Latham, John
John Aubrey Clarendon Latham, artist, born February 23 1921; died January 1 2006
“He proves it is possible to be an enfant terrible forever.”
– Damien Hirst
“John Latham was a international pioneer of systems/process art work and advocate of the artist acting as agent of change (‘incidental person’). He worked with many different mediums, which included the moving image (film and video), introducing the term ‘time based art’. With Barbara Stevini, Latham was founder of the Artists’ Placement Group. “The APG, an artist initiative, took shape in 1965 from artists who were already recognising that to work in terms of event rather than of the art object was the main line of history” (Report of a Surveyor, Edition Hansjorg Mayer, Stuttgart/London, Latham, 1984, p.40)”
– J.Hatfield
“In the course of a career that spanned more than fifty years, Latham came to occupy an important and distinctive position in contemporary art. Working in a variety of media he belonged to no particular artistic tendency. Nevertheless, the contribution he made to painting, assemblage, performance, book art, conceptual art and film was significant. The basis for all his activities and ways of working was his world view, an outlook that exploded conventional systems of thought and was essentially visionary.”
– Tate Britain
“The public life of the artist John Latham was rounded with controversy. He died aged 84 accusing the Tate of suppressing his work in the John Latham in focus exhibition at Tate Britain, running until the end of February. Back in the 1960s he had invited his students to join him in a feast where the main course was to be Clement Greenberg’s book Art and Culture, a volume of art theory. This, they chewed up and spat out for Latham to bottle, distil, decant into a phial and put into a leather case to be displayed as a work entitled ‘Spit and Chew: Art and Culture’ and now owned, but rarely displayed, by the Museum of Modern Art in New York”. -Michael McNay, Saturday January 7, 2006
– The Guardian
John Latham is represented by artHester, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire (England) and the Lisson Gallery, London (England)
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Videography:
Videotapes
1960
Unedited Material from Star1962
Speak1971
Erth1984
Dave’s Bike1985
Six Videotapes
Dadarama1987
Evenstruck1990
Cumbrae Clyde
Dave’s Bike
The Gulf
John O’Groats to Cape Wrath
Nmutter
Road’s One -
Artist works:
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Artist assets:
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Quotes:
The availability of John Latham's films. John Latham, like many artists, made films in the 1960s and early 1970s as an extension of his process-based work in painting, sculpture, installation and performance. His films were
never in distribution. He made 'Speak' (1968-69, 11 mins) with his young son Noa, who helped him move around the cut-out coloured papers into different configurations. John told me that he projected 'Speak' at a Pink
Floyd concert at the UFO Club in the Tottenham Court Road. Lux now distributes 'Speak'. John also knew Yoko Ono well at that point, and his bum is one of the bottoms that appears in Yoko's 'Bottoms' film, made in London
around the same time.Latham projected his early films in the basement of Better Books in Charing Cross Road in the late 1960s, as part of the multi-media poetry reading/environment events organised by the poet Bob Cobbing. Latham was
teaching at St. Martin's School of Art at that time (his pupils were Gilbert & George, Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Richard Long, etc.) For more information on his films the best would be to contact John's London gallery,
the Lisson Gallery."I curated a retrospective of John Latham at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford with Ina Conzen-Meirs of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, in 1991; the title of the exhibition was 'Art after Physics'. I showed all his films at MOMA
Oxford during the exhibition; they are fantastic, and too rarely seen. I consider Latham to be one of our most important living artists, and certainly one of the most important of his generation. We co-published a
catalogue, which should be available through Cornerhouse publications. There is more information on his films in that catalogue, and in the excellent book 'John Latham - the Incidental Person: his art and his ideas by John A.
Walker" (Middlesex University Press).
- Chrissie Iles April 2004
