There had to be some more effective ways of getting through to people than putting me on a box. I stumbled on a clue at a May Day meeting in Tower Hamlets attended by a curious assortment of libertarian dissidents from another era: Anarchists with long white hair from the Freedom Press, which had been operating since the 1890s from an alleyway near the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and free-spirited pensioners from the almost defunct Independent Labour Party. In the pub after the meeting, I told my woes about street-speaking to an elderly bespectacled man in one of those grey macs worn by the respectable demonstrators at Aldermaston. ‘We used to do Living Newspapers, dramatizing the news,’ he told me.
Excited by the idea of imaginative propaganda, I went into work at Tower Hamlets College and enthused to John Hoyland. A teacher who had done the projectionist course more thoroughly than I had observed, ‘You could show films on a back projector from vans.’ When I dropped into Tottenham Street, Adam Hart suggested adding light shows and the kinetic domes he was making.
I took myself off into the British Museum to find out about aesthetics and revolution. I rapidly became utterly confused; there were as many conflicts about art as between Trotskyist groups. I copied out the Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’s declaration:
TO DESIGN IS
TO PLAN AND TO ORGANIZE
TO ORDER, TO RELATE AND TO CONTROL.
I liked the rhythm of the words. However, his vision of order, modernity and control sat uncomfortably with the delight in the irrational and the absurd which was erupting from the People’s Workshop in the occupied Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Their posters echoed the surrealists and Dadaists more than the Bauhaus group and neither resembled the documentary realism of ‘Living Newspapers’. ‘Living Newspapers’, I later learned, had originated in Germany in the twenties when Ernst Toller had developed the use of montage, which later influenced Dos Passos in the United States. This technique was about to influence the visual arts, where instead of bringing new dimensions to ‘the real’, it transmuted into a strong impulse to destroy the significance of subject matter itself.
Amidst the conflicting views on art during the Russian Revolution, the name ‘Agit Prop’ caught my eye – the Agit-Prop train (much, much bigger than a van) travelling through that vast land. There must be a way to move from our closed citadels of revolutionary ideas into the everyday. When I turned up at Black Dwarf jabbering in excitement about Living Newspapers, domes, vans, Josef Albers and Agit Prop, Tariq listened. ‘You should really go and see a guy called Roland Muldoon,’ he said.
The cockney voice on the phone already had quite a history. Rebelling against the Communists who ran the Unity Theatre, Roland had formed the Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre with Claire Muldoon in 1965. CAST was to be the first of the many alternative theatre groups to sprout in the late sixties and early seventies. Unlike the slightly older group of left theatre people whom Clive knew, CAST remained on the fringe rather than entering the mainstream. It used the shock tactics of the avant-garde while being defiantly not ‘arty’.
Roland agreed to meet me at the Anti-University in Shoreditch. Modelled on the American Free School and echoing the ‘Dialectics of Liberation’ conference, the Anti-University had been set up by a curious alliance of anti-psychiatrists and members of the New Left Review.It aimed to ‘destroy the bastardized meanings of “students”, “teacher” and “course” and do away with artificial splits and divisions between disciplines and art forms and between theory and action’. Though these ideas, in a diluted form, were to percolate through the educational system over the next few years, in this radical enclave, in 1968, the dream was to be doomed. Life folded into learning too literally, turning the Anti-University into a dosshouse. The hope of a counter-institution was already sinking, like a pie lacking an eggcup, by the time I arrived to talk to Roland, and the atmosphere was bleak and besieged.
Roland looked like one of those travelling doctors in a Western. His light-ginger hair stuck out uncontrollably and then continued downwards in his beard. He was all frizzy and fizzy and absolutely adamant that my idea of Agit Prop was old hat. It should be Agit Pop and attract young workers. We argued. Agit Pop was too flip – the revolutionary tradition (Rowbotham); young workers today wouldn’t go for it (Muldoon). We had hit an impasse which we never resolved but, undeterred, within a few days we had rounded up a group of enthusiasts, including John Hoyland, to discuss forming a radical cultural group. Without any clear idea about what Agit Prop was, I would jump up at meetings and urge people to get involved. ‘Agit Prop’ was launched at Unity Theatre, which, almost despite itself, was serving as a centre for the cross-fertilization of ideas about left drama coming from groups which ranged from the Parisian Théâtre de l’Unite to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
It was John Hoyland who was to be our Josef Albers and design, relate and control. He created the organizational structure for a network by methodically establishing a card index of artistic talent and would lovingly handle the cards in his boxes. We conceived Agit Prop as a kind of left-wing mix ’n’ match between art and action. We hadn’t taken into consideration one crucial factor: left campaigns didn’t reckon that they had aesthetic needs. They liked their oblong black and white, wordy leaflets. Worse, ‘aesthetic’ was implicitly associated with effete.
For two months I had been almost constantly at meetings and 12 Montague Road had turned into a disaster area, with nobody except me paying their £1 a week into the house fund regularly. I resorted to leaving notes pinned by the telephone – we had a coinbox. Taps dripped but no one could wake up to let in the plumbers, even after they had called three times. Slogans in red paint appeared all over the walls of the house one night, denouncing me as a ‘straight drag’ for demanding the house fund money. I eventually cracked when a notice in red print, threatening legal proceedings about ‘nuisances’, arrived from the council. I might have been fighting the state in general, but I was terrified of the state in particular. I went to see Bill Fishman at Tower Hamlets College in tears towards the middle of May. I was going to sell the house; I couldn’t bear the responsibility any longer. I put it on the market at the estate agent’s at Lebons Corner.
Some of my anxieties scribbled earnestly in my diary that spring seem ludicrous now. For instance, I was concerned that my inability to believe in my own mortality would make the shock of death, when it came, worse. With hindsight this was rather premature. But the daily troubles look unbearable in retrospect and my delay in acting absurd. Desperation, however, finally made me ruthless. I swept everyone out of the house except Stevie and Helen on the grounds that it was going to be sold. Brian had left and Kathie and Mary were away. Peace fell. Life suddenly felt better again and I had second thoughts. ‘The For Sale’ notice was taken down.
Theresa Moriarty, a friend of Dorothy and Edward Thompson’s son Ben, with dark-black hair and grey-blue eyes, moved in that summer. Theresa had grown up with Irish and labour politics in her family; she was interested in art and in history. At last there was someone to talk with about ideas.
On 1 June Black Dwarf’s first issue appeared. Big red writing all over its cover declared confidently: ‘PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. WE WILL FIGHT. WE SHALL WIN.’ I agreed to go around the country to boost sales.
I recorded these Black Dwarf travels in a letter I never posted, reporting enthusiasm among the situationists of Newcastle, who were ‘chuffed because of Lebel but they think Black Dwarf should be given away (I feel this is rather ultra left)’.
From Newcastle I went to Yorkshire, where I was on home ground, reporting, ‘163 Dwarfs sold so far … Dwarfs have penetrated Leeds Gas Board, Burn Bridge bourgeoisie, tramps at St George’s Crypt, Ripon Grammar School, a Welsh College, Tony Jackson and “Ultima Thule”, Leeds CND, Tyne Tees television, the people in the Pack Horse in Leeds … We have been rejected by Hebden Bridge library because we aren’t local, by a Communist because we weren’t the Morning Star, and by a man on the dole in Newcastle because there was nothi
ng for him in the paper.’
People in the Northern left groups and in the labour movement were profoundly sceptical about a paper started by London trendies. This combined with the ingrained resistance among some socialists to anything new. I knew all this so well and knew that beneath it was also the loyalty. Once something was accepted, people would put themselves out, give their time, what money they had, and tolerate stuff they didn’t particularly even want to read. I knew that to survive, we needed these readers who were already committed, even though we had the ambition of reaching far beyond the existing left. So I argued, persuaded, cajoled and hitched across country to York and then on to Hull with my bundle of Black Dwarfs.
The lorry driver who took me to Hull entertained me with incredible stories of women who hitched lifts without any knickers on, ready for instant sex, and of intricate and extensive wife-swapping arrangements on his Hull council estate. As we headed for the east coast, I ruminated on why all this sexual revolution had been missed by the sociologists writing on family and kinship. I told him Black Dwarf was the paper for him.
I reached Hull University around noon on a sunny, breezy Saturday, my black and grey jellaba, bought in Morocco with Lawrence the previous summer, over my mini-dress, clutching the ‘WE WILL FIGHT. WE SHALL WIN’ Dwarfs. The campus was bubbling with cheery rebellion. One of the third-year students had gone to Paris, joined the May rebels and returned inspired. He had walked into his finals exam, torn up his paper and acquired heroic status.
The students were sitting around in the sun, waiting for Senate to come back with a decision on their demands for representation. They were slightly bored and I did a great sale. The red ‘LONDON, PARIS, ROME, BERLIN’ covers were soon dotted all over the green of the grass. Pity we hadn’t foreseen Hull, I thought, but there again it wouldn’t have scanned. When Senate prevaricated about participation, the students voted to occupy the administration buildings and around 6.30 they swept me along with them.
I sat on the floor blissfully happy and kept on writing to Black Dwarf: ‘Everyone is smiling at each other, food appears from nowhere. People give it to each other. The Commissions which have been created move into operation. [We used the French word, thinking the English “committee” was too rigid.] Blankets, food, toothbrushes are collected from the halls with incredible efficiency. There is total participation – no referring, deferring. Each student is himself [sic]. The organization. No them. Messages, donations, visits from staff and townspeople who support the sit-in. The sit-in becomes a celebration. Everyone is dancing, talking, grinning, giving their food away. Everyone IS. Next morning students with large brushes clean up. Books and papers are on sale. Prominently Black Dwarf. It is also up on the notice boards.’
Hull was one of a spate of occupations. Essex had been the first, triggered off by students’ protest against a speaker from Porton Down, an experimental chemical defence establishment. Three students were suspended and eventually reinstated. As at Berkeley, military defence links and their financial connections to universities were issues which stimulated the demand for greater democratic control by students over the content and structure of education. Inequality was also raised. At Bristol students argued for young workers and students from less well-endowed institutions to have access to their facilities. Suddenly curricula and customs which had been meekly accepted by generations of students were being challenged all over the country. Even tradition-bound Oxford defied the unquestioned authority of the proctors, causing Adam Hart’s liberal father, as professor of jurisprudence, to rush around trying to get a conciliatory compromise accepted by both sides.
As some of the student rebels were the most thoughtful social science undergraduates and graduates (a high proportion of whom were to turn into professors all over the globe), they were to write critiques of utilitarian and authoritarian forms of knowledge and theories of education which did have an impact upon higher education, though in such different circumstances that their social meanings were to be utterly changed. The late-sixties rebellions helped stimulate greater choice in the curriculum, continuous assessment and participant observer methodologies. This moment of revolt also generated numerous creative spin-offs – the growth of oral history, community arts and publishing, trade union resource centres, and a great number of other innovations which have long since ceased to seem revolutionary. It was to prove much harder to alter the whole structure of education than to add on new spare parts. The ideals of the late sixties survived most in women’s studies, where, long after their broader origins had been buried, battles were to ensue about subjectivity, community, the role of the teacher, the relation between experience and theory.
It was from the occupied art colleges that some of the most exciting and utopian ideas were to appear in the summer of 1968. Hornsey was occupied on 28 May and I turned up, along with variegated socialists, tenants and trade unionists, to show solidarity. Charlie Posner, always to be found when exciting ideas about education were being discussed, recruited my doctor, Michael Leibson, to stave off an attempt to close the college on health grounds. Sceptical about socialism, Michael loved to take on authorities of all kinds and liked artists.
Revolt in the art colleges, which were run by local borough councils, was dealt with very differently from revolt in the universities. The councils were not tender about academic freedoms and were to take revenge with mass sackings and expulsions. The universities still retained their ethos of training an élite of professionals and rulers, and rebellious individuals (who were not women) were traditionally treated with kid gloves. In contrast, the art colleges combined craft skills with fine art and were more open to the bright working class.
Throughout the sixties they had been seedbeds for all kinds of unconventional speculation and behaviour. In 1969, inspired by the Ecole des Beaux Arts Workshop, they were challenging both the idea of the artist as a romantic individual and a functionalism which linked their work directly into industry. The surrealist Andre Breton’s dream of taking art into everyday life was no longer confined to esoteric tiny groups.
Conflict at Hornsey had begun in opposition to incorporation into North London Polytechnic. In the furore of debate, students and staff went on to argue for a more flexible curriculum geared to students’ changing needs, with greater choice between options. Ideas which had been circulating in the art schools took a political shape during the occupations. They included a fascination with flux and impermanence, along with a view of art as a shared creative process and a desire to break down the barriers between artist and spectator and between objects and art. From surrealism came a celebration of the contingent, the unexpected, the unplanned as a means of breaking up hierarchies in society as well as in aesthetics. These cultural perceptions were to affect community art and the libertarian strands in left politics during the seventies, afterwards reaching a respectable middle age in various branches of academic theory.
Even as form was metamorphosing into attitude in 1969, the art avant-garde was preparing to do a U-turn as conceptual artists began to document objects as concepts – famously turning attitudes into form. One preoccupation, however, persisted right through from the mid-sixties into the seventies. Hilary Gresty describes it as the desire ‘to expose the relationship between perceptual and conceptual apprehension; to allow a little contemplation rather than to posit complete directive assertion’. This insight, in a period when new technology and the fast marketing of ideas were about to affect everyday life in all kinds of ways, was to have a profound influence on feminist, gay and black cultural politics. It also had obvious wider social and political implications.
Tom Nairn and Jim Singh-Sandhu, writing in Student Power, the collection edited by Robin Blackburn and Gareth Stedman Jones in 1969, noted that the art students’ rebellion was not political in a narrow, schematic way. Indeed, their questioning of hierarchical forms of learning was to exert a pervasive influence on radical thinking. While the Hornsey students were less into ‘-isms’ than the
social scientists of the LSE, they were not completely without old-style socialist disputes.
Tom Nairn may have been thrown off the scent by the assiduous efforts of the president of the Student Union at Hornsey, an adroit politico and member of the Communist Party, Nick Wright, whom I met early that June. Nick, who was from a Luton Communist working-class family, was appalled by what he regarded as the rampant ultra-leftism of the New Left Review and the Trotskyist groups alike. Throughout the Hornsey occupation he was to conflict repeatedly over tactics, style and politics with a passionate Welsh firebrand, a member of the International Socialist group at the time, called Kim Howells (now a New Labour minister). Nick played a cheeky-chappie-style Mr Cool to Kim’s ‘ultra left’. In 1968 it was Kim not Nick who was in the majority.
By June the left grouping in the NUS, the Radical Students Alliance, was beginning to look too tame for many student activists. The Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation was to fill the gap for about eighteen months, before it auto-destructed in sectarian battles. In 1968 the New Left Review was propounding their theory of ‘red bases’. The idea was that colleges were to become guerrilla bases, ‘foci’ for the development of revolutionary theories about politics and society – including education. The International Socialists, meanwhile, were telling students they should go out to the working class. Quite a lot of people like me were in between. I thought just getting redder and redder amongst yourselves made no sense and inclined to the International Socialists’ position, with some uneasy twinges when it seemed to deny the relevance of the intellectual arguments within higher education.
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