Let’s play a game. I’ll start –
What do you think? Now it’s your turn.
Smoking can damage your health.
Interesting (and I hope not). Me again:
The game is up.
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In 1969, four sculpture tutors locked 27 undergraduates in a white room. Not permitted to speak to each other, the students were given tasks which largely detailed what they shouldn’t do. They received no feedback or evaluation from their tutors, and were discouraged from discussing the course outside its enclosed environment.
Laure Genillard Gallery, a Locked Room. Until February, the little Hanway Place space hosts a kind of material reenactment of Saint Martin’s infamous ‘A’ class – a radical teaching experiment, whereby the logic of pedagogy was inverted to push students into their own rhythms of making.
How do you measure learning and progress without tests? And how do you implement tests without according boundaries to mark against? LG’s is an interactive exhibition, drawing conversation, footage and other records into an environment of engagement with the original ‘assignments’ – The Card Game (above), runs with a heavy thread of faux-freedom. The most telling exam of all, perhaps, is set by doing away with such safety nets. The most profound kind of learning, pulled up from inner wrangling rather than handed down by professors.
As a show, The Locked Room embodies the spirit of its source – perhaps because it’s brimming with ephemera. Somewhere between installation and archive, rooms are full of enough reading material to make you feel like a student on the first day of school: stimulated, and a little overwhelmed.
Anyone who attended school will recognise the double-edged sword of a curriculum’s confines. On the one hand, structure guides learning, keeping the infinity of real-world knowledge between clear lines. On the other, constraints – memorise every English king between 1770 and 1900 – are what we’re used to, and the Locked Room’s boldest move was to throw those out the proverbial window.
…constraints – memorise every English king between 1770 and 1900 – are what we’re used to, and the Locked Room’s boldest move was to throw those out the proverbial window.
Group A’s course looked more like performance art than teaching strategy: whether in the sack-masks the tutors wore to berate students at work, or 1971’s infamous Boxing Match (‘we really punched each other’, said John Burke), the teachers’ roles were as central as those of their students.
Dismantling the doors and walls of traditional education’s house left only its foundations; counterintuitively, that approach drew the course’s ethos closer and closer to learning’s core spirit.
Group A’s goal was perhaps the only aspect it shared with more conventional set ups, but different means can aim for shared ends: let’s make some artists. On the surface, The Locked Room’s structure seems so loose as to barely qualify; look again, and its rigour was arguably more stringent than the standard courses we’re comparing it to: only, inverted.
Telling students where they can’t go rather than where they have to be, for instance, leaves infinity-minus-one options at their disposal. The self discipline and independent thought required to navigate that terrible gift of freedom, far more valuable than accurate pencil shading or mastery of APA footnotes. The room’s lock, tellingly, was on the inside; under the control of its occupants, it served to keep the outside world out as well as its heady air of 60s radicalism in. On its far side, other tutors complained that Group A’s experience had made them ‘unteachable’.
The self discipline and independent thought required to navigate that terrible gift of freedom, far more valuable than accurate pencil shading or mastery of APA footnotes.
Their experience of critical self-engagement, and of prescribing their own intentions and methods of working, meant that their reintegration into higher education was fraught to say the least. Students began writing projects for each other. One took place on Hampstead Heath, and involved various states of sensory deprivation. A+, I’d say.
Your turn:
Play a different card
image credit: cardgame played once devised by Peter Venn and John Burke
words by Emily Watkins
first published Why Now
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