'Countdown to Zero, Count up to Now: an Interview with APG'

We hear a lot about the disappearance of the public sphere these days. We also hear a lot about a group of 1960s conceptualists called the Artist Placement Group, who brokered some of the earliest artists’ residencies in industry and government in the UK. In 1966, when APG was founded, the art world regarded ‘tangling with the dirt’ of commerce and the public sector as an anomaly, even an aberration within art. Today, on the other hand, such tangling has come to define large swathes of artistic practice. Operating with few precedents, APG worked hard to formulate a rigorous methodology of engagement – one that makes many of today’s ubiquitous residencies appear complacent, and complicit, by comparison. With art having long since burst its disciplinary banks, APG’s early excursions outside the white cube’s perimeter also shed light on the emerging hybrid landscape of business art, art & science, socially engaged art and even network art. This summer, Josephine Berry and Pauline van Mourik Broekman talked to APG co-founders Barbara Steveni and John Latham, both artists in their own right, and discovered their sometimes quite different approaches to the organisation and its implications