Latham & Steveni as Unidentified Curating
Against the grain of officialdom, John Latham and Barbara Steveni co-founded The Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1965. Under the guidance of Steveni this would later become influential in the politicisation of several generations of artists across Europe. Its aim was to introduce the artist, as an Incidental Person into industry and government. The notion of the artist ‘residency’ is now an accepted function by which many artists forge their careers in Britain. But for the Gregor Fellowships in Leeds in the early seventies there was no such thing as an artist residency or placement. APG would establish the non-autonomous artist in sophisticated form into social contexts. This was distinct from later residencies initiated by other bodies which tended to dilute or disestablish the artist as broadly popularist. The new possibilities of performance to provide the artist with new avenues seemed endless. Latham and Steveni had allies elsewhere in Europe. Joseph Beuys was at a comparable stage in his development when he invited APG to his 'Honey Pump' installation at Documenta in 1977. Latham’s involvement in APG was to assert the primacy of art’s cosmology with its inclusivity vis-a-vis other academic discourses. The breadth of APG’s attention to include both micro and macro, social and cosmological concerns were to attract the attention of many artists who had matured through the turmoils of the Cold War and Civil Rights. However, Latham's activity is a perfect example of the way in which social relations as artwork can then be lauded by the establishment as can be seen from the cover notes to the Tate Gallery's edition of his 1984 treatise, 'Report of a Surveyor'.
Latham's automated spray activities of earlier years might confront notions of authorship and the craftsman but they are nonetheless held within the terms of the canon and thereby easily incorporated into the systems and procedures of the exhibitionary market with its attendant bureaucracies.
Artist Placement Group might, at first glance, be mistaken as a move to take control of a curatorial process and develop an oppositional perspective. The notion of an organisation being simultaneously artwork and social initiative appears to call for the redundancy of curators and their attendants and furthermore suggests a criticism of the artist, but in the case of APG, Latham and Steveni were ultimately geared towards propping up old notions of the artist as distinct from others in society.
This essentially bourgeois position is one which adheres to Latham's assumption that an artist as 'Incidental Person' can retain some kind of Archimedean point from which to intervene into the social world. In this context APG could never think and act beyond brokering relations with the Arts Council of Great Britain, government and the United Nations, a history which suggests their ultimate goal to be one of liberal harmony as opposed to the deconstruction or destruction of Capitalism.
