The Hornsey sit-in

At the British Library there is currently a temporary presentation called '1968 On Record: A Year of Revolution', where you can immerse yourself in an on-screen trawl of images and sound recordings from the library's collections. Click on the section called Politics, then on the sub-section called Student Unrest UK, and you will find a sound clip described as 'Student leader Kim Howells interviewed on the reasons behind unrest at Hornsey College of Art'. In his unmodified South Wales accent, fine art student Howells formally lodges his grievances about the lack of sports facilities and proper washrooms at Hornsey, complementing with a touch of British bathos the adjacent revolutionary rhetoric of Tariq Ali and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Usually cited as a contrast with the perceived or supposed passivity of today's fee paying art students, the Hornsey sit-in has become one of the cultural myths of the 60s. With the LSE sit-in the year before as a model, in May 1968 Hornsey students ousted the principal from his office and took over direct control of the college for two months. The detailed history of this action and its repercussions has not become lost or hidden, but it is widely dispersed, and hitherto the only easily accessible source of information has been the Penguin book The Hornsey Affair, written by participants in the sit-in and rushed out only a year after the event.

The opening pages of Lisa Tickner's short but painstakingly researched account confirm that 'local conditions' as basic as toilets and washbasins did indeed precipitate the Hornsey sit-in. Descriptions of the parlous condition of the college's elderly annexes, spread across the borough, convey a picture of makeshift squalor straight out of Withnail and I. But these localised grievances interacted with equivocation about countrywide structural changes in higher education to provoke a demand for an 'analysis of art education nationally and the relations between artists, designers, and society', and thus 'opened onto political territory'.

As she makes clear in her preface, Tickner was a student at Hornsey between 1961 and 67. She left before the sit-in itself, though remained in close contact with events at the college, where she was subsequently to work as an art history lecturer for most of her professional life. In spite or because of this proximity, Tickner has succeeded in her aim of furnishing a 'rigorous and usable' account of the event, its prehistory and fallout, providing a valuable and dependable resource for anyone specially interested in the period, and/or in the politics of art education.

The first section of the book lucidly maps the changing structure of British higher art and design education after 1957: the replacement of the old vocational National Diploma in Design by a degree-level Diploma in Art and Design, and the amalgamation of art colleges into new polytechnics, with a consequent loss of autonomy for the colleges concerned. During 1967 staff and students at Hornsey, destined to become part of North London Polytechnic, had already mounted a quite separate campaign against these changes. Towards the end of her text, Tickner posits a theoretical referent for the course of actions that the book documents: a 1994 essay of 'incisive brilliance' by Thierry de Duve, 'When Form Has Become Attitude', in which he describes a triad of 'constellations' conditioning the state of western art education: the imitative academic mode (that of the NDD); the inventive Bauhaus-modernist mode (the DipAD); and the post-1968 deconstructive mode, influenced by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. 'The sit-in took place at the same time as seismic shifts in art education, in criticism and in art itself,' says Tickner. 'A "real revolution" in art and design had failed to find a counterpart in art education', so the Hornsey sit-in arose from an educational system that was, as it were, one paradigm shift out of step with the zeitgeist.

As is not uncommon in heavily researched microhistories, the footnotes appended to the main text are extensive and here match it in length, consequently almost producing two parallel books in one. The footnotes are not limited to identifying the sources of data, and being somewhat less bound by academic probity, they are often more wide ranging and interesting to read than the main text of the book (while reading some of its detailed accounts of post-sit-in educational select committees and their subcommittees it was difficult to stifle a yawn). For one thing, the footnotes provide the sort of incidental but enlivening trivia that one hopes to find in the small print of books like this. We learn, for example, that Howells's student lodgings near the college were in the house of a Mrs Kafka, a relative of the author.

Never dreaming that he would one day be a minister of state at the Department for Education and Skills in a New Labour government (and famously objecting to 'Conceptual Art'), in 1968 Howells hoped to replicate at Hornsey the societal détournement accomplished by the contemporaneous Paris événements. But Tickner repeatedly makes it clear that for most of the students and staff participating in the action, 'the issue was art education', rather than revolutionary politics per se. As Tickner says, she has provided 'only one possible account' of the sit-in. Other accounts might have related the sit-in to other attempts during that period (outside the world of education) to form non-hierarchical, rhizomic structures, like Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, or the Artists Meeting Place project. Paradoxically, if you wanted to go to art school in the mid 60s, Hornsey was likely to be one of the first to which you would apply - good things were going on there. It was a place where aspiring art students wanted to be. If there is a shortcoming with this book it is that it does not convey a sense of why that should have been and what exactly was being generated there. But the closing sentence of her book suggests that Tickner is aware of the ambiguous aspects of her account: 'That art schools are not what they were is an achievement as well as a source of regret.'

This book review of Lisa Tickner's Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (Frances Lincoln Ltd, London, 2008, 192pp, pb, £12.99, 978 0 7112 2874 0) was originally published in May 2008/ Issue 317, p40.

David Briers is an independent writer and curator based in Yorkshire.