The Artist Placement Group: an archaeology of impact

Introduction

This article explores the outlook and activities of Artist Placement Group (APG), the first organisation to establish artist in residence schemes in the United Kingdom. It addresses models of impact in geohumanities research and engagement by making comparisons between our current thinking on impact with mid-20th century experiments in aesthetics, and in particular, attempts to engage art, artistic philosophies and creative practices in non-art settings. Material on the APG and their activities is drawn from two archives that have yet to be fully exploited by researchers: the collected papers of the APG housed in the Tate Archives; and the innovative Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Ligatus creative digital archive of the conceptual artist, John Latham’s papers. ¹ The APG, despite having the declared ambition to work beyond the studio and to disrupt artistic, business, governmental and bureaucratic process, has generally only been assessed within the realms of art criticism and art history. ² By exploring their outlook and practices, I want to broaden this perspective to think about the ways in which they attempted to affect change in the organisations hosting artists and thereby to draw out similarities to contemporary, affective models of impact.

In exploring the peculiar history of the APG and their artists’ engagements with various institutions and organisations, I want to draw attention to the histories of creative collaborations rather than establishing an agenda for how we might add use value to geohumanities research. The geohumanities is a broad, vibrant and current field of interdisciplinary endeavour that engages with a wide variety of agendas and produces work that unsettles and challenges ‘relations among theory, praxis, scholarship, practice, and application’ undoing ‘the privilege of academic expertise’. ³ Here, I am working with just one aspect of the geohumanities, specifically work, collaborative or otherwise, by and/or with geographers on creativity that might engage with creative practice or deploy creative methods in the design or execution of research. Indeed, there is an increasing body of work that accounts for how creative engagement with art, artists and artistic practices can establish and help direct research agendas, such as accounting for emplaced bioethical relationships in new ways ⁴ or tracing the ways in which art encounters might ‘reconfigure the subject’ and afford fresh habits of being, ⁵ or helping to think through matters of contemporary geographical concern. ⁶ This work does not see art as ‘an easy component of the “impact agenda”’, ⁷ but takes ‘seriously art as a mode of critical exploration’ ⁸ and has real potential in terms of geohumanities ‘impact’, broadly conceived. My interest here is critically to explore a pre-history of these creative impacts and specifically outline an archaeology of these impact models as they emerged in the interventions that one group of artists made ‘in the field’. In doing so, we get a sense of some of the potentials and the pitfalls that are associated with it.

I begin with a brief consideration of that archaeology of impact, outlining the relative absence of geohumanities in the impact profiles of UK geography departments and the ways in which geohumanities research has responded recently by evolving affective impact models. The main body of the article then explores the foundation and operation of the APG from the 1960s to the 1980s. Here, the focus is on the ways in which placements were conceived and operated as event-based encounters between the practicing artist and those in a place of work. Latham’s cosmology was central to these ideas and the APG was in many ways the ultimate expression of it. His radical, dematerialised aesthetic underpinned the insistence that placement contracts did not stipulate any artistic output and instead focused on the interaction between emplaced artist and in situ workers, a putative version of the creative affective encounters that are increasingly common in our work today. The article returns to matters of impact in the concluding section.

An archaeology of impact

In general, there is a relative disempowerment of humanities-based work in research audit exercises such as the UK’s REF. The unquantifiable value of such work means that statements of impact are difficult to measure against more obviously problem-oriented or policy-directed research in the social science and natural sciences. ⁹ Within the discipline of geography, a brief survey of the 2014 UK REF submissions testifies to this imbalance: Of the top 11 ranked geography departments based on overall score, only 5 of the 52 submitted case studies relate to cultural geography and only one of those could be characterised as having geohumanities research practice or outlook. ¹⁰

Nevertheless, geohumanities researchers have recently been developing impact models that do not so much apply ideas generated in the academy to ‘real’ world issues, but rather, through active engagement with the world, research co-evolves and is correlational with its object of concern. In this way, the subjects and objects of research are given a say in the overall architecture of research design, findings and dissemination. Within the geohumanities, this engaged, impactful research is beginning to take on a set of distinguishing characteristics that can be summarised as an affective model of impact. Recent work that is practical and practice-based, involving experiential, embodied and autobiographical engagement with art and other creative interventions, is becoming increasingly prevalent and the emphasis is less on art objects as material outcomes and more on the resonance of the affective encounters that occur during and after the creative research engagement. Published material documenting encounters with arts-based practices and artists places emphasis on ‘creative doings, rather than attention being given to the output’ ¹¹ and on the processual nature of emergent knowledge and understanding and ways of doing things. ¹² The focus has moved from one overly concerned with the visual to the visceral, haptic and multi-sensual, where conservative art historical narratives give way to an open-ended and relational encounter with art and its production. ¹³ The art object itself therefore has become less of a concern and in its place is a kind of relational dematerialisation where ‘art-making as a distributed series of (morethan-) artistic practices’ promotes new connections and new subjectivities. ¹⁴

Such dematerialised affects, although innovative and with real potential to shape a truly alternative impact agenda, are not entirely new. Perhaps unsurprisingly they can be traced back to the emergence of aesthetic strategies characterised by an emphasis on interactive engagement and participation; in other words, art forms whose meaning emerged not solely through authorial design, but through the active participation of those encountering the work. It is in the mid-20th century that one can find a burgeoning of these forms and they were not confined to the practices of fine art. It could be found in experiments in literature, film, cultural politics, performance and style as well as a range of artistic practices from kinetic and pop to conceptual art. In general, these mid-century representational practices were inspired, directly and indirectly, by cosmic speculation, to bring to the senses of participants a realisation of matter, energy and time. ¹⁵ Of interest here is the very practical application of these explorations, because bound up with this mid-century cosmic speculation in the arts was the emergence of a practice of engagement between the arts and wider society in the form of artist placements now more commonly known as artist-in-residence schemes. The first of these schemes was the APG which was established in 1966 by the conceptual artists John Latham and his wife Barbara Steveni.

Cosmology and the foundation of the APG

The biographies of John Latham as a practicing artist and the APG as an organisation are entangled. Not only were Latham and Barbara Steveni responsible for establishing and running the organisation, the APG’s founding principles were derived from Latham’s idiosyncratic cosmic speculations and the aesthetic strategies associated with them. In setting out the nature of the APG and its activities, I must then begin with John Latham, his art and cosmology.

First, though, it is important to outline the role that Steveni played. Since Latham’s death she has been revisiting the activities and archives of the APG and working on a performative history of the organisation as part of a wider project to recover the role of women in artistic practice. This she has done precisely because she was assigned a non-creative role in the APG, taking full responsibility for the administration of the organisation, as well as being the main carer for their children. Latham was certainly not gifted in strategic thinking or organisational endeavour; a cursory read of some of his formal correspondence contained in the archive is all that is required to realise this. In it, paragraphs outlining his cosmic revelations and how it was imperative for the world to understand them, sit uneasily alongside requests to fund a placement. With a young family and an insecure income derived from the sale of Latham’s artworks and occasional teaching roles, the APG was something that could clearly provide some security and so it fell to Steveni to ensure its financial viability. Her artistic work and ideas were given very little space to flourish and shape the creative agenda of the organisation. Latham’s voice, on the other hand, was the loudest in this regard. So, while certainly not wishing to reinforce a narrative that excludes women, and specifically Steveni, from the origins of artist-in-residence schemes, because I am focusing on the connections between the APG and mid-century aesthetic practices, it is Latham’s role that is emphasised here. ¹⁶

Not alone among mid-century artists and cultural producers, Latham was fascinated by ideas about space, time, energy and materiality. His, however, was a peculiar cosmic speculation. While others were enamoured with the Einsteinian revolution that had since 1925 become popularised in various accessible textual, visual and exhibited forms, Latham favoured an approach that used time rather than particles as the defining cosmic unit. ¹⁷ His time-base theory emerged in 1954 from three sources: experimentation in his art; the experience of Robert Rauschenberg’s blank White Painting (1951); and especially his encounters with animal ethologist and parapsychologist Anita Kohsen and her husband, the astronomer Clive Gregory. Kohsen and Gregory suggested to Latham that events rather than matter should be considered the main cosmic building blocks. If one abandoned an obsession with materiality in favour of events, they postulated, the accretions of events that made up the cosmos could incorporate human consciousness itself. ¹⁸ This psychophysical cosmology did not distinguish between consciousness and matter; it suggested to Latham that both scientific and creative practices could reveal the contours of the cosmos and that the cosmos was time-based. ¹⁹ The experience of the Rauschenberg piece took on a new dimension with this revelation: its dematerialised, empty form suggested to Latham not just a lack of an object but also the lack of an event – zero space and zero time.

Latham’s own work from 1954 onwards became more processual and focused on event, initially through his spray painting in which the singular dot represented a ‘least event’ and through the repeated process of spraying – a process which in microcosm mirrored macrocosm – incorporated human creativity, a ‘statement of pure process . . . The statement was a direct record of what had occurred to make it’. ²⁰ The solidity of things emerged through the iteration of events in the paintings, as they did, according to Latham’s revelation, in the wider universe.

It is Latham’s work with books, however, for which he is most known and which is often most associated with his outlook. He used books initially to break the plane of the canvass and later, more spectacularly from the mid-1960s in ‘Skoob towers’ which were assembled and immolated in a variety of public settings. Books were, like the marks on his spray paintings, accretions of black marks, agglomerations of ‘least events’ that, when viewed at as an object, could be apprehended as one, but which were normally consumed in a linear temporal habit. This duality fascinated him and drove him for much of his career. It was also the aesthetic that first attracted him to the arts establishment and enabled him to travel to New York and mix with key players in the city’s art avant-garde in the early 1960s.

In New York, staying at the Chelsea hotel where he set up a temporary studio, he describes in letters home an uneasy relationship with the artists and gatekeepers in the city. Bent on expressing his 1954 revelations to his newfound acquaintances, he struggled to be heard, felt ridiculed and became quite resentful towards them. ²¹ It was however a productive period during which he later claimed to have produced around 50 pieces but ‘returned when the US market didnt [sic] catch on’. ²² Despite not being able to affect his mission to ensure the ‘invasion by Skoob’ ²³ in the city, from his artwork, it is clear that this experience had a significant effect on the style of his work. After this time it became more expansive, more processual and more performance-based. The Skoob tower ceremonies that he developed on his return for instance, although narrated by Latham as perfect models of his cosmology in which the burning towers of books became reverse sculptures as event-based dematerialising objects, resonated because they reflected the dominant trope emergent at the time. They were, above all, spectacular events that lived on as affective memories in the minds and bodies of the participants.

Despite being underpinned by a significantly different take on the understanding of matter, energy and time, Latham’s work bore many similarities to that of his contemporaries; his increased profile in the art world during the 1960s stands as testament to this. Like other work popular at the time, his had become performative and multi-sensory with a focus on participation. The emphasis on dematerialisation and the exploration of materiality, the visible and the invisible was another shared characteristic, alongside the related focus on multi-lineal (or anti-lineal) style. Finally, his work started to embody movement and implied process, like the work of contemporaneous kinetic artists. ²⁴ Although he proclaimed his alternative cosmic vision as often and as loudly as he could, it was the closeness of his work to the aesthetic grammar of the time that meant he had the profile and the connections to co-found the APG.

Establishing the APG

For Latham, the foundation of the APG and its activities derived from his philosophy and was a means of communicating it. He would later rationalise its establishment as a logical development in his aesthetic trajectory, suggesting that it was the ‘macro-context that would be the essential component in future art’. ²⁵ Correspondence in the APG archive from him almost without exception contains some aspect of his cosmology, regardless of the recipient. The APG were the means through which he could enact his 1954 idiom, bring about a change in consciousness and perhaps prevent the ‘fission in society’. ²⁶ After over 10 years of attempting to embody his cosmology in his artwork and, while selling work and gaining notoriety, yet feeling also that the message was not being taken seriously, the APG offered another outlet. That no one should be aware of his 1954 revelation was a consistent and repeated annoyance to him:

In October 1954 a sudden occurrence within the art tradition signalled a reversal of direction in our cultural progression . . . The failure on the part of the experts to look into this idiom in depth has led to many subsequent effects being unintelligible – one of them being that I am left myself, with APG as a logical instrument for its deployment, as the near sole repository of what change is about. ²⁷

The idea for the organisation itself, however, was probably Steveni’s. She had been active in Fluxus for some time. Fluxus were multidisciplinary group of artists and performers active in the 1960s and 1970s who emphasised the process of artistic production above the finished art object. While looking for material from factories for artists, Steveni realised that having artists engaged in the sites of production might make for an interesting experiment. ²⁸ Latham added his philosophy to this practical idea.

While it is sometimes difficult to piece together the chronology of the evolution of his cosmology from the archives and to tease out hindsight from the genuine reflection, there is, from its establishment in 1966, a consistent line about how Latham felt the APG might best enact his outlook. Latham’s notion of the ‘Incidental Person’ was developed and adapted to the process of artist placements. His time-based theorising was central to this concept with the artist entering a new context bringing with them an alternative time frame where, according to Hudek, the ‘value of money and language disappears in favor of longer-term preoccupations such as investment (rather than speculation) and poetic intuition (rather than administrative know-how) . . . the slow or progressive encounter over the quick fix’. ²⁹ The Incidental Person (IP) was the artist placed in a new productive environment, bringing with them an alternative set of values; values derived from working within an alternative outlook and ‘timebase’. Above all, Latham felt that the artist possessed a different sensibility because they were ‘prepared to spend a large part of their lives in formulating a specific personal form of expression’. ³⁰ Place that artist in an organisation and their role was akin to an ethnographer whose function was ‘to watch the doings and listen to the noises’ ³¹ and later to intervene with some form of creative intervention which need not necessarily be an art object. In the words of one reviewer, the APG saw the ‘artist as an idiot savant who could be placed within town planning or policy departments to comment on issues from outside, bringing an artistic sensibility to decision-making’. ³² Indeed, the IP, according to Latham’s son Noa, need not actually be a visual artist at all but rather a ‘creative person who is time-based informed and most likely uses a nonverbal medium’. ³³

The IP concept was undoubtedly based upon the way in which Latham liked to view himself and an idea he had been formulating for some years. When interviewed by journalists he would frequently use the term and encourage the notion that he was someone who ‘operates on Fringes (para-physicist, para-economist, para-phraser), observing wants, diagnosing faults . . . roaming through society bringing his troubled intuition to bear on every conceivable problem, sorting everyone out’. ³⁴ A model of artist as activist revolutionary whose ‘very nature is to institute fundamental change’ ³⁵ fitted of course with the tumultuous times during which the APG was established and probably gained traction precisely because of that. However, when corresponding with industry, Barbara Steveni in particular was more pragmatic. For instance, in some early correspondence with Berger, Jenson and Nicholson Ltd. in November 1968, she implies a tempering of the putative IP idea while remaining faithful to its foundations about the role of the artist not as the recipient of charity, not a boardroom candidate, but someone who could affect thinking within the organisation. ³⁶ The value of the artist to a firm, as a statement draft in the archive notes, was centred on process, event and context, with what the artist actually makes only ‘a lesser part of the event’. How they made ‘use of the situation’ was far more pertinent. ³⁷

For Latham, as he wrote in a note to the APG in 1972, the function of the organisation was tied to set of ideas around ‘Structure in Events’; of how an awareness of timeframes and an event-based cosmology could help enlighten the hosts of artists in residence. Like the spray painting or the book, large events were the accretion of a series of least events, an iteration of actions, and the role of the IP was to uncover these rhythms in the new context. In the case of commercial placements, it was to inject these ideas into the minds and practices of ‘peoples whose lives are governed to a large extent by considerations laid on them by commercial exigencies’. ³⁸ The IP was to look beyond appearances to uncover the ‘sources of action’ ³⁹ that drove an organisation, the systems of practice that defined the rational order of events, an order and rationale that was unspoken and unconscious within the organisation. The artist as IP, not having been shaped by these iterative systems, was charged with using their non-verbal intuition to make a creative intervention and alter the course of events: ‘The key to the artist in the organism, the social organism, is that the intuition of the artist isn’t verbally driven; it comes out without there being a reason for it’. ⁴⁰ Here, the notion of a non-verbal intervention arises from Latham’s long-held mistrust of linguistic systems as shapers of reality and consciousness – something he shared with a number of contemporaneous thinkers and something that pervades much of his communication about the APG from the archives. ⁴¹

Placements process

The process of establishing and instigating the placements was not an easy one. No doubt companies and public bodies baulked at some of the ways in which Latham in particular communicated with them: it must have been difficult to read about how the concept that underpinned the APG was ‘the most important discovery since the alphabet’ and try to navigate Latham’s philosophising about the incongruity between language and reality. ⁴² Nevertheless, through sending out publicity materials, advertising and hosting matching events, the APG did achieve a measure of success. The first matching event, a symposium held in 1968 and hosted at the Mermaid Theatre, London, gathered together PR and training managers to make connections with artists. ⁴³

Adverts for the APG tried to emphasise the similarities between the outlook and action of industry and those of the arts in that each required more from less: business required ‘more profit from less capital’, the trade unionist, ‘more money for less time’ and the artist, ‘more said for less noise’. ⁴⁴ With each communication with a potential host partner, the APG would send out their leaflet ‘Individual and Organisation’ which outlined the philosophy and a digestible form of the IP concept. In ongoing communications with companies, they were able to rightly boast that they were the first ‘industrial artist-fellowship’ and became bolder in their expression of the unique qualities that the artist could bring in their role as an ‘engineer of conceptual material’. ⁴⁵ They were also successful in attracting Art Council funding for the scheme in the form of a rolling annual grant.

The APG suggested that there were three phases to a placement. ⁴⁶ It is probably fairer to say, however, that there were four. The one not accounted for by the APG is the work (often ongoing throughout a placement) of encouraging companies and organisations to take part in the scheme. There are boxes full of communications in the APG archive and Latham’s papers that attest to just how laboured this process was. Included in this additional phase, apart from the advertising, was the organisation of symposiums and events, such as the open day at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on 1 November 1971, ⁴⁷ other ongoing exhibitions of the APG’s activities and an extensive amount of individual correspondence. This correspondence, sometimes from Latham, sometimes from Steveni, was often not solely focused on the placement, nor art and the visual, but ranged across broad themes. The Commercial Plastics Ltd. files for instance hold correspondence about industrial policy, manufacturing logistics, globalisation and the potential for artists to be inventors and product innovators. ⁴⁸

The first of the three phases that the APG noted was the feasibility study. This often entailed a pilot placement and a scoping by the artist as to what they might offer to the organisation. Contracts and agreements were then drawn up for the second phase, the placement itself. The APG would take 15 per cent of the artist’s placement fee, which in the case of Leonard Hessing for whom they arranged a placement at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), from £2,000 they took £300. ⁴⁹ In their contracts, the artist was required to agree that they would not knowingly prejudice the company’s interest. ⁵⁰ There was then a less well-defined phase after the placement that involved some form of dissemination of the results from the placement. The vagueness of this third phase arises from the most intriguing aspect of the APG. As far as possible, no artistic output was defined in the contracts drawn up: the artist was ‘privileged to engage on an undefined activity’. ⁵¹ While there was an expectation that there would be some form of outcome, this need not be an art object.

For Rolf Sachsse, this omission was ‘deliberately adopted from the Situationist avant-garde’, ⁵² whereas for John Walker, Latham’s favoured art critic and biographer, there were no defined products because there would be ‘little purpose in placements if outcomes were predicable; the whole point was to generate new ideas and insights’. ⁵³ Others have gone further and suggested that perhaps this was one of the most radical art gestures; ‘this emphatic refusal to give form or definition to the placement itself, seemed designed expressly to critique the notion of an object- and product-based society’. ⁵⁴ Latham himself would certainly disagree with this, but the processual engagement between artist and organisation was the key here, an engagement that also reflected a general trend towards dematerialisation in art and of course chimed with Latham’s own aesthetic developments.

It is quite remarkable in the light of this lack of commitment to a material output that so many placements were funded. The APG completed placements with large and renowned organisations, among them, British Rail, the Department of Health, British Steel, ESSO, British European Airways, the National Coal Board, ICI, the Scottish Office, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and Peterlee Development Corporation. Through these placements they consulted on issues far beyond the traditional territory for visual artists – which the vast majority of the placement recipients were – such as environmental protection, urban design and urban renewal, environmental engineering, communications technologies, production systems and human resources. While the uncertainty as to the outcome must have discouraged many from establishing a placement, in practice, most placements did produce something, but that was often not a traditional art object and frequently some kind of exhibition or installation.

The most notable APG exhibition was their first, Inno70: Art and Economics. Inno70 was not tied to one time or an individual venue, but was a rolling exhibition of 2 years, an ‘exhibition in time’ that presented evidence from placements held at ESSO, ICI, British Steel and Hillie Furniture. ⁵⁵ There were two main outlets for Inno70: the periodical Studio International, which hosted, among other things, fake newspaper reports about the APG and adverts for non-existent jobs, ⁵⁶ and an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in December 1971. In the Hayward exhibition, the APG offices themselves were presented as a process sculpture in addition to videoed interviews with artists, officials and industrial hosts screened on monitors. Many of the placements it presented were ongoing and as such it was the process rather than the outcome that was the focus of Inno70. There were then very few pieces in the exhibition that had resulted from the placements. One of the exceptions was the work produced by Hessing using plastic fibres to produce a moiré effect installation from his ICI placement. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably given its work-in-progress, processual nature, Inno70 did not receive good reviews from the critics. In The Guardian, Caroline Tisdall was disappointed by the paucity of output and clearly judged what was on offer as art objects, and as such, found them wanting as derivative, uninspiring or with the APG office ‘sculpture’, which consisted of slides of scenes taken by Jeffrey Shaw, ‘sadly incestuous’. ⁵⁷ Bad reviews of the exhibition from significant critics like Peter Fuller were later used by the Arts Council as a rationale for withdrawing their support from the APG.

Placements practice

The placements arranged by the APG reflect the shifting balance of the British political economy over the years of its operation, beginning in a moment of surplus optimism in the mid-1960s but petering out after a sustained period of recession, contraction and deindustrialisation. Early placements were associated with the burgeoning of the state in the post-war period and reflected a wider celebration of the white heat of technology. The general excess of the period of reconstruction and modernisation offered the space and the resource for the APG to intervene, with opportunities not simply because things were being built, but also perhaps because the reconstruction had a social dimension and the social engineering inherent in the APG placement philosophy would have resonated. It is worth drawing out some detail of a few of these placements, because it not only attests to the engagement of artists in large organisations who were shaping a rapidly transforming Britain, but also because the outcomes, like the placements themselves, were far from conventional. It is from these placements in other words that one can discern an impact based upon atmosphere and affect.

The placements organised with large industrial concerns are some of the more surprising collaborations, given the unusual nature of the APG contracts. Correspondence from the APG archive indicates that they pushed hard to win these. With ESSO, for instance, there was a concerted effort to place two artists, Ian Breakwell and Andrew Dipper, on oil tankers. ⁵⁸ Dipper, a conceptual artist who worked closely with Latham in the late 1960s and early 1970s, filed reports to the APG on his and Breakwell’s placement on-board the ESSO tanker Bernicia for which they were paid £30 a week. Dipper it seems struggled with the lack of material resource with which to work – he had previously had factory placements in which he had been able to fashion pieces with the workers. The impromptu ethnography he designed to aid his interaction with the workers involved photographing them at work. Although they appeared as slides in Inno70 along with a Super 8 film, the photographs were not intended to be a placement output, only means to break the ice and spark conversations. The real output was not a physical art object but a set of ‘findings’ about the levels of boredom on the tanker, how that led to an unhealthy drinking culture, and the poor ship-to-shore communications which came to light when the workers requested the photographs to send home. ⁵⁹ As the catalogue for the 2012 APG Raven Row retrospective notes, this was characteristic of an APG placement, where an artist took time to observe the context before suggesting change and where outcomes were essentially ‘intangible (at least in economic terms)’. ⁶⁰

Given Dipper’s intention, it was disingenuous of one reviewer of Inno70 to dismiss them as ‘no different from company publicity’. ⁶¹ Tom Batho, the then head of employee relations at ESSO and also an APG director was open-minded about the artist’s role, noting that

an artist working with a company on an artistic project is more like the pure researcher – he’s not using the material directly for the benefit of the company. And yet from his work could come new outlets into the use of the materials of that company. ⁶²

A later placement involving the artist George Levantis on several Ocean Fleets Ltd. cargo ships travelling to Africa and Asia took inspiration from Dipper’s work on the tankers, initially taking photographs and giving art lessons to engage and connect with the workers. When Levantis eventually chose to ‘make’ art from found objects on the ship during his third voyage, some of his pieces were tossed overboard by the crew. ⁶³ Although there seems to have been some misunderstandings about Levantis’ role on the ship, it is telling then when he played the role of the traditional artist in this environment, it was not appreciated.

Placements hosted by public bodies were far more numerous and the APG arranged collaborations via government departments with a range of organisations. One of the more notable of these was Stuart Brisley’s Peterlee Development Corporation engagement in 1975. The APG archives indicate that they had been looking at placing an artist in new and expanding towns for some time. In 1974, for instance, the artist and film director Ken McMullen reported on an uneventful and uninspiring scoping visit to Crawley in a dismissive note to the APG: ⁶⁴ Crawley obviously offended McMullen’s metropolitan sensibilities and he suggested that the chosen artist would need to be able to ‘work under the pressure of feeling that he was living in a children’s nursery’. ⁶⁵ Brisley’s Peterlee project addressed a similar impression of immature placelessness. His report in the APG archives describes the collective participatory history project he established to affect community consciousness called ‘History Within Living Memory’. The idea was that he would instigate the project and ‘withdraw slowly once it has been established’, leaving the community to then transform it to reflect ‘their own needs and understandings’. ⁶⁶ He designed a process whereby six remunerated local residents would collect oral and visual memories of the area before and after the development of the new town. Around 200 recordings and over 2000 photographs were generated by the research and the gathering of oral and visual memories that resulted from the first 18 months of the placement was exhibited in the Sunderland Arts Centre. ⁶⁷

Later phases of the Peterlee project were to account for the establishment of the Development Corporation and establish a local community forum where residents of town could gather to help them cohere as a community. For Brisley, however, the Peterlee project was a failed enterprise because his envisioned radical ‘socialist historiography’ did not materialise. ⁶⁸ Brisley, who benefitted from a few placements and was already highly critical of Latham and the APG vision, became an even more staunch critic after this experience because he felt the APG approach failed to address conditions of exploitation in the workplace and elsewhere.

The best documented placements in the archives were those Latham himself took up. One in particular, his 1975-6 Scottish Office placement, became a lifelong obsession for him. In one of his reports to the Scottish Development Department, he recounted his encounter with the Air Photograph Library and the revelation provided by the aerial perspective chimed with his cosmology because the ‘distance from the Surface of the Earth is directly proportional to the Time-Base of the event one sees. The Event, in this instance is the effect of the human presence from the greater distance as a history’. ⁶⁹ From these photographs, Latham identified an area of derelict land near Edinburgh that came to fascinate him, the shale bings of West Lothian. Latham came to see the bings – slagheaps produced from the deep mining of oil shale – as a large scale ‘process sculpture’, ⁷⁰ testament to ‘a century of anonymous work’. ⁷¹ As such, they were akin to the book or the spray painting: accruals of repeated actions which viewed as a whole, could ‘re-establish historical processes in a way that literature cannot’. ⁷²

Latham often made the connection between the bings and his cosmology even in formal correspondence with government departments. ⁷³ He did not propose to carry out any work on the bings, either on site or represented within an art object in some way. Instead, his efforts were geared towards having them classified as works of art in their own right, initially by the Scottish Development Department and later by the British and international art establishments. ⁷⁴ His particular focus was on one bing, the Niddrie tip, near a series of bings known as the Five Sisters. From the aerial photographs Latham discerned a female form and named this bing the ‘Niddrie Woman’ and although no one else seems to have accepted this moniker, it appears in a great deal of correspondence from him and in catalogues of his works.

The Niddrie Woman became a rallying call for his battle against the gatekeepers of British art as well as another vehicle that could transmit his cosmology. To Peter Moores, then trustee of the Tate, he compared the Niddrie Woman to other monuments of ‘geological scale’ such as the pyramids and Austria’s Venus of Willendorf. ⁷⁵ Not long after Latham identified their artistic significance, the site was under threat as the landowner of the Hopetown Estate on which the bing lay wanted to sell and Latham instigated a campaign to raise around 5 million pounds to save them using his contacts in industry, especially the oil industry. ⁷⁶ His letters to various figures in the art world to support his campaign to designate the Niddrie woman as an artwork, ‘an uncontrived process sculpture with its own variant of the atomic proposition’, ⁷⁷ were many, but despite his persistence, they were not successful. West Lothian District Council, while not rejecting his ideas, were ambivalent on the project: their director of physical planning noted in a letter to Jorgen Harten of Stadtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf for instance, that the naming of the tip as Niddrie Woman was Latham’s idea alone and that whether the planned removal of the tip would affect the concept was something he did not feel qualified to comment on. ⁷⁸

But it was the lack of support from the art establishment that irked Latham most. In increasingly annoyed correspondence with key figures at the Tate who had not responded to any of his missives about the bings or the Niddrie Woman, Latham connected this rejection to a more general rejection of his work and cosmology. To Nicholas Serota, then Tate Director he wrote in 1993 in exasperation that instead of taking his ideas and work seriously the ‘Tate has preferred to bring on Gilbert and George to bring the word cosmological into the vocabulary of art’. ⁷⁹

Affect and the Arts Council

Even for placements that produced some form of art object, the affective nature of the engagement was foremost. Garth Evans’ British Steel 1969-71 placement for instance was actually established as a sculpture fellowship, but used the materials and products already produced by the workers – ‘extrusions, wires, rolled sheets etc’ – because, not unlike the bings, he found them to be works of art in themselves. ⁸⁰ For the Hayward exhibition, Evans did not exhibit an object but played atmospheric sound recording of the steel works. ⁸¹ The IP encounter and the long-term affects arising from it then was central: in their practical and practice-based placements, artists, as makers of things, worked with employees in gathering together materials and reforming them. In non-work placements like Brisley’s Peterlee work, the materials were co-produced with the community. While these trends were reflective of a more general 1960s–1970s trend in visual and performance arts towards the dematerialised, participatory, affective and atmospheric, they are also chime with Latham’s peculiar cosmology. Latham’s persistence in proselytising to all with whom he corresponded, regardless of whether it might be diplomatic to do so, coupled with the related dematerialised IP philosophy of the APG, are probably the main causes of the APG losing its Arts Council funding.

The relationship between the Arts Council and the APG was always strained because the Council struggled to ‘assimilate’ its ‘speculative character’ and the ‘intangibility and the uncertainty of its “results”’. ⁸² A sizable proportion of the correspondence in the archives testify to this conflict. There are reams of correspondence with companies who had hosted artists detailing the long-running campaign to retain the Council grant. The chemical company Scott Bader who had hosted Alan Sekers and Barry Flanagan were especially supportive. In a 1973 letter of recommendation to the Arts Council, their president Godric Bader noted ‘we believe that the dimension of life they are concerned to introduce is one that is lacking in industry and that industry is very much the worse for its absence’. ⁸³ ICI Fibres wrote in the same year in support of the APG scheme and its lack of output suggesting that ‘whereas the performance of APG may be criticised in the results of a particular placement, the concept has never been seriously challenged’. ⁸⁴

The withdrawal of support in 1979 was not unexpected and was justified because the APG were considered to be more interested in social engineering than producing art. ⁸⁵ The Arts Council then established their own placement schemes. Latham and Steveni tried to launch a legal action because they had expropriated the ‘APG’s original initiative and to replace it with public subsidised worthless imitation’, ⁸⁶ but this petered out. Most of the reaction was in the form of letters from Latham to art establishment figures bemoaning the actions of the Arts Council who he felt had both appropriated the APG initiative and tried to ‘delete my record’. ⁸⁷ He had for some time believed that the Arts Council were determined to undermine his cosmological revelations and disparage his work, and as early as 1963 he believed that his agent John Kasmin was pressured by them to remove him from his list of exhibitors. ⁸⁸ Latham also withheld his income tax in protest against the actions of the Arts Council ⁸⁹ and would go on to suggest that he was a victim of a similar ‘disinformation strategy’ that surrounded the Spycatcher publication ⁹⁰ and compared his plight to that of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic in their dispute against the government-backed British Airways. ⁹¹ After the withdrawal of Arts Council funding, the APG struggled on for another decade and then in 1989 re-named itself ‘O+I’ or ‘Organisation & Imagination’, refocused on a consultancy role.

Conclusion: impact and the geohumanities

In the past decade, geographers focused on creative practices have begun to approach art objects differently. They are no longer a singular focus and where they are, the context of production and consumption, of practice and participation, play a much more significant role. It is not often acknowledged that this shift in epistemologies is directly related to the shifts in the practices of creativity itself: as art has become more performative, more participatory, less visual, more kinetic and more haptic, so our modes of academic engagement with it have followed the same trajectory. This shift in the register of representation can be traced to the mid-century period as artists and other cultural producers who developed multi-sensual, immersive art, some of which, like Latham’s, was directed by a fascination with ideas about matter, energy, time and space. These art practices emphasised affective encounters with viewer-participants and the development of a more formal engagement between artists and non-artists in the form of placements was another dimension and logical outcome of this shift in the register of representation. In short, impacting the world beyond the studio and the gallery in an affective manner has a pre-history and this pre-history is tied to shifts in art practices.

The APG’s engagement in a variety of workplace settings resulted in outputs that were characterised by this dematerialised, affective nature. Context was more important than material outputs and recognising the art of work itself was part of this. Indeed, it is the ‘not-art’ – as both object and practice – of the APG placements that is most salient. Successful placements were spaces and moments of co-production curated by the presence of the artist, but where the artist performed as a conventional artist, such as in Levantis’ cargo ship experience, the emplaced relationships broke down. The most effective material outcomes of placements were either mundane and not conventionally ‘artistic’: such as improved signage around a factory, community noticeboards, a programme of free time activities on board tankers; or emerged from recognising the art in work at the placement, such as the steel process sculptures of Garth Evans or Latham’s Niddrie Woman. The placements were then models of co-production where the artist is somewhere different and doing something different from their normal process. The co-production of atmospheres was a relational outcome of placements and this affective mode of impact bears direct comparison with our contemporary models of impact.

The initial reaction to the impact agenda from geographers who were resistant to such imposed protocols and standards was not a negation, but to find ways to make their research outlooks and practices fit and claim impact for them, to co-opt the agenda and make it radical. The debates about how this co-option might be seen through grappled with the problematic of how designing research engagements with impact outcomes in mind from the outset imposes instrumental frameworks upon the focus of studies that are not endogenous. The material outcome of research is, at least in part, predetermined by the requirement to claim relevance and to make a measurable difference. ⁹² Navigating this dilemma becomes a negotiation between curiosity-driven work, such as creative research, and the requirement for impact in research design. Phillips, for instance, asserts that curiosity and impact need not be mutually exclusive if, through engaged, embedded research we can be creative in our problem finding and problem solving. ⁹³ But above all, reflective pieces on impact have asserted its radical possibilities: far from closing off avenues for research there is the ‘potential for less traditional research to be officially valued’. ⁹⁴ The shaping of impact in the broader field of social and cultural geography then has, as Rogers et al. note, despite the pitfalls, subversive and radical potential. ⁹⁵ Co-productive, participatory and immersive research has now emerged as a mode with which the impact agenda might be co-opted. It emphasises an engaged model of research production and dissemination in which the longer lasting and affective results of the engagement are of primary significance. ⁹⁶ In this emplaced and embedded research practice, the researcher, like the emplaced artist in a residency, curates an affect and the palpable outcomes of research engagement arise from dialogue.

Of course, it is not possible to provide an evolutionary lineage from what the APG were doing in the 70s and 80s and our current concerns, but there are for sure clear comparisons and similarities. There was an innovative and radical model of making and doing impact in which outcomes were coproduced through placements and the interaction between the emplaced and the in situ. The radically dematerialised nature of those engagements, disregarding Latham’s cosmological underpinnings, are something we would struggle to recreate because material outcomes of research and their afterlife are the lifeblood of impact today. Nevertheless, the lesson here is not a salutary one of the past failures of affective models of impact and engagement, nor to suggest that our current endeavours might suffer the same fate. Rather, in covering the history of the APG in this article, I want to highlight and celebrate the possibilities: the organisation may have ultimately failed, but given its esoteric, unconventional and radical nature, its achievements were remarkable. In short, there are possibilities and potentials in a belligerently different way of thinking and doing impact.