JOHN LATHAM: BOOKS FOR BURNING

[INTERVIEW WITH JOHN A.WALKER] Copyright 2009.

Photos of works of art by John Latham are copyright the John Latham Estate and

the Lisson Gallery, London.

John Latham, Great Uncle Estate, (1960).

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JW: You began to use books to construct reliefs in 1958. What prompted this unusual

choice of material?

JL: 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.

JW: What practical problems did you encounter in attaching the books to the surface?

JL: I used canvas to key to board surfaces with household materials like Polyfilla. I

anchored books with. screws and wire.

JW: And when wires loop from one concentration of books to another I presume they

become part of the work?

JL: Yes, they acquire an iconographic value.

JW: Where did the books come from?

JL: 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.

JW: 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?

JL: 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.

JW: Could you say something about the relationship between the books and the

grounds from which they projected. Was a symbolism intended?

JL: 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.

JW: But you also used colour didn't you?

JL: In the beginning I wanted to concentrate on the white to the black because

that's the sculptural element - a dynamic, autogenerative relation. Only later, in

1959, did the coloured pages come into it. This was a response to a film made in my

studio by Pathe News. My idea was to have an unmoving object - the book relief -

animated by changes of pages and colour. That is, a universe which provides a

stable framework but within which there are changes of state. Pathe News proved

uncooperative so I made the film myself. It's called Unclassified Material. You can

run the film in reverse and it still works.

John Latham, Film Star, (1960). Tate Gallery collection.

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JW: The idea of reversal occurs a good deal, inverting the word 'books' to produce

'skoob' for example. Were the book projections into actual space a reversal of the

illusionistic space of traditional pictures?

JL: That idea wasn't very important to me. 'Time' doesn't go in reverse. I think my

interests were too far out to fit into the framework of discussions about painting,

and it is still a bit like that. I am across a corridor where there are 'facts' as distinct

from aesthetic apprehensions about it.

JW: Spray paint was still used in the book reliefs. Am I right in thinking the areas of

spray paint signified concentrations of energy ?

JL: They do do that. Particularly in the three-point Observer series where the

concentrations of books represent accretions of different orders of 'memory'. Black

aggregations on white ground are in-forming, literal statements.

JW: The Observer series (1959-60) was, I understand, a case in which there was an

allegorical relationship to literature?

JL: There was a direct equivalent. Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov was

tremendously important. The brothers represent three distinct structured levels of

mental resource, intuition and self-awareness. They cover all kinds as 'prototypes'.

Alyosha, the third brother, is the intuitive one. In the reliefs, the relationship

between the brothers' mentalities is represented in terms of a triadic structure.

John Latham, Observer IV, (1960). Tate Gallery collection.

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JW: Did The Observer series actually include copies of Dostoevsky's novel?

JL: No. It would have been too literal.

JW: 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?

JL: 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.

JW: 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.

JL: 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!

JW: So, a kind of image of the unconscious. One early relief was a re-interpretation

of EI Greco's Burial of Count Orgaz. Why EI Greco? Why that painting?

John Latham, The Burial of Count Orgaz, (1958). Tate Gallery collection.

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JL: 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.

JW: 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?

JL: 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.

JW: Because books conventionally stand for literature and knowledge, your assault

on them was bound to disturb. And it also created confusion as to exactly what your

attitude to literature was. Could you explain?

JL: My attitude towards books was detached: no special hostility or reverence. At

the outset I was hesitant about putting one in plaster, but I then realised that in a

relief it would become completely detached and would be more 'real' than it was

simply lying around or even when read.

JW: In the mid-Sixties, when you began to burn towers of books, you said this was

intended to indicate that 'the cultural base was burnt out'. Could you expand on this

remark?
JL: Art is multivalent. The reading you quote is one valence. There was also, in the

front of my mind, the flagrant abuse of privilege by the arts authority which had

been instrumental in bringing a gallery contract I had with Kasmin to an end. At

the beginning of the modern era the new physics and the new painting destroyed

appearances and common-sense understandings of reality. The base is burnt out in

the sense that there is no reliable standard of reference to which we can turn for

authority. The idea of authority has to depend upon a stable frame of reference. If

this has been demolished, another way of resolving social priorities has to be

devised. Wittgenstein thought his atomic propositions were the answer. I thought he

had failed, whereas James Joyce had succeeded. In Finnegan's Wake, instead of

writing a conventional story, Joyce constructed a cyclic string of images which was

completely event-structured. This is the literary solution of the century that is

dimensionally in tune with the view I have. It puts art and science into a new

perspective.
John Latham, Skoob Tower ceremony: National Encyclopedias, (September 1966).

Bloomsbury, London. Photo John Prosser.

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JW: To turn to the Destruction in Art movement of the Sixties. Did you share the CND

[Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament}, anti-nuclear perspective of other participants

like Gustav Metzger?

JL: Before we take up rhetorical positions we need to establish their basis in

actuality. I first burnt skoob towers in 1964 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the

Institute for the Study of Mental Images - it came directly from the atomised mark

painting discovery. Metzger witnessed these ceremonies. They weren't making an

overtly political point. I was making an observation rather than indulging in

rhetoric.

JW: There was an adverse reaction to destructive art in various official quarters.

Destruction as an artistic method was surely bound to shock and to raise the spectre of

anarchism. Was this your intention?

JL: Absolutely not. Some people did interpret the book burnings as anarchist

gestures but I thought the content far more richly interesting than shocking. The

towers were mainly encyclopaedias - I do object to the idea of a fixed mode of

knowledge. After all, one can reach a state of knowing - getting in touch with

universal being - without having read anything.

John Latham, Still and Chew, (!966-7). Case with documentation is in the collection

of MOMA, New York.

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JW: Still and Chew, the 1966-7 alchemical-like transformation of Greenberg's in-

fluential 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?

JL: 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.

JW: 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?

JL: Right. The real concept of structure is in the book reliefs and time-based roller

painting.

JW: In 1967 a series of events were organised at Better Books, which involved col-

laborations with Jeff Sawtell and Jeff 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 and other artists, Photo of Book Plumbing event and installation,

(April 1967). Girl with bicycle both wrapped in newsprint. Better Books, London.

Photo Jennifer Pike.

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JL: 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.

JW: These events were the last use of books until your 1976 designs for book monu-

ments extruded from shale heaps in Scotland?

JL: 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 Latham, Study for a Bing Monument, (1976). Photo Gareth Winters.

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John Latham, Five Sisters Bing, (1976). Tate Gallery collection.

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JW: From some angles these monuments resemble the Christian cross. Is this a

connotation you are happy with?

JL: 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.

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This interview was first published in Studio International, vol 200, no 1018, 1987,

pp. 26-9 on the occasion of a 1987 exhibition held at the Lisson Gallery, London.

John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of John Latham -

the Incidental Person - his Art and Ideas, (London: Middlesex University Press,

1995).

See also 'The spray gun and the cosmos: John Latham's spray-gun paintings of the
1950s'. (Catalogue essay) (London: Delaye/Saltoun, Feb 2008), pp. 7-29. Plus

chronology, pp. 36-37.

Below John Latham, photo copyright John A. Walker.