THE GOVERNMENT OF THE FIRST AND THIRTEENTH CHAIR
31 March–6 May 2012
Following a performance at Wysing Arts Centre on 10 March with a reworked script, Flat Time House presents an exhibition including an installation of the original set with props, preparatory material and documentation from performances in 1978, 1991 and 2012
The performance of the late John Latham's work at Wysing was 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 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 Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair was first performed in 1978 as part of a week of Artist 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 in which the artist attempts to physically embody time. Within Latham's theories of temporality and evolution a 'least event' - the shortest departure from a state of nothingness- is represented at Band 1 and the entire '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.
A version of The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair was also performed in 1991 as part of John Latham: Art after Physics exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. This performance took place at the Oxford University Debating Chamber involving students from the Ruskin School of Art. On every occasion, six performers work from a basic script and framework provided by John Latham and improvise much of the dialogue. The two-act play begins with Act One as a 'least event' or the creation of something from nothing 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 John 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)
The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair has been developed in collaboration with Gareth Bell-Jones, Elisa Kay, Hana Noorali, Claire Louise Staunton, Flat Time House, Wysing and NUCA.
About Mark Aerial Waller
Mark Aerial Waller is an artist who works with video, sculpture and event-based practices. His many films, installations and events condense forms and symbolic orders from multiple time zones into a skillfully articulated present tense. Mark defies conventional screening formats, integrating sculptural objects and live performances for an experience of cinema defined in spatial and situational terms. He is also the founder of The Wayward Canon, a platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices.
