John Latham: Books for burning (1987)
John Latham interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
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John A. Walker: It is obvious that you were interested in transforming books in various ways by burning, sawing, and so on. Could you say something more about the significance of, these changes?
John Latham: One issue was the different conceptions of time in literature and sculpture. Compared to literature, visual art is atemporal. Reading involves a sequential process—turning pages can be thought of as a recurrent event. When a book becomes part of a relief its temporal character is negated, but, by singeing a shaped edge, by cutting back the pages, I exposed the "strata" making up the form of the book, I gave it a geology. Hence, the temporal came to be represented in the atemporal medium.
John A. Walker: I’m interested to hear you say that because in your Lisson show I was struck by pieces in which layers of books appear beneath a shelf as if representing the cultural debris that might be revealed by an archaeological dig.
John Latham: Possibly. A wedge-shaped shelf is compatible with a book projecting at right angles from the wall. One likes a clear surface with a lot of chaos underneath!
John A. Walker: So, a kind of image of the unconscious. One early relief was a re-interpretation of El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz. Why El Greco? Why that painting?
John Latham: At the end of World War Two, I saw some El Grecos in Rome. I found them instantly compelling. What impressed me about the Burial was the way El Greco had managed to solve the Renaissance problem of how to show Earth and Heaven in the one picture, with a unity of form.
John A. Walker: There has been a critical tendency to interpret your book reliefs in either formal or art-historical terms, for example, as post-Cubist exercises. Such readings ignore their philosophical ambitions. If I can summarise: art, arguably, serves a redemptive function by presenting a resolution of the part/whole dichotomy of existence within a single frame. Is this what is going on in them?
John Latham: I’m sure of it. Art is something additional to the appearances of Nature. We make art in order to represent experiences and ideas which are not out there in the visible world. I was looking at, constructing, an idea of structure in events. The book reliefs became not things but a "score" for events. Music is another example of event structure. The works embody a relationship between the totality outside time— the whole event of the universe past, present and future— and connect it with the momentary, lived experience. The atomised action plus books has been able to represent this relatedness.
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John Latham. Skoob Tower ceremony: National Encyclopedias, (September 1966). Bloomsbury, London. Photo John Prosser.
John Latham interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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