The Locked Room

The Locked Room: Four Years that Shook Art Education, 1969–1973

MIT Press, 2020

Edited by Rozemin Keshvani. Sheila Ross a contributor and editorial board member

The untold story of a radical approach to the teaching of sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/locked-room

Sheila Ross | Dropped into a box | excerpt

The locked room: what was it? A primary experience of experiencing?

Not of our minds in interplay with teachers, but watching our own minds at work and play, bored or struggling at times, but confronting our very selves rather than the forms or concepts created by other minds.

The structure of the course was very careful to be empty, to presuppose nothing, make no statements and give no answers or even responses. This was its genius and its difficulty. A necessarily empty vessel. In an empty space devoid of imperatives or outside demands, what arises?

We didn’t know what sculpture is. We weren’t asking that question. It wasn’t relevant, though some of what occurred in there may have pointed to a very large opening-out of the question.

It was more a matter of the acceptance of the appearing and disappearing of things. That was what was necessary in the situation we found ourselves in, and was a large part of its fascination.

(Like being a child, it strikes me now, the mystery of the world, with the grownups making things appear and disappear and being in charge of reality, and us watching, playing, exploring, trying to figure it out. The world made new over and over and someone else in charge.)

I feel now the unselfconsciousness with which I worked, and the continuous creativity of those first weeks, that has left me at other times in my life, especially when I am Supposed To Be Doing Something [Known].

It was like moving through my own dream in a completely private situation, and yet there we all were. The lack of speech, commentary of any sort, judgement, was essential and liberating.

I wrote at the time, while working with chicken wire, lead pipe and clay:

“This cage is different each time I come to it. This chicken wire is different each day, each minute of each day. It changes in relevance to me. Continually new facets of me are brought forward, others hidden, remembered in that they happened. They showed themselves but refused to be captured.”

*****

The lack of interaction with the teaching staff came across as very cold. There seemed to be no recognition of us as human beings, or recognition of the existence of psychology as part of being human. It seemed a denial of personhood. No account was taken of the effect of such non-contact on a person, especially a teenager. Most of us were about 19 when we entered the room. In a way we were performing guineapigs, but we collaborated in experimenting on ourselves.

The aloneness of it, the isolation, brought to mind a sensory-deprivation tank…

…What happens when you take away the responsiveness of the world? Replace it with institutionally enforced alienation? 
I was after all one of only two women in our intake in a male-dominated department. I had doubly to prove myself. “Can you hack it?” was the phrase of the time. But isn’t not-hacking where things get really interesting? Where difference happens?

We students didn’t know what sculpture is, but the tutors did know. That is a problem. We had come out of very adventurous foundation courses that had taken apart all of our assumptions and abilities. In the locked room we were obviously in an experimental situation. We were intent on discovering what sculpture could be at a time of great change. But the situation we were experiencing was not the same as that the tutors were so carefully observing, because our heads were in very different places. The tutors thought they had set us an encounter with materials, but what we experienced was different for each of us. For me it was above all an existential encounter with extended time.

*****

That the room be locked in one way but open in a much more critical way … No, both are critical. A locked room with no walls.

Aren’t we each a locked room? That’s the power of it, and the danger.

Sheila Ross | Empty or full? The eternal question | March 2018 

Was there an “ideas vacuum” at the heart of the A Course?

Nick May first suggested this at the 2010 symposium, The A Course, an inquiry, organised by CSM in 2010. I think he was talking about the structure of the first year, starting with the materials project. The empty studio, the 13 of us, two tutors, 13 blocks of polystyrene… 

And answered largely according to the expectation of the asker.

A school renowned for its faculty and former students, the heart and hub of London, the year 1970 when new ideas were bouncing off each other—and the faculty have no intention of speaking to you. Possibly ever.

Instead of an opening into all that potential, the studio door is opened to what could be seen as a wasteland, an empty studio that became increasingly dusty and dirty and filled with the detritus of us working through all of our preliminary ideas of what could be done with a block of polystyrene, with or without brown paper, and reaching ground zero. The wasteland—wasteland?— of ourselves. 

Time stretching away even in its carefully allotted increments: 10-10:50; 11:20-1; 2-3; 3:30-4:30—each of these swelling to the enormity of nothingness. What to do? What lies on the other side of boredom and all the things we know to do? 

Were we empty or were we full? 

And in giving us emptiness were they (They!) giving us in as open-handed and non-directed a manner as possible, ourselves? 

Because it seems to me now—did it seem to me then?—that that is what each of us had in that room. The boundless territory of the perhaps (we were only 18) previously unexamined self. The freedom, the inescapability of observing our own minds. 

For me, that was the fascination of it, but also the difficulty.

https://thelockedroom-stmartins.blogspot.com/2018/03/empty-or-full-eternal-question.html

Sheila Ross | Encountering time - the 'materials' project | April 2018

There has been much talk amongst us of the 'Materials' project being a raw encounter with stuff. And many of us seem to have adopted this in our art practice: the unfolding process of working through stuff. Being in conversation with it as John Crossley once said.

I did take that away with me, but even more so it was an encounter with bare unvarnished time. No prescription made as to what to do with it, how to fill it — and can filling time really be our job in life? That sounds as off the mark to me now as the idea, strangely prevalent in other parts of the sculpture school, as filling time, or life, with sculpture.

It’s something that seeped in gradually, the desire, need, to work in and with time. There is no stuff to it, in fact stuff gets in the way. I remember well the day I realised I preferred my studio empty to anything I could put in there. Empty, I could watch the day. But how to make it visible to a viewer, bring to consciousness something intangible that is always in background? It’s the medium in which we live, we swim in it without noticing. It seems it would have to be theatrical, like Waiting for Godot which I saw at the time.

Theatre has a captive audience, voluntary but there for the duration. We also were a captive audience: an audience to ourselves, each other, the long unfolding of the days; and as I now appreciate, the tutors were also audience to the rolling out of their unscripted play, and to their own moment by moment responses. And all of us were audience to the complete impossibility of setting these basics in our minds as something knowable, plannable, foreseeable. Because one morning after having worked for over a week with wire and tin sheet, we went in to find the studio clean and emptied of all traces of our work, with just 13 blocks of polystyrene wrapped in brown paper.

It’s interesting how many people went on to work in the time-based mediums of film and video: Tony Hill, Andy Darley, Nick May, Tom McPhillips, Tim Jones, myself. Who else?

And I still try to create the basic situation for myself: an empty room, nothing extraneous, where I can encounter myself and all the parallel worlds of time in which I live. And the big question: How to leave a trace of that experience that is really true to it, so that others can witness it and so witness themselves?

https://thelockedroom-stmartins.blogspot.com/2018/04/encountering-time-materials-project.html