late ’70s. Other participants included Barry Flanagan, Andrew Dipper, David Toop, and David Hall. In 1971, Hall made a series of ten TV Interruptions for Scottish Television, which appeared during ordinary commercial breaks; unsuspecting viewers found themselves confronted suddenly with the spectacle of a burning television set or gushing tap faucet. While the unexpected aspect of these works was lost when seven of the original ten were exhibited recently at Raven Row gallery, Hall’s project continues to pack a playfully subversive punch, reminding us of the radical agenda inherent in so many APG projects.

In another APG project, Stuart Brisley attempted to confront what he felt was the organization’s lack of direct political action during his placement at the furniture manufacturer S. Hille & Co. Ltd. by bridging the communication divide between the workers and management. However, Brisley’s task was a difficult one because, as Claire Bishop has recently argued, APG’s placements too frequently cast the artists less as the “incidental persons” intervening productively at the specific site than as middle managers negotiating on behalf of the boss. Yet Brisley’s project had its successful moments: He invited the workers to paint the machinery in colors of their choice and masterminded the installation of a large circular sculptural wheel of 212 Robin Day chairs, direct from the factory’s own production line; the piece remained in place for many years.

The challenge of this show, curated by Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury, was to convey the largely administrative work of the APG in a visually compelling manner. The curators responded by including assemblage works by Latham, along with Garth Evans’s sculpture Frame, 1970–71, made during his residency with the British Steel Corporation. These objects offered welcome moments of respite from the seemingly endless paperwork that had proliferated under each collaborative venture, evoking the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nature of APG artists’ encounters with bureaucracy. Upstairs, a sound recording from Tate Archives by Steveni, Audio notes to self ca. 1975, also breathed life into the prevailing aesthetics of administration here
on show.

In one gallery, a table of books and monitors presenting documentation of APG projects and discussions formed a neat reprisal of the group’s collective work The Sculpture, 1971, a table around which a series of debates between the APG and their industry counterparts was organized for the duration of “inn7o,” their dismally received exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1970. This attempt at a contemporary recapitulation of the work was fitting, for what emerged from this exhibition was a vivid image of the APG as a group marked by compromise and real discussion between art and industry. Its failures are as significant as its successes. Perhaps most revealing are the prescient ways in which the APG tackled head-on the very debates surrounding the relationship between art and politics that continue to govern much post-studio and participatory art practices today.

—Jo Applin