ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolution of contemporary interventionist methodologies, and explores the continuities and changes that have occurred throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It investigates three examples from the 1920s and 1930s that have had a significant role in shaping the development of artists' interventions in the 1960s and 1970s through to the 1990s and 2000s. They are: Seeds of dissent: 1920s and 1930s, The Spirit of 'Blague', and A New Sense of Order: Curating and Negating. From the early part of the twentieth century the use of undermining parodic methods, in response or retort to museological practices, situates artists' interventions as a mechanism of critique with political leanings. Making connections with, and increasing the visibility of, interrelationships between practices in cultural institutions and practices in society can also be observed as a driving force in proto-interventionist practices.
