The Artist Placement Group (APG) was conceived by Barbara Steveni in London in 1965, and established in 1966 as an artist-run organisation seeking to refocus art outside the gallery, predominantly through attaching an artist in a business or governmental context for a period of time. Then the participating artists would try to create and organize exhibitions of work related to those new experiences. Industrial placements included the

British Steel Corporation British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and cultur ...

and Ocean Fleets Ltd., and governmental placements included the

Department of the Environment An environmental ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for the environment and/or natural resources. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of the Environment, ...

, the

Scottish Office The Scottish Office was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom from 1885 until 1999, exercising a wide range of government functions in relation to Scotland under the control of the Secretary of State for Scotland. Following the es ...

and the Department for Health and Social Security. As well as these placements, the organisation exhibited in galleries - for example in INN70 at the Hayward Gallery in London, in 1971 and other venues including a retrospective review at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1977 and at documenta 6 in the same year. Among the participants were Barbara Steveni, John Latham,

Maurice Agis Maurice Agis (7 December 1931 – 12 October 2009) was a British sculptor and artist whose ''Dreamspace'' projects drew the involvement and work of various schools and art institutions all over Britain. His disillusionment with galleries and m ...

Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...

, Ian Breakwell,

Stuart Brisley Stuart Brisley (born 1933) is a British artist. Education Brisley studied at Guildford School of Art from 1949 to 1954 and at the Royal College of Art from 1956 to 1959. In 1959–60 he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Ge ...

, Hugh Davies, Andrew Dipper,

Barry Flanagan Barry Flanagan OBE Royal Academy, RA (11 January 1941 – 31 August 2009) was an Irish-Welsh people, Welsh sculptor. He is best known for his bronze statues of hares and other animals. Biography Barry Flanagan was born on 11 January 1941 i ...

, David Hall, Ian Macdonald Munro,

Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...

, Anna Ridley, Jeffrey Shaw, David Toop, and the

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...

Group. After 1989 the organisation became known as ''Organisation and Imagination'' (O+I). In 2004 the Tate Archive in London purchased the APG records. Co-founder John Latham died shortly after, in 2006. In 2012 Raven Row Gallery, London, revisited APG's early years by staging a major retrospective of work carried out including examples of some of its placements together with related documentation much of it loaned by the Tate. A further retrospective occurred in 2015 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, forming the basis for a further exhibition at Summerhall, Edinburgh in 2016.

References

External links

Tate Gallery archiveHoward Slater on The Artist Placement Group 1966-1989'The Artist and Artist Placement Group' by Stuart Brisley, published in Studio International 1972Context is Half the Work: A Partial History of Artist Placement Group
British art Arts organisations based in the United Kingdom Arts organizations established in 1966 1966 establishments in the United Kingdom {{art-org-stub
Barbara Steveni Website and ArchiveKatherine Jackson on Garth Evans' placement with the British Steel Corporation 1968