The Journal Block and Its Art School Context

This paper looks at an important moment in the recent history of UK art education by examining the magazine Block, a radical and interdisciplinary publication produced from within the art history department of an art school in the late 1970s and 1980s. Block was created and edited by a small group of lecturers at Middlesex Polytechnic, most of whom were art school educated; it was formed by, and in turn influenced, the milieu of studio-based art education in the UK. Despite the small scale of its operation, the magazine had a wide distribution in art colleges and was avidly read by lecturers looking for ways to incorporate new theoretical, often Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, perspectives into their teaching.