12 September 2005  –  26 February 2006

JOHN LATHAM

Extracts from an extended conversation
in Flat Time HO
210 bellenden rd

I’m going to try to tell you what this is all doing. This used to be a shop, and the window is a membrane through which I thought I’ve got a book sculpture. A book sculpture is information which is in the face. The house is... the front of the house is the face of what I’m calling Flat Time HO. Flat Time House you can call it. But what you see has a membrane behind it which takes you into what I’m calling the mind in here. And why this is the mind is because it’s got the abstract version of the cosmic history which comes from a zero point. So in here, what you can do is to go round from the zero piece, which shows the difference between white and pre-white, which is transparency. And you come round via book reliefs.

The framed work there is a development from the One Second Drawing when it becomes... Historically, there’s an organic something in there. But you come round to where... another idea altogether came into existence. It was a reversion to painting, the painting that I did. For convenience sake, it was rolled up. And in rolling it, I put it on the floor and noticed that, when unrolling, you could see the painting doing what I’ve got it doing here. You could see what the painting was like but you couldn’t see what was on the other side. And that was one of the big thoughts which brought about rolled-up paintings as representing two kinds of time. One of them is the time it takes to drop. The other is - let’s put it the other way up... The other is what could be said to happen between one end, which represents the very, very fast recurrencies through the middle times, which we understand in terms of years and seconds and hours and so on, to the total universe at the far end, which, of course, nobody knows how long it’s going to last. There is no phenomenon in existence which doesn’t have time in it. But there’s an awful lot which doesn’t necessarily have space in it. Well, when that is deciphered, we’ve got the basic T diagram, as you see up here. In there, I have joined the two sets of forms as art. What this says is that the universe is a recurrent event and no more like an organism than is implied by the language of physics. They start from a Big Bang and can’t solve the problem when it comes down to basics. There’s an inconsistency between gravity and the other dynamic forces. So there’s a lot of talk about string theories and so on. Which in this language can be explained but they are redundant - we don’t need it. But I would leave that for another discourse, so that we go to... what is the next thing in the house.

It’s what I’m calling the brain. The brain component is where you start to think and put things down on a computer. I have a great filing system which is the most recent discovery arising from physics but, really, it doesn’t discover anything except the fact that there is an immense range of frequencies. Technology gives us a brain, but it doesn’t give us a mind. The mind in that room is an abstraction which you can read if you can understand the development from one state to the next. To where we weren’t interested in appearances and we’re not interested in skill.

Anyway, we’re going out to look at the rest of the body event. I use this as a place where I see things that I have to attend to. I can never think it out so it’s very chaotic because I see what I have, but I can’t think what file they’re in. You understand? So,... cooking, stove, stove. I’ve got a spiral which goes up to sleeping and plumbing. All the necessary things which happen to a body event are coped with in this area. Sitting. Lying. And a spiral to go up. I’ve even got a window on the natural wild. The natural wild. We used to have Concorde going past. It’s a great shame. It had such authority. It’s the only plane that had real determination going forward, and so effortlessly. So, just to show, the body event has to have a space which has got water in it. Water, water everywhere.

The Flat Time HO is the end of a 50-year-long excursion from the art of the 1850s to the 1950s. Where you have a countdown from total confidence in the spatial representation of nature and in constructions from the appearances of nature, which you get in, shall we say, Delacroix. And what then we would remember, or people would remember, would be... the Impressionists used marks and elevated the action on the canvas above the represented, the subject matter which was ostensibly there. And that, gradually, lost more and more credibility until you got Picasso making interesting allusions to people. Both, of course, they weren’t about the people, they were about the painting. And, following that, nobody could redo the Picasso, so that one had an abstract movement, which became pure. What happened then after Mondrian’s Boogie-Woogie paintings, there were action paintings which came in - of course, Jackson Pollock. That action was, of course, an attention trap, an attention magnet. The other one was very cool and obliterated time like philosophy has tried, science has tried.

Many of the traditional approaches to understanding what is the main, what is the ultimate starting point of all this that we belong to. There was a dichotomy between action and the deletion of action and then, finally, what we got to was an exhibition of minimalism, where the last minimalist statement where a zero-action canvas presented as a work. It’s very important to realise that in each new approach to art, we can notice the differences between Cezanne and Picasso and then Mondrian, for instance, those very specific differences. They are the main, key pointers to what was going on that people may have got anyway. It was a philosophy, only it was a visualised, non-verbalised version, which, when it came to the zero action, I happened to be on the side, I knew nothing about it. It wasn’t a part of what I was doing at the time. But the two scientists who came to talk - I happened to have an introduction - two scientists who were crossing categories in order to discover the link between the biological and the astrophysical. It still hasn’t been done, except at the Institute for Study of Mental Images, where I was the artist that was chosen to do a mural for them. And the instrument used for giving them the picture was a spray gun. The interesting thing from here is that nowhere in the whole of history has a spray-gun image been available to construct a philosophy from or to construct a science from. From there we go to the hand. This has got some relics from the God is Great works, which I did in 1990. It’s got that and there is another from the same tradition. Those are all Hebrew. This is Faraday. This is a very interesting juxtaposition because this is an early Faraday book. Chemical History of a Candle. In here, I call this space where things are made with the hand. It’s in a state of total chaos at the moment. That’s how it is. I’ve been here 20 years. Well, nearly 20 years. The vine was planted in that space. It’s still growing quite big.

The idea of conceptual as art obviously brings in the question of origins. The Big Bang universe which we’re told about as when time began, has infinite heat. But we don’t have to believe that. What we can say is the universe that we have the Big Bang start from has a prehistory going down from... If we call the universe we’re in U Now, it could be traced back through a U - 1U - 2. And when we get down to a U1, proto-universe of one extended state from a non-extended state. What is of extreme interest is that if one starts from a universe with one extended state, that has to go back instantly to a non-extended state. What you have is what is virtually a co-present, non-extended plus impulse-informed non-extended state and the expression of the extension. What that then produces as a starting point is not "in the beginning was the word", it was not the physics version which was a fluctuation in a vacuum. Number two universe, U2, is able to give us what we call time. Number three brings in a few - if you consider the zero point as a score - which, after all, we’re artists here, we know what it is to do things in time, so we’ll call it a score. So Universe 1, 2 and 3 give us something which will behave very much like a quantum unit. It doesn’t know whether to stay put or to traverse, and has a very big uncertainty to it. U4 begins to know that there’s something that establishes position relative to something which traverses. And the habit which goes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... will traverse from the entity which goes: 1-2, 1-2, 1. That kind of entity is the prototype of a particle from which radiation, photons, disappear at a regular set speed. The regularity of the set speed tells us something about the profundity of that particular phase in the development of the universe which we’ve got. The history that imparts a score which then modifies and adds to what has gone before and develops it... has got all the characteristics of a Darwinian investigation of evolution and The Origin of Species as well. What we’re looking at in art cosmology is much more probable and much more feasible and it includes people and their behaviour and the sources of their action, where physics and the other sciences are totally lost.

Accidents happen. That’s probably clean enough.

God is great is a war cry which was heard as such by (INDISTINCT) coming out of the Gulf War. And at that time, I thought God is the opportunity to align who the hell it is that people think that they’re talking about when they use their particular word for the Almighty. If people do use the word "God", it’s just as much of a noise as "Dog" is. It doesn’t really convey anything but a rooted prejudice which is taught with enormous energy from institutionalised religion. And it’s become quite dangerous in many ways. It needs synthesising into one. It needs bringing together by an image. That’s what I’m bringing the glass into for, that it’s such a good equivalent for the mysterious being.

I have made three or four variants on the theme of God where the canvas is replaced by the transparency of glass. Now, the transparency of glass is more minimal than a white surface. When I started to use glass, it was a wonderful foil for books which are extremely personal. They tell stories, they’re wonderful for telling stories, but they are very awkward for coming to grips with... the original question that I started with. What happened then with the books was, obviously, to take the three scriptures, the three sacred books, of the three different, the main three central theologies. And to put them all through the glass or to make them emerge from that glass, as if extruded from it. And in that way, to say that glass is where the truth is and the written material is vulnerable. The written material is contentious and liable to provoke hostilities if one is not very careful.

Now, it’s very important to recognise that in art what we have is a map which will give us a step behind where physics got to and a step behind where theology started and it’s still labouring because it’s still viable. And a step behind viable logic because there is no logic of any known kind.

The pieces that I’m calling God is Great are there to indicate that underneath the theologies is a real source from which they all are extruded, if one is talking about the physical character of them, or emanated if they are in a kind of spiritual sense. People do know a source that they experience and they call this person Allah or God or Jehovah, or whatever it is that they call this source. And that’s got to lose its sectarian characteristics.

I could lift.

That is the main thing.

So, that’s what happened. And that’s what you see.

It could be universe, as you say. I quite enjoy doing these things. Because they’re all a bit different.

See what that does.

So that’s what we’re seeing. And that’s probably more interesting than the others.

I use the word... or the phrase "the mysterious being known as God" to get over this particular problem when introducing the booklet called Event Structure. That was 1980-81. I had been very impressed at the time with a phrase from Chomsky, who was being interviewed on the box by, I forget who it was, but he was a distinguished English philosopher. I knew he was doing a series on philosophers. What Chomsky said was this: "If we go back to the early history of science, people were raising questions as to the heavenly bodies and the sources of human action. "Well," he said, "there’s been no progress. We’re still asking the same questions. We cannot construct even false scientific theories about them." Now, that to me was a sign there was a flaw in that whole system. The idea of God is much more intelligible if one starts from the zero point which I described just a moment ago. Where non-extended, comes from Einstein after all, and plus huge impulse, which means there’s an awful lot to be done. Reduce that to zero or to near zero, and what you’ve got is a proto-universe of one extended state, which becomes two extended states without any question at all because the impulse still stays. The impulse becomes the equivalent of what we have in musical terms as a score.

There is the text The mysterious being known as God, which I think has been taken up and made into a statement. It’s very useful on account of the way that it gets one out of saying "God". It’s got a more descriptive power to it. Now the way that it arises: a zero state is represented in this book by a blank page. And the initial hit is given one point, which would disappear. The second and third points are documented as the way that the points have different possibilities of connections. So that the behaviour is more quantum-like. And there we have the fourth, where in this book I was thinking of information from outside or from inside the scope of those three points. And I think I was really going towards the idea of an observer of the following. And, of course, the story that I’m telling here with this book is not quite the same as what I would say now. But it forms the basis of what was summarised in the whole of the book relief period, which you can see... coming into being with State 7, 8 and 9, and then the book’s standing in the constellatory mark is linear time and the white of the book, but constellatory, omnipresent time that you see all the time outside, that’s how it would look from this side.

The development from that State 11, that must be State 12... Yes, the development... When we’ve got into books, we’re into psychology, an entity like a story in a book. Which is a long-term event, which is an organic problem. We haven’t got it in physics. There’s no such thing as an organic system in physics but, in biology, they can’t get out of it. So where did the word biology start? This would give you a hypothesis. Let’s call it just a hypothesis for what could be said to be going on, or to have gone on, that we’re now more like that, which is... The legend here says the Aloysius type in the Dostoevsky book, where you’ve got a source of information which is genetic in the animal person. But the person becomes more than an animal because in there, there is the connection to a language, a way of coding the information, so it becomes consistent. That gives a rational individual which we recognise as the social person in the society which we have at the moment. What we also recognise is that there are people who invent things which nobody’s ever thought of before. And the intuition which goes to that is very mysterious because it’s never thought out, it just happens. Like "Why don’t people do it like this? Why isn’t this done?" And I put on the explanation for that in a book which is orientated towards the person, like that.

And the rest of this has gone into the new thought. If a very long time base is considered, it would go on and on, it would go right up a spectrum. And a very short one, which we would know or recognise as the province of physicists and such like, it’s a matter of enormous importance.

What do you see as Flat Time, which is that plane? First of all, that is what you see as time on the roller. But that on the other side of it is what actually went on. But, nevertheless, there’s the whole of time. There’s the whole of the gamut of extended states which we know as the inhabitants of the universe. As well as the planets under the sun and galaxies and so on.

If those are all collated together, the total plane will become a kind of map of what... It’ll even show who we’re addressing with this strange word "God". As a mysterious being is very mysterious and is personal. And there’s no way of doubting it because the dimensionality of event is the dimensionality of a person. There is impulse, there is think, reflection. And there is also a picking up of information from God knows where. That’s how we talk it.

After I finished doing this and got out the Flat Time roller, that gave me the idea that the white of the canvas is not quite adequate and therefore when I found that the pane of glass was doing such an effective job relative to the white - it showed why white is white, for instance. That plane could be used to be the sign of where all the visible universe, the ostensible extended universe is extruded. So that the glass becomes what we call God. And the things that are extruded from it are vulnerable, changeable and will perish. They all will come to an end. They are events. They come to an end as extensions. But they go into the score, they are not lost. And that’s why the heat in the religions is that they all say, "Oh, well, you don’t believe it." But there’s no question about it. It’s all come from having to talk and words which don’t really have a visual. Nature has never had this particular visual series on which to ponder and debate and think, "Well, maybe that’s the geometry or the trigonometry that is being followed." And it all seems to me to be more plausible as I’ve gone on. After all, it’s been 50 years that I’ve been agnostic about whether I’m doing the right thing or not. But I’ve come to be more sure the more I read into the scientific publications that I’m able to understand - they don’t ring true. They’re only so much invention in order to fill up pages, so many pages every week. Or just to get a job. It’s all driven by the commercial system. In music, for instance, nobody goes on doing the same old thing - they know what’s gone on before. And so they do something different. That’s it.

We’ll go up to where we can park. Interesting plots.

We went further up.

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