John Latham; artist
Hyfler/Rosner
http://bertc.com/subone/latham.htm
http://www.lissongallery.com/images/exhibition/31Image1.jpg
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/latham/default.shtm
(I just saw this show at Tate Britain.)
05 January 2006
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, artist: born Livingstone,
Northern Rhodesia 23 February 1921; married 1951 Barbara
Steveni (two sons, one daughter); died London 1 January
2006.
One of John Latham's admirers, Damien Hirst, said, "He
proves it is possible to be an enfant terrible for ever." So
Latham remained, still at his death, at the age of 84, in
dispute with the Tate over their current exhibition of his
art.
Yet at the private view of "John Latham in Focus" at Tate
Britain in September, the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas
Serota, paid him an informal tribute: "Think of all the work
around the world that's derivative of John on which so much
praise has been lavished," he said, "and yet none of it
comes close to his vision."
He has been compared with William Blake as a visionary but
Latham saw his work as making connections between art
practice and science theory, using the former to expand the
latter. He saw books as signifiers of the dissemination of
knowledge but also of deceit, and as representative of a
different time-scale in metaphysical terms.
The argument was over the withdrawal from the exhibition,
without his sanction or that of the curator, of a key 1991
work, God is Great, for fear it would bring violent
reprisals from Muslim fundamentalists - the piece is a
six-foot-high sheet of plate glass with torn copies of the
Bible, the Talmud and the Koran stuck in it. Latham argued
that it was an apolitical observation:
Each of these books is in the format of linear time, but
they are not complete, each of them is as incomplete as the
others, and I thought that that was fair comment. What I
want to say is that this is how history looks to me, and in
a piece like God is Great I'm saying this is what happens,
whether I like it or not.
He found the Tate's concerns about public safety
incomprehensible: "To say we can't have this in here when
they know it's right in the middle of the art track is a
failure of common sense," he said. "It's an interrupted
discourse, and therefore it's a form of assault for purposes
which are nothing to do with the art." The issue was the
subject of a debate at the Tate in November which concluded
overwhelmingly that the piece should not have been
withdrawn.
John Latham was born in 1921 in Livingstone, Northern
Rhodesia, now Zambia, the son of the District Commissioner,
Geoffrey Latham, a devout Christian, and sent as a boarder
to Winchester College. He served in the Royal Navy in the
Second World War, witnessing from the battleship King George
V the sinking of the Hood on 24 May 1941 and the sinking
three days later of the Bismarck. Injured, he was
transferred to motor torpedo boats, serving under Peter
Scott and ending the war as a lieutenant-commander, with his
own MTB. Then, in 1946, he went to Regent Street
Polytechnic, and, after a year there, studied painting at
Chelsea College of Art and Design until 1950.
In the early Fifties he became more concerned with processes
than the production of art, and with recording sequences of
events and patterns of knowledge in different dimensions.
Books became a recurrent theme, both as compositional
elements for their metaphorical potential but also as a
signifier of knowledge and information. His south London
house has two giant books, their pages intertwined, emerging
from the façade.
He had his first solo exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery in
London in 1955. In 1958 he produced the first of his book
pieces with Burial of Count Orgaz, a transcription of El
Greco's paintings using overpainted and burnt books of prose
along with other objects like a whisky bottle and a
fireguard whose forms remain the same but whose appearances
are changed simply by spraying them black.
In the Sixties he created a series of what he called "Skoob
Towers", piles of venerable volumes like the Encyclopaedia
Britannica which he set on fire in a parody of how knowledge
systems work. A film of the event was a centrepiece of last
year's "Art of the Sixties" Tate Britain exhibition. "Those
things were never intended to be provocative, any more than
God is Great is," he said.
Latham taught fine art at St Martin's School of Art and
developed a popularity among students for his disregard for
the artistic establishment. Offended by the
compartmentalising of artists - "We don't have movements, we
have individuals who happen to be doing something different
to all the rest," he said - he borrowed from the college
library a copy of Clement Greenberg's 1961 Art and Culture
which expounded the theories of modernism, which Latham
found tendentious. He and his students carefully dismembered
the book, literally, and assiduously chewed every page, with
Latham arranging the regurgitated remains in an elegant
travelling case, which is now in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Latham was duly dismissed,
but only when he failed to return the book to the library.
He continued to experiment, through performance art,
paintings, assemblages, films and videos, and conceived his
Event-Structures representing a complex realigning of
social, economic, political and aesthetic structures around
a "time-base" in which the artist, far from being outside
the art in the conventional way, plays a critical part. It
was a time of performance art by Destructionists such as
Gustav Metzger, a lifelong friend, and the young
conceptualist Yoko Ono.
In 1951 he had married the artist Barbara Steveni, and with
her in 1966 he created the Artist Placement Group, a
sociological and aesthetic programme for placing artists in
positions within industry, science and government where they
could generate alternatives to what they saw as divisive
systems of power. The couple were working on an updated
version, Organisation and Imagination, when he died.
But he was most concerned latterly with scientists who, he
said, believed in two levels of time, one cosmological and
the other linear. He believed, and said he had proved
through art, that there was at least one more, which he
called Flat Time. "I'm saying all time is event-based, like
a spray of paint - each spot can be seen as a happening
issuing from a single event, the pressing of the spray
trigger," he said. "Physicists can't visualise it, and
they've got into an awful tangle." So seriously did the
scientists take him, however, that he was made an honorary
fellow of the Imperial College of Science and Technology.
Before Christmas John Latham and his wife visited the newly
reopened De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill. He caught a chill
and failed to overcome it.
Simon Tait
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, artist: born Livingstone,
Northern Rhodesia 23 February 1921; married 1951 Barbara
Steveni (two sons, one daughter); died London 1 January
2006.
One of John Latham's admirers, Damien Hirst, said, "He
proves it is possible to be an enfant terrible for ever." So
Latham remained, still at his death, at the age of 84, in
dispute with the Tate over their current exhibition of his
art.
Yet at the private view of "John Latham in Focus" at Tate
Britain in September, the Tate's director, Sir Nicholas
Serota, paid him an informal tribute: "Think of all the work
around the world that's derivative of John on which so much
praise has been lavished," he said, "and yet none of it
comes close to his vision."
He has been compared with William Blake as a visionary but
Latham saw his work as making connections between art
practice and science theory, using the former to expand the
latter. He saw books as signifiers of the dissemination of
knowledge but also of deceit, and as representative of a
different time-scale in metaphysical terms.
The argument was over the withdrawal from the exhibition,
without his sanction or that of the curator, of a key 1991
work, God is Great, for fear it would bring violent
reprisals from Muslim fundamentalists - the piece is a
six-foot-high sheet of plate glass with torn copies of the
Bible, the Talmud and the Koran stuck in it. Latham argued
that it was an apolitical observation:
Each of these books is in the format of linear time, but
they are not complete, each of them is as incomplete as the
others, and I thought that that was fair comment. What I
want to say is that this is how history looks to me, and in
a piece like God is Great I'm saying this is what happens,
whether I like it or not.
He found the Tate's concerns about public safety
incomprehensible: "To say we can't have this in here when
they know it's right in the middle of the art track is a
failure of common sense," he said. "It's an interrupted
discourse, and therefore it's a form of assault for purposes
which are nothing to do with the art." The issue was the
subject of a debate at the Tate in November which concluded
overwhelmingly that the piece should not have been
withdrawn.
John Latham was born in 1921 in Livingstone, Northern
Rhodesia, now Zambia, the son of the District Commissioner,
Geoffrey Latham, a devout Christian, and sent as a boarder
to Winchester College. He served in the Royal Navy in the
Second World War, witnessing from the battleship King George
V the sinking of the Hood on 24 May 1941 and the sinking
three days later of the Bismarck. Injured, he was
transferred to motor torpedo boats, serving under Peter
Scott and ending the war as a lieutenant-commander, with his
own MTB. Then, in 1946, he went to Regent Street
Polytechnic, and, after a year there, studied painting at
Chelsea College of Art and Design until 1950.
In the early Fifties he became more concerned with processes
than the production of art, and with recording sequences of
events and patterns of knowledge in different dimensions.
Books became a recurrent theme, both as compositional
elements for their metaphorical potential but also as a
signifier of knowledge and information. His south London
house has two giant books, their pages intertwined, emerging
from the façade.
He had his first solo exhibition at the Obelisk Gallery in
London in 1955. In 1958 he produced the first of his book
pieces with Burial of Count Orgaz, a transcription of El
Greco's paintings using overpainted and burnt books of prose
along with other objects like a whisky bottle and a
fireguard whose forms remain the same but whose appearances
are changed simply by spraying them black.
In the Sixties he created a series of what he called "Skoob
Towers", piles of venerable volumes like the Encyclopaedia
Britannica which he set on fire in a parody of how knowledge
systems work. A film of the event was a centrepiece of last
year's "Art of the Sixties" Tate Britain exhibition. "Those
things were never intended to be provocative, any more than
God is Great is," he said.
Latham taught fine art at St Martin's School of Art and
developed a popularity among students for his disregard for
the artistic establishment. Offended by the
compartmentalising of artists - "We don't have movements, we
have individuals who happen to be doing something different
to all the rest," he said - he borrowed from the college
library a copy of Clement Greenberg's 1961 Art and Culture
which expounded the theories of modernism, which Latham
found tendentious. He and his students carefully dismembered
the book, literally, and assiduously chewed every page, with
Latham arranging the regurgitated remains in an elegant
travelling case, which is now in the collection of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Latham was duly dismissed,
but only when he failed to return the book to the library.
He continued to experiment, through performance art,
paintings, assemblages, films and videos, and conceived his
Event-Structures representing a complex realigning of
social, economic, political and aesthetic structures around
a "time-base" in which the artist, far from being outside
the art in the conventional way, plays a critical part. It
was a time of performance art by Destructionists such as
Gustav Metzger, a lifelong friend, and the young
conceptualist Yoko Ono.
In 1951 he had married the artist Barbara Steveni, and with
her in 1966 he created the Artist Placement Group, a
sociological and aesthetic programme for placing artists in
positions within industry, science and government where they
could generate alternatives to what they saw as divisive
systems of power. The couple were working on an updated
version, Organisation and Imagination, when he died.
But he was most concerned latterly with scientists who, he
said, believed in two levels of time, one cosmological and
the other linear. He believed, and said he had proved
through art, that there was at least one more, which he
called Flat Time. "I'm saying all time is event-based, like
a spray of paint - each spot can be seen as a happening
issuing from a single event, the pressing of the spray
trigger," he said. "Physicists can't visualise it, and
they've got into an awful tangle." So seriously did the
scientists take him, however, that he was made an honorary
fellow of the Imperial College of Science and Technology.
Before Christmas John Latham and his wife visited the newly
reopened De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill. He caught a chill
and failed to overcome it.
Simon Tait