The installation contains archive material related to experimental art education in the UK, focusing on The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course. Running from 1976 until 1985, the influential course’s chief agenda was to rethink the relation between art and society. The Open University (OU) itself was founded in 1969, with the aim of expanding higher education to working adults who had not previously had the opportunity to study at that level. For this reason, many of the students were from working-class backgrounds or were women who had previously missed out on education due to child care responsibilities. Courses were offered for home study without entry requirements, and lectures were broadcast on BBC television and radio.

Showing on monitors in the installation were three programmes produced as course material, in collaboration with the BBC. In Children and Video (1976) young children, aged between seven and nine, work with light-weight video cameras and recorders to make their own television programme. Play and Place (1976) demonstrates how children’s play evokes the larger society and environment on a miniature scale. In Whatever Will Be (1977), futurologist James Dator analyses the modern world and suggests how it can be improved through alternative lifestyles, communes and adventure playgrounds.

TAD 292, 2012, archival display

As part of my solo exhibition ‘Rise Early, Be Industrious’ I also curated a display of archival material from The Open University’s interdisciplinary Art and Environment course which was officially titled ‘TAD 292’ (referring to Technology, Art and Design). The archival presentation comprised course material, including television programmes, letters, vinyl records, artworks, posters, course books and other printed matter.

Art and Environment emphasised ‘playfulness’ and creativity as tools for liberation, aligning itself with many of the activist movements emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Women’s Liberation, the Community Arts Movement and Environmentalism. Students were asked to start with their own experiences at home, mapping their locale and the environment around them, in order to make art that was relevant to society.