“No one has
seen any point in shooting a spray gun on a white surface, but to my question
it held a dizzy promise.” -- John Latham, 1968
A
decade after his death, the visionary Conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006)
remains a vital force and influence. Coinciding with a trio of museum
exhibitions that reveal his exceptional legacy, Lisson Gallery presents its
seventh solo show of Latham’s work, focusing on an aspect of his practice that
revolutionised the artist’s outlook: the spray painting.
Far
more than just a medium, spray painting was a discovery that proved revelatory.
Latham acquired a spray gun in 1954 from a local ironmonger shop and later that
year executed his first piece with the device: a mural in the home of Clive
Gregory and Anita Kohsen, two scientists whose concept of ‘psychophysical
cosmology’ – a theory that aimed at unifying mind and matter – was to have
a profound impact on the artist’s own philosophy. For Latham, the qualities of
spray paint opened new approaches to form by breaking through the impasse
contemporary painting had reached and allowing the convergence of art and
science: “It destroys the picture plane
in a legitimate way where contemporaries were at such pains to establish that
plane,” he later explained. “It is both abstract and referential in ‘image’. It
has a variable time-scale where the orthodox approach was very limited; it is
anti-scale, where contemporaries were obsessed with the effect of large-scale
presentations; it can be ‘read’ in several ways, as, a mathematics and as a
memory trace.”
Read moreThe
exhibition begins with a very early spray painting work, the monochrome Sleep (1955), in which a heterogeneous
range of marks suggests a reclining female. Combining emulsion with spray
painting and blending paint with chance, the piece oscillates between
abstraction and figuration, its fluid form conveying feelings and traces. One
of Latham’s later works, a ‘roller’ painting made in the mid-’60s, will also be
on show – a large, delicate work which features faint bands of colour set among
areas of empty space. Executed on unprimed canvas and attached to rollers, it
differs from conventional painting by exploring the question of time: the
near-invisible tiny dots made by the gun hover on the verge of existence,
suggesting “a coming into being” when they accumulate with others; and by
rolling the canvas up and down, Latham was able to make painting a temporal exercise
in a process analogous to memory, aimed at exemplifying the experience of past,
present and future.
Moreover,
spray painting made it possible for Latham to assign various time-signatures to
his paintings, mechanically making the effect of time visible (through the
direct correlation between how long the trigger was held and the mark made).
This idea was carried to its logical conclusion in the instantaneous Noit (One second Drawing) series he made in 1970, each piece created
according to a set of instructions and presented together with a
“time/operator” stamp recording the exact date and time of their production. In
doing so, Latham restated as economically possible his conception of ‘least
event’, describing the drawings as “the primitive event from which one could
derive a picture of the world event…. It is the temporal just as much as the
spatial that gives the mark significance.”
The
exhibition will also include works that draw from Latham’s 1966 Niddrie series, which the artist created
as part of an APG project in Scotland, where he designated derelict ‘bings’ –
shale heaps from the early oil industry located between Edinburgh and Glasgow –
as artworks. This theme later resurfaced in the 1990s as part of a series of
works, three of which will be on display at Lisson Gallery. These works adopt
the spray painting technique, staining both mounted and unmounted canvas in red, the colour of shale.
Latham’s influence on contemporary art is further explored in the exhibition ‘A Lesson in Sculpture with John Latham’ at the Henry Moore Institute, which presents his work in conversation with sixteen sculptures by artists working across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (24 March – 19 June); and the group shows ‘KALEIDOSCOPE: The Indivisible Present’ at Modern Art Oxford (6 February – 16 April) and ‘Conceptual Art in Britain: 1964-1979’ at Tate Britain (12 April – 29 August). Before its closure later this year, Flat Time House will also present a series of exhibitions celebrating Latham’s legacy, including 'The Shift' (21 April – 29 May), a retrospective of Flat Time House’s activities over the past eight years.
