I didn't take much notice to be frank of  most of what the staff were saying. I sort of in a rather arrogant way thought They're not that bright anyway. why should I be listening? 

 

(Gibson) Because he was robust it meant you could have a proper argument with him. And feel like there was something there you were arguing with.

 

(Art Students Observed) I remember when it came out and the library at Midville getting half a dozen copies and I remember reading it in a very sort of skimmed fashion so thinking oh well Barbara got that bit and not that bit and oh well it doesn't matter.  Well it's curious because I find  a lot of the emotional things that are built into the way that Barbara wrote that stuff really quite remote from me. It's slightly indicated by the way the Arthur character is in that thing.  Actually reading some of the  women's reactions to things was really quite sort of distressing in lots of ways because you sort of thing oh my god they really did feel put upon. which I can understand. It was an interesting year group in that it was somewhat imbalanced. it was 50/50  male-female   but there were only one or two strong women in the group  and there were four or five of the guys who were pushy in all sorts of ways. And there was a weird aspect to it as well that for some reason or other  we were regarded as being the big blokes. because for some reason most of the guys in the previous years weren't very tall where has suddenly this group turned up up who are all six foot. What's going on? And it was a quirky group of people, certainly the blokes. 

​

The Midville building in Portsmouth Street, I always thought it looked like a cigarette packet made out of concrete. We moved to that In the January of 68 so when we first started out our year group we started in what was part of the Midville Polytechnic buildings, which is sort of  towards the cathedral from there. We were just in two or three rooms there. Really the whole of the fifth floor was  sort of the fine art painting area and the whole of the lower ground floor, media centre etc was sculpture. Joe almost always did sculpture, Dave would have been regarded as a sculptor, Brian, well basically sort of because he did bits of kit and stuff, for Dyer and people like that, virtually all the others were in the painting studio. Pam sure, and Diana I think were in sculpture at times. This girl -  I can't remember what her name was, she joined in the second year and she was really a separate girl,  and very angsty. That was Jean so-called.  That's the whole course, the whole year group.

in terms of other people I saw Harold  in the late 80s. I went back to Midville to teach. In the end I sort of took over Coutt's old job.  Dave was an interesting character, quite a reserved character, liked ironies I suppose is the best way of describing it. He was known as the chicken man absolutely. First started do those things. A lot of it was just to push the limits, to see how people would react. and he just thought it was very funny that they just went for it. We shared the house in Midville. It must have been in our first year. 

 

John and I and Brian found a place in Midville in St Jude's Road, and we live there for the rest of that year. And then in the second year ear I found a flat which was in a tower block unfurnished, which was just amazing at the time, and then a number of the people from the course ended up sharing with me at various stages in the proceedings.Harold and Diana did and Chris and Bert did and Joe did.

 

I think I was always a bit of an outsider and being an outsider was fine as far as I was concerned. I think that was related to my background, in that I'd gone to a public school that I really didn't like and that's had learnt to be an outsider in those sort of circumstances. and how to deal with an institution. It was the public school set up to be the place to take you to Sandhurst so I became adept to do things which were against the system without getting caught by the system as it were. I didn't feel any threat from the criticism at all. There was a bit in there which was interesting to read that there was a sort of confrontation with Gibson where he said afterwards that he was glad it had cleared the air. I got on quite well with Gibson and that's a really quite like him. He was very robust he was very Nietzschean, very into Wagner and that whole sort of drive of the self etc. There were other people like Watson who was first year tutor, who was a painter, it was like there wasn't anything really there you know. Like what are you saying? You do get a sense of both Coutts and Gibson driving the course, even though they weren't the most senior membesr of staff. but they shared the place in Midville in Coronation Crescent. Coutt's spent the summer going round the States on a Greyhound bus trying to meet as many people from the art world as he could, and he's done very well with that . Their work was very different but I suppose because they were both engaged, you could see a relationship but their viewpoints are very different. 

 

For me, Dyer I got on well with mainly because I was interested in some of the stuff about cybernetics, so read that Norbert Wiener stuff and all that sort of thing. And I can remember that there was a project that was set that was to do with games. Dyer was a very low key  character he was a very nice guy, quiet but very thoughtful. Coutts was the one I interacted with most I suppose. Until Ashley appeared. He had effectively been a student the year above me, but he got thrown out. Ostensibly for messing up things in the printing department and using up too much stuff. It was actually because they were regarded as being far too difficult to deal with. but then Coutts, it must have been in the first term of the first year, invited Ashley back to do a presentation which I remember him doing about anthropocentricity and anthropomorphism and Japanese paintings. But he and I got on instantly. And he was the person I got talking to more than Coutts. Although Coutts was the only one who was on the exam boards etc. At the end there was a lot of fuss about who was going to get what, and was I going to get failed etc. Coutts said, it was a bit stupid in the exam board, because I was arguing for you to get a first and they were arguing for you to fail, so we agreed on a 2;1.

 

I think there wasn't a rigid schema. and I think the biggest thing that the students found difficult was that they would get heavy criticism, And then they would be looking for what the answer should be. And the answer was, there wasn't one. And I think that most of them found that disturbing and difficult. Whereas there was a sense that I thought great, that's what I want to hear, I don't want them to give me an answer. They're telling me why don't you go and do a philosophy course or something. I did investigate the possibility of actually doing that, and I decided that in fact philosophy courses were actually far too rigid, that I couldn't have explored the things I was interested in exploring. I think a lot of the course was organised around, the course is getting a bit too chaotic, let's think what project we can think up, let's do it next week, let's do it on Monday. a sudden rush and Gibson would go,  so let's do a life good drawing course, and that would be it. Let's do it,  that life drawing course and it was quite interesting. 

 

Coutt's drawing project. it was a setup of balloons, We haven't talked about the relationship of Liberal studies to fine art and that was a big thing, at Hornsey for example. With those two life drawing courses, it was a lot to do with if you're trying to draw something, what are you actually trying to make with the drawing. In a traditional academic sense you're making a representation on a piece of paper and you're trying to do it as accurately as possible. I remember Gibson saying that. Well  that was like a red rag to a bull. So why don't you take a photograph? I  I didn't think that any of it could really be accurate, for example you watched the models breathing. To prove a point and I think Brian did this with me, we managed to borrow a  strobe light from the physics department and take photographs of the model. With it flashing about eight or nine times a second, so that you could see in a second's exposure just how much the model had moved. Ok let's do some analytic thinking about this.

 

Now Coutt's course, the drawing project was based around in lots of ways a similar idea, because it was a non-static setup, because the balloons waved etc etc and then they went down, and what do you do how do you draw that. and a lot of that problematisation of representational drawing was very much I think, that was there then. 

 

Abbott came in the second year. and she was like a breath of fresh air, because up until that point the  the liberal studies tutor was ex-Courtauld, and very self unaware. and her chosen subject area which she couldn't help but repeat was essentially baroque painting and sculpture, and she would head for baroque painting and sculpture almost regardless. And she had a sort of thing where she clearly liked images of horses, and saw them as something erotic. And she would talk about plunging horses, and it became something for our year group where everyone would start laughing. and she would get even more wound up. It typified the fact that liberal studies departments hadn't woken up to the fact that we should be talking about current art practice.  I think one of the reactions was getting in Abbott, because one, she was American, she had acted as a sort of personal assistant to Barnett Newman. And in consequence knew a lot of the people. around at the time. she got in, Carl Andre,  Sol LeWitt, Seth Siegelaub who was an organiser a lot of a lot of those things,  to come in to do talks. That surge of things was interesting and exciting. The description in the book seems to miss out that real excitement of things changing.

 

My interview was at two o'clock so I turned up at two and Kerr meets me at the door. I have a bundle of paintings most of which I have have no real interest in whatever, in fact I've sort of produced a ridiculous number in about in a week and a half in order to get in. And there's a panel of about eight people. Gibson think was there. Price who was head of sculpture was we were around a table showing the work, Kerr mostly asking the questions and suddenly somebody asked this question about something and I thought who the hell said that. I said I'm sorry I couldn't quite hear could you say it again and the person said it again. it was somebody under the table. so I answered the question to the person under the table. It was after lunch. He'd been in the pub since 11 and he was so pissed he had slid  off his chair before the interview had started. So Kerr was very much as I was walking out the door, we're looking forward to seeing you. 

 

I read personally quite a lot of philosophy before that. reading existentialist stuff, I read a lot of Camus, Sartre all that kind of stuff. That was part of the baggage that I came into the thing with. The painting that I did at Midville was very small, the painting that Barbara talks about was the final painting that I did. which was about 4-ft by 3-ft matt black on hardboard. Then images of black tomatoes in black enamel paint. except for one space where I inset a piece and had a cast of a tomato. so what Kerr and Barbara did was help paint these tomatoes. It was like, it needs filling in, and there's 72 of them to do. It was really stylistically related to minimalism, and surrealism I suppose. After that all the things I did were writing.

 

(The Second Year Show) It was quite a pivotal point. Bert was quite pushy about it, he was a curious character he was really quite talented, he was fairly well read, he was a good guitarist, smoked too much dope, and enjoyed himself too much to be really serious about anything. Used to go down to London a lot. So he was one of the people because of the Hornsey thing etc who came back with lot of whoa, this is what should be happening. Because of the change in the kind of work I was doing, Brian was doing, we were keen to do something about it rather than it being just something that could be cornered. There was a small  space up on the top floor and and Brian and I moved into it, He came from a background of being a sort of telephone stroke television engineer. And partly therefore saw that doing the second year exhibition, which had never been done before, was actually, would be a good thing to do. There was a space which could be a gallery, which at that time was at the back of the lecture hall. To say we really mean this. There was a lot of why, why should we bother, that sort of attitude. I felt quite committed to it I remember, because I felt let's see what happens if we do this sort of thing. 

 

In terms of statements I think it was only Bert who had something. and I was the one who had just statements. It was a marker in a sense so that you can't keep saying we've got to have painting. 

 

(Framing under perspex). Actually I now realise that probably the person being talked about there was Abbott. The good thing about Abbott was that she was very voluble. She used to ask us to do do seminars in the style of different artists. I just thought this was great fun, you could do amusing ironic things. She was trying to push me, it was like why have you put it behind perspex? And actually it was to do with the fact that the wall was in fact covered with hessian, so how do you actually fit bits of paper to hessian. Probably I hoped that it would have generated a bit more discussion but it didn't come up, but it did put a marker down, at the end of the day. 

 

My guess is that it was probably someone from the Midville Art Gallery who came along and chatted, probably with Kerr 

 

This was a show at the Midville, guess who came up with the title, Stone. It was basically most of the fine art stuff plus one or two other staff members who showed there.

Brian had been involved making the switchgear for Dyer's space. so I was sort of familiar with it.  It was basically a big boiler, and things changed as you got closer to it. The woman who did teach on the course right from the first year was Fawley. She was a very interesting lady. she was one of the early people to actually do holography. she was very good. She was very nervous. But robust. Stone, he was an amusing character, he used to drink regularly in Midville in the evening as well. It was at the time when the shopping precinct was being extended and WH Smiths was being completely refurbished and he got the neon signs from outside. and reject them in his office so he put them on the end wall and he had a little switch on his desk and basically if you pressed it, it just said s***.

 

He objected to all the bureaucracy where Midville College of Arts was becoming Midville Polytechnic and he had a brother that worked in the company that made rubber stamps, and every bit of paperwork that came from the Polytechnic, and there was a lot, he used to stamp with stamp and send it back, and a stamp simply read 'bollocks'. 

 

Two other people that were quite significant that came  during the second year, were both Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman, who are both fantastic. They were both very articulate very good at talking about what they were doing. 

 

(Dave paintings) If he did do paintings he certainly didn't do them back home in Midville. He might have, Dave was quite capable of seeding something like that in Barbara's mind, on the grounds that he would know that it would get back to Kerr. 

Emma, Rose, Jackie and Liz were really like a sort of a group. They lived together. I remember in the first term Emma and Rose writing a parody of some of the teaching. in the style of a restoration comedy. it was really funny. I think that they all got somewhat pushed under by the general atmosphere of the place. Jackie was a sculptor.  Emma ended up doing quite well on the course I'm not sure of the reason the work never really showed itself. Frances is in there as the butterfly painter. The one who drank 12 pints a night or whatever. She was a real character but she didn't veer from doing the butterfly paintings right the way through the whole course. I can remember meeting her when she was out drinking like that. She would be there with her boyfriend who was a photographer on the local newspaper. Still standing and still drinking. 

​

The course was towards those text-based things but the rigorousness came from Gibson's view of things. Not text based, but rigorousness would fit with Gibson very strongly. a very strong sense of no, it's got to stand up to everything. You had a situation where Stone was the head of department, he was not going to write a course document even if somebody held six shotguns to his head. 

 

When the new building was opened and it was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh. Gibson decided that he was going to run a life class on the day that the Duke came. He had both a male model and the female model. He kept telling them to get closer until they were absolutely up against one another when the Duke of Edinburgh came round.