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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA) founder and architect Trevor Green selected Maurice Agis and Peter Jones\u2019 installation Space Place: Constructed Space<\/em> Participation<\/em> as MOMA\u2019s first self-generated exhibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the words of art critic Andrew Forge, the exhibition declared the director\u2019s intention to make the museum \u2018a place where things can happen\u2026 music can be played or children can run about, people can talk.\u2019 Forge\u2019s review favourably contrasted the installation with so-called \u2018gallery art\u2019, with its associations of dullness and elitism. Like MOMA itself, Space Place<\/em> was for \u2018real people in real places.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of its physical appearance, Space Place<\/em> was a geometrical installation in bright primary hues. Square and rectangular planes of blue, red and green defined a three-dimensional space, set against or jutting out from walls partially covered in black fabric and lit by a large light box. Poles of blue and yellow shot through them at right angles, ending abruptly in mid-air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Agis and Jones had trained as artists at St. Martin\u2019s in the early 1960s. They originally conceived the work in a Fulham basement in 1964, spending a year transforming a decrepit carpenter\u2019s workshop into Space Place<\/em>\u2019s first incarnation. In Oxford, the materials were mostly newly developed synthetics, such as viscotex and lamithane, all donated by industrial sponsors including Pfizer Limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The museum went to considerable lengths to ensure that Agis and Jones\u2019 geometrical installation in primary colours be seen not as a finished piece for contemplation but as an incitement to further creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Space Place<\/em> was conceived as an environment for personal interaction, rather than as an arrangement of solemn attention in its own right. And yet the artists\u2019 ambitions for the piece were far from modest: their design for the gallery claimed to offer a \u2018total experience\u2019 that could reverse the alienation of \u2018man from man and man from his nature.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n The visual experience was supplemented by a taped soundtrack of \u2018hoots and booms,\u2019 and the museum invited a distinguished succession of experimental artists and musicians to perform within the gallery. Yoko Ono enacted Tao k\u014dans<\/em>, Adrian Mitchell recited anti-war poetry, and John Tilbury performed an action with a piano and some beans to a youthful \u2018bearded, jeaned and bell-bottomed audience.\u2019 Typically for the museum in this period, none of these events were documented, although Tillbury\u2019s performance was registered a local reporter who commented \u2018perhaps it was a happening at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art last night, because certain things happened, though it\u2019s hard to explain exactly what.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/modernartoxford.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/MAO01SP-1024x702.jpg\")
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