FTHo

The event is part of a day of performances and live works that look at ideas around space and time. An archival exhibition of The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair will open at Flat Time House Friday 30 March 2012. 

The performance of the late John Latham's work at Wysing is the first of a series of new re-workings of the artist's play The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair, for camera, for live audience and for publication over the next 18 months. In this collaboration between Wysing, Flat Time House and Norwich University College of the Arts (NUCA), artist Mark Aerial Waller has reworked Latham's original script and stage directions with students from NUCA to develop a new version of the play, which expresses Latham's theories of space and time. 

The play was first performed in 1978 as part of a week of Artists Placement Group (APG) events held at Riverside Studios, London. Latham used commonly found stackable chairs and laid out a numbered grid along the set floor. Numbers between 1 and 36 were displayed, with several chairs facing the audience. These 36 positions or 'bands' were first seen in Latham's Time Base Roller works which are an attempt by the artist to physically embody time through art. Within Latham's theories of temporality and evolution a 'least event' or the smallest event possible, is the represented at Band 1 and the universe as event at Band 36. Between these two extremes, the spectrum allows for the understanding of all cosmological, geological or spiritual phenomena, all physical, emotional or psychological states within the same system. 

The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair was performed again in 1991 at the Oxford University Debating Chamber involving students from the Ruskin School of Art. In the play, six performers work from a basic script and framework from by John Latham and improvise much of the dialogue. The play involves two acts with the first act representative of the creation of something from nothing - or a least event - using two chairs representing the traditions of science and art. Two performers enact a conflict between the two chairs/traditions and the act closes with a resolution. Act Two involves all the performers along the horizontal time base spectrum, each enacting the various stages of evolution and development from the most simplistic organism through to the most evolved intuitive being. The performers move up and down the time base, a performative allegory of Latham's Event Based theories. 

"In all probability viewers did not distil a single meaning from Government because it was designed to generate associations . Like the evolution of life itself it became more complex over time and reflected the influence of chance. Latham once compared it to the Rorschach ink blot which encourages viewers to project their own meanings onto it."
(John A. Walker, 'John Latham, The Incidental Person', Middlesex University Press, 1994)