Ian Kirkwood is an Artist and Head of the School of Fine and Applied Art at De Montfort University. Recent exhibitions include Blue Violet and Purple Brown and other untitled stories, at the Span Gallery, Melbourne 2006 and the Depot Gallery, Sydney 2006, and a forthcoming exhibition together with John Lancaster, What do you think you are looking at? at Peterborough Space 4 in June 2007.

Document or Docudrama?

Within the space of one recent week it was possible to watch Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life and Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock in Pollock on BBC.2. Now in the current exhibition at Tate Britain, St Martins Sculpture Department 1966-71, there is a chance to see footage from a BBC film documenting the innovative and radical course at St. Martins School of Art, known as the year of ‘the locked room’, another anguished depiction of the passionate and tormented creative process.

The film was made and screened in the early 1970’s and chiefly documents events on the course for a group of students in the year 1969-70. The course set out to challenge accepted artistic and educational practices and its principles and outcomes continue to offer a challenge of both today. The footage has come to represent an account of what the experience of the course was like and as such stands, as a key document for an increasing number of artists and educators keen to appraise the relevance and application of the course and its philosophy now.

The documentary however was a ‘docudrama’ made during the following year using the students as actors to dramatise some of the key events as they had unfolded on the course. This raises questions, which this presentation will pursue, not only about the nature of the course in its focus on the creative process but also about the possibility of documenting it. At the close of the symposium it will be possible to see some of the footage from the documentary in the current exhibition at Tate Britain.