"The Dakar-based Laboratoire Agit-Art was founded in 1973-74 by an interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, filmmakers, performance artists, and musicians. Laboratoire's aim was to transform the nature of artistic practice from a formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, process rather than product, ephemerality rather than permanence, political and social ideas rather than aesthetic. Audience participation was of paramount importance to the group's work, which privileged communicative acts over the embodied object. Neither utopian nor self-referential, Laboratoire grounded its actions in the immediate sociopolitical situation. Whether or not the group was aware of similar practices in the West, Laboratoire's position on art after the object is supremely consistent with Lucy Lippard's assertion that conceptual art was "emerging from two directions: art as idea and art as action."
Compare with contemporary situation?
