Monday Oct 1st Coffee with Spartacus
My day began with a coffee in the new temporary cafe next door to the Archive, bizarrely shared with performers from Spartacus Chetwynd’s Turner Prize installation dressed in outfits involving camouflage and plastic ducting ! The Tate was buzzing with press prior to the Turner Prize Opening tonight.
Something to think about: …“The APG (Artist Placement Group) was formed in 1966 to examine the potential activity of a fine artist within industrial and commercial organisations
to investigate the circumstances of their professional segregation
and to attempt to bring about a continuous communication between these two poles.”
“The artist – or more significantly, to get away from the traditional concepts inherent in the word, the individual – must insist on being recognised as an autonomous professional.”
TGA 815/1/10/3/2 Mayor, David The Artist Placement Group 11 Nov 1971
One item I enjoyed from the Archive was the “Egg Placement Group”, linked to the influential Fluxus Group and obviously a send-up or reaction against the APG . It invited artists to submit proposals for the “placing in its widest sense, of at least one egg”. Proposals included placing an egg inside a crater on moon, and on pile of dog excrement gathered in the centre of a public park. One of the items I looked at included an ‘egg-placing’ kit, sent through the post.The egg concerned was to be placed in the centre of the lawn at the Courtauld Institute.
