Jaleh Mansoor

This dissertation examines the Artist Placement Group’s (APG) artist placements within industry and government in the U.K. and Western Europe from 1969-1976 and brings to light correspondence letters, corporate contracts, proposals and artist statements that have not been previously published. I consider the APG’s placements as prototypes that sought to juxtapose and critically question what they perceived as artificial divisions within society. These included art versus society, left versus right political affiliations, the working class versus management, perceptions of use versus uselessness in capitalist production and the organization versus the individual. I specifically examine Garth Evans’s placement with the British Steel Corporation (1968), Stuart Brisley’s placement with Hille & Co (1971), John Latham’s placement with the Scottish Office (1974) and the APG group exhibition titled, inn7o: Art and Economics (1972). These case studies form chapters that investigate the specific socio-political conditions of each placement’s organization, artist and the artwork produced under the umbrella of the APG mission. I adopt a localized social art history approach that considers these placements within the divisions of the British Marxist Left and the changes in the U.K.’s economic and labor policy that occurred against a backdrop of paradigm shifting events, such as the U.K.’s acceptance into the EEC (the predecessor to the EU). Within this politically sensitive and complex context, I argue that the APG’s refusal of political party and class affiliations was representative of a complete disavowal of their contemporary political options; a political position that for artistic practice meant foregoing class and political loyalties in favor of focusing on art’s relationship to ideology itself. Exploring themes of class, labor, time and the political potential of a work of art, I argue for the broader importance of the APG within histories of art and interdisciplinary practice, and propose an alternative perspective of the relationship between art and politics during the 1960s and 70s.

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In June 1968, at the University of Vienna, artists Otto Muehl and Gunter Brus staged a radical action called Art and Revolution using the body and its most base processes, instead of traditional media, as primary material. Following the failed revolutions of 1848, Richard Wagner, composed an essay bearing the same name, arguing for the unifying potential of a total artwork. The purpose of the University action was to question the role of art under advanced capital, while denouncing the repressive hypocrisy of civilizing processes, with the whole, I argue, amounting to a collision between the material body and aesthetic practice as political action. This dissertation examines the Vienna Actionists’ reaction to the limitations imposed by painting, within the longue durée of 1848, as a response to a historical trajectory which eroded the political weight, or “mattering,” of the finite body. It situates them in relation to their inheritance of an aesthetic discourse which privileged totalization in the midst of a modernist narrative that mirrored this aforementioned corporeal erosion through its insistence on abstraction. This study resists an argument which posits the development of modernity as driven solely by the pursuit of pure reason, viewing the Romantic critique of Enlightenment as an equally vocal note in the elaboration of aesthetic and political modernity. I view the Actionists’ focus on the body’s finite materiality in the aftermath of fascist violence, in the midst of a postwar rise in consumer culture, and in relation to a modern discursive obsession with estrangement, as an attempt to call attention to the political stakes of a historically contingent corporeal alienation. I understand, however, their act of total refusal to be diluted by their operation within the limits and language of a masculinist established order. VALIE EXPORT, in response to her male cohort, I argue, occupied a more suitable position to expose the brutality of processes of subjugation based on bodily difference, further exposing a corporeal imperative to collective cohesion. I posit her refusal, however, to be limited by her own normative subject position, thus exposing a repeated myopia toward the totality of fragmented social ties.

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