John Latham: Books for burning (1987)
John A Walker interviewed John Latham on the occasion of a 1987 exhibition at the Lisson Gallery, London.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 02 August 2010
This interview was first published in Studio International, vol. 200, no. 1018, 1987, pp. 26-9.
John A. Walker: You began to use books to construct reliefs in 1958. What prompted this unusual choice of material?
John Latham: I’d discovered a principle of structure in the atomised mark in 1954. By 1958 I had the feeling that the black on white spray paintings had reached a point of exhaustion. I wanted something to project from the surface, to serve as a visual enricher. There were books lying around the studio including one with the title The Philosophy of the Good Life. It was entirely fortuitous. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I saw it. However, the book proved to be the precise solution to many problems.
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John Latham. Great Uncle Estate, (1960). Copyright John Latham.
John A. Walker: What practical problems did you encounter in attaching the books to the surface?
John Latham: I used canvas to key to board surfaces with household materials like Polyfilla. I anchored books with screws and wire.
John A. Walker: And when wires loop from one concentration of books to another I presume they become part of the work?
John Latham: Yes, they acquire an iconographic value.
John A. Walker: Where did the books come from?
John Latham: Mostly from Peter Eaton’s, a second-hand bookseller in Holland Park Avenue. He had bins of very cheap books outside his shop. I just delved, picking out titles or compact shapes that interested me.
John A. Walker: One cannot read the books in your reliefs in the normal fashion but, even so, titles and fragments of text remain legible. Were the contents or titles relevant to the pieces?
John Latham: Sometimes. If the title wasn’t relevant I might obliterate it or remove the spine. You see, I detected a consistency between the black on white of the printed pages and the "geometry"—the spatial relations of points—in my spray paintings, though, of course, in the case of books, the former angular geometry becomes linear and time-determined. On the outside a book is part of the world of appearances, but inside it is governed by a code. So, in a way, a book is like the human organism with its genetic code. And aren’t such organisms anchored in a whole event—Nature? That’s what the questioning and examination of the form was about. I was finding out more by this approach than by reading.
John A. Walker: Could you say something about the relationship between the books and the grounds from which they projected. Was a symbolism intended?
John Latham: The ground, if it is white, stands for "no action"—the zero state of action. Art’s blank canvas as a work was equivalent to Einstein’s conclusion that gravitational collapse of the universe would proceed to nothing.
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