John Latham

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 23 Number 4 and 24 Number 1, 2005

Transcript

William Furlong: Now I’ve just walked through the Gymnasium with a number of pieces by three artists, one of whom is John Latham, who is sitting here. John is this your first trip to Venice?

John Latham: It is since I began doing serious art, which was exactly fifty-one years ago now. I made an original statement then by using a spray gun. That was the most inartistic thing that I could of possibly have done and for the scientists that I did it for, it was the only thing that they really needed for their thinking, a theory which would join the biological with the material world. They saw it and made me an honorary founder member of the Institute that they then set up called the Institute for Study of Mental Images. Mental images was a very comprehensive idea. It was thrown our by orthodox scientific journals for not talking the language, but the language was where the flaw was. The fact that in physics the proper move to anything too serious has not yet been resolved, and can’t be resolved in those terms. But if you switch the dimensional framework from space-time to event, event is three-dimensional time when you come to simplify it. Three-dimensional time isn’t in the same framework as spatial three-dimensional, it has to do with what you find in music, it’s three dimensional time and you can list it. There’s a count time, where a body event listens, the thing comes to an end and, say it has lasted thirty minutes, you also have all the frequencies which have gone on to manifest the musical idea of the composer, which has drawn the interest and the impulse to come and hear it in the first place. Of course there is a score that is somewhere tucked away in a drawer and for practical purposes doesn’t exist. For the people who go to a concert the score is taken for granted.

WF: I’m quite surprised that you haven’t been invited to do something in either the British Pavilion or in any of the shows ever. It seems an extraordinary omission to me.

JL: Ah well I had an enormous fresh unadulterated starting point with this programme, with the marks that it made and the things which could be done with it. I had reason to fear that I would be accused of following this line or that line or any other line. It was so clean that I could discover images for this and that aspect of life, or just another aspect of everything, and find that nobody else had ever got to it. The whole of this particular planet is brought up to believe that there isn’t such a thing as creativity, for instance, unless it is an unsupported belief system or we happen to get the attention of the museum as an art. I think it was for Lawrence Alloway, who had a piece bought by the Museum of Modern Art and I thought, well that was real perception on the part of the art world. I then have to listen to the amateurs who run the art world and they felt the same and they took umbrage to my apparent indifference to their wishes and they wouldn’t fund me, except on one or two very special occasions with people like Bill Coldstream. Those that wouldn’t be named went to the extent of getting me black listed. Somewhere in my archive was a pile that said don’t do anything with this individual. What I found that then happened was that no official body would fund me to do anything, so Venice was right out. Venice was the last place that I would get brought into, but I didn’t have an advocate, the scientists couldn’t get their, professional words certainly, round event structure, and event structure is going to win out over them because there is this flaw in what is the current physics, which has been taken up. A gradual development, that find’s there are two kinds of time, has been brought out and is published in a book now, in The University Press. Of course time runs right across the disciplines and therefore across all the languages.