Working across the arts
Dartington's three arts structure (art, theatre and music) offered other opportunities beyond what was going on in the Art Department, which I (and several other staff), found particularly exciting. For one thing, the precedents in drama for engaging with social change and for community involvement were well established. Community arts itself often operated across the arts and there were well established community theatre companies such as Welfare State, Horse and Bamboo, IOU, Bread and Puppet Theatre in the USA, that worked outside regular theatre settings and touched into traditional forms of community celebration. Augusto Boal's famous 'Theatre of the Oppressed' offered powerful possibilities of direct political and social intervention. Over the years, art, music and theatre students engaged together in many group and community projects that added a colourful and exciting dimension to the work. (10)

The students
Students were drawn to Art and Social Context from all over Britain. Intake was around thirty a year with a relatively high proportion of mature students. They mostly arrived on the course not fully knowing what it was about, often drawn to an alternative way of approaching art or with a sense that they would like to combine an art practice with working with others. Some had specific social concerns they felt would not be accepted or supported in a traditional art school. Because motivation was a crucial factor for this kind of course, we took students with a wide range of abilities. Therefore, a particular focus at an early stage was to bring up the skill level of weaker students. In this we benefited from a staff used to working with unskilled people in a community setting.

Student residencies (11)
Our primary educational devices for this work in addition to normal studio practice, seminars, etc., were staff- led group projects (in college or based in the community), work experience (in which students went out to join relevant professional groups and projects) and the student artist's residency (which we originally referred to as 'Placement'). Whereas work experience entailed attachment to a professional arts organisation, the residencies (generally in the final year of the course) involved students in choosing and working in contact with a setting where art was not normally practised. Students were expected to initiate their own live project in the chosen setting, often with participation from people who lived or worked there. While the group work and work experience proved powerful devices, the real driving force and often formative influence for students was the residency, which increasingly over the years gave the course its identity. Students often said that it was only through doing their residencies that they suddenly understood what contextual art was about. This could also be a severe challenge to students, many of whom were still at a vulnerable stage with their own artistic maturity. To balance students' artistic development with community- based work was one of our biggest challenges and the source of endless curriculum adjustment.

In describing the course to others, the most inspiring aspect of it and the one that excited most curiosity was always the amazing variety of settings different students managed to engage with. Whatever you cared to name, our students had been there and done it. Student residencies included: a public laundry, a terrace house, a fish shop, Water Board offices, shopping malls, bus stops, a Macdonald's restaurant, youth groups, weight watcher's groups, adventure playgrounds, streets, centres for people with disability, orphanages, an industrial museum, a gymnasium, pubs, a church, railway stations, schools, a foundry, a biological research centre.... the list could go on and on.

The essence of the student residency (as with the APG - see footnote 11) was that work should emerge from a sustained contact with the setting, what went on there, and the people concerned. Thus it required students to investigate and to react to whatever they found - not just to 'weigh in' with a pre-formed idea. This was a 'listening' model of art practice, which could be slow and possibly undramatic, but if well handled would always lead to work that connected organically and surprisingly to the chosen setting and could not have been conceived or exist without it. Starting with an 'open brief' was the crucial factor.

Assessment of this work could be a headache - somehow we had to balance judgments of product and process - i.e. artistic competence in what was produced with other (less visible) abilities in setting up and running projects and working with others. Where, a student showed considerable strength in one of these and not the other, judgment became quite difficult.

Closure of the Dartington course and the move to Bristol
The course at Dartington was brought to an unexpected and premature ending. At the close of the academic year 1989-1990, it suddenly transpired that the College was substantially in debt. A restructuring and scaling down had to take place and in the process the Art Department was squeezed out. The full reasons for this have never been made public, but the official argument was that a simplified (more economical) college would best survive if it reduced its portfolio of courses to performing arts only. In these cynical times, it is seldom acknowledged how much love and care can go into an educational process, when the people working within it really believe in the work (and this applies as much to students as to staff). All the more shattering then if, what has been so carefully nursed along against all sorts of odds, is suddenly and arbitrarily abandoned for institutional (rather than academic) reasons. We were all therefore (staff and students) profoundly shaken by the news of closure. A campaign against closure was mounted but was unsuccessful. However, we refused to accept that this educational project was at an end and went looking for an alternative host institution.

As it turned out, the course was set up again immediately at Bristol Polytechnic (which soon became University of the West of England), restarting even before the Dartington course had finally closed. This was thanks to the mediation of Iain Biggs (then Head of Fine Art), who saw an interesting possibility of running two Fine Art courses with differing philosophies side by side. While this did not help the majority of the Dartington staff or the remaining students, it ensured the continuity of the project that we had all worked for. Meanwhile at Dartington, a new 'Visual Performance' course was initiated by Sally Morgan (an art course with a performance remit) and, as I understand, the replanning of all courses drew partly from the thinking that had informed Art and Social Context.