Staging Dissonance: Artist Placement Group’s Performative (Non-)Exhibitions

Despite the recent resurgence of interest in Artist Placement Group (APG) – founded in 1966 by Barbara Steveni and a number of progressive artists to negotiate remunerated placements on behalf of artists in industrial and governmental contexts – the Group’s history has attracted criticism for a perceived lack of ideological sophistication. These attacks are hardly new: they greeted APG’s exhibitions in 1971 in Düsseldorf and London. This article returns to these two exhibitions, and their central discursive element titled The Sculpture, to argue that APG’s ideological awareness was in fact acute. By turning to curatorial stagecraft, APG successfully exacerbated, and thereby questioned, the entrenched oppositions between ‘right’ vs. ‘left’ and ‘studio based’ vs. ‘socially engaged’ artist.