Conceptual Art? Garth Evans considers whether the A course was a response to the student unrest of 1968

Many people have viewed the 1971 division of the teaching in sculpture at St. Martin’s as a response to what was happening in the art world where new idea based work was receiving attention. The division of teaching into separate tracks, A and B, has been represented as an academic way to deal with what was becoming an unbridgeable divide between conceptual art and object based art, and between a studio-based practice and a non-studio based practice. 

In the U.K. many of the developments expanding the definition of what sculpture could be were initiated by sculptors while they were still students at St. Martin’s while, at the same time Tony Caro and his followers, were making welded steel sculpture, dominated by the teaching within the school. Seen in this context the division into A and B courses will be interpreted as a response to that situation.

Another “explanation” comes from the use of a political lens and sees in the student unrest of 1968 the source of the thinking that lead to the A course. The subsequent division of the teaching program by a conservative authority into separate steams can then be interpreted as the means by which the authority sought to maintain control. As one of the primary architects of the A course I must assert that the truth (as perhaps it always is), is not this simple.

Understanding the thinking and intentions of the actors involved in creating the A course might be a more useful way to account for the A course than viewing it as a direct response to external events. Generally in my experience, what happens in any situation is as much the result of the aspirations of the participants, combined with their (perhaps too often misguided) judgments about how to achieve their goals, as it is anything else and I would suggest that the A course is no exception.  

Garth Evans.

May, 2018