FTHo

Photos: Ken Adlard

FLAT TIME I-IO

Latham’s art extended the boundaries of nearly every artistic genre conspicuous in Western art from the 1960s, including sculpture, installation work, paintings, film, land art, engineering, found-object, assemblage, video, performance happenings and theoretical writings. His work became increasingly driven by theoretical questionings. He believed the non-linguistic media of art were the keys to resolving society’s conflicted relationships with objects, money and possessions. He proposed a shift towards a time-based cosmology to compensate for our sensory, spatially-dominated view of the world. Latham passionately believed that this would free the mind, language and pedagogy from dangerous specialisations and inevitable divisions. He developed a theory of time - ‘Flat Time’ - relating the notions of time-base, passing time and the atemporal.

The name of the house derives from Latham’s theoretical language, in which ‘Flat Time’ describes the way in which time and all possible events can be represented by the length and width of a flat canvas, demonstrated in works including Time-Base Roller (1972, Tate Collection). A giant cantilevered book entitled How the Univoice is Still Unheard emerges through the glass frontage of the building. Inside, Latham assigned the rooms with the anthropomorphic attributes of the living body, with the aim of taking us on a physical and metaphorical journey. The book sculpture inside/outside is the Face, a small front gallery (housing more of Latham's works related to time) is the Mind, an office centre and archive is arranged as the Brain, and the large gallery/studio space represents the Hand. Latham's wall spray artworks in the long gallery joining the Brain to the Hand encourage us to make ‘the shift’, emphasising Latham's eternal drive to find new ways of thinking and working. The kitchen/living room, bedroom and bathroom represents the internal organs, which Latham described as the Body Event, or ‘plumbing’.

Flat Time House aims to make a wider audience aware of Latham's work and ideas, his spirit of discovery, and through his example to understand and appreciate the crucial role of art and the artist in society. We focus particularly on subject areas that deal with this concern thematically; time and temporality; art and science; language; and value and belief systems. This is demonstrated though an original artistic programme that includes exhibitions, experimental curating, workshops, screenings, publications, artists' residencies, event-based performances and education events. We aim to facilitate new discoveries and research into the fields of experimental art from the 1950s onwards in Britain and beyond, as well as to support the work and thinking of emerging artists and curators by creating a safe space in which to experiment.

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