Date: 03-12-1991
Owning Institution: Museum of Modern Art
Publication:       The Independent 1987 - 1999  
Subject:     20th Century    

''SUCCESSFUL art can be depended upon to explain itself,'' wrote Clement Greenberg in Art and Culture. John Latham, a retrospective of whose work can currently be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, doesn't agree. Latham, who is widely but not quite accurately regarded as one of the pioneers of Con-ceptual Art, has spent much of his long career trying to explain his own art. So much of it, in fact, that it is questionable which has more exercised him: the act of creation, or the act of exegesis. Within that small circle of people known as the British art world, Latham is famous for his explanations.

The catalogue to the present show includes, by way of an appendix, Latham's latest attempt to clarify what he refers to as his ''Time-Base Theory''. He clearly regards this as being of considerable import. It is said to contain the seeds of human salvation, so the fact that it is also said to be crucial to an appreciation of Latham's own work - the collages of burnt, dismembered or otherwise defaced books which he has been making since the 1950s - may prove incidental.

The world doesn't look like being saved for some while yet, however. ''Time-Base Theory'' is not very easy to follow. Take Latham on Man, for example: ''The human organism is considered as an Insistently Re-current Event (IRE) within a spectrum of IREs, and reproducing on the average about every 30 years. The 30 years is in band 25 and is written for purposes of visualising proportions as 10 to the power of 9 seconds within the range of A-U, 10 to the power of minus 23 seconds - 10 to the power of minus 21 seconds (roughly a thousand times the presently calculated age of the present universe).'' To be fair, this quotation accompanies a diagram, but even with its help Latham's drift is not entirely apparent. Latham on God is, if anything, still more obscure: ''THE MYSTERIOUS BEING KNOWN AS GOD,'' he announces, ''is an atemporal score, with a probable time-base in the region of 1019 seconds.''

This begins to sound a little like Douglas Adams' Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, according to which, it may be remembered, the answer to the mysteries of life, the universe and everything was 42. And just how it all relates to a work like (say) The Burial of Count Orgaz, Latham's 1958 reworking of El Greco in which charred books and other objects (a tap, something that might be a sponge) stand in for burial attendants, angels and all the other paraphernalia of Spanish Catholic iconography, seems even harder to puzzle out.

The alliance of ''difficult'' modern art with even more difficult text purporting to explain it is nothing new. You might say that it has acquired the force of convention, that it has become one of the standard marketing strategies employed by those whose business it is to shift contemporary art as product. It is, commonly, an intimidatory tactic, a way of boilerplating the art in question with such heavy-duty jargon that although no one could possibly pretend to understand it, they might just be impressed by it. Yet if Latham's arguments appear impenetrable, they also appear genuinely meant. Latham is a tireless proselytiser of his ''Time- Base Theory'' and has been banging on about it for so long, in the face of such discouragement, that it is almost inconceivable that he could be a simple fraud.

All this places him in a singular position. He has many admirers, as this show, first seen at the Staats-galerie in Stuttgart, confirms. Richard Hamilton, whom few would question as one of the more considerable British artists of the second half of this century, is on record as saying ''we owe Latham''. Yet not one of his supporters, as far as I know (and I have made enquiries) appears to have more than the faintest idea of what his ideas about life, the universe and everything add up to.

Latham remains best known for what he and a group of his students at St Martin's School of Art did to a copy of Greenberg's Art and Culture in 1966. Having borrowed the book from the art school library, Latham invited a number of his students to his flat to chew it over. Pages from the book were torn out, distributed among the members of the party, chewed up and spat out into a bowl. The resulting mess was fermented in acid and distilled into a phial which was eventually, after many requests for the book's return, offered back to the library. St Martin's took a dim view of Latham's bibliophagic tendencies, and he was dismissed. However, he was allowed to keep the residue of Art and Culture. He later designated it, along with the documents informing him of his dismissal, as a work of art. New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired it in 1970.

Displayed in a vitrine in Latham's present show, Art and Culture is not a fantastically impressive work. It is a relic of a gesture whose significance may be held to lie, primarily, in the way that it has come to symbolise one of the more significant debates in British art during the past 25 years. It has become the emblem, par excellence, of that reaction against Clement Greenberg and his influential ideas on art, which took place in St Martin's School of Art in the later 1960s - a reaction which is often said to have issued in the work of such artists as Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean and Richard Long. Latham's detractors may merely see, in Art and Culture, a form of intellectual mastication; for others, however, it remains a cultural totem of sorts, a profound memento of that liberating moment when Greenbergian orthodoxy was finally repudiated in this country. Yet either way, all it suggests is what Latham was against: Greenberg's notion, for example, that the best modern art was inevitably abstract; or his conviction that modern painting should aspire to absolute non-illusionistic flatness. It does little to clarify what Latham wished to put in the place of those ideas.

But neither, in the end, do the majority of his other works. This is not to say that they are without interest, or even a certain kind of power (if this show proves anything, it is that Latham's iconoclastic energy has not been dampened by age). But they present the unusual spectacle of an art whose effects seem oddly at variance with those intended by its creator.

Latham's peculiar, cobbled together assemblages of books are solemn and sinister works that are liable to suggest anything but the intricacies of ''Time-Base Theory'' to even the most inquisitive viewer. The most recent of them, God is Great, is a case in point. It consists primarily of a freestanding sheet of glass through which a copy of the Talmud, the Koran, the Torah and the Bible have been jammed - as if they have been thrown through a window but, somehow, have remained lodged in it. The exhibition broadsheet suggests that in this work ''Latham asks us to examine religion as ideology through a consideration of the often turbulent relationship between Christianity, Judaism and Islam.'' Well, up to a point. The work is awkward and violent, implying (maybe) the extent to which faith can become a pretext for aggression. You might take it as an emblem of human folly, but hardly as an ''examination'' of religion.

Books are said to be symbols of foolishness, for Latham, because they represent the limitations of cur-rent human thinking - as opposed to the liberating broadness of his own ''Time- Base Theory'' which, once universally understood, will usher in a new age of mutual understanding and peace. (Latham refers to books as ''Skoob'', a mocking reversal that may reflect the same attitude.) Mutilated, they cling to the surfaces of his paintings, like great winged butterflies pinned to the canvas, or like the bats in Goya's famous print The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters. Books are anthropomorphised, in Latham's art: they are battered stand- ins for the participants in the long and fruitless wars of thought which he sees at the centre of human history. But if Latham's book works are meant to represent battlefields, the aftermaths of those hollow ideological battles fought out in the dark ages of pre-''Time-Base Theory'' between adherents of various faiths and philosophies, they do not necessarily fulfil the artist's intentions. It is possible to argue that the book's potency as a symbol, and a symbol of something other than that meant by Latham, sabotages his work.
Many Lathams arouse sympathy, rather than contempt. You feel sorry for these books, so twisted and burned and manhandled; you think, almost inevitably, of what happens to books in countries ruled by op-pressive regimes, of what happened to books in Nazi Germany. And so these works assume the status of cautionary objects: emblems of certain situations, certain attitudes, that must not be allowed to recur. It may not be inappropriate to mention, here, how strong a resemblance Latham's ashen, desolate pictorial terrain bears to that of Anselm Kiefer - an artist who has made his own preoccupation with Nazism and its horrors entirely (perhaps too entirely) explicit.

Latham's work, then, can be affecting. It can suggest some awful holocaust in which all human knowl-edge is destroyed; it can suggest a world ruled by draconian, firebrand-bearing censors. But still you have the feeling that all this is quite unintentional - and that, paradoxically, if Latham's art ever managed to explain itself, it would be much less admired.