London: 1968 
Tate Britain, London

TUCKED away in a side room adjacent to the Tate Britain gallery where the paintings of the early 20th century anti-war artist Mark Gertler are displayed — always worth a viewing — is an interesting exhibition of artworks, political ephemera, manifestos and posters that take us back to 1968.

It's an eclectic mix, with a wall of sculptural pieces including artworks from the 1969 ICA exhibition When Attitudes Become Form.

On the opposite wall to this small but illuminating selection of works which, at the time, were regarded as daringly radical is an almost complete display of agitational posters from the pioneering Camden Poster Workshop.

This was a very productive collective set up in 1968 under the impetus of the student protest movement of that year and inspired by the Atelier Populaire in Paris. It rapidly acquired a reputation for taking working-class protest seriously and willingly lent its primitive but effective equipment and the design skills of its collective to a wide range of strikes, occupations, tenants campaigns and anti-racist actions (see posterworkshop.co.uk).

At the opening of the show I came across workshop veteran Peter Dukes, who assembled this valuable display, talking to a couple of veterans from the Hornsey College of Art occupation and viewing Diana Holland's 1969 film which revisited the art student protests of a year earlier, recreating something of the atmosphere and rehearsing many of the innovative ideas that bubbled up during the nationwide series of art school strikes and occupations (see player.bfi.org.uk).

The show includes a fairly comprehensive selection of  tracts, declarations and discussion documents of the Hornsey occupation and the short-lived but fertile Movement for Rethinking Art and Design Education that followed.

Revisiting these events after 50 years unlocks a treasury of memories of the people involved, the various dramas and the deeply serious discussions that unpicked the fabric of Britain's dysfunctional system of art and design education and burst through the detail of a local dispute to engage, with great seriousness, government itself and the educational policy establishment.

Out of the 1968 time frame, but well within its emotional range, is Ruth Ewan's modified analogue clock (2011) which follows the 1793 French revolutionary reworking of time to a decimal metre. Each day of 10 hours, each hour of 100 minutes each minter of 100 seconds.

Otherwise, there are instances of deep frivolity on display, replete with self-indulgent rhetoric and ultra-left phrasemongering. The passage of time and events have punctured the radical pretensions of some of the protagonists, but the dominant impression is of a period in which ossified structures of thought and education, unresponsive structures of management and government and the slow accretion of discontents produced a series of ruptures and opened up new possibilities of thought and action.

Capturing some of these, as does this show, does not give us a full analytical picture, but it does convey something of the spirit of those times.

Runs until October 31, opening times: tate.org.uk