EPH E MER A I ANE C E DOT circaseventies
The End of the Art School Dance The night is young and the moon is still rising You're high on poppers and your eyes are igniting I'm getting lost in your hypnotising I've gotta slow down Red-eyed sisters and Grade A junkies College slackers and late night funkies Everybody's trying to do the monkey They've gotta shake it on down They've gotta shake it on down They've gotta shake it on down They've gotta shake it on down Ooooh Slow down A Cat walk diva's waiting on tables and drag queen Susans are hustling favours They're getting busted for dubious behaviour oh they're gonna get sent down All the cuties do their duty they shake their booty in the name of beauty Their little heads go'n turn around they've gotta shake it on down There's a pseudo punk crying revolution He makes art but gives no solution He's telling everyone what's goin down And it's wall to wall with Roxy maybe's Looking cool with their foxy ladies This whole dance floor is spinning round Riding home in an Austin Allegro My brain's fried like a disco potato The city lights are distinctively day-glo I've gotta go 'n slow down This world's going up the junction We're all headin for a big malfunction But I've got this one compunction I've gotta shake it on down I’ve gotta shake it on down I’ve gotta shake it on down Oh I’ve gotta shake it on down Ooooh Slow down Tony Baker
Front Cover Photograph of the Fine Art Studio from The Little Nipper publication for Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Department
For Harry Thubron, Paul Staniforth, Ken Rowat, Frank Tovey, Harold Cove, Tony Earnshaw, Jeff Nuttall, Mary Gordon, David Dawson, John Lester, Willy Tirr, Marian Lux, Roger Ely, Andy Gill, Maurice Whitbread, Steve Dixon, Bill Major, Andy Sharpe and all the other departed who took part in the Leeds Experiment
THANK GOD FOR THE ARTIST FOR WHOM TRUTH never MASQUERADEs AS FACT
DOG KNAHT EHT ROF - TSITRA MOHW ROF reven HTURT sEDAREUQSAM TCAF SA
Excerpt taken from 'From Now Until Yesterday' by Rick V Parsons
circaseventies is a continuing long-term project that aims to assess the long term impact of what was, according to Patrick Heron, ‘the most influential Art School in Europe’ during the nineteen seventies - Leeds. This bold ‘experiment’ in art education initiated by Harry Thubron in the days before the Coldstream Report, had broken down the delineation between the disciplines, creating one studio where sculptors worked alongside painters, and the crafts of printmaking and ceramics were offered the same privileges in the hierarchy of the fine arts, that had been previously afforded exclusively to painting and sculpture. This allowed for a cross-fertilisation of process and form that, by default, placed emphasis on the idea rather than the end product, and, in the heyday of the ‘experiment’, the notion of anything resembling permanence was eschewed in favour of the transitory, thereby paving the way for performance art, and a sort of Fluxus free-for-all, in which students were told to “go and make some art” - although it was never made clear as to what art actually was. In this culture of negotiated structure, in which the traditional relationship between teacher and student was blurred, where disciplines crossed over without inhibition, and where students, encouraged by the example of their mentors, were expected to breakdown whatever barriers existed – art practice blossomed in ways hitherto un-precedented since the Bauhaus, and the subsequent formation of the Black Mountain College, thus setting the mould for all contemporary models of Art Education. Under the wing of such luminaries as Jeff Nuttal, Glynn Williams, Roland Miller, Geoff Teasdale, Dan Graham at Leeds Poly and T J Clark, Griselda Pollock, Terry Atkinson et al at the Leeds University, and in an environment of constant flux where anything went, and where Art was practiced with true rock’n’roll sensibilities - Leeds spawned a wide diversity of aspiring young artists, as well as a plethora of bands: The Mekons, Soft Cell, Scritti Pollitti, Gang of Four, Fad Gadget to name but a few. Although diametrically opposed in terms of detail - academically marxist and radical feminist in one camp, and post-fluxus pranksterism in the other, the two institutions converged in the zeitgeist of punk with a shared dynamic, that between them covered all that was cutting edge. Since when, artforms have been honed, experience broadened and politics reassessed – but the essence still remains as vital today, as at its inception. The circaseventies : ephemera + anecdote show is a collection of posters created by Tony Baker that respond to the ephemera still surviving from this vibrant period in Art Education, and tells the story through press cuttings, posters and artefacts taken from the collections of former staff and students, along with anecdotal texts from people who were there at the time
One of the first experiences of any new student to the Fine Art Department, at Leeds Polytechnic was to have their photograph taken for a set of mugshots by George Dunn. In his day, he had been a sculptor, known for his wood carvings, and had studied at The Slade before the Second World War, but for most students of the seventies, he was the slightly eccentric tutor, at odds with the rest of the staff, who wore a beret and took their photograph at the beginning of their studies. The collection of mugshots defied any form of uniformity - no composition was the same, neither was the lighting exposure or title for each year. George died in 1977 Poster (right) : 68-79 Mugshots from the Lucy Hainsworth Collection Staff Mugshots (above) : from the Ulrike Rost Collection Mugshots (below) : from the Alan Naylor Collection
In May 1969 Meryle Secrest of the Washington Post, writing in Studio International, described her visit to the fine art course of Leeds College of Art, where she asked of members of staff, “What does a student need to know in order to graduate?” Implicit in her question is that she expected to receive an account of an identified set of intellectual and practical skills and abilities which were developed through a curriculum of organised teaching and were capable of being evaluated for the purposes of the award. She was to be disappointed, staff responses to her question were met with polite amusement and included; “discovering how to live sane in a society”, “the willingness to see with your ears”, “creative anarchy”, “think around corners”, and “the assimilation of knowledge comes through self-discovery”. She was told that “The student is directed to selfish inquiry materially and intellectually, and encouraged to respond to those primary clues within himself (sic) which would enable him (sic) to make an original contribution in a form most consistent with his (sic) true interests.” A student commented that “the course is difficult to detect, difficult to recognize, difficult to imagine, probably not provably existent, impossible to fault, impossible to even criticise, one can only criticise oneself.” Secrest described the college as “ a random collection of ramshackle buildings, connected by labyrinthine corridors loosely congregated somewhere in the middle of a bleak black city.” She noted that the college was to move into the new square shaped glass and concrete quarters of the newly formed Leeds Polytechnic. She suspected that ”staff and students were going to miss the serendipitous possibilities offered by their present floor plan and look back nostalgically on the bad old days. This prescient observation was to be expanded upon by Patrick Heron’s article “ Murder of the Art Schools” in the Guardian 1971 where he described Leeds as the most influential in Europe since the Bauhaus. Geoff Teasdale
In 1967 the print maker Michael Rothenstein maintained that "In painting and sculpture we are long past the day when study was broken down purely on the basis of different techniques ... In print making alone this attitude tends to persist; each area, etching, lithography and so on, boxed in with minimal overlap with related areas and with the school of fine art." (18) Even more recently, the contemporary debate about the 'polytechnicization' of the art colleges has sharpened the old lines of conflict. In attacking the Government's policy of integrating the art schools with polytechnics, the painter Patrick Heron has argued that the fundamental autonomy of the art schools (a condition of the dynamism of British art during the past decade) is now threatened. And in making this attack Heron has brought traditional artistic quarrels to the attention of the public. He argues that it is the non-fine-art departments that have been partly to blame, that they "become Trojan horse enthusiasts for polytechnicization" and helped to bring this great calamity down upon the fine arts. (19) But, as Heron argues, correctly, it is not they but painting and sculpture which have been at the focus of artistic activity in the past. Other activities, such as graphics, textile and ceramics have always "crystalised" around painting and sculpture. Heron is right to situate the problem in its historical context. Indeed his own arguments and beliefs have a long and respected pedigree, reaching back hundreds of years. Nearly two hundred years ago James Barry, Professor of Painting and the Royal Academy, subscribed to the same views when he asserted that "our tapestry workers do nothing excellent without a painted exemplar". (20) ‘Murder of the art schools’ was printed on page 8 in The Guardian. 12th October 1971, and was referred to in ‘ Labourers in Art’ by Gordon Fyfe of Keele University (above)
On November 24th 1970, the regional BBC news programme, Look North interviewed Jeff Nuttall, ostensibly to quiz him regarding the recent court case involving staff and students outside a block of flats in Askern Chase, Leeds, while trying not to be engulfed by Paul Readers giant inflatable cube (see transcript below)
Press Cutting from the Raym Richards and Dave Seeger Collections
LN : I must say Jeff, as an intellectual philistine, that nothing that I have seen this morning, seems to me to bear any relation at all to art, to learning, or indeed to sanity. JN : It doesn’t bear much relation to learning or sanity, er, except in so far as one finds out new things by doing new things, er. Most of the things that we are doing here have not been done before, except until very recently, and therefore one’s exploring new area and therefore it’s to do with learning - but it’s nothing to do with established disciplines of learning - certainly not, it’s expanding learning rather than, er, rather than operating within given traditions. And as for sanity, well I, I hope it’s insane, you know, I would hope so, I am, and, er, I really have a faith in insanity and not sanity. LN : I think you’re going to worry, and possibly upset, you know, a lot of people who complain about taxpayers, ratepayers money being spent on education, when you talk so glowingly and affectionately about insanity JN : er, (coughs) well we have to compare terms, and what are associated with terms - like it is, it is claimed that the Vietnam War, which is much more expensive than the Fine Art department at Leeds, is a ‘sane’ project - er, I think that is truly insane, whereas I think the things that we are doing here are sane, as I think all ‘play’ is sane, finally. But by, by the terms of economic organisations, political organisations, and society as it is rigged at large now, um, it must be termed ‘insane’, I suppose because it’s not sensible, it’s not a serious project.
LN : would you say though, that there’s anything artistic about this huge ballon that is about to engulf us, unless your insane students, colleagues, get it out of the way, as they just have done? JN : I don’t really like the term artistic, it was mainly used by the middle classes about seventy years ago about watercolours, it might not be artistic, I don’t really know what it means, but it’s certainly art in my understanding of the term LN : What about the kind of, er, happening that we have just seen reenacted for us, it caused a little trouble in the courts yesterday? JN : I think one of the great shames about the way in which the thing was received in the press and by the police and by, er, the people in the area where the performance took place, is that people seem to look out of their flat windows these days and if they see something out of the ordinary, well then they greet it with distress rather than wonderment or amazement. If I saw something unusual happening outside my house, I’d say “cor, look at that”. No, I wouldn’t have sent for the police, and I think it’s a shame that people do, I don’t think people should be afraid of one another, whether they’re, they seem to be barmy or whether they seem to be sane. I think people do nasty things to one another, because they’re afraid of one another, and I think, er, the only aggression, er, the only attack, whichever takes place really with regards to events like this comes from, er, frightened people, a frightened public, or a kind of worried police, but it certainly doesn’t come from the people who precipitate it, usually, who are merely trying to kindle a kind of human activity and human reactions.
Video Stills from Look North . BBC Archives : https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=425522785054115 Poster(Overleaf) : Sanity Includes film still and transcript from Look North Interview
The All England Project was a maquette, and part of a whole series of interlinked works questioning Art Education. Under the new Dip AD nearly everyone got a degree after 3 years. Did one get the degree just for being at college for 3 years or was one supposed to reach some sort of standard. If there was a standard then could one not reach it in two years, or one, or four? In my view art was about communication. I resolved to get my degree in two years and then set off round the world to do the Whole Earth Sculpture. The All England Sculpture was a trial run for that. If departing at the end of the second year was unacceptable I needed something to be my substitute in college. I had a full body cast made of myself and from that made an articulated replica with latex skin and glass eyes. With 16mm stop frame I filmed all my hair being shaved off lock by numbered lock then all my cloths coming off my body, then in reverse the cloths and hair being reassembled on my replica. The two of us were then superimposed as one until I got up, put on my rucksack, and left the replica to do my work for me for the year I was away.
Poster (opposite) : England is his Canvas Newspaper Article from the Simon English Collection Above : Documentation & Photograph of Point 61 Grid Reference SU 936.888 ŠSimon English
To prove I had been in college for that time I had built a machine to take one frame an hour on a 8mm camera of my replica who was hung in the rafters above the studio with a clock above him. Before each frame was taken a floodlight came on and the replica would be signed IN during the day and OUT at night. 24 frames a day for 365 to 400 plus days = 6 minutes plus = two rolls of film . Turning the rolls of film over and changing them and frequent winding of the clockwork camera was done by the fine art studio technician Bob Pointer who must have spent the year every two or three weeks putting up and climbing a thirty foot ladder. I am not sure that I ever thanked him enough.
So off I went finally……………….
Before I left I put on a “2nd year Diploma Show” with all the work I had done so far and showed my films as well as giving a lecture. The tutors were asked to write it up as though it was a 3rd year final show – if I did not return then my third year show would be the second years assessments pinned up so the adjudicators could copy out what had been written the year before, on the assumption that art education is “cumulative” and one should be judged by ones “high water point.” The tutors nearly all entered into the spirit of the things and gave – some - quite revealing reports.
Did I get my degree after all……….…Yes Did I finish the Whole Earth Sculpture … No - but that’s another story.
Actually I built two replicas with two timelapse machines, the other mounted in my mother’s shed with a view of the garden in case the studio one failed.
And I did come back - a year and a half later to finish my third year in person. Into the winter of 1973/74 with the strikes and 3 day week. There seemed to have been not just a social change in the country but at college there were no students who remembered the old college before the Poly. I spent much of my time writing my thesis on research done in Peru and North America. This was hand written Kerouac like, (On The Road) all on one long roll of paper then typing it out with spaces for the photographs, diagrams and illustrations. This was long before the days of word processors.
And the result of querying the structure of art education? Well in the fullness of time I eventually taught part time. It was a different world and my youthful philosophy bit me on the bum……… but
Photograph (Below) of Journalist at Point 24 ©Simon English ‘I Produced a Flag’ from Northern Young Contemporaries Show from the Simon English Collection Poster (opposite) Freak Out : including Daily Telegraph article on Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art
The Guardian article on the England Sculpture came about from a telephone interview to a stringer mate of a postman who gave me a lift near Carlisle. When I told him what I was up to he said 'Oh you must talk to a man I know' and (long before mobile phones) went to his house to use the phone. Much later, after the story had been syndicated all over the world, I, like Ray Richards, was contacted by a big Sunday paper to do a feature. OK will do. He came to Leeds. we went to the pylon at Pt 24 9 near Kirkstall bridge, which was the first point I visited and therefore I closed the loop. Anyway, long interview , nice chap , told me stories about interviewing Princess Anne, etc. At the end of it all he asked how I paid for my travels. Oh with my own money and I did it all in the school summer holidays. At that he closed his notebook and went away. and I never heard from him again. No story. No public money. No scandal for the News of the Screws. Why, I even took a a picture of him.
The article in the Telegraph Magazine was the reason I applied to Leeds while at my Foundation Studies course. One of the tutors there told me to apply to Leeds, as it would be the only place that would take me! And of course, they took me without seeing any of my Foundation Studies portfolio, just on the strength of my notebooks and ideas, as I eventually realized they picked a group of students who would make for an interesting blend, more than those with a consistent, full body of work. Ron Crowcroft circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
We were new to Leeds, new to art college, the fraternity who only weeks before had been lauded in the Daily Telegraph as the most exciting place in the universe. A Leeds College exhibition at the ICA had exploded onto the art world with adrenalised anarchy, predating Britart by 25 years and creating overnight heroes out of scruffy near teens. Atherton was God, Simon English a messiah, travelling the world creating a whole earth sculpture. We were the follow on year. Each one of us the one in a thousand who had been chosen to carry the message forward, the creative elite, an army of visionary makers. As John Fox had described it, we were psychedelic Elastoplast in a badly wounded stratosphere....or at least that was the way that we saw it. Dave Stephens circa 72-76 Leeds Poly
Daily Telegraph Article on Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Department from the Simon English Collection
Sandy Weatherson was the London agent who arranged the venue and the unsung hero of the whole escapade was Harold Cove, who organized and provided the cash, the removal firm and a million other things he would never mention.Without Harold it wouldn’t have happened. It was magnificent that all students and staff committed themselves to the project. There had never been such harmony and friendship in the Fine Art Department. In fighting was put aside. The department was focused on a single aim. Practically, there had to be a ‘heavy gang’ of staff and students to get the show on the road. Glynn Williams, Geoff Teasdale and myself were the ’staff heavy gang’ who planned, selected and executed the order of exhibitions to be shown and which students should be in which show. We selected the ‘student heavy gang’ who would help us pack the 8 different exhibitions into the pantechnicons for the assault on the ICA. (Ricky Atkinson, head of Fine Art before Willy Tirr, sometimes said the wrong word. Before moving to the Polytechnic he would tell us what it would be like in the ‘Pantechnicon’, and at last we found out) Amazingly the transport to London, the storing of the 8 exhibitions in the ICA and the mounting and taking down of each exhibition overnight was achieved without any major problem. All the students were there to see that their exhibit was in order before the gallery opened to the public each day. It was a logistic success. The ICA exhibition was a considerable achievement. No other Fine Art Dept had ever dared to do such a thing. No other college had ever allowed the students to do and show what they liked on such a scale. There was no censorship. Leeds Fine Art was frighteningly confident, it knew it was right. The press was generally good. The sentence I remember was from Nigel Gosling review - Leeds 'were quicker on the ball than the Royal College’. In retrospect I think that the ICA exhibition was a watershed in the history of Leeds Fine Art. From that point on I personally thought that Leeds was on the downhill slope. The move to the polytechnic was not wished by any or many. On the first day there Robin Page looked around the main studio and said ’Not much lads, but we might as well call it home’. With that we all formed a circle and performed an enactment of Van Gogh's interpretation of Gustave Dore’s ‘prison yard’. Robin had summed up the situation very well. Within a few years major staff members were leaving for pastures new, and the Poly used these moves to reduce the staff numbers. Academia was taking over. The writing was on the wall for all to see. Miles Macalinden circa 67 - 77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) Mad Art including photocopy of the Daily Mirror Newspaper article from the James Charnley Collection
In 1973, with a small grant from the ‘Yorkshire Arts Association’, I made a number of short 8mm films shot in Leeds. These conceptual films were mostly filmed outdoors as I had no access to a studio and as a consequence have become social documents of Leeds from almost fifty years ago. One of these films called ‘Fuck Off Film’ (8mm, colour, 3min 20sec, silent) consists of me walking around Leeds giving the two-fingers sign - ‘the uppers’ - directly to the camera. The analogue quality of film, as opposed to video, appears to capture the light of those times, in a similar way to the colour photographs of Leeds taken a little later in the nineteen-seventies by the photographer Peter Mitchell. ‘Fuck Off Film’ came about because someone in ‘The Fenton’ said that I said fuck a lot and that after a while if you said fuck enough people ceased to hear it. I wanted to make a film to see that if you gave the Fuck Off sign again and again, would people stop seeing it? Now, forty-seven years later, I am more interested in whom I might have been giving the fuck off sign to.
Poster (opposite) Proposed Monument to Kevin Atherton Photograph of Woodhouse Moor circa 1975 ©Ron Crowcroft Film Stills (above & overleaf) from ‘Fuck Off Film’ ©Kevin Atherton
1: I was saying Fuck Off to the ‘Isle of Man Education Authority’ for continuing to pursue me for the repayment of my student grant. 2 : I was saying Fuck Off to the ‘Art History and Complementary Studies Department’ at Leeds Polytechnic, who by failing my Isle of Man Yellow Pages Telephone Directory as my final thesis, meant that I had to repay my student grant. 3 : I was saying Fuck Off to Leeds Utd for beating Liverpool 2-0 at Elland Road in the FA Cup Fourth Round Replay. 4 : I was saying Fuck Off to Leeds Social Services Department for making me walk from Eastgate to Westgate to register on the dole. 5 : I was saying Fuck Off to Edward Heath and his government. 6 : I was saying Fuck Off to the Catholic Church. 7 : I was saying Fuck Off to London. 8 : I was saying Fuck Off to The Goethe Institute who hadn’t awarded me a scholarship to study in Dusseldorf. 9 : I was saying Fuck Off to the Scouse stewards I’d worked with on ‘The Tynwald’ who’d held me down on the deck and force-fed me horseradish sauce. 10 : I was saying Fuck Off to Leeds Students Union who’d barred me from the Polytechnic Bar. Kevin Atherton circa 69-72 Leeds Poly
Dave Hill . Soft Soap Performance . The Oval House . London . November 26 . 1974 . ŠMichael Bennett
Probably the first group thing I did with my Year group (72-75) at Leeds, was a cabaret which a large group of us put together possibly in the first term. This show was largely brought about by Judy Newton who was a force of huge energy. There was a meeting in someones flat and we aired out all kind of ideas, coming up with what was essentially a review using lots of short sets. The ones that I remember most were the ones that I was directly involved with and in particular one I did as a twosome with Dennis De Groot. We hurled insults at each other and at the audience which were full on stereotypical insults of the time. The punchline was when we discovered that some of the insults that we were shouting were actually ones that could be attributed to ourselves and started to apologise to each other. The whole skit was pretty rowdy and aggressive. Judy had introduced a structure into the whole evening by basing it loosely around the opera, Carmen. I can’t actually remember who started Soft Soap Co though, as I wasn’t really part of that stage of its development. I think it was mainly Ray Richards and Gerry Pilgrim but am not 100% sure. Although I do know that Judy Newton was not in it. My first real memory is that before its first incarnation, stickers with Soft Soap Co were being given out and a specimen letter sent out to Student Unions to try and get gigs at other colleges. I don’t think I had even decided to take part until the first show had been booked. If I am right it was at Oval House Theatre in London which Gerry had done work with before becoming a Leeds student. The Oval was a kind of extension of the Art Lab mentality and run by someone called (I believe) Peter Oliver. We had been booked to take part in a festival of new experimental performance. It was the first time that I saw Rob Conn performing when he was in GASP. Later on I did lots of work with Rob including touring the Midlands doing street performances with him sitting on top of a performance tower and giving me orders down below as a kind of slave performer. At the Oval House, Soft Soap did a smashing group performance. It was one of the rare times that we all collaborated on one image involving most of the performers. 15 of us stood at one end of the main performance space forming a geometrical triangle. All of us were naked and all of us had our heads painted red. Entering through the middle of the audience came another naked performer with their head painted white. This performer came into the performance area in a straight line and made contact with one of the red performers. A chain reaction then happened and all performers, moved around the space in straight lines only changing direction when they encountered another performer or a wall. The bouncing carried on for a few minutes and then slowly all performers came to a stop. It was a human game of snooker. I am not sure what happened after that but I think it was something to do with a human lighthouse played by Gerry Pilgrim. There were lots of people involved in Soft Soap with as many as 20 or possibly even more. There were lots of volatile arguments and personality clashes throughout its existence. Probably due to its size. Initially the structure that we worked with was a strange cabaret which moved in and out of peoples ideas. It usually started with Dave Lewis doing an impersonation of Joel Grey from the Cabaret film and singing welcome etc. Ron Dewhirst did some kind of poem about dogs dicks but apart from that I can’t really remember what happened with that kind of structure. Probably because, for me, it wasn’t really anything that I was interested in. Personally I was much more interested in breaking down the traditions of theatre, art and entertainment. Dave Stephens. Soft Soap Performance . Leeds Poly Common Room . 1974 . ©Michael Bennett
One of the gigs that sticks in my mind, and that seemed to be much more adventurous, was when we did a show in a village in the Pennines. We all started when it was dark and slowly converged from the darkness, coming down the hillsides from a multitude of start points carrying flaming torches. By the time we got to the centre of the village where we going to then perform, the police had arrived. They said that they had numerous complaints about devil worshippers attacking the village. If my memory serves me rightly they didn’t actually stop what was going on and just watched us with curiosity. The rest of the weekend we spent building a drystone tower in the assembly hall of the school so that when the kids arrived on the Monday morning they had an assembly with a giant monolith tower in the middle of them. It was only after the event that we suddenly realised that the extra weight of the tower could have made the floor collapse when combined with the weight of the assembled kids. We did a show in Oxford at one of the students unions where we didn’t have a central performance and all did separate things. This series of cameo, or small performances took place at different places in the room. At certain points, and working to a signal, we all stopped and started singing Elvis’ All Shook Up in unison. I suspect that someone was conducting this and that the performers became a bit like instruments in a giant improvised visual band. I think we stuck to this format for a while and did a show in Reading University through the Arts Exchange Festival where I first met Genesis P Orridge and Harry Kipper. Arts Exchange was run by the Fine Art students at Reading and was a very lively and creative way for students to access visiting artists. There was a similar one in Newcastle in the late 1970s called the Basement group and I was invited by both groups over a long period and on a number of different occasions to perform when I had left Leeds Poly. Another memorable event using this format was in a Teachers Training College in Lincoln. We did the event split up into smaller cohorts around the college not just in the main space that we were booked to perform in. The idea was to eventually converge on the performance space forming relationships between different performing ensembles as we arrived. I cant remember what happened exactly but by the time I arrived in the performance space huge arguments had erupted amongst the audience along the lines of supporters and vehement haters of what was going on. I don’t remember us getting involved in the arguments but eventually the social secretary of the student union who had booked us stepped in and decided to abandon the show. We of course ignored him and carried on to the point, I think, where he was threatening to call the police. God knows what happened then but I do remember having to sleep in one of the surrounding fields because our accommodation agreement had been withdrawn. The last show that I ever did with Soft Soap was in Birmingham Festival where we were booked to perform in and around Birmingham Rep. For the indoor show in the studio theatre we split into smaller groups and devised a series of visual pieces that were then performed . These were intended to be then performed all at the same time after a procession onto the stage and were intended to be seen rather like a Hieronymus Bosch picture. I worked with Jon Latham which was often our chosen pairing. Jon led me onto the stage on a rope and then bent me over a stool disrobed me, covered my bare backside in shaving foam and proceeded to very carefully shave it off again. There were lots of other things going on around us at the time creating a sense of visual chaos. People were reading things out. Others were spinning round with torches fixed to their heads and screaming (rather like the banshees trying to attract passing ships onto the rocks at the base of a lighthouse), a vicar was running round trying to induce people to confess. Possibly the strangest thing of all was that half the audience were dressed up in Medieval gear. The reason being that some of them were in the cast of King Lear which was on in the main theatre and they had come along with all the extras to see what we were up to. People who weren’t in costume must have thought that Soft Soap actually had about 50 members and were waiting for them to spring out of the audience and onto the stage. You couldn’t have asked for a better setting really. A review of that show was entitled something like Jeff Nuttal’s Babes come to Town and Rip the Place Apart. Jeff had no involvement at all with Soft Soap apart from supporting our aims and his daughter Sara being one of the members. I thought that show was brilliant but unfortunately not everyone in Soft Soap did. The next day we had a huge row (which was fairly normal for us). With the large amount of people that were involved, many had totally different aims and needs. Factions built up and people became too incalcitrant to move. At the end of the argument I left Soft Soap Co. Dave Hill gave me a lift back to Leeds late at night. Not sure whether he had left as well or whether he just wanted a break from the arguments. Later in the year I think I did one more show with Soft Soap, in Leeds Poly Common Room. It was because Jon Latham asked me to work with him again, and we devised a piece which involved two performers connected by rope who were hanging from constructions at either end of the performance space with their hands and feet attached to each other by ropes across the performance space. Each “puppet“ had control of the other and our movements were a constant battle between who could win control. At the end we were supposed to drop to the floor with our weight breaking the 2”X1” wooden bars that supported us. Unfortunately we had never tried this hypothesis out before and when I dropped forward to break the bar I was left hanging in the air. Poor old Jon though was shot upwards with his wrists being trapped against his bar and practically breaking them. At that moment he most probably thought “Why the fuck did I persuade Dave to perform again”. My last ever performance with Soft Soap. Dave Stephens circa 72-76 Leeds Poly
Soft Soap started as a kind of slightly anarchic, student review type thing. The first shows consisted of a series of gags and silly songs, I don't think any of us were particularly serious about it, it was just a way of having enormous fun, getting money (expenses) for props, costumes and special effects, and getting very drunk in the bar after meetings. I don't remember much about those early shows because they weren't very memorable, I only really remember The Axalotles, a cod rock band, who performed songs written by Ron Dewhirst. The only one I remember was "My Baby Gorilla" written by Dewhirst about me, it was loosely based on 50's type rock and roll. None of us could play instruments - it must have sounded bloody awful. We got to know each other well in those early days, it was all quite exciting, like putting on a school play. It was pretty shambolic, funny in parts and almost certainly dire in others. It forged something though. Even though there were probably about 20 of us we did cooperate, there was give and take, mutual support, shared humour, a pooling of ideas, daft quarrels and sulks, and some very small moments of potential genius. it was mostly driven by Ray Richards, (it was his baby) and Dennis De Groot in the early days, and although they were very egalitarian they were the driving force behind it. Ray started to get us gigs outside of college, and with every gig it developed into something wilder, more surreal, more performance art and less student review. We mostly played other colleges and universities, bundling everything and ourselves into and on top of the Ford transit van that we'd earlier persuaded the student union to buy for us to facilitate trips for The Rural Sketching Club. In reality these were weekend camping trips to wherever we fancied going, getting horrendously rat-arsed, stumbling round the Yorkshire Dales and getting lost. No sketching was ever done. Over the two or three years we were together we evolved into something quite astonishing, becoming very tight practitioners of some extraordinary surrealist theatre. It may have appeared anarchic, but it was all really precisely choreographed at times, and at others it was more organic and loose, but worked none the less because we knew, understood and respected each other. There were meetings that were more like battle grounds, egos did have to be reigned in sometimes, diplomacy practiced, fences mended, all the stuff you'd expect , it really was amazing that it worked as well as it did, and when it was good it was very good indeed. Wondrous costumes, sets and props were constructed, some brilliant set pieces were performed, sometimes along with bizarre and unique improvisation. Huge "situations" were manufactured and performed to the delight of some people and extreme irritation of others. We were those art student wasters of tax payers money, but actually they got more than their money's worth. At Reading Festival - not the Heavy Metal Fest it's become, but an Arts Exchange Festival that took place in the University grounds, Ray Richards had roped me in to help with his portable Confessional Box that he'd built out of plywood and various other bits and pieces. I remember it being black, and fairly gothic looking. He was inside it as The Priest, and I was his assistant, a bit like a slutty magicians assistant. I can't remember exactly what I was wearing, but I think it involved fishnet tights and a corset, Ray was in vicars robes and a dog collar. It was my job to lure people into his confessional box. Once in there they'd be subject to the rantings of an evangelical lunatic possessed by the Devil. Ray was outrageous, very funny, brilliant and terrifying in equal measure. Nobody got off lightly. Once he'd finished with someone he'd pick up the box with two internal handles and we'd move on to another unsuspecting part of the crowd. Ray definitely had the gift of the gab. If his life had gone slightly differently he could easily have become a very successful career criminal. He was very talented, a bit of a narcissist and sociopath, very charming and funny, and utterly determined to become a successful and famous Artist, with a capital 'A'. He was certainly driven, and to some extent we all followed along in his wake, equally talented in most cases, but not nearly so single minded.
Poster (opposite) : All Shock Up Reference to Dave Stephens’ account of Soft Soap performance in Oxford 1973 (see previous page overleaf)
One time, Ray persuaded a firm that did barge holiday rentals to let us have a couple of barges for free for a fortnight, in exchange for advertising their business. We all crammed onto these barges with all our props, costumes and enough food to last us a couple of weeks. The barges were very basic, definitely not the height of luxury, pretty crude in fact just bunks, and some rudimentary cooking equipment that we used to boil up huge pans of T.V.P. and vegetable stew - one didn't stay below decks for long if one could help it. We had a boatman, Jim. He was very ancient, wiry and a bit wicked, drank a pint glass full of raw eggs for breakfast every day, and became our friend and co-conspirator. I think one female member of Soft Soap even ended up in his bunk with him. Over the course of that fortnight we put on several impromptu performances almost every day. These would mostly be devised on the spot or the night before. We'd stop at lock gates, beauty spots, small towns and villages, anywhere that there would at least be a couple of people. Sometimes we'd just glide through a populated area in peculiar poses and costumes like a kind of strange mirage, well that was the idea anyway. The gigs got better and better, we got more sophisticated, and started to gain a good reputation on the performance circuit. The meetings got more serious, there were rifts and conflict. Some of us got very pissed off and left, others joined. Ray's ambition grew and grew. He, Den and Tony Emerton started to work separately from the rest of us. After one last magnificent show at the Oval Art Centre, we split. Ray, Den, Dave "Willy" Lewis and Tony became DDart, a kind of "prestige" performance group. They briefly became very well known for ripping off the tax payer and accepting a large Arts Council grant to walk around Britain with a plank attached to their heads, performing in every town they came to. I think their route made an image on a map, but I can't remember. Maybe that was the huge dodecahedron they pushed around the country later on. The rest of us drifted away, and Soft Soap became history, and is now long forgotten, except by those of us who were in it and who, in my case anyway, marvel at some of the things we achieved, wonder at our audacity and ridiculous confidence, laugh at some of the more disastrous events that were inevitable, and remember (or not) fondly the many drunken and ludicrous after-event parties and adventures we had. . It couldn't happen now, not in the mean, reduced, cruel, dangerous and nasty times we live in. Apart from anything else health and safety wouldn't allow it. Sara Nuttall circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Soft Soap Poster from the Michael Bennett Collection Photographs © Michael Bennett Left to Right : Janek Dubowski, Sara Nuttall, Dave Stephens, Janet Goddard, Dennis De Groot, Judy Newton, Tony Emerton, Jeff Nuttall, Robert Joyce, Chris Lawton,Tony Emerton, Sara Nuttall, Janek Dubowsjki, Ray Richards, Ron Dewhirst, Unknown, Dennis De Groot, Dave ‘Willy’ Lewis,Bob Malston, Colin Fraser Gray, Dave Stephens, Gerry Pilgrim
Squeezed out, painfully, from between the two massive pillars of Performance Art and Alternative Theatre of the time – Namely ‘The People’s Show’ and ‘Welfare State International’ – a small group of teenage undergraduates formed ‘Soft Soap’ in a vain attempt to mimic the luminaries of that time. Both Jeff Nuttall and John Fox tutored us, we all studying on the BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree. At that time I went by the name John, John Dubowski but I later chose to use the Polish Janek instead, because I thought it might make me sexier. Who else can I remember from the Soft Soap group? Geraldine Pilgrim and Janet Goddard who went on to form Hesitate and Demonstrate and worked as professional Performance Artists throughout the 70-80’s and perhaps beyond? Colin Fraser-Gray sticks firmly in my mind – in the character of Wing Commander Fraser-Gray who performed acts of aerial gymnastics and free-fall parachuting – in reality he had built his fighter-plane from a small child’s tricycle to which he had attached wings, he would leap out of the saddle face down on the ground, head held up, back arched, arms out, in each hand a flare blazing away (this was the 1970’s and Health & Safety still unheard of to us undergraduates). Tony Emerton performed with a fireman’s axe but tragically was taken from us before he was able to graduate – but to me he was a key player and a great loss. Dave Lewis and others who’s names I no longer recall split off from Soft Soap to form DADART – I recall they performed on trains between Leeds and London wearing massively oversized padded suits (this was well before the Talking Heads rock-band used these). Back then I was in my teens – now at age 66 (and non the less sexy for that) its difficult to recall everyone and interesting to consider why these – why are they more vivid in the mind that the others? And what did we achieve as we survived what was a turbulent time? For my final degree show I experimented with the latest technology, video was in its infancy and still used reels of magnetic tape and only in black & White. For my performance I has my face completely bandaged like a blank canvas. In front of me to the right, an easel with a real completely white canvas and to my left the black staring eye of the video camera. Above the canvas I had fixed a mirror – a clue to the audience that my intention was to paint a selfportrait. So first I applied paint onto the bandage, some random abstract form then repeated the same to the blank canvas and mark by mark, blob by blob I created my new identity onto the bandage, made a faithful copy on the canvas and transmitted the whole process to a television set.
Perhaps this is as good a metaphor as I can find for that brief period of creativity and protest that Leeds Polytechnic gave space for during the mid 1970’s – something about identity, shedding something and creating something else. Janek Dubowski circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
During a break when Soft Soap were performing at Reading Arts Exchange Festival, I was wandering around looking at all the stuff that was going on, when I heard an ethereal and exquisite sound. I moved towards it’s source, which turned out to be a small chapel in the grounds. The sound was produced by someone playing a saxophone. Each note hung cool and perfect in the hot summer haze, I’d never heard anything quite like it, and stood there entranced outside a window listening. I didn’t go in, there was no notice , the door was firmly shut, and I didn’t want to intrude. It was a kind of magic. All the other sounds faded away, there was nothing but me, the sound, and sunlight. Quite a while later I found out it had been Lol Coxhill rehearsing for a concert that night. Lol was at quite a few of the big festival gigs we did later, and he worked closely with John Fox’s Welfare State, as well as with various other performance artists. John Fox taught at Leeds Poly, and we were very much in thrall to him, his ideas and Welfare State (who lived together in a permanent camp site just outside Burnley, in a collection of ramshackle caravans and sheds surrounded by mud and bleak Lancashire fields). Their visual extravaganzas were second to none, and something to which we could only aspire. Along with Ron Dewhirst, I took up John Fox’s offer to join the Welfare State camp as part of my course of study. I don’t remember a lot about it. It was winter and we stayed in a cold, damp caravan that had no heating - it was bloody freezing. The site was desolate and muddy, everything seemed very ramshackle and disorganised. It was hard to believe that the extraordinary extravaganzas full of light, colour, fire and magic were plotted and put together in this bleak, God-forsaken shithole. But it was industrious, people were scurrying around bundled up in layers of clothes doing things. building things, sewing things, painting things with earnest energy and grim determination. Lol Coxhill was there, and there seemed to be a lot of discussion and arm waving going on in small groups all over the site. I don’t remember it being a happy experience. Ron was given more interesting jobs to do whilst I was given boring ‘women’s work’ kind of tasks. I felt awkward, uncomfortable and unwanted and couldn’t wait to go home. I’m pretty sure Ron and I had a huge row, he was having a great time! I’m pretty sure Foxy extended that offer to supply Welfare state with lowly minions to do the shit, boring jobs, but I might be being unfair. He was a good teacher and a lovely man. Sara Nuttall circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Welfare State Manifesto from Mrs Worthington publication from the Tony Baker Collection Page 2 of the John Fox memo from the Michael Bennett Collection Photograph (below) © Tony Baker
A drawing of mine was accepted into Sheffield Open Art Exhibition 1974. The exhibition was reviewed in the Sheffield Star Newspaper (As It as my first I was overjoyed and was very proud) Regrettably the drawing was lost when I moved to London. I left / stored it at John Langford's house in Harehills back in '82. It may still be around but I doubt it. If anyone knows of its whereabouts it would be great to be reunited. Andy Sharpe circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Public Convenience Exhibition Review from the Andy Sharpe Collection Photograph of Urinals Š Peter Heaton Photographs (top & bottom) Š Ron Crowcroft
The world had changed since the 'experiment' had begun - the spirit of Bomb Culture that Jeff Nuttall had written about, whereby the response to post-war affluence and the fatalist future of a Cold War implosion, was to party like it was 1999, had been slowly replaced by a nihilistic 'no future' mindset that resulted in the birth of punk and the not-too-distant start of Thatcherism. This wasn't to say that people were prophesising its coming, as the residue of the hedonism practiced by their predecessors was still very much in evidence, but it was incrementally becoming eroded. If anything, it was as though the children of the experiment were growing up, and bringing with them more politicised motives - the beards and sandals were now being replaced with New York culture and RoxyMaybe's. The turning point being a well-attended lecture by John Peel (he gave two), where, after entertaining everybody with 'Paralysed' by the Lone Star Cowboy, he played 'Blitzkreig Bop' by The Ramones and 'New Rose' by The Damned - firmly closing the lid on the Old Order. Excerpt taken from 'From Now Until Yesterday' by Rick V Parsons
I first came to Leeds in 1973 to attend an All-Night Festival at the Queens Hall, (a former bus depot), to see amongst others, Roxy Music, Vinegar Joe and the first professional appearance of BeBop Deluxe. This was my first time in 'the North' and everything seemed a bit different from my home town of Birmingham - it appeared grimmer, people talked different and they drank Tetleys instead of Ansells. On arrival I asked an old woman (she was probably younger than I am now) where the Polytechnic was, but she professed to have never heard of it, even though, as I discovered later, it was almost in my sight, so I carried on in a kind of blind faith that the direction I was heading in was the right one - and as it turned out, it was. Once inside, I found the corridors lined with students lying on the floor with sleeping bags and food supplies, there was a 'Sleep-In' going on, and, although I'd heard about these things on the news, this was my first experience of a student protest - by the time I made it into the Fine Art studio, I knew I'd arrived home. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Photograph Š Ron Crowcroft
The Mirror Boys were started by Graham and Phil Cardy and Phil Middleton when I only knew Phil Cardy. They played a gig at the Leeds Poly Common Room and had a poster that was “Big Eyed Beans From Venus”esque, I saw the poster too late so I missed the gig. Phil Cardy took me to meet his brother who lived on Leeds Road in Harrogate, I think I expected to play the tenor sax. We immediately connected, the guiding forces towards the band were likely a great love of Beefheart and Zappa, and LSD, and showing off. We very definitely did not fetishize musical prowess. So we started rehearsing above the strip club in Harrogate My brother had bought a Hofner Futurama for £1.50 which he sold to me for a fiver. Perfect, once I had paint-stripped it. Some time around then I bought the Vox AC30 that I still own. Graham had an Epiphone semi-acoustic bass with the frets removed. The drums were played by Jeff Sedgewick, or possibly Johnny Middleton. Will Jackson came once I think; he lent me a gold plated Gibson Les Paul. We did the Leeds Fine Art Studio recordings very early on. I had already recorded “The Pimps” album there with Tony Jennings and Colin Booth using the two Revox A77s and a spring reverb. I copied the studio keys so we could get in any time. The first gig with me was probably the Crown Hotel. The plugs were pulled! The first half a dozen gigs we played had the PA turned off and/or Graham had an interaction with someone in authority. We rehearsed at Nidd village Hall and played there too, obviously. It was 1975, it would be only a year until the Pistols at Fforde made me at least feel quite “mature”, ironically. We were really in fine form when Graham, possibly in tandem with John Keenan, put us on at the Poly Common Room, probably late 1975 (I need to look it up). I think the lineup was Phil Cardy and Sylvie Slade dancing, Graham on bass, Phil Middleton, me, Graham on vocals, Wendy Freeman on baritone sax, Charlie Daykin on keyboards, Mike Bongos Holdom on congas, and Rosario on drums. We were the support and had no idea what the main band would be like. Rosario lent his floor tom to their drummer (Palmolive) who beat a dent into the skin. Mike was offered to play with them. But as they were the Slits they were approximately 1000 times better than us, well they are as fine a band as has ever been! We played Roots (International/Cosmo) in Chapeltown many times. I remember how the place always filled up with people for the last half an hour. By that time Junior (Graham Airth) was playing sax. We also played virtually every week at Norman’s club “The Wanderers.” I vividly (?) remember it being so hot that people were dancing in the light shower that was dripping through the ceiling that was later found to be the overflow from the gent’s urinal which was blocked with someone’s vomit. I remember Chumbas (who called me Bendy at the time) playing with us there too when
Midge was still with them. Harry Hamer was often our drummer around then too. Julian Walker had joined, he actually knew where some notes were on the guitar. Sarah Morrell played trumpet. Time went on, Graham and Phil Midd started “The Wanderers” and the Julian, me, and Sarah, became “Indiscriminate Hoax Fund”. Because I ended up with infinite free access to studio time we made a lot of recordings under various names using people fished from the ne’er-do-well ocean. Geoff Clout circa 73-76 Leeds Poly Opposite : Poster : Valentines Day Flyer for Mirror Boys Valentines Gig from the Tony Baker Collection Blue Scribble by Archie Nesbitt Above : Mirror Boys Photo from Geoff Clout collection
Before the explosion of Punk and its infiltration of all the fine art departments of Leeds, there was only one art school band, and that was the Mirror Boys. It would have been Phil Cardy who introduced me to the delights of the band. In the first few months at college, Phil had probably been the most prolific student on the course, he had, what appeared to be, boundless energy, and had a propensity to express enthusiasm over anything that life threw at him, but, sadly, by the end of the course he had seemed to have burnt out, becoming a casualty of his own energy. Phil’s brother, Graham played bass guitar in The Mirror Boys, and Phil, following in the footsteps of Stacia from Hawkwind, would often dance on stage with the band, although he tended to keep his clothes on. The band, themselves, were a ramshackle group of colourful misfits who summed up the art school aesthetic of the time, and formed the soundtrack to my fine art experience - although I can only remember one song, which was ‘You’ve Got it All in the Boot of Your Car’, but I guess that one song is all you need for a soundtrack of a lifetime. My lasting image of The Mirror Boys, was going to see them perform in a pub in Knaresborough and watching Wendy (I think that was her name) playing a baritone sax that went right down to the floor - at the time (and after a couple of pints) I thought that was amazing - whether or not I could hear a note she was playing, didn’t seem to matter - it just looked good. After the gig we discovered that it had been snowing and proceeded to run out of petrol on the ring road outside Moor Allerton, and didn’t have a clue as to how to get home. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly Photographs by Will Meredith Owen from the Geoff Clout Collection
When I worked in Jeremy Lane's Pause Club opposite Leeds station I once finished my cleaning there and went into the pub next door. I sat next to a man and woman without really looking at them and then realised that the woman was really ripping into the bloke, verbally. He seemed quite patient and when she went to the loo I conspiratorially lent across to him and said "She doesn't half go on doesn't she". At that point I actually looked at the guy and realised it was Tommy Cooper. Wow he just chuckled and said something like "She's my missus". We ignored each other then because his wife came back. When I got up to leave I just said see you mate and they both smiled at me. Little things that make you feel special. Dave Stephens circa 72-76 Leeds Poly
I used to go to the Pause nightclub down in the bottom of town. I don’t remember very much about it, apart from it being a club with highbrow performance art interfaced with lowbrow drinking. The interface was not always appreciated however, and one time when a performance artist was performing a sort-of walking and pointing straight ahead kind of thing that brought his pointing finger too close to a patron of the club, the patron joined in the performance and bit the outstretched finger. Looked painful. Ouch! (Performance artist and patrons names withheld). Colin Fraser Gray circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Photograph (below) ŠTony Baker Pause Advert (opposite) from the Michael Bennett Collection
The ‘Park Drive’ cigarette pack ‘Wokker’ drawings where made by Tony Ernshaw while we students were in an informal chat with the Leeds teachers in the main ‘Bear-pit’ (otherwise known as the main studio), where we all worked. He was sketching away, with the only materials he had to work with at that moment - the insides of an old cigarette pack, and a biro. We all exchanged ideas and thoughts about art and art-making, with Glynn Williams at the helm as I remember, as Tony worked his Wokker magic on these now faded bits of clearly non-archival cardboard scraps. It always struck me that Tony never felt completely comfortable with the academic stuff, and that would make sense I guess, since as the story goes, he was plucked out of a factory job he had in order to teach at the Poly, and this slight awkwardness in the environment he found himself in seemed to be channelled into those two little cigarette packs. By the end of the seminar, Tony and everybody had dispersed, and the scraps had been tossed onto the floor. I picked them up, and eventually brought them to California, where I have been living for the last forty years, and more recently framed them and put them on my wall. Well it takes time, but eventually things we love percolate through the creative system and turn up in our work. My ‘Museum for One’ series first had fairly rounded legs, until one day I was looking at the little ‘cig' pack drawings, and it occurred to me that I could make something like them to suggest something between legs, wheels and feet. This was not the only influence I had from Leeds teachers that showed up much later in my work. I had been bowled over by Leeds teacher Ken Rowat and his small highly finished work. He had been an airplane designer prior to WWII and a pacifist. Eventually he was asked to design bombers, and that spelled the end of his career as an airplane designer. His attention to sculptural detail and his quiet manner were somewhat overwhelmed by the more brash and louder teachers, but nonetheless his work influenced me more, and years later, I made some cameras - sculptural ones - 'sculptures to carry around' - that I now see were influenced by his work. I once showed these cameras to the photographer Lee Friedlander who was completely nonplussed, but took a photograph with me holding them anyway, and then I eventually traded them with sculptor Ed Kienholz for one of his works. It often strikes me that good teachers are rarely stars, but they very much brighten the sky anyway. Colin Fraser Gray circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Tony Earnshaws’ Canvas Wokker drawings (above left) by Tony Earnshaw from the Colin Fraser Gray Collection Museum For One & Sculptures to Carry Around (above right) by Colin Fraser Gray
Spring 1975. I was in the first year of Leeds Poly Fine Art and had gotten to know quite a few third years and some second years by this point. The Polaroid camera was one of the most exciting and modern devices at our disposal. The film was relatively expensive, from an art student’s point of view, but the results were charmingly unpredictable, combining Warhol Superstar and Duchampian chance. I’d seen Richard Hamilton’s ‘Polaroid Portraits’ and just had to make something of my own. Looking back at all the faces now, I’m amazed by our youth, and that mix of sophistication and naivetté. The locations stand out too: Raz on the grassy mound outside the Poly, ‘Leeds, motorway city of the future’ backdrop, Jon outside the church at the end of Blackman Lane, near where we shared a house, Jeff in my room on the balcony in the main studio and Anita on the train, heading south. There are other faces it would be great to have on here. These few dep for the many who occupied the Leeds Fine Art barricades. Richard Knight circa 74-77 Leeds Poly Poster (opposite) : Famous Artists ‘75 Poloroid Photographs and Text © Richard Knight Photograph of Richard Knight (below) from the Tony Baker Collection
Film Still and text from The Pig Story . Tony Baker Quarry Hill Flats filmed through the window of a Morris Traveller
In the lake performance Bob Malston was the narrator - it was not planned that he enter the water - he fell in and, as I recall, was very cold by the end of the performance. Of course the media had a laugh - but I was happy with the piece, I had written it all in rhyming couplets. The planned finish was to exit in a hot air ballon but I could not find a pilot willing to take off at that time of day, hence the Rolls Royce - which, after some badgering, the fine art department paid for. I just had to produce documentation to prove it wasn’t used for a tutor’s private excursion. My muse and collaborator Linda Bunting, who is mentioned in the article, became my wife and we are still together. Raym Richards circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
In addition to his performance in Roundhay Park, Ray Richards also took part in a performance with DDART along a disused railway track in Pool Bank near Otley and created a live installation upstairs in the Fine Art Studio involving a pig. Being one of the few students at the time who owned a car (a grey Morris Traveller), I was tasked with collecting the pig from a Pig Farm in Batley along with Ray and Keith Cardwell (who just fancied coming along for the ride). Driving back to Leeds, with Ray and Keith sharing the passenger seat, the pig was not particularly happy in the back of the car, and she proceeded to squeal and stomp, push her snout into my back, and piss and shit all over the place (I had lined the car with polythene, but this did little to stop the smell). After arriving back in Leeds and driving around City Square (where I can still remember the looks on people’s faces), we arrived at the Fine Art studio, where we then had to fathom out how we were going to get the pig up the metal stairs, and along the corridor to the studio that Ray had turned into a luxury pig pen - none of us had a clue, and the pig was getting somewhat agitated - we were also a little bit concerned that the pig might run amok through the main studio where other students were hanging their final show. Mel Charlton, who professed to have some knowledge of pigs, said we should grab her by the ears and lead her up the stairs, which Ray, after an initial hesitance, proceeded to do with suitable authority, and the pig was led to her new home. When we returned the pig to the farm in Batley, she trotted down the stairs and virtually leapt into the back of the car where she sat there quite contented for the whole of the journey, with no need for any cleaning up afterwards. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : The Lake, The Pig and The Morris Traveller Newspaper Cutting from the Michael Bennett Collection Morris Traveller and Pig photographs : Tony Baker
The pig was transported to be exhibited in my stead as a continuous performance in one of the upstairs studios, as I was too busy with both my own and DDart’s performances to be in the exhibition space all of the time. At one point during the performance, the RSPCA were called as another student claimed I was harming the pig - they visited and said she was living a life of absolute luxury - fortunately a technician was an ex-farm hand and helped me look after it, so it really was well cared for. Because of the bizarre swine laws at the time I had to get a licence to move it to and from the farm, and when I returned the pig (I bought the pig and resold it to the farmer at a small loss) it had to be kept away from the other pigs as they would have turned against her because of her alien smells. Raym Richards circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Photographs (left) : DDART performance at Pool Bank ŠMichael Bennett far left Tony Baker / White cap centre Jeff Nuttall / on his right John Darling (balding) / behind him Roland Miller (hands in pockets) / Centre long black hair Geraldine Pilgrim / on her right Jon Latham / far right Sara Nuttall Newspaper Cutting (right) : From the Michael Bennett Collection
Letter from Ron Crowcroft to David Hockey Halftone image of David Hockney in the studio at the Royal College of Art
circaseventies aims to assess the long term impact of what was, according to Patrick Heron, ‘the most influential Art School in Europe’ during the nineteen seventies - Leeds. This bold ‘experiment’ in art education initiated by Harry Thubron in the days before the Coldstream Report, had broken down the delineation between the disciplines, creating one studio where sculptors worked alongside painters, and the crafts of printmaking and ceramics were offered the same privileges in the hierarchy of the fine arts, that had been previously afforded exclusively to painting and sculpture. This allowed for a cross-fertilisation of process and form that, by default, placed emphasis on the idea rather than the end product, and, in the heyday of the ‘experiment’, the notion of
anything resembling permanence was eschewed in favour of the transitory, thereby paving
These People Are Bizarre originated from thinking about how ordinary everybody looked, and how boring everyday activities seemed, which led to me to think of an ironic response, which I took to the grey and dreary streets of Leeds, standing in bus queues, in front of people sitting on benches, or at student demonstrations, along with my sign that read ‘These People Are Bizarre’, as well as handing out a printed handout that read “I Find Your Manner Somewhat Bizarre.’ After taking the sign to a student demo, my friend Tony Bradley and I returned to the Poly cafteria, and while we were having coffee at a table, the whole of the student demo came in, to have a meeting, at which point we thought it best to quietly make our way out with my fairly obvious sign.
I was amazed Hockney replied to my letter, and took it so seriously! Andy and I met him in London at his flat, as Andy Sharpe wanted to interview him for his thesis. I took photos for him. Very odd experience, but he was very gracious..... china tea service, houseboy in stacked sandals, cut-off jean shorts, and Mickey Mouse t-shirt, Hockney in a suit..... he gave us signed copies of a a little book about his designs for a Glyndebourne Opera. I could see the spots in the flat where he had painted several still lives and portraits. Since I was not a fan of Hockney’s work at the time, I gave my copy of the book to Andy. Ron Crowcroft circa 73 - 76 Leeds Poly
Poster (previous page) : These People Are Bizarre Photographs (previous page & left) from the Ron Crowcroft Collection Map with route of DDART’s Circular Walk and Newspaper Cuttings (opposite) from the Michael Bennett Collection
Our aim was to create “Art as legend” and the Circular Walk succeeded (not quite in the way we planned) beyond our wildest dreams. We walked as precise a circle as possible using existing roads and pathways in 1976. The event was covered positively by local newspapers and local TV as it happened and we felt the idea of describing a circle by walking it, had sunk into the local consciousness and we were happy. Several weeks later we were approached by a “freelance journalist” writing for a “Sunday Magazine” who was thrilled with and very interested in our performance piece. Promising exposure in a Sunday supplement we naively gave him an interview and photographs thinking it was well deserved wider exposure for an innovative piece of Performance Art. Of course he was lying to us. After the article appeared in the Sunday People our lives became a living hell, with journalists camped outside our homes looking for interviews and reenactments, and I was also assaulted at work by angry co-workers. Once it became controversial, being discussed in Parliament with Ddart being banned from future funding by both sides of Parliament and two governments, our supporters disappeared into the woodwork. Notable exceptions being Beat Poets and Performance Artists Jeff Nuttall and Adrian Henri, both of whom described the event as “a beautiful thing”.
Upon the break up of Soft Soap in 1974ish. Me, Tony Emerton David Lewis and Ray Richards decided to form a Performance Group, four being a far more manageable group than twentyfour, and we were all roughly on the same page as regards ideas and sense of humour. As with all groups a vast amount of time was spent thinking up a name, finally coming up with Ddart. What its deep meaning was, is beyond me - lost in the annals of time. We got together a flyer and then spent weeks coming up with a performance. Tilted “Animal Magic 1” Gerry Pilgrim joined us for this first performance (we went on to do another seven or eight “Animal Magic” performances) for which we built a cage. Each fixed on a drink and in rotation called out their slogans “Guinness is good for you”, “M&B for the Men of the Midlands”, Gerry Pilgrim “Cinzano Bianco”.
My overriding feeling at the time was that I found it exhausting as I was the only one who could map read. I think that a better performance was that which we did at the Northern Young Contempories and which was shown on an Arena programme on the BBC (It might have been Omnibus)
We started at 6pm and expected people to pop in and out, just have a look and go, but we ended up with an audience for the whole show, which ending at about 11pm. We all got completely plastered, descended into emotional crisis (at least I did) Gerry had to be taken to A and E with alcohol poisoning. She went on to create the amazing Hesitate and Demonstrate with Janet Goddard. In retrospect I think it flushed out Soft `Soap and set up a Ddart creative identity. Soft soap was a fantastic creative group from which came a lot of great things
Anthony Emerton circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Dennis de Groot circa 72-76 Leeds Poly
Interestingly land artist Sir Richard Long CBE, RA created a very similar event one year later in 1977 which was not controversial and was critically acclaimed, perhaps if we has had not worn a pole and not discussed the work publicly - we would have been knighted...’ Raym Richards circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Tax Payers’ Money Sunday People article from the Gavin Butt Collection Photographs (left) ©Michael Bennett Cartoon (above) from the Michael Bennett Collection
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The argument often used to question the merit of the work of contemporary artists, especially those of a conceptual nature, is that ‘anybody could do that’, but the truth of the matter is, that it is only artists that put their money where their mouth is and actually ‘do’ it - a case in point being Screening by Robert Joyce. Robert, or Raz as I used to know him at the time, was the epitome of the Leeds Fine Art student, who worked in every medium he could lay his hands on - he worked in film, in print, drawing and paint, he did performance and wrote poetry, he even wrote East is Red by The Mekons and I had always believed that he had once held an exhibition of drawings window mounted in Morrisons carrier bags, but since he has denied that this ever happened, I realise that it must have been John Lester. So when he asked me to help him with his Screening project, I said yes without question. On paper, it seemed very simple - he had cut out small paper rectangles and circles, scaled down to represent the exhibition screens and stands, and had randomly dropped these onto a scale drawing of the Poly Gallery producing about ten different combinations. The plan was, that over the course of a day, we would replicate his scaled drawings with the actual boards and metal stands, changing the arrangement at regular intervals. What I hadn’t accounted for was that the boards weren’t tiny pieces of paper, but, in fact, very heavy eight foot long constructions, and that when the pieces of paper had landed on top of each other, and had overlapped the perimeter of the gallery in the plan, this meant that the boards not only needed stacking on top of each other, but needed to be propped up at angles to the floor - coupled with the fact that the gallery also had a balcony, it was probably the most exhausting art project that I ever got involved with.
Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly Poster (overleaf) : Screening . 1976 (photograph : ©Robert Joyce - Top : Ron Crowcroft / Bottom : Rob Elliot) Photographs (below) : ©Robert Joyce - L to R : Tony Baker, Ron Crowcroft, Rob Elliot.
Screening was an attempt to make the gallery and its fittings a work of art, and one which could subsequently be restaged in other gallery spaces. To a casual observer it would seem that the gallery was between exhibitions and being readied for the next show (which in a way it was). The empty hanging screens and their fixing poles were moved around the gallery according to plans I had mapped out on acetate sheets with my rapidograph (I loved that pen*). I had taken measurements of the space and produced scale drawings. The screens and poles were represented by small paper cut-outs which I dropped onto the plan, which I recorded a series of positions from a number of drops. I think the event lasted a day, with changes evenly spaced over time. I see from the photographs that I had the help of Tony Baker, Ron Crowcroft and Rob Eliot. There may have been others. * In 2019 I found hundreds in the flea-market in Barcelona for 2 euros each**. ** Technically they were Isographs, but…
Robert Joyce circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
I don’t recall anything about it, other than moving screens. It feels like it was another of Robert Joyce’s pieces that blended performance and humour. Very simple idea based on his connecting the word Screening to the physical screens and connotations of the word ‘screening’. Akin to his video: ‘Sony and chair’, which was, um, a video of a chair next to a Sony video machine. Ron Crowcroft circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Detail from diagram for Sony & Chair piece by Robert Joyce
Janet and I met on our first day, sitting drinking tea in the Poly Canteen. We discovered we would both be considered soft southerners in “Gods own Country” as we came from below Yorkshire – Janet from outside Leicester and me a Londoner. We both liked doing the same things - going shopping, having cups of tea and talking about ideas as we did both. We shared sensibilities, ideas and a commitment and passion for art, but it was our differences that drew us together, the different ways we each looked at the world, our different backgrounds that inspired us to make work together that became Hesitate and Demonstrate. “Hesitate” came from our fascination with the Victorian photographer Eduard Muybridge – his photos that broke a simple movement of the human body down into complex parts; “Demonstrate” from time spent observing out of work actors in the basement of Schofield’s Department store demonstrating chopping up vegetables with magical gadgets and the mythical perfumery department women in their white coats and terrifying made up faces with fixed grins spraying their perfumes as they headed towards us. We realised they weren’t acting - pretending to be someone else - but were performing – being themselves just more so.
Gerry Pilgrim . Soft Soap Performance . Poly Common Room . May 17 . 1974 . Photograph ©Michael Bennett
Poster (opposite) Brighton Pier 1976 Photographs of Hesitate & Demonstrate © Michael Bennett
We both loved being “invisible” as in fitting into situations and then subversively transforming. In the “Art Attacks” of our early outside work, we would arrive in middle class areas of Harrogate, Scarborough, York wearing neat little suits and carrying handbags like the Queen. Unnoticed we would arrive in pedestrian precincts, shopping malls and sea fronts and open our handbags, take out powder compacts and powder our noses which was our cue to start a style of movement inspired by Muybridge – not mime, not slow motion just “Hes and Dem”. Our performances were very simple. For example, Janet would take a cake with a cherry on top out of her handbag and I would take a cake without a cherry out of mine. The performance would simply be me chasing Janet down the street in the style of movement we had invented trying to get the cherry off her cake. We would do flower arranging on traffic roundabouts, boxing matches at the end of piers - all objects coming out of our handbags. Our street performances were brief, we would appear and disappear, wanting people to say “Did you see that?” One of our favourite performances was taking our furniture for a walk. We saw no reason why we couldn’t take an armchair, standard lamp and tea trolley all chained together and on wheels, out for the day, and would set off on the train from Leeds to York and walk around the town – two smartly dresses women our furniture in tow. We also both did our own art work separately, encouraged and supported by the college. Leeds Poly Fine Art course, with the support of tutors notably Jeff Nuttall, John Darling and John Fox, offered us a unique educational experience. With no separate departments we could – with the help of brilliant technicians - try our hand at anything - and we did.
Gerry remembers our obsession with Muybridge and the element of time, hesitation between movement. I think throughout our work together, time always took sent centre stage, whether frozen, to do with memory or the breakdown of movement reminiscent of photographic stills, frames in a film. I don't think that the work that happened at Leeds happened in a vacuum - we were part of the zeitgeist feeding off artists as disparate as Joseph Beuys (a favourite of Jeff Nuttall) and Delvaux, and writers such as RobbeGrillet and his fellow existentialists. We were obsessed with the strangeness of the mundane, the formality of city parks, hedges, topiary. One image which comes to mind is of the two of us sitting on chairs half hidden in a manicured hedge - we were there for some time. The Fine Art Department was housed in one big open space known as the hangar and described by head of department, Willy Tirr, at interview as the bear pit - asking me if I were up for it. It was certainly the case that Leeds Fine Art was not the place for shrinking violets. Everything happened in the hangar, no place to hide, drift off to sleep. This was a place which bred experimentation, encouraged new ways of looking, making. The style of the teaching was hands off and see what happened - a lot did.
Being financially supported to create Soft Soft which broke boundaries, was totally experimental and forward thinking, and inspired all of us involved to make work that involved challenging the art world of the day. We believed and were encouraged to take art off the walls, for it not to be about financial value, saleability and the art market - to make it truly live - live art. We were lucky, it was the golden age of free education and a flowering and understanding of the importance of Art Schools to education and cultural life.
Gerry and I collaborated with tutors who were themselves performers, notably Jeff who was the tutor most visible in making Soft Soap happen and John Darling whose brilliance with sound collage should have made him a household name and who we were lucky to have work with us when we left. We gained from an early exposure to the performance world outside the walls of college, met other performers with similar preoccupations, discovered the exitement , the thrill of creative collaboration through performance, seeing a piece grow as we each responded to the other's ideas. Art was live, immediate and transient and our interest was fired by its impermanent nature.
Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Department was unique, tough, challenging but offered an experiment in education that worked. We would all be there working from morning till late at night, all week, all year. We were inspired and driven and the work ethic and importance of integrity and commitment that Leeds gave us, lives on in us all.
Yorkshire in the seventies was home to many creative, crazy and inventive people who were familiar faces in our world and however different the work we produced was, we shared a belief in the freedom to express and create in a way unfettered by outside expectation.
Gerry Pilgrim circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Janet Goddartd circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
Whilst it was a surprise to see the piece when she hung it, especially when we realized it was an actual tampon print, it was not a surprise in the context of the other work she was making. Mari’s work often focused on her body and time. From a woman’s perspective, she had very strong views on relationships, and worked with the process of cycles, repetition and process-oriented projects. I am not sure who gave the newspaper the false information, which I indicated in the clipping I had in my notebook. We often worked closely on a variety of conceptual/performance process pieces, as well as individually, often with similarities regarding using our bodies over extended periods of time. for example, I used urine in one piece, ran up and down stairs until I could not, played the same note on a piano for one hour, exhibited my cut hair, pubic hair, belly-button fluff, etc., and like Mari, I did projects that lasted for a year, recording of experience pieces. My first year-long project was started in 1973. I have made quite a few over the decades, including 2019, where my project ‘Yestodays’ involved writing the word ‘yes’ each day for a year in a diary. Ron Crowcroft circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : It’s All Wrong Contact Sheet of Mari Hobbs / Peacock taken every minute © Ron Crowcroft Newspaper Article and Notebook from the Ron Crowcroft Collection Book by Mari Hobbs / Peacock (above) from the Paul Carter Collection Photograph of Mari Hobbs / Peacock (above) ©Ron Crowcroft
Between 1972 and 1980 Richard Demarco produced and led a series of yearly ‘Edinburgh Arts Journeys’ criss-crossing all of Europe, taking artists and academics from other countries alongside those of Scotland to visit interesting people, great collections, cities, landscapes, and events, to examine Europe’s cultural history of the past 5,000 years. The participants were from all over the world and were mostly practising or student artists, academics and performers. They included established artists such as Joseph Beuys, Paul Neagu, Jimmy Boyle, Rose FinnKelcey, Tina Keane, Chris Wainwright. In 1976, after having attended a lecture by Richard Demarco at Leeds Polytechnic, I managed to join this journey, travelling on the British leg from the West Country through Wales, Ireland, Northern England, Western Scotland, the Hebrides, Northern Scotland and the Orkneys. On the way we met and travelled, talked together and worked with most of these artists and many more. This was perhaps the most formative artistic experience of my life so far. Memorable experiences from this time include watching a performance of Rose Finn-Kelsey and Tina Keane’s The Visitation - standing on the cliffs opposite the Old Man of Hoy cold and wet waiting for the mist to disperse to see the sun shine down onto this 449 foot high sea stack for just a few seconds - a barbeque on the jetty at Isle Ornsay on Skye still daylight at midnight hearing a piper and a drummer growing louder as they approach from the Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (Iain Noble’s Gaelic college) – running from the journey bus with Chris Castle at every stop trying to be at the sites to get photographs without people in them – The ancient Sheila-na-Gig sculpture at St Clements Rodel on Harris – the whiskey filled night with Chris Castle talking to two ancient old tinkers and their canvas ‘bender’ on the roadside at Rodel! Perhaps the most unusual artistic memory I have of the journey is of watching Joseph Boyce holding a up a handful of fat in the middle of a moor declaiming that it was pure energy. Sadly Joseph Beuys was not part of the journey that year so this was almost certainly a false memory maybe of a film or a conversation at some point on the journey – or maybe a remembered dream. A dream of Joseph Beuys - Quite a journey. Brian Larkman circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Pure Energy clockwise left to right : Joseph Beuys The Girt Dog of Langport by Brian Larkman Brian Larkman at Loughcrew . County Meath . Eire Alll Photographs on this page
Together with Bradford Art College student Derek Wain and heavily influenced by The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart Peter Parkin set out to out-shock the unshockable members and tutors of the Fine Art dept with a fun fair style recreation of a shooting range equipped with air rifles and living targets of mice and budgies tethered to their perches, performed to a recording of Camptown Races (two mile long, doo dah, doo dah ... etc.). Hardly had the performance begun in the department’s specific performance area than it was disrupted by the outraged (as I remember mainly female) students who set about assaulting the performers (in true dada style) and bringing proceedings to an end. Russell Harris circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Although the obituary for Patrick Nutgens (Daily Telegraph April 5th 2004) makes references to funding cuts, friction with George Mudie and Leeds City Council over alleged corruption, as well as student (and staff) protest (including a ‘sit-in’ in his office in 1972), it would appear that the ultimate nadir of his tenure as director of Leeds Polytechnic was (to quote the Telegraph) the ‘performance entitled “Violence in Society”.’ The obituary went on to describe how ‘an artist shot a live budgerigar with an air pistol; having then been assaulted by an angry audience member, the artist discharged the rest of his ammunition into the crowd, which smashed the doors down in its haste to get out. Again the police arrived, prompting the students to declare the event “a total success”.’ A somewhat more sensational account of the event than that published by the Daily Mirror at the time of the incident, and consistent with the policy of the press to only cover stories of art student shenanigans, if they involve controversy. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (previous overleaf) : Beat Me Senseless Daily Mirror Article (left and previous) from the Tony Baker Collection Newspaper Articles (below) from the Paul Carter Collection
Excerpt taken from 'From Now Until Yesterday' by Rick V Parsons Photograph © Ron Crowcroft
The title and subtitle were from Keith Cardwell and I think refer to his evolving “theory” of the time that knitted together Woolworths daily consumers with the early twentieth century foundational modern artwork of Paul Cezanne and the mass production techniques of Andy Warhol’s celebration of “fame”, popular culture and trashy camp. The poster was devised photographed and printed by Peter Parkin, and the performance was devised and designed by Russell Harris and Shaun Cavell while the texts were selected and edited by all four members of the loose collective; the whole being a joint collaboration. Four performers in black poloneck jumpers and wearing plastic facial cleansing masks sit still in a line behind desks while a reel to reel tape replays previous recordings of the performers reading excerpts of various texts including medical descriptions of radiation sickness and the often-mistranslated quotation commonly attributed to Hermann Göring: “When I hear the word ‘culture’, that’s when I reach for my revolver”—the actual quote is “Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!” This translates as: “Whenever I hear [the word] ‘culture’... I remove the safety from my Browning!” (I don’t remember if there were also projected visuals?) Russell Harris circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
I decided after chats with tutors at Bournville to apply to Leeds College of Art, the Polytechnic. It had a great reputation for liberal views and a creative atmosphere second to none. I knew about Black Mountain College of Art in South Carolina and its influence on the young Raushenberg and Johns, and I wanted a piece of that cake. Fellow students Russell Harris and Peter Parkin also applied to Leeds : to my surprise we all got in. We shared a house with Shaun Cavell, who was a great cook. Peter was always poking fun at my love of Cezanne as I was crazy for this painter. Peter said, we should do a performance called, Cezanne in New York. This hit the spot, as New York at that time was going burst and Bowie’s album Diamond Dogs was right up there. Yes, Music was the core of my relationships with these boys. At Art School in the 1970s who you shared a house with was so important and for its success you had to be a follower of Bowie, Roxy, Lou Reed, The Velvets, Van Morrison, Patti Smith and Ry Cooder, etc etc, and then later in 1977 the birth of PUNK exploded at Leeds Polytechnic. After three years I moved to London to do the Goldsmiths College MA, graduating from here I got various jobs teaching and freelance photography work, eventually working for The Guardian/Observer and Indi. However, that time at Leeds was Magical and remains with me forever. The characters, the people but mainly the attitude to students treated as equals I will use every time I make a decision in my life. Keith Cardwell circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
We did something, something we were very pleased about, but not everyone around us was quite as settled about it all as we were. In fact unsettled was what many were and as such we were even more pleased. We created a confusing format for a piece of performance that was akin to the other side of our studentship; the lecture, ordinarily to be the stuff of our complimentary studies and academic art history components. The tutors sat silent in black at a desk whilst a Grundig (or some suchlike) reel-to- reel played back their speech. Balanced on stools and tables from the opposite balcony where super8 and standard8 movie projectors and Kodak carousels beaming a grid of nine images moving and still, black and white and some in colour. There was soft porn in there and other seemingly unrelated material too. That’s how we did it, what we said I don’t remember. I don’t remember because it would have just been an episode of a recanting of some of the things we were interested in at that time and there were many more around than those we used, as well as many more to come; we could have repeated the format over and over with different stuff. We didn’t. I remember (although when I talked with Russell recently, he didn’t) that there was an inquisition of sorts by our fellow students – they didn’t much like what they seemed to see as our proto-authoritarian approach. It wasn’t performance-art such as they were used to seeing or apparently wanted. As I said then and repeat now: “fuck off”. There was no recording of Cezanne in NY and no photo’s were taken, there wasn’t of most live work at that time. I’m glad. A performance is a performance; be there and remember … that’s all there is too it. The real problem with the work of us Leeds FineArters was that most of it was only produced in the hanger and only seen by our comrades. Nuttal and Darling thought highly of it all. Shaun Cavell circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Shopping List Original poster by Peter Parkin from the Russell Harris Collection Flyer (below) from the Barbara Frost Collection
THE Victorian imperial prowess: engineering; hard skills; muscular Christianity; investment and never touching the capital. The power of that empire had died on the cobbled streets that led to nowhere as factories across Leeds were pulled down, as the Victorian pubs emptied and the civic pride of the city centre collapsed. We had been sold consequent Modernist solutions to traditional problems like housing, social behaviour and economic development, think of Quarry Hill. These solutions used male elite knowledge, high technology and expertise; we know what is right for you. They didn’t work either. Utopia was collapsing in front of us in 1977 and the only ideology in town was a belief in consequence-free, consumer materialism and hitting anyone ‘other’. Text : Mark White circa 75-79 Leeds University . Photograph : ©Michael Bennett circa 72-75 Leeds Poly
EN
Art Athletics, which was loosely based on the TV games programme, ‘It’s a Knock Out’ (or Jeux sans Frontières, if you preferred to affect the original French title), took place on January 17th 1977 in the gallery at Leeds Poly the date designated by Robert Filliou in 1963 to celebrate Arts’ Birthday, and for which he proposed a public holiday to recognise the presence of art in our lives (he had also claimed that art had been born 1,000,000 years earlier, when somebody had dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water) Making reference to the History of a Art, and with a tongue firmly placed in the organisers cheek, the games, involving two teams competing for a plastic, gold framed miniature of the Mona Lisa, included, amongst others: The Andy Warhol Game in which two Andy Warhol’s wearing sunglasses (Ricky Knight and Paul Carter) were tasked with stapling limited edition prints of the Mona Lisa to a wall, whilst Art Languagists (or are they Art Linguists?) threw copies of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations at them to hinder their path The Dada Game, based on the 1920 Dada Manifesto by Francis Picabia, in which he stated that ‘The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow’*, involved Cubists (Sara Easby and Christine Eastwood) wearing cardboard boxes, who proceeded to pour polystyrene beads over a Dadaist on the other side of a wall. The Van Gogh vs Dali Game which involved two Van Goghs (Sandy Weatherson and Joanne Clarke) wearing bandages wrapped around their heads who had to throw plastic ears at Salvador Dali (Alan Selka) Other contestants included Frank Tovey, Veronica Nute and Immelda Glover, adjudicators were Mike Nulty and myself who had both created and organised the event, and the scorer (dressed in a beret and striped T Shirt) was Shaun Cavell who was assisted by Denise Bruce and Liz Aylott. - the winners were captained by Veronica Nute. *adding that ‘They think that Dada can prevent them from practicing this odious trade: Selling art expensively. Art costs more than sausages, more than women, more than everything.’ Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : Art Athletics 1977 Screen Printed cover wrapped around a jumble sale book for the Andy Warhol Game (below) by Tony Baker
Photograph (above) : Ricky at the Gang of Four gig at the Cellar Bars ‘77 © Tony Baker NF Prints Punkzine article (above) from the Jon Langford Collection
A different stage? A band maybe? The Mekons was not really an art project so much as a political project involving some who were art students. Think of the sofa, the key site in ‘comfortable’ TV sitcoms like the racist Love Thy Neighbour. We had wanted to wheel a sofa on to the first Mekons gig with ‘spaceship’ written on the front, a deconstruction of the white hot technological future we had been promised and clearly not received. Art students, obviously. Mark White circa 75-79 Leeds University
It was a different world back then, materially, economically utterly different. As art students we were on full grants for living expenses, no fees. Seems hard to imagine now. Education wasn’t reduced to an economic transaction. But we had no idea the vicious strangling hand of neoliberalism was crawling just below the horizon ready to point it’s accusing finger and blame YOU - personally, for all your shortcomings. And this was no golden age either, Leeds was heavy, dark, charcoaled with Victorian soot, soft sickly yellow lights murmuring through the fog exactly like an Atkinson Grimshaw painting. In the unlit ignorant dark, catastrophically incompetent proud patriarchal policeman had a message for all women: ‘You’re under curfew - lest you face mutilation and death…’ One night some of us went to the Poly to see some bands. It was called the Anarchy Tour: Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, The Damned and The Clash. Not that many people there. Andy Corrigan got photographed by the Evening post: ‘This punk rocker wore a razor blade ear ring.’ We met Rat and Sensible in the Bar. Rat borrowed a fiver off Andy. Years later he actually paid him back. The Clash seemed so young and serious and just like us. Jacky said, ‘Johnny Rotten’s going to be big - like Bowie!’ After we saw the Clash again a few months later, headlining this time - we formed a band.
Tom Greenhalgh circa 76-81 Leeds University
Poster (opposite) : Fine Art Against Racism Photograph of posters © Peter Mitchell University Fine Art Mugshots from the Kevin Lycett Collection Photograph, Advert and Review (above) from the Jon Langford Collection
For years I didn’t paint at all. A painter needs a subject and for a long time I didn’t have one. Maybe that’s not quite (or always) true but it’ll do for my current purpose. When I went University to study Fine Art, in the autumn of 1976, I was 18 and charmingly provincial (but to misquote Ernest Tubb, you’d better just remember to smile when you call me that). Straight out of High School via the cluttered back bedroom at my parent’s house, I arrived in Leeds just in time for Punk. Even as I sat in my Dad’s Volvo heading north up the M6 the Sunday tabloid headlines screamed Outrage & Horror! A band called the Sex Pistols had just broken the tea-time fuck barrier on some local London TV show. Horror & Outrage! Suddenly Punk, like some great scabby legged buzzard came soaring over the drab British horizon to fix us all with its crazy polarising stare. In a country with only 3 TV channels (one of which just showed a potter’s wheel going round and round and round) Punk became instantly inescapable for both the kids on the street and their parents back indoors. The former, with pants aflame, commenced spitting and hopping up and down on the spot to sever all ties with the past and fumble ungratefully for control of their own culture & entertainment, while the latter, sniffing Armageddon in every Oxfam shirt and safety pin, kicked their 9-inch black & white steam powered TV sets around the living room floor. All that Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones had said was “What a fuckin’ rotter” but, oh yes, I knew right then how I’d be spending the next 42 years of my life! Me and my mate Tom immediately ceased nailing apples to the art-room wall to watch them rot, setting our boots on fire with dangerous flammable materials or showing up at our painting studios at all. As a kid in Wales I’d painted happy sloppy landscapes of yellow sunlight dancing through the leaves of bluish green trees out on a lush private golf course near the Severn Bridge waiting for my Dad and Uncle to finish up their Sunday afternoon round of golf and sneak me an underage pint. I arrived in Leeds a sub-impressionist hick, well-deserving of the kicking I received from my smug modernist tutors who quickly squeezed all the Monet & Pissaro out of my tubes with their giant rainbow light-bulb ladders, terrible beards, monkey boots and indifference. And that was it really. In 1977 we downed brushes and formed the Mekons. Or rather, Tom, Kevin, Chalkie and Corrigan did and got me to join ‘cos I had a drumkit. - “We’re gonna start a band where no one can play, do you wanna be in it?” – yeah OK… * It was a joke, a one-liner, the anti-band, a bunch of drunk art students scribbling daft songs about Outer Space, girls and unemployment on beer-mats in the pub. We’d be the first Punk band to only play slow songs, but compromised even before our first gig when the promoter told us to play fast or stay home, the accelerated tempos reducing our set to a cozy 12 minutes. Someone else’s gear, someone else’s van, but within a year we had a record out and people were calling us for gigs and interviews. From Nashville Radio by Jon Langford (Verse Chorus Press) circa 76-81 Leeds University
Photograph (left) from the Jon Langford Collection Photographs (below) : Anti Nazi March Manchester © Ros Allen Mekons from the Jon Langford Collection Sheeny and the Goys from the Marianne Lux Collection Tom Greenhalgh exhibition of Mekons material at his End of Year Show from the Tom Greenhalgh Collection
I arrived in Leeds from Wolverhampton as an art student in 1977. Back home I had sung in a ‘school band’ called, Hard Core. The name had been given to us by the Deputy Head Master. We had been called before him because a parent had complained that their son had got very drunk on QC sherry at one of our parties. I was also accused of singing too loudly in assembly and it was disrupting the seriousness of the occasion. I said that I was just enthusiastic. He said that he suspected that there was a “hard core of party-goers in the Lower Sixth” and he suspected “there was more than cider being drunk”. We were lucky that the Deputy Head really had not got a clue. Anyway, it turned out the complaining parent was the bass player’s mother. He was ill because he refused to share that bottle of QC. You get the feel of it. A gritty, grainy rebel without a cause kitchen sink film of a life. The point is, there was nothing in Wolverhampton in the 70s except to escape and usually to escape inwards with music as an accompaniment. Long nights of years in an attic listening to Dylan, Doors, Beefheart, Velvet Underground. My first gig was Slade, my second was Lou Reed and my third was the Feelgoods. The trajectory of my influences was clear and the stage was set for Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and the punk explosion. I arrived in Leeds at the confluence of years of currents of culture. The DIY ethos of punk, arriving via the Situationist International, and the blank street-stare of Dada, arriving via Andy Warhol, could not be underestimated. The radical tradition of Leeds art education mixed with the appointment of 1968 veteran T.J.Clark at the Department of Fine Art at Leeds University, and his consequent hiring in of a pretty extraordinary team such as Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, Terry Atkinson, and John Tagg, made for a rich soil around a fertile mind. So, arriving in Leeds, I went in search of sympathetic musicians and surveyed the scene. There was some interesting stuff going on and a new type of equation between art, music and politics that was bigger than the smaller world between the attic, the school and gigs at local church halls. Bands with strange names like, Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers, were about. There was an anarchist energy in the air. There was a Marxist seriousness in the beer. There was a Feminist sister stream. There was also a jazz scene with the older generation of rebels and art school tutors, like Jeff Nuttall. And then, thanks to John F. Keenan there was the F Club – a punk club that brought the best of the worst to Leeds on a shoestring budget for shoestring prices. This was the mix that spawned a Devonian-style explosion of bands. One Sunday, between Hyde Park and the Royal Park, I counted 23 bands rehearsing. I started Sheeny and the Goys as a direct anti-racist pop combo. There was Household Name, Age of Chance, the Mekons, Gang of Four, Sisters of Mercy, Cassandra Complex… the list goes on. After Sheeny, I started 69 Tears who gave Soft Cell their first ever gig as support, and then Another Colour before The Three Johns. Interestingly, The Three Johns were also hauled up in front of the Head of Department and told that our music was interrupting the seriousness of our art studies! And over us all, listening over us always, was that invisible and beneficent god, John Peel. John Hyatt circa 77-81 Leeds University
The catalyst of Punk that facilitated The Mekons formation, did not appear on the scene ready-formed, with any notion of a clear agenda for where it was going - there was no written manifesto, no mission statement, but instead, a set of unwritten rules that didn’t actually state what it was, but merely what it wasn’t, and, like all movements of rebellion, it’s protagonists were just making up as they went along, However, by Christmas 1977, Punk was allegedly already over, and things were starting to look a bit bleak. The Firemen had already been on strike for over a month, the government had brought in the army with their Green Goddesses to prevent the home-fires burning, and, as with the Miners’ Strike seven years later, the political divide between the North and South was beginning to raise its pointy little head. The campuses of Leeds had always had a bit of a reputation for being somewhat leftist, and with the formation of the Rock Against Racism Club, following Eric Clapton’s drunken, racist outburst in the previous year, Benefit Gigs had become a natural convergence of both music and left wing politics. That Christmas, The Mekons played at a Fireman’s Benefit gig at the Tech Hall, where a year earlier the Anarchy in the UK Tour had come to town. Being the festive season, many students had already gone home, including some of The Mekons, if I recall - so the audience, made up of aspiring punks and ‘socialist workers’, was, as well as being a bit incongruous, a bit slim on the ground. Apart from remembering Ros Allen wearing a highly distinctive, cerise pink boiler suit, my main memory of the gig was seeing a long haired chappy wearing an RAF greatcoat and long, striped Dr Who scarf, pogo across the large, and fairly empty hall, personifying that awkward transition from one world to another, where the residue of sixties innocence was about to come crashing down to earth as it met headlong with it’s nemesis, in the form of some kind of fatalistic behemoth. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Sitting in my kitchen in Leeds. Enjoying a late Sunday lunch. Purely by chance it happens to be International Women’s Day 2020. Around our kitchen table my partner and I are with old friends. There’s 6 of us. 3 are women. Every one of them a major second-wave feminist of Leeds. All of whom practiced cultural feminism and two of whom studied art at Leeds Uni in the late 70s. Jacky Fleming, feminist cartoonist, also of legendary all-women post punk band the Shee-Hees. Dinah Clark, founder member of Pavilion, the first feminist photography gallery, later a member of Leeds Postcards, the radical postcard co-op. Also Janis Goodman, co-ordinator of the 2nd Sourcream book of women cartoonists, then member of the women only Leeds Animation Workshop, set up in 1978 to produce and distribute animated films on social issues. So amid all the glamourous(?) nihilism of us proto-punk waster artists, getting stupid drunk in meandering performances, or being wheeled on stage in sofas labelled ‘spaceship’, some people were buckling down to the real stuff. Kevin Lycett circa 74-78 Leeds University
Photograph from the Jon Langford Collection
Yes it is Yes, that’s exactly right Before we start to talk about that, I was in Leeds about ten years ago - it’s become a very boring city. It’s all about coffee places - it’s a very yuppy city. For me, it (Leeds) was so good, Mike Nulty took me to the moors - that was an important feature. Nature is very important - English nature - it’s the main feature of location. I think it was a boring conference on video Leeds is an insurance capital - it’s full of boring beurocrats You know, I did an early piece of video there Much more important, I did a piece in some glass office buildings - it was done very quickly - I don’t think it survived. People seemed very curious about what I was doing. If I remember, Mike Nulty gave me a tour - he was a very good guide to the area. Well, for me, it (Leeds) was where I first met Tim Clark, and of course, the students were The Mekons and Gang of Four. The early Mekons records, they were really great singles. Where Were You? - an astonishing piece of early work - I wouldn’t call it Punk, - it was basically just good music. You also had Gang of Four - so Leeds was actually a great music city - students doing great music. I’ve also seen women, young women, who adore Gang of Four - it comes from Tim Clarks teaching. I don’t know if you’re recording this, but Tim Clark was a Situationist - he really disliked Malcolm McLaren - he called him Malcolm McNasty (chuckles). So maybe it was his answer to the London trendies. So Leeds was a city of commerce, but it was also industrial. It’s the same in England - people go as far away to school as possible, to get as far away from their parents. So the wildest places are the most interesting places for schools. It was like that with the moors - Mike Nulty took me there - he was fascinated by them. It was Dave Bromfield, he was a student of Tim Clark. Tim and I are both Aries- we seemed to like each other. He gave me an early pamphlet which he signed - where he described the new painting of cafe culture - recently I’ve become anti-Manet. In many ways, Tim’s become a bit boring - his new book is called Heaven on Earth, it’s a very strange book. The main thing for me though, was discovering The Mekons - I didn’t expect to find them there - I think they’re both geniuses. But one thing I learned is that London is not the whole of England - so Leeds was a kind of outsider situation - it was anti-London. So, was Leeds always known as an important Art School? People ask me what I think about Art Schools - most important Art Schools are ones that teach you an actual trade - like Ed Ruscha, he was actually a graphic designer - and Polytechnics also had an actual Architecture department, which is quite important - so for me, it offered greater potential than the old fashioned Art School. Of course, I’m forgetting the Henry Moore Institute. Penelope Curtis, she was there, she’s the best writer I know on Architecture, she’s written a book on me and Mies van der Rohe called Patio and Pavillion - she’s now the director of the Gilbenkin in Portugal. So, was Henry Moore from Leeds? Poster (opposite): Dan Graham Annotated Page from draft copy of Punk as Propaganda including all annotations from the document by Dan Graham and Mike Nulty (student) overlaid in pink
I went there - it was boring - sculpture needs to relate to nature, and the landscape of England is so important. So I guess the relationship to nature is very important in Leeds. Because I’m from New Jersey, and very rarely as a kid did I get into New York City, I thought it was very interesting that a place like Leeds can produce such great Art Historians as Tim Clark and Dave Bromfield - and for me, Tim had a great love for Rock Music - I was astonished that three of his students became great Rock Stars - not stars - groups What was interesting was that they were producing singles. I remember The Desperate Bicycles - there were people from outside London producing their own singles - it was against the idea of the Rock Opera LP From my point of view, meeting Tim Clark and discovering The Mekons was the most important thing (about Leeds). The Mekons are one of my all-time favourite groups - I have their singles, but I lost the pamphlet that Tim gave me - he signed it by the way. It’s like meeting great people at the right time - the high point in my life was when I met Ray Davis - he came to a dinner at the Hayward Gallery, and we had a long conversation - he drove me to my hotel - it was called My Hotel. Ray went to a very small Art School, at Hornsea I think - he’s also one of the only Rock Stars who came from a working class background. I would say as a reader of Sounds and NME, in England, the connection between Rock Groups and Art School is very important It’s interesting, I saw The Fall when they began - the punks were spitting on them, but the punks hated The Fall, but The Fall actually covered a great Ray Davis song - Victoria - I have it on my Greatest Hits. I remember reading Sounds, and Pete Townsend always referred to Ray Davis as a genius. So I got my information, not from Art School, because I didn’t go to any school at all, but from reading Rock Magazines. Like I go to Europe, and older men are wearing Ramones T Shirts
Transcript of conversation with Dan Graham 14.01.20 Opposite : 2 x illustrations by Paul Carter of possible configuration of components of ‘Two Glass Office Buildings’ at Leeds Polytechnic 1976
Well I know exactly where The Ramones come from - and it’s important, in England, to also know where people come from. Mick Jagger, he came from the edge of London from a middle class suburb and wanted to make pots of money, so he went to the London School of Economics. I found out from a connected friend, that when Keith is on Methadone, Methadone is more dangerous than Heroin - it’s more addictive - and, of course, you know he hates Mick. For some reason our connection is not so great, or maybe my battery isn’t so good, so I’m going to have to say bye for now - so bye. My memories of working with Dan Graham on the Two Building (Two Glass Office Buildings) project are all very vague, or more accurate to say, I remember only feelings and insights. However, the few concrete details that remain, are: David Bromfield was the instigator and funder. We had a lot of trouble sourcing the large mirrors needed for the piece, and these only just arrived in time. What I did get from being involved in the Two Buildings Project was the experience of working with a professional artist. I think we were supposed to get that experience from our tutors at Leeds and probably some did - I didn't. Happily, I did go on the keep in contact with Dan (for a while) who continued to give me an insight and some support. Insight into what, I am not sure - I am still trying to work that out. And with the music (Punk as Propaganda), here too I can't remember having any input, although I do remember making those notes. Why I did make those notes - is lost in time.
Mike Nulty circa 75-77 Leeds Poly
I think I must have taken Dan to see the neolithic cup and ring stones and related hedges up on Ilkley Moor. God, how much I missed that moor after I left Leeds. At one point I must have known every inch of it. Well, the western end at least.
I discovered the mail-art network during my foundation course at Winchester around 1974. A small London gallery owner gave a lecture about all the strange stuff he’d been receiving in the post and I picked up a sheet of addresses. When I arrived at Leeds in 1975 I started contributing to a few mail-art publications, projects, ‘add and pass on’ pieces and shows. By the second year of the course mail-art had pretty much taken over completely. Projects included ‘I justify my work by...in 12 words or less’ (a form sent to mail-artists for their response to the question), ‘Atrocity Photographs’ (collected from various mail-artists and compiled into a xeroxed booklet., for which, the ladies in the reprographics department refused to print Genesis P Orridge’s contribution, so I had to xerox it myself) and ‘Incorrectly Addressed Envelopes’ (mailings to mail-artists deliberately given incorrect addresses - some of which were returned undelivered with additional postal service stampings and alterations). I had rubber stamps made up like ‘Suspect Mailing’, ‘Unsolicited Mail’ ‘What do you think you are looking at?’ and ‘..you think you know everything’ and spent most days cutting out and collaging, pasting, rubber stamping, adding to or subtracting from, recycling, defacing then mailing out the results after xeroxing, date stamping and putting into plastic folders. My studio space consisted of a table, calendar and a concertina folder stuffed with postcards, letters and packages. One day a couple of tutors pulled me aside and told me they couldn’t assess my work because they didn’t know what it was I was doing. One quipped something like: “When you get fed up with all this nonsense, can you give me the stamps?” By 1977, while my contemporaries were fired by the punk zeitgeist and forming bands, my mailings took on a more punk flavour like ‘I Do Art!’ - a mail-art type pastiche of punkzines like ‘Sniffin’ Glue’. My final degree show in 1978 consisted almost entirely of mail-art (dated documentation of projects, publications and catalogues, sent and received over the three years) and I scraped my degree. At least Jeff Nuttall seemed to get it. After I left college I joined the rank of UK mail-artists fingered by the authorities (Genesis P Orridge, Pauline Smith/Adolph Hitler Fan Club) when I was raided by the bomb squad and questioned for my ‘Suspect Mailing’ assemblage photos (mixed media : battery, wire, electrical and cotton wool constructions). I carried on mailing activities into the early 80’s, though concentrating more on audio (Rod Summers VEC Audio) and the D.I.Y. ‘cassette scene’. Paul Carter circa 75-78 Leeds Poly
I first encountered Robin Crozier when visiting a friend who was ‘doing art’ at Sunderland. If I recall correctly, we met at Sunderland Arts Centre, a recently converted Victorian house that had a bar in the basement where Dave Stewart (later to be known as Dave Stewart of The Tourists, and then The Eurythmics) used to play darts. It was because of Robin that I first became introduced to that Fluxussy thing called Mail Art, and the joys of collaborating with other artists in a truly egalitarian sort of way. One of these collaborations was to write a play with Ray Monk (who went on to write biographies of Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Oppenheimer, and was the brother of the friend I visited in Sunderland), which involved writing either a line of dialogue or a stage direction, then posting it on to await the next line - however, the time delay interrupted the flow too much, that it didn’t go beyond one page. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) Add and Pass On Envelopes exchanged between Paul Carter and Robin Crozier All envelopes from the Paul Carter Collection
The first Black Boat was a product of the lost years 197778 between Leeds Poly fine art dept and Goldsmiths ATC in New Cross, when I retreated to Huddersfield (and a brief attempt at teacher-training in Newcastle). Interspersed with unemployment / odd jobs, I was spending many weekends at Andy Sharpe’s squat in Blackman Lane (whether he wanted me there or not). Lots of people passed through that house. We had to collect firewood from abandoned properties to keep warm. It was a cold winter. Looking at these magazines now I see – they were preceded by Fishsunk Pinning and Oppenheim Substitute – my first inklings that photocopiers could reduce from A4 to A5 opened the door to those publications. The first Black Boat was a Huddersfield issue, produced with Martine SM Banks, an eccentric drama student at Huddersfield Polytechnic. The contributors were from the Leeds Poly Fine Art department, Leeds University Fine Art department, Jacob Kramer College, and Huddersfield contacts. The name Black Boat, pretentiously enough was a reference to the Black Boat of Ulysses via Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. The second issue was a Goldsmiths issue, produced in their New Cross printshop on a Gestetner duplicator (which also produced Mary Heptinstall’s Crap Exclusive titles). Mary had also come down from Leeds to Goldsmiths to do the ATC course. The content was still mainly Leeds based, with no Goldsmiths content.(Seeing Someone, 30p – more poems by Mary Heptinstall, and Royal Readers all came from that New Cross period.) The third issue was the Bradley/Crowcroft Issue, edited from their HQ in Selsey West Sussex, which had looser Leeds connections and more international/mail art contributors. I have a slide of me assembling Black Boat 3 magazines on a carpet in front of a gas-fire. Whether in Catford or Leeds I cannot now tell (see previous page) How and where it was sold are another two things now forgotten. Poster (previous overleaf) : Black Boat All pages from edition 1 overlaid Pages from Black Boat 1 (below) Photograph of Andy Corrigan, Mark White and Jon King in performance (opposite left) . Photograph from the Mark White Collection Sketches for video installation at The Breadline Gallery(opposite right) by Robert Joyce
Robert Joyce circa 73-76 Leeds Poly
Aah, the irony of sitting in University lectures and tutorials studying, for example, Manet’s ‘Music in the Tuileries Gardens’ as a sign of the early development of Modernism (Baudelaires: fleeting, transitory and contingent etc). Whilst outside Modernism was dying in violent fascist attacks against progressive belief; the evident collapse of the technocratic solution. Current contemporary art was rarely mentioned at the university, maybe by some New Art Historians, never by our actual ‘practical’ tutors. Performance?
We went to The Breadline Gallery in Rodley. It was a tiny place uncompromisingly dedicated to contemporary art. Raz aka Robert Joyce was doing a performance. Inside the gallery were a few grey video monitors. We watched. The screens showed someone outside by the canal towpath, hooded, wearing a straight jacket. We watched for about half an hour or so as he slowly and with difficulty freed himself from constriction. It was very inspiring to see actual art practice, here and now, which gave you permission to do anything you wanted to do. Maybe form a band, even.
But what was to be done? The Poly was keen on performance and us ‘University lot’ went to see several, actual pieces of art in action. We put on something ourselves in a space at the University Union: trying to show the breakdown of an underlying coherence. Not so much 3 characters in search of an author as atomised elements swimming in the same direction etc, or so we portentously thought in our ‘Fine Art’ way. In fact, it was just three art students drinking themselves into incoherence and repeating a script about not swimming in the sea. I remember (Professor) Tim Clark describing it as ‘a worthy attempt at exploring the aesthetics of tedium’.
For a while we lived in Archery Place. I don’t know if it’s still there. The house was like an endless Beckett play, bleak, siting round a table wearing overcoats, donkey jackets, writing and drawing, producing material for Raz’s photocopied publications, Black Boat, Pentel Theory, Wallsend Snooker and more. I remember the kitchen permanently flooded with water, three or four inches sometimes. Robert Joyce, Andrew Sharpe, Mark White, Simon Pollock. It was all about making art: performance, conceptual, painting, music or nothing, the categories didn’t matter.
Mark White circa 75-79 Leeds University
Tom Greenhalgh circa 76-81 Leeds University
Date : It was after I left Leeds Poly and when I had gone back as a Visiting Lecturer. Probably 1977. Place: The main studio of the Leeds Poly Fine Art Department. The external wall of the performance space. High above the work spaces of the students below. Audience : Mainly the students and tutors who were present.
Time: About midday. Structure : Performer (myself) hanging on the wall about 12ft above the ground. No visible means of support. Wearing a grey suit with hands in pockets looking nonchalant. On either side of me and level with me in a row were 4 prints created by Geoff Teasdale one of which was based around a wine glass. It was meant to feel like an exhibition of which the performer was a natural part of.
Performance notes: The purpose of the performance was to create a situation which was a combination of an everyday meeting between two people in a pub and an art exhibition. The performer was meant to look casual and at ease as if leaning on a bar in a pub (probably the Coburg which was Geoff Teasdale’s local). The monologue that ensued was meant to cover such things as would be normal in a pub conversation. The form and structure of the words was essentially stream of consciousness and observational. Possibly one topic that got included was about the breakup of a relationship that I was having with a girl called Irene. On starting going out with her she had made me swear to never include intimate details about our relationship in a performance. Without actually setting out to do it I was performing an act of exorcism because I was so hurt by the break up. Kind of burning my bridges. My style of performance was essentially to bounce ideas about in the air in front of myself and the structure of a monologue was very much about what was going on inside me and around me at the time. I would have a rough frame work for a performance but then improvise my way in and out of ideas. Most of the monologue in Hanging around with Geoff Teasdale was about art and student’s relationships with tutors. Dave Stephens circa 72-76 . Leeds Poly
Original Poster (above) for Hanging About With Geoff Teasdale. Jeff Nuttall Poster (opposite) : Hanging About With Geoff Teasedale
In 1976 I was visiting my school friend Frank Tovey (later to become Fad Gadget) while he was a Fine Art student at Leeds Polytechnic. Dave Stephens had perched himself about five metres up a bare white wall in the studio concealing a seat counter levered from out of the brickwork. With no visible means of support he was just ‘hanging about’. From here Dave deliverd a continuous monologue of mundane proportions to anybody who would listen or who was in the room at the time. It seemed mostly to concern his relationship with his girlfriend and their recent breakup including, if memory serves, a canal holiday they took together. Very funny, very witty and very hard to forget. Michael Vale circa 76-78 Trent Polytechnic
Poster (opposite) : The Loopy Performance Notes from The Loopy from the Estate of Frank Tovey Original Poster for The Loopy (above) © Peter Parkin
Frank had spent much of his first year at Leeds working with other students on performances. However he began his second year feeling that, although he enjoyed working collaboratively, he hadn’t really begun to develop his own voice – if voice was the word to apply to someone working mostly in mime. He decided to force his own hand by spreading the word that he was about to embark on a performance before he’d actually come to any decisions as to what that performance might be. This was a strategy he continued to employ for many years to considerable success. The resulting series of short pieces, entitled “The Loopy” after the final item on the program, harnessed the diverse off-stage talents of various students from both the Poly and the University as well as non-student friends and undoubtedly kicked Mr Tovey’s arse into gear as deviser, performer and composer. The performance in it’s entirety can be seen as a collection of short stories plus an adaptation of one: The Loopy is a dance inspired by Richard Matheson’s short “Dance of the Dead”. Other pieces included a man turning from the routine of housework to a tragic sexual liaison with the vacuum cleaner; a kleptomaniac who only steals light switches; an anti-tribute to Marcel Marceau with the famous mime transformed into a cock puppet; a museum cleaner who got careless with a feather duster and a joyous dance in plastic rainwear to the soundtrack of a Chinese revolutionary song. In retrospect quite a few of the pieces seem to feature penises. Another strategy he continued to employ … For some, unremembered, reason The Loopy was not performed at the Poly but in a small studio under the University’s theatre workshop in early March 1977. Barbara Frost Chelsea School of Art 75-76 / Leeds Poly (unofficially) 76-78.
A solo performance in the lecture hall in which Frank goes from vacuuming to fucking and being sucked off by the machine (the while accompanied by ? song?) the performance lasting the duration of the music. Russell Harris circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Although, as a term, it may come across as sounding somewhat patronising, the notion of ‘bringing art to the people’ has always held great appeal - being both egalitarian and anti-authoritarian in nature it has the potential to challenge the elitist stance of art galleries, whilst at the same time fulfilling the often forgotten, yet fundamental role that a municipal gallery, in particular, was set up to perform - namely to open it’s doors to the citizens of the town or city to which it belongs, for both their enlightenment and the enhancement of their lives. Stemming from a desire to practice art in the real world, an ethos resulting from my Art School experience at Leeds Poly, and inspired by the Arts Council funded conversion of a mobile library into a peripatetic art gallery that would travel around rural Lincolnshire, (an idea taken further in the eighties by the Channel 4 Byker Art Project where residents from the Northumbrian housing estate selected artworks from collections across the UK to exhibit in their living rooms), I had long harboured the idea of exhibiting work in contexts outside of the homogenised white cube gallery. So when the opportunity arose to use one of the display cabinets situated on The Headrow in the centre of Leeds, to promote Several Images, (an exhibition that I was taking part in with Monty Rakusen and John Coombes at The Breadline Gallery), I seized it, along with my coexhibitors, turning it into what was probably the first gallery of its kind. Unfortunately, the tenure of the gallery was short-lived. When I contacted the council regarding a more permanent arrangement, the real world turned round and bit me on the bum - not only was the cost of the rental prohibitive, but the censorship that they would impose would ultimately impinge too much on the potency of the project to make it ideologically tenable. Tony Baker circa 74-77 Leeds Poly
Poster (opposite) : 24hr Miniature Modern Art Gallery . 1979 photograph : Monty Rakusen text : Tony Baker. Letter (left) from the Tony Baker Collection
EP
ILOGUE
On November 6th 1984, Dave Seeger arrived at work to find a group of 5 women entering the Leeds Poly Gallery, by means of a broken window - some of whom had hammers in their hands - the same hammers that had been used to smash the vast glass window and various ceramic pieces on display in the FiredWorks exhibition of staff and student work. In their protest over what they considered to be the offensive nature in which life-size figures of women were portrayed in sexually abusive contexts, the five women had, in so doing, brought the Fine Art department face to face with the politics of the time. Leeds had now become the Feminist Capital of the UK, the threat to women, under the shadow of fatal sexual attacks by the Yorkshire Ripper (that had included a thwarted attempt on a Leeds Poly Fine Art student) was hard to ignore, and the notion of art being used to shock without consequence was no longer to be tolerated. Although elements of the spirit of the ‘Leeds Experiment’ would still continue to make their presence felt, the unadulterated freedom of Harry Thubron’s original vision was now starting to experience the incremental presence of constraint - both politically and institutionally. This was, after all, 1984, and the Thatcher government, like Big Brother, was at war with the ‘Enemy Within’ - and this included the likes of the Fine Art department. The writing was on the wall - the transformation of Polytechnics into ‘new Universities’ was on the horizon, and the governments prevailing thirst for commodification was set to tame the spirit of free thinking in such a way that art education would never be the same again - in spite of the efforts of excellent contemporary educators. Having watched from the inside, the hatchet jobs dealt to education over the last forty years, I have always returned to my own educational experience to remind me of what education, and in particular, art education should all be about, and have continued to draw reference, warts and all, from that last bastion of creative hedonism, that was the Fine Art department of Leeds Polytechnic, circaseventies. Lest we forget.
Tony Baker . Leeds Poly . circa 74-77
above : original poster from the Dave Seeger Collection Poster (opposite) : Fired Works and Hammer Police Statement by Dave Seeger, press cuttings, artists statements from the Dave Seeger Collection
I wanted to write a sequel to Creative License covering the Leeds scene from 1973 -1983. There was a story to be told of how the University took over from the Poly Fine Art Course as regards a centre for creativity and progressive ideas. This was most apparent in feminism and art historical studies and of course Leeds University bands, Gang of Four and the Mekons. Yet this was only a part of the whole seventies scene in Leeds There were the pubs and clubs for punks, gays, transsexuals, soul and reggae and many hair-raising anecdotes of excess and violence. Plenty to go on then. Yet I failed to make any headway with the interviews I set up with some of the major players of the time. Why was this? I suspect this may be due to the more politicised nature of the time. It seemed to me then and now that there was a harshness to the 1970s that fed into political activism and division. The nights seemed darker and the winters longer with the spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper, the three-day week, inflation, strikes and unemployment and racism. There just seemed to be more to hate and less to love. Crucially perhaps, I was no longer a player. I had been pushed to the side lines of a scene I no longer identified with. By the seventies I had become disillusioned with the progressive ideals I had once subscribed to. Seeing them played out did not convince me things were getting better and when Punk came along it was a necessary purgative while containing an element of dĂŠjĂ vu. I could not become enchanted twice. Worse, my marriage fell apart and some of this was at least due to the times. No doubt these negative experiences contributed to a jaundiced view of the seventies in Leeds. For these reasons I would have written a counter narrative, one less celebratory and more critical of the epoch. That said, I think there is a great story to be told and one which needs to be both objective and enthusiastic about what was a defining decade whose seminal moments continue to resonate.
James Charnley circa 70-73 Leeds Poly Poster (opposite) : This Poster Is Made Up Of The Contents Of The Very Top Drawer Of James Charnley’s Bright Yellow Filing Cabinet Photographs of press cuttings, promotional material and photographs from the James Charnley Collection Creative Licence (below) published by The Lutterworth Press
This edition of circaseventies is by no means comprehensive, but merely just the start.
OH, THE FICKLENESS OF MEMORY THE AUTHOR OF HISTORY
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Back Cover Photograph of the demolition of the Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art Studio 2010 Š Tony Baker
thanks to Dave Stephens, Sara Fitzgerald, Ron Crowcroft, Robert Joyce, Simon English, James Charnley, Kevin Atherton, Dave Seeger, Miles Macalinden, Andy Sharpe, Michael Bennett, Raym Richards, Dennis de Groot, Tony Emerton, Gavin Butt, Janek Dubowski, Geoff Clout, Colin Fraser Gray, Richard Knight, Gerry Pilgrim, Janet Goddard, Brian Larkman, Richard Demarco, Paul Carter, Russell Harris, Shaun Cavell, Keith Cardwell, Jon Langford, Mark White, Tom Greenhalgh, John Hyatt, Dan Graham, Sarah Toh, The Lisson Gallery, Mike Nulty, Barbara Frost, Michael Vale, Monty Rakusen, Lucy Hainsworth, Ulrike Rost, Jack Chesterman, Geoff Teasdale, John Ross, Sandy Weatherson and Alan Naylor for their contributions, without whom the content of this book would not exist, and to Jack Penford Baker, Kevin O’Hare, Tom Poultney, The Creative Arts departments of Leeds City College and The University Centre, for their support with the publication.