John Latham - Conceptual Art

John Latham, (23 February 1921 – 1 January 2006) was a Zambia-born British conceptual artist. Latham was educated at Winchester College. In the Second World War he commanded a motor torpedo boat in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After the war he studied art, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. He married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in Westminster in 1951.The spray can became Latham's primary medium, as can be seen in Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object (oil painting, 1954) in the Tate Gallery collection. In addition to spray paint, Latham tore, sawed, chewed and burnt books to create collage material for his work, such as Film Star (1960).Latham's event-based art was influential in performance art. In 1966, he took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London led by Gustav Metzger along with Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell and Al Hansen.His "skoob" ("books" written backwards) works using books or materials derived from them had the power to shock. He moved from collages to towers of books which he then burnt, awakening uncomfortable echoes of the Nazi regime's public burning of banned books.
From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time House in Peckham. In 1991 he produced God is Great (no. 2), a conceptual artwork featuring copies of the Bible, Quran, and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in two and attached to a sheet of glass. In 2005 Tate Britain held an exhibition of Latham's work.Latham died at Kings College Hospital, Camberwell, on 1 January 2006.In 2010 John Latham: Canvas Events was published by Ridinghouse.In 2016 the Henry Moore Institute presented A Lesson in Sculpture with John Latham, an exhibition addressing Latham's visionary contribution to the study of sculpture, bringing sixteen works by Latham, spanning 1958 to 2005, into conversation with sixteen sculptures by artists working across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Wikipedia

John Latham

British painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, performance artist, video and filmmaker, of Rhodesian birth. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London, from 1946 to 1950. His concern from 1954 was not with the production of art objects as an end in itself but with various processes and consequently with the recording in three dimensions of sequences of events and of patterns of knowledge. In 1958 he introduced torn, overpainted and partly burnt books into assemblages. The destruction and parody of systems of knowledge implied in Latham's work was apparent in 1966, when he organised a party at which guests chewed pages of Clement Greenberg's book Art and Culture; the remains were then fermented into mash, distilled and returned in a test-tube to the St Martin's School of Art library.

 Latham's art and theory were consistently experimental from the late 1950s, including investigations into conceptual art and performance art as well as paintings, assemblages, films and videos. His concept of Event-Structures, which was central to his theories, represents a complex proposition suggesting the realignment of social, economic, political and aesthetic structures around a ‘time-base' mode of thinking progressing from what Latham termed the ‘least-event', to complex social and political structures in which a critical role is played by the artist, Latham's ‘Incidental Person'. In 1966, with his wife Barbara Stevini, Latham created the Artist Placement Group, a sociological and aesthetic programme for placing artists in positions within industry, science and government so that they might generate alternatives to divisive systems of power.(.tate.org.uk)