FTHo

John Latham: The Object Lectures, The Back to Nature Lectures and The Lectures

with Patrick Goddard, Holly Pester, Carlyle Reedy and Sue Tompkins

Raven Row

Saturday 25 March
Continuous performances, 2-5pm

During his time at Gallery House, John Latham wrote a number of text scores titled Lectures, each only a few minutes long. These will be performed for the first time since 1973 by artists, writers and performers including Patrick Goddard, Holly Pester, Carlyle Reedy and Sue Tompkins.

Whilst working on his OI-IO Project at Gallery House, John Latham wrote a series of text scores entitled The Object Lectures, The Back to Nature Lectures and The Lectures. The pieces were intended as verbal performance pieces to demonstrate Latham’s concept of event-structure and written whilst he developed his ‘Time-Base Theorem’. Lecture 1 consists of a single occurrence of the letter/word ‘a’. In Lecture 2 the ‘a’ is repeated and then sustained, before a new word ‘the’ is introduced in Lecture 3. As the series progresses new words, propositions, questions and statements are gradually introduced. In Latham’s terminology, as the lectures progress they display the occurrence of a ‘least event’, its repetition or insistence, development into a habit, a change generates a second habit before replication of the process.

The series of lectures include stated durations of between two and five minutes with the sequence as a whole lasting approximately 45 minutes when performed. They were first delivered at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1972 and later at Arthur Tooth’s Gallery in march 1973 on the occasion of the group exhibition Critic’s Choice selected by Richard Cork, then the art critic of the Evening Standard newspaper. The exhibition also included work by Conrad Atkinson, David Dye, Gilbert & George, John Hilliard, Bob Law, Richard Long, Gerald Newman, Bruce McLean’s ‘pose’ band Nice Style, and John Stezaker. The selection of lectures Latham made for 'Critic’s Choice’ does not include a Lecture 7, 8 or 9, but instead, following Lecture 10, jumps to 2001, 3001 and 4001. It is this selection that forms the basis for the event at Raven Row.

Four artists have been selected to interpret and re-perform the series of lectures at Raven Row in a programme devised by curator/director of Flat Time House Gareth Bell-Jones. They are Patrick Goddard, Holly Pester, Carlyle Reedy and Sue Tompkins.

Four artists have been selected to interpret and re-perform the series of lectures at Raven Row in a programme devised by curator/director of Flat Time House Gareth Bell-Jones. They are Patrick Goddard, Holly Pester, Carlyle Reedy and Sue Tompkins.

Patrick Goddard (b.1984, UK) is a London based artist whose recent works have taken the form of video, publication, performance, and installation. His work explores politically loaded issues with a sense of pathos and self-defeating humour, which playfully calls into question the authority of the narrator. Recent solo shows include Almanac Projects, London; Matt’s Gallery, London; OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich.

Holly Pester (b.1982, UK) is a London based poet and writer. Her work experiments with speech-sound and the radical potential of cadence, including an investigation into the lullaby as a form of work song. She has performed her work internationally including events at the ICA, London; Matts Gallery, London; Festival Expandible, Mexico City; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel; Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Serpentine Galleries, London. He writing has been published in The White Review, Eros and Tender Journal.

Carlyle Reedy (b. Virginia, 1938) is a poet, performance artist and collagist-painter. Working mainly in the UK since the 1960s, her early performances and readings took place at venues such as Jim Haynes' Arts Lab, Middle Earth, Gallery House, London Musicians Collective and Acme (all London) and later at Franklin Furnace (NY), Chisenhale, South Hill Park and ICA (London). She has had exhibitions at Peter Biddulph Gallery and England & Co. (London) and was featured in the survey exhibition and catalogue Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979 at MOCA (Los Angeles) in 1998. Five of her collages were purchased by the Arts Council in 1999. Reedy has devised productions for theatres such as the Royal Court Theatre and Riverside Studios and has led two avant garde performance groups: Monkey Enterprises (1974-77) and O Production (1981-2). She has taught at Hornsey and Slade schools and was a member of the Artist Placement Group. Her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, including the solo collections: Obituaries and Celebrations published by Words Worth Books, 1995 and Epos: Selected Poemsby Etruscan Books, 2012.

Sue Tompkins (b. 1971, UK) lives and works in Glasgow. Working with fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, Tompkins’ practice incorporates text, sound, installation and performance. Tompkins has been involved in exhibitions and performances worldwide including solo exhibitions at Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York; Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (Glasgow International); The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; Spike Island, Bristol; and Contemporary Art Musuem, St. Louis.

John Latham, 'Lectures', performed by Sue Tompkins

John Latham, 'Lectures', performed by Sue Tompkins

John Latham, 'Lectures', performed by Sue Tompkins

John Latham, 'Lectures', performed by Sue Tompkins