After stewarding at “Hand of the Maker”, I went to Tate Britain for half an hour and discovered the display about the posters and college occupations of 1968 – mainly Hornsey Art School, the LSE and the Camden Poster Workshop. Following the events of ’68, art went in a different direction from the poster workshop, whose philosophy was community inclusion in artistic production, and towards an exclusive, intellectually challenging conceptual art, though both were anti-bourgeois in inspiration.
I remember the rhetoric of ’68, inspired by Paris and the ultra revolutionary intellectuals of the time, Marcuse, Sartre, Gerassi, Fanon, Debord – and, if you fancied, Mao Zedong – and how overblown it was in relation to our grievances: lack of consultation, poor accommodation, inadequate grants, petty university rules, and, in the case of Hornsey, the mismanagement of the transition from the NDD system to the DipAD.
The exhibition includes an article from the Daily Telegraph (below) which dissected the Hornsey students’ complaints and included the authorities’ admission that they had made serious mistakes. Part of the college’s inadequacy came from the fact that it was run by a local authority.
In the aftermath of the Hornsey occupation it was commonly supposed that the art school was absorbed into Middlesex Polytechnic as a sort of punishment for the students and the lecturers who supported them – that’s certainly the idea I picked up. In reality, the amalgamation had been planned by the Labour government long before the occupation and was opposed by the Conservative administration in Haringey.
