The artist and tutor Rita Donagh initiated The White Room Project, Reading University Fine Art Department in1970. This project became part of The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in 2 | To Be Potential, Cooper Gallery, December 2021- February 2022 with contributions of archival materials and an audio commission The Ballad of the White Room by Graham Challifour, Rod Melvin and myself, all participants in this 1970 project. Also included were my collages from the time, Drawing Life.

This text was used in the publicity for the Cooper Gallery exhibition:

Declaring that our collective future is determined not by what we know, but by how we create and share knowledge, Sit-in #2: To Be Potential activates how artistic practice as pedagogy dares education, in the words of bell hooks, to be ‘the practice of freedom’.

Political in origin, radical in intent and emancipatory by nature, this radical pedagogy is an inherently social practice. Subverting hierarchies between ‘those who think they know’ and ‘those who assume they don’t’, artistic practice as pedagogy is a global phenomenon that recognises no conceptual, discursive or intellectual limits. Characterised by an ethics of equal access and an ethos of generous solidarity, together the radical pedagogical practices featured in Sit-in #2: To Be Potential transform knowledge from a capitalist commodity to an emancipatory power available to all.

Juxtaposing significant and un(der) explored case studies from the Global North and the Global South, Sit-in #2: To Be Potential rethinks and unsettles the conventions, hierarchies and economies of access that haunt the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Placing emphasis on knowledge as a collective experience and communal act, Sit-in #2: To Be Potential will occupy and extend the social and political implications of radical pedagogies from the early 20th century to the present; including the Bauhaus, the Basic Course in Newcastle, Anti-university London, Copenhagen Free University, the Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art, Edinburgh Arts Summer School, Free University New York, GUDSKUL in Jakarta, The Hedgeschoolproject in Ireland, the Hornsey Sit-in of 1968, The White Room in Reading and Womanifesto in Thailand, and The Rooftop Institute in Hong Kong, amongst many others.

The White Room experiment was instigated by artist and tutor Rita Donagh with a group of students at the Fine Art Department, Reading University in May 1970. Students included Will Adams, Charles Astier, Becky Bailey, Anne (Sarah) Bean, Graham Challifour, Phil Cole, Jennifer Hutcheson, Roderick Melvin, Chippy Muir, Suki Patterson, Monica Ross, Stuart Smith, Philip Winder, and Alison Yarrington; while tutors and visiting artists involved included Derek Boshier, Cornelius Cardew, Roger Cook, Keith Critchlow, Tom Cross, Alan Davis, Terry Frost, Carol Hodgeson, Keith Milow and Claude Rogers.

Though initiated by an artist-tutor, The White room was a shared event over a three-week period, a collaboration that took off initially from the traditional situation of the ‘life room’ and included the presence and participation of the model. Starting with the decision to paint the floor white – giving the project its name and signifying a new beginning – the centre of the experiment was a consideration of the figure of the ‘life’ model, and a question of what could happen in a ‘life room’ at a time when art education was subject to radical changes.
Bringing aesthetic activity into violent conjunction with real world politics and shattering the temporal and spatial hermetic of the life room and educational environment, while working on this studio project the radio transmitted the shocking news that four American students had been shot by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, during a protest over the Vietnam War. In the same spirit as that of Joseph Beuys (and influenced at Reading by the presence of Beuys’ close associate Caroline Tisdall) Donagh was encouraging a consideration of fundamental questions concerning the nature of art, especially to challenge ideas of works of art as self-contained gestures, and the role of the artist within broader cultural and political contexts.

This time was profoundly impactful to Donagh and her students, inspiring Donagh’s painting ‘Reflection on Three Weeks in May, 1970’ and then-students Anne Bean, Graham Challifour and Rod Melvin to reconvene in May 2021 and devise the performance work ‘Nothing’, exactly 50 years later.

A newly commissioned audio work The Ballad of the White Room by Anne Bean, Graham Challifour, Rita Donagh and Rod Melvin is installed within the reconstructed elements of the White Room alongside ephemera of the 1970 experiment and Drawing Life (1970) a series of collage works reflecting on the White Room by Anne Bean.