John Latham (artist)
Encyclopedia
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, (February 23, 1921 – January 1, 2006, born in Zambia
) was a British
conceptual artist who lived for many years in England
. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences. He married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in 1951 and together they devised the idea of "flat time", based on theoretical physics.
Whatever the scientific credentials, the effect on Latham's work was profound and the spray can (or 'atomising paint instrument' as he sometimes called it) immediately became his primary medium, as can be seen in 'Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object' (1954) in the Tate Gallery
collection. By the 1960s Latham had, in addition to spray paint, begun tearing, sawing and burning books to create collage material for his work, as in his 1960 piece Film Star.
displayed an unmarked canvas as an artwork. In his writings he asserted that language, being object based, could not adequately describe an event based reality. As the artist Richard Hamilton
put it, 'Civilised man has been using a medium (language)... which denies concepts of dimensionality and event many twentieth-century thinkers regard as fundamental to a farther understanding of the universe' (Hamilton, R. 1987). This creates a dichotomy between people, their decisions and the actions that result from them. Without resolving this issue, there can be no progress past a certain point in human development.
The ideas of event-based art were hugely influential in the emerging fields of performance art
and happening
s. In 1966, Latham took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, along with Fluxus
artists such as Yoko Ono
and Gustav Metzger
. He constructed three large "skoob towers" (towering piles of books), dubbed "the laws of England", on the pavement outside the British Museum
, and then set fire to the structure. He had not, however, obtained permission from the authorities to perform this work, so both the fire department and the police intervened.
Also in 1966, Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg
's Art and Culture — a work that held something of a cult status at that time — from the library of Saint Martin's School of Art, where Latham was employed as a part-time lecturer. At a party Latham invited students to chew pages from the book, and then distilled the resulting pulp into a clear liquid. This process took several months, and Latham began to receive letters from the library demanding its return. Latham presented a vial of the fermented book-pulp to the library, but this was rejected and his teaching contract was not renewed. The vial and correspondence became an artwork of its own, displayed in a leather case; the piece is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York.
Perhaps the culmination of Latham's fusion of art, science and sociology was the concept of Flat Time. In its most basic form, it is represented by a canvas attached at the top to a cylinder which rolls up and unrolls on an electric motor. The back of the canvas faces outwards so that the image is only visible along the cylinder at the point where it unrolls. This represents the present moment in passing time which can only be made sense of when related to what has already gone, the past, represented by the image on the back of the canvas. The ideas contained within the time-base roller, as it is know, are far more complicated. While the vertical represents passing, clock time, scale along the cylinder is the 'time-base'. This is a concept, developed by Latham, asserting that the period of an event is fundamental to its properties and to how it relates to other events. The cylinder is scaled A-Z with A denoting the shortest possible event, M the period of human activity cycles (roughly 30 years), U the period of the universe and Z a notional period in which other universe could occur. The square of this canvas, time-base against clock time, is the area where all events can be mapped out, as Latham himself puts it, 'This omnipresent component the painting surface becomes a score which unfolds while being there all the time, via the time base.' If all events, however large or small, can be represented on the same scale, then psychology and sociology must take an equal foot physics in our understanding of the universe.
Latham tried to apply these ideas not just to his own art practice but to wider society through the Artist Placement Group
(APG) that he set up with Steveni in 1966, which aimed to integrate a more holistic, intuitive style of thinking into business and government and can be seen as the precursor to the current artist residence system.
put on an exhibition of Latham's work, but cancelled his next piece 'God is Great #2', believing the current political climate (just after the 7th of July bombings
) could incite violence against the work or gallery. The piece consists of three sacred religious texts (the Qur'an
, Bible
and Talmud
) embedded in a sheet of glass.
From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time Ho, in Peckham
, London
and died at Kings College Hospital, Camberwell,on the first of January 2006.
Flat Time Ho opened to the public for a year-long programme of exhibitions
and events in October 2008. The programme focuses on important moments and
themes within Latham's practice, including his involvement with underground
culture in 1960s London, his interest in ecological issues and solutions and
a re-evaluation of his work in film and video. Works by Latham's
contemporaries and collaborators will also be exhibited, as well as pieces
by a younger generation of artists influenced by his practice.
published an unflattering account of his experience interacting with John Latham on artnet.com entitled "Perils of publishing" concerning the book John Latham: The incidental person—his art and ideas (1995). In the article, Walker says, "[The book] was about to be published by Middlesex University Press (MUP), [when] the press received an alarming letter from Latham’s solicitor. He demanded that the book be withdrawn and threatened legal action if it was not." Walker says that he received long letters by Latham on a daily basis demanding changes to the text. In 2009, Walker publicly released the legal letters surrounding the dispute, stating, ""I am not a paid advocate or PR person for John Latham… I have told him that if the book is still not what he wants—he should disown it. This would make a good publicity point!"
Latham, J. (1984) Report of a Surveyor. London; Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer.
Zambia
Zambia , officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west....
) was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
conceptual artist who lived for many years in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
. He believed that violence and conflict between the people of the world is the result of ideological differences. He married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in 1951 and together they devised the idea of "flat time", based on theoretical physics.
1950s
In 1954 Latham, already interested in collaboration between art and science, was invited by two of his friends, Anita Kohsen and Clive Gregory, to create a mural for their Halloween party. Kohsen, an animal behaviourologist, and Gregory, an astronomer, were looking for ways to integrate biological and psychological sciences with physical science. Central to this work was their theory that the most basic component of reality is not the particle, as in classical physics, but the least-event. Using a can of black spray paint, Latham produced a single burst of dots on a white surface. Latham realised that this could be used as a visual description of how a least-event (the spray burst) produced action (the dots) in a pre-existing, a-temporal omnipresent (the white wall). Latham later declared this idea as I054 (idiom 54). While Latham himself often cited the work of these two scientists and their 'Institute for the Study of Mental Images' as providing the scientific basis for much of his theories, Gregory's ideas were perhaps more concerned with a rationalisation of his own spirituality than with rigorous scientific thinking (Gregory, R. L. 1996).Whatever the scientific credentials, the effect on Latham's work was profound and the spray can (or 'atomising paint instrument' as he sometimes called it) immediately became his primary medium, as can be seen in 'Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object' (1954) in the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
collection. By the 1960s Latham had, in addition to spray paint, begun tearing, sawing and burning books to create collage material for his work, as in his 1960 piece Film Star.
1960s
Through the 1960s he developed his ideas into a complex cosmology that he termed 'Event Structure,' linking it to philosophy, literature and contemporary art practice. He stated that art's trajectory reached its least event in 1951, when Robert RauschenbergRobert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
displayed an unmarked canvas as an artwork. In his writings he asserted that language, being object based, could not adequately describe an event based reality. As the artist Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
put it, 'Civilised man has been using a medium (language)... which denies concepts of dimensionality and event many twentieth-century thinkers regard as fundamental to a farther understanding of the universe' (Hamilton, R. 1987). This creates a dichotomy between people, their decisions and the actions that result from them. Without resolving this issue, there can be no progress past a certain point in human development.
The ideas of event-based art were hugely influential in the emerging fields of performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
and happening
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
s. In 1966, Latham took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, along with Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
artists such as Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
and Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger
Gustav Metzger is an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966...
. He constructed three large "skoob towers" (towering piles of books), dubbed "the laws of England", on the pavement outside the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
, and then set fire to the structure. He had not, however, obtained permission from the authorities to perform this work, so both the fire department and the police intervened.
Also in 1966, Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...
's Art and Culture — a work that held something of a cult status at that time — from the library of Saint Martin's School of Art, where Latham was employed as a part-time lecturer. At a party Latham invited students to chew pages from the book, and then distilled the resulting pulp into a clear liquid. This process took several months, and Latham began to receive letters from the library demanding its return. Latham presented a vial of the fermented book-pulp to the library, but this was rejected and his teaching contract was not renewed. The vial and correspondence became an artwork of its own, displayed in a leather case; the piece is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York.
Perhaps the culmination of Latham's fusion of art, science and sociology was the concept of Flat Time. In its most basic form, it is represented by a canvas attached at the top to a cylinder which rolls up and unrolls on an electric motor. The back of the canvas faces outwards so that the image is only visible along the cylinder at the point where it unrolls. This represents the present moment in passing time which can only be made sense of when related to what has already gone, the past, represented by the image on the back of the canvas. The ideas contained within the time-base roller, as it is know, are far more complicated. While the vertical represents passing, clock time, scale along the cylinder is the 'time-base'. This is a concept, developed by Latham, asserting that the period of an event is fundamental to its properties and to how it relates to other events. The cylinder is scaled A-Z with A denoting the shortest possible event, M the period of human activity cycles (roughly 30 years), U the period of the universe and Z a notional period in which other universe could occur. The square of this canvas, time-base against clock time, is the area where all events can be mapped out, as Latham himself puts it, 'This omnipresent component the painting surface becomes a score which unfolds while being there all the time, via the time base.' If all events, however large or small, can be represented on the same scale, then psychology and sociology must take an equal foot physics in our understanding of the universe.
Latham tried to apply these ideas not just to his own art practice but to wider society through the Artist Placement Group
Artist Placement Group
The Artist Placement Group was founded in 1966 as an artist-run organisation seeking to refocus art outside the gallery, predominantly through attaching an artist in a business or governmental context for a period of time....
(APG) that he set up with Steveni in 1966, which aimed to integrate a more holistic, intuitive style of thinking into business and government and can be seen as the precursor to the current artist residence system.
2000s
In 2005 Tate BritainTate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
put on an exhibition of Latham's work, but cancelled his next piece 'God is Great #2', believing the current political climate (just after the 7th of July bombings
7 July 2005 London bombings
The 7 July 2005 London bombings were a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in the United Kingdom, targeting civilians using London's public transport system during the morning rush hour....
) could incite violence against the work or gallery. The piece consists of three sacred religious texts (the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
, Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
and Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
) embedded in a sheet of glass.
From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time Ho, in Peckham
Peckham
Peckham is a district in south London, England, located in the London Borough of Southwark. It is situated south-east of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
and died at Kings College Hospital, Camberwell,on the first of January 2006.
Flat Time Ho opened to the public for a year-long programme of exhibitions
and events in October 2008. The programme focuses on important moments and
themes within Latham's practice, including his involvement with underground
culture in 1960s London, his interest in ecological issues and solutions and
a re-evaluation of his work in film and video. Works by Latham's
contemporaries and collaborators will also be exhibited, as well as pieces
by a younger generation of artists influenced by his practice.
Book controversy
In 2007, art historian John A. WalkerJohn A. Walker
John A. Walker is a British art critic and historian who has written over 15 books on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on mass media. He has also written on design history methodology...
published an unflattering account of his experience interacting with John Latham on artnet.com entitled "Perils of publishing" concerning the book John Latham: The incidental person—his art and ideas (1995). In the article, Walker says, "[The book] was about to be published by Middlesex University Press (MUP), [when] the press received an alarming letter from Latham’s solicitor. He demanded that the book be withdrawn and threatened legal action if it was not." Walker says that he received long letters by Latham on a daily basis demanding changes to the text. In 2009, Walker publicly released the legal letters surrounding the dispute, stating, ""I am not a paid advocate or PR person for John Latham… I have told him that if the book is still not what he wants—he should disown it. This would make a good publicity point!"
See also
Allan, Kenneth R. “Business Interests, 1969-72: N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Les Levine, Bernar Venet, and John Latham” in Parachute 106 (April-June, 2002): 106-122.Latham, J. (1984) Report of a Surveyor. London; Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer.
Sources
Hamilton, R. (1986) John Latham. In: Lisson Gallery (1987) John Latham: Early Works. London: Lisson Gallery.External links
- John Latham's Flat Time House
- John Latham's Online Archive Project (Ligatus, University of the Arts London)
- Tate Britain's 'John Latham in Focus' exhibition website
- Interview with John Latham from the Tate Britain website
- The Guardian newspaper's obituary of John Latham
- Lisson Gallery
- John Latham's website and discussion of flat-time (not available 10/01/06) Archive
- The Least Event The Future of Flat Time HO - The Least Event, Camberwell Arts Week (24 and 25 June - 11am - 6pm)
- 'Portrait with Word' of John Latham by Mark-Steffen Goewecke