This lecture performance presents ‘A Stone, Incidental: or You're Not a Failure’ to share an ongoing body of practical and theoretical research that answers the clarion call to contemporary art to ‘Make yourself useful!’. Holding fast to uselessness as a cherished value of critical art, 'A Stone' springs from the flourishing field of ontological pluralism: being art and something else. This ethos of and/also unites Arte Útil (Bruguera and others), postartistic practice (Szreder and others), usership (Wright and others), and, more recently, incidentality (Bradfield and others).

‘A Stone’ amplifies the contemporary resonance of ontological pluralism via the ongoing relevance of the Artist Placement Group (APG). One of the UK’s most critically acclaimed cultural networks, APG was founded by Barbara Steveni and others in 1966 to wrestle with the social value of art. The Artist Placement Group’s exceptional experiments found form in administration (government departments and public policy), industry (manufacturing and technology), commercial enterprise (trade and urban renewal) and beyond.

In 2016, Steveni gathered an intergenerational community of practice to reconvene the Artist Placement Group as the Incidental Unit. Central to this legacy is the incidental person. Steveni organised placements in the 60s and 70s to situate this figure (often an artist) in an extra-artistic context as an adjunct with an open brief. The vision and organisation of Steveni’s approach - and her own example of incidental practice - continue to fascinate and inspire contemporary cultural producers to work in subtle, surprising and multidimensional ways and create art and something else. ‘A Stone’ for SAR 2025 evolved in dialogue with the first retrospective of Steveni’s prolific practice (Modern Art Oxford, UK, spring of 2025). This version weaves together expressions of Steveni’s incidental practice with those of the Incidental Unit and other relevant examples.