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Illustrations from Hornsey 1968 –A security guard, called in to close the college on July 4 1968, is given a cup of tea by the students. |
We all want to change the world
The revolutionary fervour that spread throughout the western world in 1968 ignited a small corner of north London for six days. Gerald Isaaman on the Hornsey Art College rebellion
Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution.
By Lisa Tickner. Frances Lincoln £12.99 order this book
IT was the year we booked to go to France, to stay at the home of a Communist professor from the Sorbonne, whose country retreat was in a perched village a dozen miles from Nice. France was in uproar, pickets manned the ports and gendarmes lined the roads as we headed south in our Mini.
It was 1968, the year of the student revolution and, surprisingly, our holiday was hardly affected, despite the traumatic headlines and apart from having to dash across the border into Italy – to buy sugar.
Paris may have been in chaos but this was one revolution that failed to upset our English applecart. And you might say the same about little Hornsey, in north London, where students at the college of art dramatically staged their own surprising revolution.
On May 24, 1968, students occupied the college’s main building in Crouch End for 24 hours, initially because of a row over the control of student funds.
Yet it escalated into a six-week saga of confrontation with the stubborn, out-of-touch college authorities, leading to a debate on all aspects of art education, including the social role of art, and the politics of design – one of the many posters produced at the time declared Smash the System.
Forty years on, Lisa Tickner from Kentish Town, an arts professor at both the Courtauld and what is now Middlesex University – herself a former Hornsey student and teacher, though not through the dangerous days – re-examines the sit-in and its aftermath in her own book.
With picket lines now reappearing as unions go on strike for wage rises, it is worth looking back at a much more turbulent time when the war in Vietnam provoked violent clashes between the police and thousands of protestors in places like Grosvenor Square.
Hornsey, by contrast, was supposed to be a one-night, 24-hour discussion of grievances. Yet it went on for six weeks, partly because the stubborn bureaucracy of the system and the refusal of Haringey’s Tory councillors to appreciate its seriousness.
What came under the microscope was the need for a major change in attitudes at a college, originally founded in 1880, to accommodate a faster-moving world where art was seen a political force for change, as well as a social phenomenon.
With the help of sympathetic lecturers, the students took over the day-to-day running of the college and its various outposts and invited an assortment of speakers such as Buckmaster Fuller, Nikolaus Pevsner, Tariq Ali, RD Laing and Oh What a Lovely War! director Joan Littlewood to join the debate. Even the sculptor Henry Moore gave a donation to the cause, as students pumped out dozens of newsletters and pamphlets to champion their cause.
Unfortunately, this is not an account of events where you get an honest taste of the fervour of dissent felt at the barricades, when the students were virtually fenced in and security men with dogs patrolled the building.
Yet for all its academic, non-judgmental dullness and lack of fireworks – there are a remarkable 180 pages of notes, let alone a bibliography – this is a serious study of a subject that undoubtedly shook up the system and deserves its own niche in education’s on-going story.
As Lisa Tickner writes in her postscript: “Like any historical event, and unsurprisingly the sit-in was a different experience for different people… There were those who were for or against the arguments, or for the arguments but against the methods. There were those caught up in the excitement of ‘a real, lasting, valuable, indelible, active, transforming, future-orientated, inspiring adult education’, and those who thought it was ‘revolt for revolt’s sake’, those who lent conditional support, and those who waited it out at home.”
Today’s calmer students probably know or care little about that or believe in determined direct action, but then, while the level of design since Hornsey has produced brilliant results, the soulless conceptual art pouring out of art colleges today provides little inspiration for the birth of some 21st century renaissance.
Indeed, there are, as always, those students intent on their own idividul interests. There is one I know in Hampstead who virtually ignored the barricades during his final year at Hornsey, intent on getting his diploma for fear of disappointing his father, who had wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer.
Diploma No 4 from Hornsey College of Art now proudly hangs on his studio wall, partly because he refused to rebel and insisted on getting his accolade. “There can’t be many more from that amazing year at Hornsey,” he cries. “This may be only one of a handful of diplomas from the 1968 revolution.”
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