FROM REAL TO REEL: JOHN LATHAM’S FILM STAR REVISITED

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Film Star – Then how should I begin....?

Every film should have a beginning, a middle and an end – but not necessarily in that order. Jean Luc Godard

The legend of Godard’s words echo through Tate Modern as I ponder the piece in front of

me. Pages temporarily fixed against hurricanes that might blow, the undeniable remains of

books burned in some horrible holocaust lay sprawled among a parched wasteland of metal

rods, broken fixtures and melted plaster – a remnant metaphor to a steel and concrete

bastion of knowledge and ideas. A ladder runs lengthwise through the rubble and ruin, a

reference perhaps to our thirst for knowledge and civilization’s ill-fated climb up

Wittgenstein’s ladder.

John Latham, Film Star, 1960, Tate Modern ©The estate of John Latham (noit prof. of flattime), courtesy Lisson Gallery, London

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The winds begin to lift around me, slow and continuous, punctuated by jagged moments of

sudden burst, producing a momentary settling of pages as the leaves of autumn landing in

the now stilled breeze. Each instant produces a random juxtaposition of transient texts,

each individually capturing a picture, a frame in what together becomes a moving cinematic

metaphor of the unfolding of time. History, it seems, unfolds, not in some linear subterfuge

of contradiction followed by sublimation but, in fact, as a haphazard juxtaposition of

seemingly meaningless moments, each one giving rise to a new story, each story to be

reinterpreted by the next in an endless cycle of supplanting and renewal. In it, there are no

beginnings, or at least no beginnings that come first.

This is John Latham’s Film Star, 1960, a large ‘book relief’ currently on display at the Tate

Modern in the Energy and Process Gallery. It is located in Room 2, ‘Beyond Painting’, where

it is displayed with the work of other artists, who in the 1950’s and 60’s, sought to explore,

challenge and expand the artistic possibilities of “the painting” beyond the traditional

method of applying paint with brush to the canvas.i Film Star, one of Latham’s monumental

and groundbreaking works, is sensitively positioned between Lucio Fontana’s Spatial

Concept Waiting, 1960 and Gunther Uecker’s White Field, 1964. Yet, could it be that this

presentation of Film Star as merely a book relief which challenges the tradition of canvas

painting obscures the essential significance of the work, perhaps even undermining an

appreciation of Latham’s developing oeuvre in the 1960’s?

Latham made Film Star in 1960. About 1958, he had begun experimenting with the potential

of using books as found materials in his art, using them to create artworks that challenged

dimensional boundaries. Books became central figures, perhaps even “actors” or

“protagonists” in his art. He burnt them, defaced them, cut them, plastered them, painted

them, affixed them to surfaces, turned them into sculptures, ate them, made them the

central figures in his performance pieces and, as is the case in Film Star, even gave them

starring roles in his film-making.

Film Star showcases some fifty books of various size, weight and thickness. The subject-

matter of the books is equally random: gardening, reference, travel, surveys and histories.

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Latham has altered the books, damaged their significance as words and instilled them with a

timeless insecurity by cutting and rounding their edges, staining and singeing the pages and,

in some instances, blacking out text, randomly obscuring titles while allowing others to

remain untouched. The books are bound to the untreated canvas through an armature of

wire mesh and plaster -- their pages spread open, their appearance fragile, their state

unstable -- in any instant they might be blown about to resettle in a heretofore unseen

concatenation of ideas, as might the leaves of autumn landing in a now stilled breeze. The

work is designed to exist in these altered states as the artist intended an occasional

repositioning of the pages.ii

Film Star and Unedited material from the Star

Latham made Film Star to take the leading role in a 16mm documentary film he produced in

1960 and named ‘Unedited Material from the Star’.iii The artist has filmed shots of Film Star

open to various pages in order to present Film Star in animated form. The pages painted in

twelve vivid colours, appear to open and close, and randomly turn to create a visual score of

colour, word and idea. Indeed, the turning of Film Star’s pages highlights the artist-viewer-

work triad and activates Film Star’s inherently performative nature, bringing it to life as it

were, transforming it from static work to process sculpture and emphasising its extant

potentialities, the realisations of which depend upon the direct engagement of the viewer.

As the title, ‘Unedited material from the Star’ suggests, Film Star inhabits unstable

dichotomies -- subject-object, possibility-actuality, idea-instance -- which cannot be fully

appreciated without the film.

Perhaps what is suggested is that Film Star is the ‘work of art’ and that Unedited Material

from the Star is the unedited ontological precursor to Film Star, inasmuch as the artist (and,

indeed, the viewer) must choose in which form(s) -- of the thousands, perhaps millions, of

random groupings of open pages (only some of which have been documented in the film) –

the work shall exist. Unedited material from the Star represents the limitless possibilities

which, like Schrödinger's cat in the sealed box, comprise reality prior to its realisation --

before the moment or event is perceived by the viewer -- while Film Star itself assumes one

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realised state which remains, nevertheless, precariously in a perpetual state of possible

transformation.

Indeed, inasmuch as the two works derive their existence from the other, neither Film Star,

nor Unedited material from the Star may be primordial to the other.iv Latham’s Film Star, by

causing the artwork to reach beyond the canvas, takes art from two-dimensional to three-

dimensional space. When viewed together with Unedited material from the Star, however,

Film Star enters the fourth dimension, laying claim to the realms of what have been, what

are and what could be.

The problem of continuity over time vanishes; for there is no continuity as such. Continuity

is, as it were, an illusion of the film-maker. Akin to the Kuleshov effect, any randomly

thrown together set of images will suffice – even the unselected pages settling in the wind.

What can be known when the wind, like a desert storm, continually reinvents the

landscape? The viewer is thus trapped in a futile search for meaningfulness. Involuntarily

and of necessity, one imposes meaning and structure – for knowledge is essential to the

viewer’s existence! What else is there but to know? To know is to give life and to be known,

to be!

In a world of randomness, meaning itself becomes an act of capture. To comprehend is not

just to understand, it is to own, to make one’s own, to enclose and engulf, and perhaps

even, to consume. History, like a film, becomes realised in its being comprehended, and the

random collusion of fragmented stories is in fact an act of story-telling, like the making of a

film. That is the directive of existence -- the act of being in the world is an act of making

meaningful.

Re-presenting Film Star

Latham began his career as an artist after service in the Second World War. He returned in

1945 to the bleak British environment that was post-war England, caught up by food

shortages, widespread poverty and meat rationing, amidst the din and fallout of the

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emerging Cold War, McCarthyrite terror campaigns, arms-race escalation and the

debilitating uncertainty and impotence brought on by the hydrogen bomb. Art’s purpose in

such an environment was part distraction and part soporific, in all cases, the manifesto being

to look inward and divert attention from the troubles of the day, social, political and

economic. Art’s scope and form was medium-specific and any straying beyond the limits of

its medium were an anathema. Latham responded to his personal experience of Second

World War and the Cold War which followed through his artworks, challenging these

inconsistencies and searching for a framework of understanding that might succeed in

resolving ideological differences. His practice was nothing short of experimental and radical,

at times embracing Auto-Destructive Art, Tachisme as well as the Fluxus, Performance and

Conceptual art.

In fact, John Latham has challenged the creative scope of nearly every media -- performance,

film and video-art, sound, found-object assemblage, sculpture, land art and even painting.

His interdisciplinary collaborations gave rise to the Artists Placement Group and to his

development of an utopian art or cosmological art, in which he sought to discover a new

framework for comprehending an “event-based” non-linear structure of time.v Latham’s

oeuvre demonstrates his concern with both language and time. His works bear out his

fundamental belief that art (and indeed, our current notion of space-time) had reached an

end point.vi He was convinced that the ills of civilization were primarily the result of our

dualistic subject-object based linguistic-structural framework which prevented us from

comprehending the true nature of the universe. Latham himself sought to instigate a kind of

paradigm shift in which he believed artists would play a crucial role and his theories place

him at the forefront of the very radical developments that began to shape Western art in the

1960’s.

Film Star deserves to be presented and viewed and within this context. It is a piece that

speaks to Latham’s exploration language and the dimension of time in art, philosophy and

science. It is central to Latham’s development in his ‘book relief’ period, but also indicates

his increasing concern with language both as cornerstone of ideology and the guise which

drives international misunderstanding, as is alluded to in early works, such as Belief Systems,

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1959, and later made explicit in God is Great series.vii Film Star embraces the performative

aspect typical of the Fluxus movement, while heralding the ideas which were taking shape in

the landscape of the 1960’s just prior to Conceptual art’s crystallisation. Indeed together,

Film Star and Unedited material from the Star articulate the ideas which would soon emerge

in the British Conceptual art movement. Film Star stands as a monument to the notions of

art as idea and its realisation through viewer participation, and of art as performance which

may be subject to documentation; yet it trades on the inherent ambiguity that subsists

between the work of art as idea or performance and the notion of “the document”. With

respect to the latter, it raises the fundamental question: ‘Which is the more real and in

which piece is the reality founded?’ And even more significantly within Latham’s oeuvre,

together the works provide a lucid metaphor of Latham’s then developing ideas about time

and event structure. In speaking of his book reliefs, Latham once said:

Art is something additional to the appearances of Nature. We make art in order to represent experiences and ideas which are not out there in the visible world. I was looking at, constructing, an idea of structure in events. The book reliefs became not things but a 'score' for events. Music is another example of event structure. The works embody a relationship between the totality outside time - the whole event of the universe past, present and future - and connect it with the momentary, lived experience.viii

John Latham died on New Year’s Day in 2006. Controversial to the core and equally

tenacious in the propagation of his ideas, he has produced an extraordinary oeuvre spanning

well over fifty years. There is growing recognition of his art as transcending the boundaries

between form, idea, word and media; science, philosophy, practice and art. To say that his

contribution to contemporary British art is significant is nothing less than understatement.

His list of collaborations is as extensive as it is impressive. Yet Latham’s work continues to

remain largely unseen, and often misunderstood, by the broader public. Today few

‘Lathams’ are on display in British public galleries leaving open the question of how the Fifth

anniversary of Latham’s passing, now fast-approaching, will be recognised by the art

community in London, his home.

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i As set out in Tate Modern description of the gallery room; see also http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/explore/room.do?show=2338&code=02&tourid=undefined&action=1

ii See Tate Records, Tate Acquisitions File 1965-69, John Latham, TG 4/2/601/1 pp 9 &10: correspondence

between John Latham, dated 14th November 1967 and Tate Keeper of the Modern Collection dated 23rd

November 1967 discussing the need to regularly turn the pages in order to keep to keep the work alive.

iii Unedited material from the Star by John Latham, 16 mm, colour, sound (optical), 12', 1960.

iv

v See, for example, John A. Walker, John Latham: The incidental person – his art and ideas (London: Middlesex

University Press, 1995) (1-5); Beyond Preconceptions: the Sixties Experiment exhibition catalogue, originally published by Independent Curators International, New York, 2000 (eds. Michael Newman, Milena Kalinovska) originally exhibited at University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) October 26 through December 29, 2002; Flat Time House, website http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/16/; Andrew Hunt, ‘John Latham’, Frieze Magazine, 90 (April 2005), available at webpage http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/john_latham. vi

According to Latham, a zero-state in art was reached when Robert Rauschenberg produced his 1951 ‘no mark’ canvases (the White Paintings), heralding what he believed was a convergence of art and science which would lead to a unifying inclusive epistemology based on time as event rather than space and time as distinct. See ‘John Latham: Extracts from an Extended Conversation in Flat Time HO 210 Bellenden Road, December 2005’ (Marianne Brouwer, John Latham, Laure Prouvost) in Tate Archives, John Latham in Focus exhibition, (12 September 2005 – 26 February 2006) http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/latham/furtherresources.shtm; Latham also said: “Art’s blank canvas as a work was equivalent to Einstein’s conclusion that gravitational collapse of the universe would proceed to nothing.” See ‘John Latham: Books for Burning’ (Interview with John A. Walker). vii

God is Great (no. 2), 1991 is currently on display at Tate Liverpool. viii

‘John Latham: Books for Burning’ (p.9).