The Independent Daily

A newspaper cutting of the "Leeds 13" - the art students whose work of art was a spoof holiday in Malaga - is a trophy pinned to Esther Windsor's office wall at the University of Wolverhampton's School of Art and Design, where she is exhibitions organiser.

On the same floor, her exhibition, "Heatwave", includes the work of the students' tutor, Terry Atkinson, Leeds University's Reader in the Rhetorics and Practices of Fine Art. It is seven pages of typescript in a glazed frame - "The Wild Think" (1966) - and, to the untutored, is
only slightly more recognisable as an artwork than his students' escapade.

If the newspaper cutting and The Wild Think were swapped, one for the other, artists of the Situationist persuasion would not turn a hair.

It is the 30th anniversary of the Paris student riots of '68 – which were triggered by Situationist International, a group of artist-intellectuals who chafed against what they saw as social conditioning and strove to create situations that would liberate the energy of the people. To them, putting up barricades was a form of performance art. One of their aims was to supersede art as we know it.

"Heatwave" was the title of the British offshoot of the Paris Situationists. Formed shortly before the events of '68. Its magazine of the same name extolled heroic nihilism and was probably the first to evolve a critique of style culture.

"Heatwave" is largely forgotten today. The emergence of irs name as a coded reference to Situationist International (SI) in the exhibition's title, once explained, might make one wonder whether there are still Situationists under the bed.

In fact, we can expect more cultural sabotage of the Leeds 13 variety, even though they themselves are not involved. The concepts of SI are potent enough to have influenced the thinking of agit groups as seemingly unrelated as the Angry Brigade, jailed for conspiracy to cause explosions in the early Seventies, and the Punks - invented by the Situationist spiv Malcolm McLarcn after reading a proposal by Chris Gray, co-founder of British SI, for a "totally unpleasant pop group".

However, instead of bombings and spit, we are likely to see a form of neo-conceptual art that has nothing in common with Damien Hirst and the YBAs and even less in common with the new-realist paintings that Charles Saatchi has started buying. It will be jokey, japey, performance-based, and will open an art-critical chasm between art as paint-and -canvas and art as situation comedy.

The Leeds 13 escapade is an example of how dormant SI concepts can suddenly burst into the open. The 13 students, the entire third year in fine arts, were well versed in the Paris  culture of the Sixties at the classes of Ken Hay, head of Leeds University's department of fine art. They hatched plans for the jaunt to Malaga at Atkinson's weekly seminars on cognitive space and cultural evolution - but kept him in the dark. He believes that their art-trip showed more a convergence with Situationist ideas than the direct influence of them,

But there are some tantalising correspondences. The students claimed that they had duped the Student Union into shelling out the money (£1,126) for the project. Back in 1966, a group of students at Strasbourg University, having got themselves elected to a moribund Student Union, used Union funds to run off 10,000 copies of a revolutionary comic strip attacking student apathy- Their initiative spiralled into the events of May '68.

In those days, Situationists formed themselves into democratic councils - just as the Leeds 13 insist on acting and speaking to the media as a group.

At the trial of the Strasbourg students, who were convicted of misusing Union funds, the judge uttered words not totally dissimilar to the apoplectic press provoked by the Malaga jaunt: "Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with 'unlicensed pleasure' as its only goal".

Mr Atkinson, now 58, was co-founder of Art and Language, a group with Situationist sympathies - notwithstanding its complaint that Situationist texts were too difficult 10 read. It was formally constituted in 1968 in order to promote art that extended beyond traditional categories - notably texts presented as art, such as The Wild Think.

Shortly after Art and Language's formation, Atkinson and another Art and Language founder, David Bainbridge - now 56, a lecturer in fine art at Wolverhampton University who is also exhibiting in Heatwave - were sacked from their academic posts at Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry, on the grounds that what their Art Theory course taught was not an.

In a farcical episode, Don Lock, an academic philosopher at the University of Warwick, was invited by the Lanchester authorities to investigate whether what they were teaching might be classified as philosophy, instead. Lock was equivocal, pointing out that categories tended to leak into one another. But Atkinson, Bainbridge, and another Art and Language founder, Michael Baldwin, nevertheless had their employment, in Atkinson's words, "brutally terminated".

Another name crops up in the web of Situationist associations – that of David Wise, one of the notorious Wise twins, who, with Chris Gray, founded King Mob, Heatwave's successor. King Mob hatched stunts such as dressing up as Father Christmases and entering Selfridges, where they handed out toys from the counters to children, much to the consternation of parents, children, and the police.

Malcolm McLaren reminisces thar he was amazed to discover that Gray and the Wise twins were art lecturers.

Atkinson taught alongside David Wise at Birmingham College of Art in the Sixties. They were sacked at the same time.

Atkinson's The Wild Think text is a series of flashbacks and fast-forwards dating from 1966 (when Art and Language began) to 2005. One passage describes a vivid turquoise lark flying higher and higher, flashing on and off in different colours- The hero is observing it in an SLE area - Stimulating Learning Environment.

Bainbridge has contributed two beige monochrome watercolours of men working at a kiln, between which is displayed a political tract written in [he jargon of the Stalinist Communist Party, that begins:

"We, workers, activists and democrats, meeting in Berlin, coming from 23 European countries, Denounce .." and ends with "Let us ensure the success of the mass rally in Paris in May 1998" - that's last month. Back in 1968, the Stalinists baulked at supporting the students. Surprising, the sort of fellow travellers that the Situationisis have attracted since then.

Among other exhibits: protest placards by Gavin Turk, record cover designs by Hypgnosis - remember, in the Seventies, freelance design groups were something new - and several videos, including one by Mark Wallinger showing him reciting Genesis in front of a reverse-
motion escalator, which he finally ascends. Star turn, by David Burrows: blown up colour photographs of the decapitated heads of George Michael, and Tony and Cheri Blair, from miniatures made from chewed bubble gum, overpainted - with plenty of blood, reminds you of what Malcolm McLaren did to the Queen.

Heatwave, University of Wolverhampton School of Art and Design, Molyneux Street, Wolverhampton (01902 321941) until 16 June.