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A SEASON OF JOHN LATHAM

2 March – 21 May 2017

A WORLD VIEW: JOHN LATHAM Serpentine Gallery

SPEAK: TANIA BRUGUERA, DOUGLAS GORDON, LAURE PROUVOST AND CALLY SPOONER Serpentine Sackler Gallery

‘The present day world is comparable to a fission reactor the design of which is unknown but which is overheating and out of control.’ (John Latham, 1981)

As a pioneer of British conceptual art, John Latham (1921-2006) has exerted a powerful and lasting influence, not only on his peers but on generations of younger artists. This spring, the Serpentine hosts a new exhibition that encompasses all strands of Latham’s extraordinary practice, including sculpture, installation, painting, film, land art, engineering, found-object assemblage, performance and the artist’s theoretical writings.

Central to the world view that Latham spent a lifetime developing was his proposed shift towards a time-based cosmology of events away from a spacebased framework of objects. In Latham’s eyes, ‘flat time’ expands across and beyond individual disciplines, aligning social, economic, political, psychological and physical structures. He saw the artist holding up a mirror to society: an individual whose dissent from the norm could lead to a profound reconfiguration of reality as we know it.

Since he started exhibiting in the late 1940s, Latham has been associated with several national and international artistic movements, including the first phase of conceptual art in the 1960s. He was an important contributor to the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966, and also a co-founding member of the Artist Placement Group APG (1966-89), along with Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw, David Hall, Anna Ridley and Barry Flanagan, an initiative that was to expand the reach of art and artists into wider society through organisations of all kinds, at all levels and on a basis equivalent to any other specialist.

Adopting a holistic approach, the Serpentine exhibition spans Latham’s career to include the artist’s iconic spray and roller paintings; his one-second drawings; films such as Erth (1971) and Latham’s monumental work, Five Sisters (1976) from his Scottish Office placement with APG.

Over the course of the exhibition, Flat Time House, John Latham’s studio home in Peckham, south London, is open to the public, hosting a programme of workshops and events. In 2003, Latham declared Flat Time House a living sculpture. Since 2008, it has been a gallery, residency space and centre for experimental events and research into Flat Time. It is also home to the John Latham archive.

Speak

In dialogue with the Serpentine Gallery survey, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery exhibition brings together contemporary artists – Tania Bruguera, Douglas Gordon, Laure Prouvost, Cally Spooner – whose diverse work has affinities with Latham’s ideas. This show proposes Latham as an ‘open toolbox’ for artists, revealing how his concepts of time, language and society resonate today.

A catalogue to accompany both exhibitions features contributions from artists who worked with, or have been influenced by, Latham, including Rita Donagh, Anish Kapoor, Liam Gillick, Richard Hamilton, Yoko Ono, Pedro Reyes and Barbara Steveni, as well as the four artists featuring in Speak.