From the Life to the Locked Room: applying the Chaîne Opératoire to the pedagogy of the copy

In response to the recommendations of the Coldstream report (1960), to qualify for validation, art courses across the UK engaged in a decade of restructuring and broadening of their course delivery. Emphasis was placed on the alignment of classical traditional methods and art technical skill along with Art History and later Complimentary Studies (1970). The balance of these relationships and what constituted technical processes had become less clearly defined. This paper explores whether between the years 1969-1973 the pedagogy of the copy continued to be instrumental within radical teaching projects, centered on and around St. Martins. Using the ‘A’ Course as a case study, how tutors collectively approached the development of alternative teaching methods, where the class itself became a site of a continual experimental process is discussed. To explicate the teaching rational, a framework, in the form an Operative Sequence is applied to a selection of projects that made up the course. Both the structure and methodology of their design and content are analyzed in order to ascertain, whether they dispel a genealogy and technical memory in the form of the copy and if this can be considered to be both evolutionary and dynamic.