John Latham: Books for burning (1987)

artdesigncafé | café library | Published 02 August 2010
Page 5 of 5

John Latham interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

John Latham. Study for a Bing Monument, (1976). Photo Gareth Winters. Copyright John Latham. Book cover of John A. Walker’s John Latham: The incidental person—his art and ideas, (1995). Middlesex University Press.

John A. Walker: Still and Chew, the 1966-7 alchemical-like transformation of Clement Greenberg’s influential text Art and Culture, is perhaps your most famous demolition of a book. This arose because of its pretentious title and the fact that your emphasis on time opposed the American stress on space? John Latham: Yes. the event involved people chewing and spitting out pages of the book. I didn’t take up Greenberg theoretically, this would have meant being trapped by a syntax and grammar that was a key reason he was wrong. Also, I’d been pressing St Martin’s to set up a study group to look at temporality in artwork. When this idea was rejected I had to think of another way of getting the notion across. It then came to be central in the shift to "Conceptual art" in America without anyone yet noticing that it is a hard scientific proposition that has been made. John A. Walker: Am I right in thinking that the material in possession of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is more a documentation of the event than an artwork in its own right? John Latham: Right. The real concept of structure is in the book reliefs and time-based roller painting. John A. Walker: In 1967 a series of events were organised at Better Books, which involved collaborations with Jeff Sawtell and Jeffrey Shaw. These were complex multi-media events. I find the symbolism hard to follow. For example, you ran pipes into books and pumped foam through. John Latham: Yes, book plumbing. Putting pipes through books was suggestive of acquired habits for organising information. They were extensions of the idea that books were forms of "mental furniture" which is transferred from generation to generation. John A. Walker: These events were the last use of books until your 1976 designs for book monuments extruded from shale heaps in Scotland?

John Latham: The maquettes are based upon two intersecting books for The Niddrie Woman Torso and, half a mile away, The Niddrie Heart. My conception was that these structures would be seventy-five to eighty-feet high on the 300-foot plateau. They would be visible for fifty miles. People would be able to enter them, climb up and look across at the others.

John A. Walker: From some angles these monuments resemble the Christian cross. Is this a connotation you are happy with?
John Latham: I don’t mind it. This view is one amongst several. I accept it as real and valid, but enhanced now, given a new cast.

John Latham interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

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