Without walls: performance art and pedagogy at the ‘Bauhaus of the North’

Abstract

This essay explores a period of education in the early 1970s when performance art briefly flourished under the auspices of a libertarian approach to art pedagogy. Charting developments at Leeds College of Art and Leeds Polytechnic from the 1950s to the 1970s, I analyse how the teaching of Basic Research mingled influences from the Bauhaus and elements of sixties counterculture to create an exceptional educational environment which, in the early 1970s, made possible student exploration of inter-media performance work. Drawing upon newly-obtained oral histories from former students the essay explores the work of large-scale student collective Soft Soap in order to delineate how performance practice was shaped by a pedagogy focused on the possibilities of open-ended cross-disciplinary creativity. Recollections and analysis of sometimes literal, oftentimes metaphorical, ‘walls’ show how performance-making developed as a practice of ignoring or traversing disciplinary barriers and exploiting the relative accessibility of an art college education for students from multiple economic backgrounds made possible by post-war UK state-funding of higher education.

Keywords:

• Performance art
• art education
• Leeds Polytechnic
• Soft Soap

Notes

1 I would like to thank Michael Bennett, Ron Crowcroft, Dennis De Groot, Robert Joyce, Geraldine Pilgrim, Raym Richards, and Dave Stephens for their extensive help in making this essay possible.

2 James Charnley (2015, 194–195) has questioned the accuracy of Rogers’ reporting and accused him of extracting the most odd-ball and outrageous art works, even inventing or exaggerating some elements for effect, in order to portray Leeds as home to a whacky, and ultimately, questionable seam of creativity.

3 On the coinage of the ‘Leeds experiment’ see Manson (2010, 34).

4 Other early 1970s Leeds graduates, including poet George Szirtes and artists Rose English, Kevin Atherton and Ron Crowcroft, continue to make vital contributions to visual, performing and literary arts in the twenty-first century.

5 Additional staff members of the theatre working party included: John Oxlee, Russell Platt, Henry Giles, Derek Hyatt, Denise Mockler, Bill Mayson, Derek Carpenter, Val Gaudsen, and Adrian Yorke.

6 Playwright David Edgar was Yorkshire Arts Association Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic in 1973, attached to the Department of Contemporary Studies. This connection to theatrical models of performance, and theatre professionals, echoed the role of Bradford Art College’s Complementary Studies programme in developing the work of the Theatre Group under the leadership of Albert Hunt. For information on Coldstream please see note 8.

7 Other Polytechnic staff, like Tony Earnshaw and Patrick Hughes, were also indebted to surrealism making Leeds, at least for a time, a Northern English enclave for the poetics of estrangement.

8 Following the recommendations of the first Coldstream Report the largely craft-based National Diploma in Design (NDD) was superseded by the more liberal arts approach of the Diploma in Art and Design (Dip. AD). With the latter, the study of art was treated as comparable to other university degree subjects and required a sudden step-up in terms of academic entry requirements – to five ‘O’ level passes or the equivalent mixture of ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels. For more on this see Strand (1987, 8–14).

9 Nuttall’s claims about the winding down of performance art’s vitality beyond Leeds Polytechnic should be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly as the form becomes expressly important for exploring identity politics into the 1980s and beyond.

10 Nuttall notes (Leeds Polytechnic 1976, 89): ‘Now there are seven people in the third year, more in the second year, and a possible seven people in the first year who are performance oriented. The predominant direction is post-Cage in its preoccupation with accident and mathematical repeat procedures.’ These figures may well be inflated by Nuttall, as they do not seem to concur with student memory about the low level of performance art activity during these years.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gavin Butt

Gavin Butt is Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, Newcastle. He is author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 and Seriousness (with Irit Rogoff). He is also editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now. Between 2009 and 2014 he was a director of Performance Matters, a creative research project exploring the cultural value of performance, during which he made his first feature-length documentary film with Ben Walters, This Is Not a Dream. He is currently completing a book on post-punk bands and UK art school education.