The course content and its sources
Art and Social Context encompassed what was actually a fairly loose assortment of approaches, some of which (on the face of it) were in conflict with each other. However this could often be a fruitful conflict and the juxtaposition of these different approaches and positions was what made the work interesting. The approaches, as described below, were not rigidly built into the course structure (we were at pains to avoid simply a training in any existing category of practice), but they did reflect various camps and affiliations within the staff and student body. They also reflected a range of what was going on in Britain at the time in the realm of 'contextual art' (although the actual term was to emerge much later). The approaches were as follows:

• a) The aim of widening access to arts practice (participation outside the realms of professional art: This focus drew upon the traditions of Dartington and the early manifestation of the College as an arts centre. Ivor Weeks, a key member of our team and a previous Head of Department, had originally run inspirational adult education courses in art as part of this arts centre (George, of 'Gilbert and George', was an early student). In terms of our course, this focus upon 'art for everyone' was to do with training the artist-teacher, capable of working, not so much in education itself, but in the wider community. Some of the students interested in this approach would continue into Art Therapy or Art for Special Needs (Bruce Kent's professional involvement in the latter also provided opportunities for students). In the short term, this aim of widening access to art, catered to the personal creative development of each individual student. My own particular interest in strategies for creative work, also fed into this aspect of the course. In pursuing this interest I had been inspired by such writers as Marion Milner and D.W. Winnicott, who understood creativity as being at the heart of all human life, not on some rarefied edge of it.
• b) Community Arts: Paulo Freire's book, Cultural Action for Freedom, had appeared in a Penguin edition in 1972. It articulated a view that provided the spirit of community arts. This was that cultural production was the right and property of everyone. Su Braden's book, Artists and People, published in 1978, (sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation), helped to raise the profile of community arts, documenting such initiatives as The Paddington Print Shop in London, The Great Georges Project in Liverpool, The Manchester Hospital Arts Project, Freeform, David Harding's work as a 'Town Artist' at Glenrothes New Town, and the Craigmillar Festival - work that was mostly based in deprived urban areas and concerned with unleashing the creative energies of people who for one reason or another lacked a 'voice'. As has been well described, community arts was seen at the time as a radical 'movement', not, as it later became, simply a matter of local authority provision. (7) There was actually some determined resistance from many community artists to the idea of community arts being institutionalised through education and some (understandable) pressure from the artists involved that any training offered should be done from within their own ranks. Although many students later went into community arts, we never claimed to be offering a training in it. Rather, community arts offered one of several models of practice that students would need to be aware of. The many groups and projects around Britain provided a huge resource for visiting staff, work experience, and examples to study. Parallel to these contacts in Britain, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, we were beginning to make contact with a number of activist art groups and artists in the USA. These included Suzanne Lacy, whose large scale participatory performances and tableaux, such as, Whisper the Waves the Wind (1984), or The Road of Poems and Boarders (1990), became a model for another kind of 'artist led' intervention, different to community arts, but sharing many of its aims. (8)
• c) Public Art: It is true that 'public art' or 'art in public places', has a long history as art in conjunction with architecture and urban design, reflecting church or state power, and even in the 20th century was often the domain of famous artists responding to (often rather grand) public commissions. But it had fairly recently emerged in a new, more participatory form, in which artists tried in various ways to involve local people in the work and to reflect the place in which the work was located. David Harding, fresh from being 'town artist' at Glenrothes New Town in Fife, brought with him to Dartington this more human, small scale and participatory vision of public art. It took inspiration from the eccentric structures that 'outsider artists' built for themselves (e.g. the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, or the monuments of Le Facteur Cheval in Southern France); the Chicago, San Francisco and other murals representing particular cultural groupings and minorities; the town art phenomenon itself; and a growing number of small scale environmental works, such as those by Jamie McCullough, or the organisation Common Ground. Later the temporary and conceptual public art work of Krystof Wadiczko, Jochen Gerz and Jenny Holzer pointed the way to other possibilities, a now-you-see- it-now-you-don't form of public art, in stark contrast to those huge statues of the Soviet era that had to be trucked away when it all came apart. (We had some difficulty at times in persuading validating bodies that we were not training students to build monuments of any kind). The community arts and public art element of the course was introduced at Dartington largely through the influence of David Harding and later developed by Sally Morgan, who took up his post in 1986, after he had left to initiate what became the highly successful course in Environmental Art at Glasgow.
• d) Critical art practice: This approach to context viewed art as a form of cultural enquiry, often in opposition to the dominant culture of the time. It stressed questions of audience and intent and the 'reading' of images as part of a wider visual culture. Art work stemming from this approach typically took on issues that had become problem areas in the culture - issues of race, class, gender, sexuality being recurrent among them. For individual students, it was often an opportunity to see questions concerning their own lives within a wider cultural frame - an obvious example being issues then current within the women's movement (9). Academically, this work was supported through contemporary cultural studies and film studies. John Hall, a poet and inspirational teacher enabled successive generations of students to successfully grapple with contemporary French philosophy and the intricacies of semiotics. It was through the cultivation a 'critical art practice', that the Dartington course achieved an integration of theoretical and practical work that was I think quite unusual in art courses at the time.

The above themes (a-d) could be viewed simply as aspects of any contextual practice, reflecting the who? why? where? and for whom? of contextual art. But they could also be at war with each other, each position seeming to the others to be lacking in some key ingredient. Work done in the name of community or public art could at times be visually crude and critically unsophisticated; workdone in the name of individual creative expression could be self enclosed and unfocussed; work attempting cultural critique could be impenetrable or, conversely, mind bashingly obvious, (i.e.. where some issue or other was beaten to death by the student concerned). Somewhere between all these hazards, good work could emerge. The course structure attempted to integrate all these positions into a single practice, where artistic competence, strategies for work in community settings, and cultural awareness could be built up together. Combining these elements within a single programme of work was perhaps its most distinctive feature.