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Screening | John Latham Talk Mr Bard

On the occasion of the centenary of John Latham's birth in 1921, Lisson Gallery is screening three experimental film works made by the artist between 1961 and 1971, over the next three weeks. The first, Talk Mr Bard (1961, screening from 23-28 February) is a proto-psychedelic, stop-frame collage of feverish audio and video fragments that reflects Latham's alternately painterly and linguistic expressions of singular moments in time, expressing notions of the ‘time-base’ and ‘structure in events’. This is followed by a paired work, the stroboscopically animated Speak (1962, 1-7 March), an even more aggressive composition, with a constantly shifting barrage of images, splattering the screen like ink from a spray can. The final film is Encyclopaedia Britannica (1971, showing 8-14 March), a blurred and overwhelming representation of every successive page of this tome, the supposed epitome of knowledge at the time. 

Click through to watch with audio and full work description.
 

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