The Locked Room: Saint Martin’s School of Art’s Most Controversial Experiment, Frieze

a book review by Juliet Jacques, first published Frieze

In 1969, sculpture students were kept in isolation and prohibited from keeping whatever they made – an approach contested at the time and inconceivable now

The Locked Room – the title of MIT Press’s forthcoming book, edited by Rozemin Keshvani – refers to a pedagogical experiment conducted, if not imposed, by four tutors at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London between 1969 and 1973. Students on the sculpture course – 27 in total – were instructed to lock themselves in a white room every weekday between 10 am and 4.30 pm, given projects that only specified what they could not do, banned from speaking to each other or to their instructors, discouraged from discussing the course outside of school and prohibited from documenting or keeping whatever they made with the one specific material, be it a block of polysterene or a bag of plaster, they were given. (click here for full article)