Pffft went the spray gun, spitting a little constellation of black spattery dots on an otherwise empty canvas, like God’s first go at filling the void, an event in time as well as space. I expect lots of artists have this same feeling of beginning again whenever they set out to work. A kind of hubris, at least it doesn’t harm anyone or tear a rent in the known universe.
John Latham, who died in 2006, regarded these fuzzy spray-gun bursts as durational events rather than as marks or images. They appear and reappear on surfaces large and small. He also bounced paint-covered tennis balls on to canvases, filmed the London stock exchange, ants and locusts, made paintings and diagrams (if that is what they are) on huge horizontal rollers and domestic roller blinds. Probably his best-known works set damaged, burned and damaged books in glutinous morasses of paint, among a jumbly sculpture of metal piping, wires and springs. Latham was good at materials and processes, perhaps less good at making sense.
A pallid Earth heaves into view, to a countdown in German. Coloured abstract discs and targets flicker to the sound of a screeching circular saw. Latham’s early abstract films are as aggressive as they are fun. Little planets hang from the ceiling, crunchy, frangible things confected from bits of books, plaster, paint and wire. One is ringed like Saturn, but with a tyre and spokes. Others have collided with interstellar detritus, or at least with the junk in Latham’s studio.
These genial objects provide calm respite in Latham’s A World View at the Serpentine, London, a partial and incomplete retrospective of an oddball, self-invented visionary, who designated himself not as an artist but as an “Incidental Person” – which is to say a freethinker at large, with a role to play in society. If his influence persists, I think it is less to do with the pseudo-science than with his daring to wander into uncharted territory. Latham’s most important contribution was in his collaborative work with Gustav Metzger in the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (the two fell out), and his involvement in the Artist Placement Group, set up by Latham’s wife Barbara Steveni, which was intended to give artists a place in industry and other public and private institutions.
Formally, Latham was extremely inventive. Conceptually, he was bloody impossible. The impenetrable aspects of his art are compounded by the cultish aura that surrounded the artist – and still, I think, hangs in the air. Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake are all in there somewhere. High on one wall, in black vinyl lettering, swims the following phrase: “The mysterious being known as God is an atemporal score, with a time-base in the region of 1019 seconds.” I don’t know if I need a physicist, a theologian or another artist to help me with this.
But help is at hand, in an accompanying show in the Serpentine’s Sackler gallery of artists who have either been inspired by Latham, or who echo his sense of social engagement, but this too is hard going. A subtitled video conversation with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (not exactly an artwork, but never mind) gives the artist the opportunity to detail how she transforms her ideas into actions, and navigates the censorship and restrictions of life in her country. Her belief that “art is the place where you can perform your citizenship” is in many respects closer to the ideals and work of Metzger than to Latham’s. In Cuba, Broguera has been designated a “non-artist”, which is not the same as Latham’s Incidental Person. As it is, how many will sit on a hard bench in the Sackler to watch the artist, speaking in Spanish (fairly inaudibly) with rapidly moving subtitles, for almost 20 minutes?
More difficulties arise in Laure Prouvost’s installation. The winner of the 2013 Turner prize has filled one of the darkened interior spaces with plinths, on which sit all manner of Venetian glass objects. These delectable arrangements of fruit, bits of folded tinfoil, a piece of carpet and a cooked breakfast are sporadically and fitfully lit. Wandering spotlights give us only fleeting glimpses. This installation is an invigilator’s nightmare, in which we are all Unreliable Persons in the dark. Over it all, Prouvost tells a story. I couldn’t understand half of what she says. There are screams and whispers, overdubbed dogs, sounds of water dripping. “Try try, try,” she says, and, “I think we need some Spam.” I think it has something to do with her years in the early 2000s working as Latham’s studio assistant. It is all very beguiling, and accompanied by a lonely, tinkling piano. I think she and Latham drank an awful lot of tea together. The object that stands out most is a milk carton with breasts. Both in and outside the installation, radiators have been fixed to the walls, with tea bags drying out on them. I do not know why.
The same is true of the billiard and ping-pong tables set up in Douglas Gordon’s adjoining space. Gordon first met Latham in the heady days of the Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, then, a decade later, went with Hans Ulrich Obrist to visit Latham. They took a taxi. On the way, they shot a video of their conversation in the cab, and again with Latham in his studio. These play on pairs of monitors on the floor. The doubled images mirror one another. Gordon does a similar thing with fragments of Latham’s text – including that thing about God – on a gallery wall. These pairings and reversals are familiar Gordon territory, but don’t really advance either his own work or our understanding of Latham, except as a kind of homage.
Latham had his own notions of time, synchronicity and the way we perceive the world. He was also very keen on diagrams and charts, and Cally Spooner has used the walls running round the periphery of the gallery to draw a timeline in pencil, crayon and cosmetic tanning mist. The different lines wander up and down the walls, tracing the artist’s metabolic rate, her career rank according to Artfacts.net and data about the British pound measured against the euro. On the whole, her career is on the rise and the pound is fucked. There are blips and dips, currency crises and tanning shortfalls. Livestream radio from New York and the sound of the bedtime beats of a hotel alarm clock accompany several live dancers (there were two on my visit) casually doing stretching exercises in the gallery.
I wonder what Latham would think of these works? Coming on the heels of the Henry Moore Institute’s A Lesson in Sculpture with John Latham, which included reworkings of some of Latham’s work alongside 16 other artists whose work bore a relation to his own, this double exhibition at the Serpentine conflates the difficulties more than it addresses the big questions. Tea is the answer. It is always the answer.
- At the Serpentine Galleries, London, until 21 May. More information: 020-7402 6075.
