Chapter seven First student protest.
The other compulsory trip abroad to complete this twentieth century
version of the Grand Tour for we who had learnt a smattering of Italian
for two years was a whistlestop dash from Florence to Sienna, Assisi,
Padua, Rome and Venice, all the images and artists left jumbled in the
mind like a quick fire slide show.
In Italy it was cheaper to eat standing up than sitting down just when
you needed a rest. We couldn’t afford a gondola, anyway there was no
romance except the Swiss girl went out with a soldier who wore one of
those feathered helmets. In Rome we walked single file down a street as
a passing male drove slowly by, playing with his penis, so that each of
us turned round to check with the student behind if we’d really seen this.
It was impossible to walk about in Italy as an 18 or 19 year old woman
without a constant what would later be called harrassment. No, we were
not Americanos, no, we would not go dancing, no. I turned on a group of
boys so savagely that they dropped back a little stunned by my anger. It
was far more constant a nuisance than at home. We were evidently not
Italian and therefore were assumed to be much more available.
As it was Easter many of the sacred works of art were covered up by
lenten purple cloths. We also missed Leonardo’s last supper and the
Borghese gallery in Rome was closed.
I prefered the pre-Renaissence works. The Michelangelo David was
too big and fleshy, too Derek. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, which
Professor Smart had had projected on the very low lecture room ceiling
for weeks on end, where it was reduced to about two feet long, was a
bore. I tried to lie on the floor to study it and was at once ordered to get
up by the invigilating guards. I said to Bryony there should be a
trampoline and we could bounce up and scrape bits off until the
wretched thing was destroyed.
The tutors were distressed that the stuudents seemed to have given up
the practice of sketching. The University staff didn’t mix with the art
college tutors and the politics of running a course between the two
institutions was becoming awkward. The art college had opened a new
building with a white brick interior. Margaret Thatcher, education
minister, came to open it and was greeted by shouts of ‘Margaret
Thatcher, milk Snatcher’ as she’d stopped the school milk provision that
had made us grow taller than the previous generation. In the old council
flats opposite the tenants hung out a banner ‘They’ve tarted up the
outsides [hastily repainted the week before] come and look at the
Insides’. She didn’t. The new building had a new regime of students
having no individual territory, none of the little personal cubicles beloved
of art students and that I was looking forward to. There was instead a
big open plan space with clean, new metal tables and no years of
scrapings of oil paint like there’d been in the old place and that had so
attracted me at my interview.
In Italy I didn’t take to the Venetian artists either, but I took a trip alone
to Torcello and loved the Byzantine mosaics. I didn’t like shopping for
shoes endlessly like the other four girls and I went off boldly alone to
see the Appian way and the Catacombs. Jane, the Professor’s daughter
was impressed that I knew all the events of holy week from earlier
instruction in Christianity. I hadn’t really been able to believe in it all
since before my confirmation when I was ten when my Mother said that
of course she didn’t believe in the virgin birth. I thought belief had to be
all or nothing but then I couldn’t stop it being chipped away in bits even
though I had loved the stained glass windows of St.Thomas’ Church in
Derby and the painting of Christ with a lantern, and the evangelical
course on which we all got a little gold key on a red ribbon and Father
Gibbard gave impassioned sermons and there was at least time away
from home to hear of ‘the key to happiness’ and be assured over and
over again that you were loved, [happy,loved and saved] that your
decisions were important, that you were a person apart from your family.
It gave a space for thought and for topics that were never broached at
home.
I loved the Giottos in Padua and Assisi. Assisi was so beautiful with the
hills and I decided it would be an excellent place for my honeymoon. I’d
wear the green satin pre - Raphaelite dress and I’d be properly in love. I
was clearing space where such a thing could happen, to care
passionately, not just for art, but for another person. I was in love with
the idea of it.
I also loved Donatello’s David, so slim and sweet and androgenous,
Botticelli’s Venus and the picture of Spring, the black and white marble
patterns and the spaces and the warmth in Florence, the being
surrounded by people I didn’t know who spoke another language, the
being away from home, a flaneur, observing from the sidelines, the flow
of images, the exhilaration of what art could be, so all around, an urge to
ving from the sidelines, the flow of images, the exhilaration of what art
could be, so all around, an urge to go beyond home,
to be someone completely different, completely away
from the Horrid Uncle, who I could now avoid ever seeing, to be some
one whose home would be wherever I was, who would not be going
home for Christmas, who would not be surrounded by three children like
my Sister, even though holding the first baby Anne had in my own arms
had made a wonderful connection, that could wait.
As one of the BAs had been removed from our course there was a
place vacant on our trip and this was taken up by an art student from the
college who was from Thailand, the one who had proffered the dirty
postcards.
There’s a thing some men fail to realise that women share a lot of
stuff. They are talking, talking all the time, in their shared hotel rooms,
every time they go off to the toilets together, all the time comparing
notes and sharing and learning and thinking. The Thai boy approached
the Swiss girl first, knowing her father was rich, but not that her Dad
wouldn’t pay her the equivalent of the grant that the working class one
got for free. He asked her, behind a sculpture somewhere in Florence if
she could lend him a few quid. She refused. When he approached the
other four, each time cornering them on their own, he didn’t even notice
that they were well prepared for his request as they turned him down
determinedly, their resolve strengthened by their nightly comparing if
notes.
In Florence we all went dancing and found on exiting that tv pictures of
us had been transmitted to street level.
Did anyone even take a camera? I didn’t. There is no record of those
glorious days in Italy. Were there any notes taken? Any drawings made?
It feels as if there were none, we were so rushed, so busy laughing and
talking and being that it’s all a blur of shimmering excitements and
carefree one thing after the next without stopping.
There were of course examinations. I was good at them, confident
that I could cope with the strain, whereas the doctor’s daughter suddenly
stood, knocking her chair over, called out something, ran out and was
only allowed to pass on grounds of recurrent migraine. However, she
wasn’t allowed to pass in practical, she was told to leave, and then
there’d be eight. She was one of those women who, sure only of her
unattractiveness and unfashionably large, formed sexual relationships
only with unavailable men who went back to their wives, then she could
say to herself that they’d never been free and that was why they left,
that it was over before it began. There were no classes for self esteem.
ere were no classes for self esteem.
None of us had heard of eating to make a barrier of fat against the
world. Who knows what had happened to make her thus?
This all coincided with a new mood in ’68. Students were meeting, there
were demonstrations in Paris and a revolution at Hornsey. Art students
from Hornsey arrived to address us, to politicize us.
We BA students were an ideal group to target, we mixed with the
years above and below in lectures, we studied in one compact area of
the campus and we were easy to get together. Julian Spalding was an
eloquent speaker and we forced the staff to listen to us. We demanded
to learn about art beyond Europe, beyond America, we wanted a world
view, what was happening now, globally. The staff could see the point
but how could they teach what they had never learnt?
There was no actual sit-in, but there was a sense of taking power. Our
main success was the doctor’s daughter. She was allowed to work over
the holidays, resubmit and return to the course. Solidarity worked and
she was re-admitted.
We did not even ask for female tutors or for study
of female artists beyond Hepworth and Riley. In fact the woman who
made the surrealist fur surrounded cup, Meret Oppenheim, had been
mentioned, but it was years before I discovered her gender.
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