The late British artist John Latham referred to the ‘Incidental Person’ as someone who invests a situation, observes it and responds to it in a specific, though not necessarily tangible or practical, way. For Latham and some of the other artists involved in Artist Placement Group (APG) between the 1960s and 1980s, the Incidental Person allowed the emphasis to shift from the person’s identity — ‘artist’, ‘theorist’, ‘worker’, ‘politician’ etc. — to her or his engagement in a given context. Hence APG’s axiom ‘Context is half the work.’

Here the context is a group exhibition selected as part of apexart’s annual call for unsolicited proposals. Thus the exhibition itself can be seen as incidental to a pre-existing framework, and its curator and participants as incidental persons invited to act within the event’s given parameters — a relatively small space in Manhattan, with a relatively small budget. As befits their incidentality, many of the projects in the exhibition The Incidental Person are still, at the time of writing, in development. What is certain, however, is that the displayed projects will reflect the incidental persons’ engagement in diverse situations, irrespective of whether these situations fall within the remit of what one calls ‘art’ or not.

With projects by: Ron Bernstein, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, Luca Frei, Will Holder, Marysia Lewandowska, Gianni Motti, Brian O’Doherty, Joachim Pfeufer, Keiko Sei, Barbara Steveni, Megan Francis Sullivan, Neal White, and faculty and students from Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice Concentration: Katy Asher, Katherine Ball with Alec Neal and Matthew Warren, Jennifer Delos Reyes, Harrell Fletcher, Constance Hockaday, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Laurel Kurtz & Sandy Sampson, The Print Factory, Eric Steen, Michelle Swinehart, Lexa Walsh, Jason Zimmerman.

There will be a gallery talk Saturday, January 9, 3-4 pm. Join Antony Hudek and Raphaële Bidault-Waddington for the launch of the Polygon project

This exhibition is supported in part by The CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Mondriaan Foundation.

apexart’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Edith C. Blum Foundation, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., The William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.