Noits and Skoobs: a recent New York exhibition presented the work of pioneering British artist John Latham, whose Conceptual projects made an indelible mark on postwar art

John Latham (1921-2006) died on New Year's Day last year, several months into a survey of his work at Tate Britain. As befits his contentious career, the Tate refused to include his 1991 God Is Great (#2) in the show. The sculpture consists of three books--the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud--inserted through holes cut into a sheet of glass. The exhibition opened just two months after the July 2005 attacks on London's public transport by suicide bombers; the Tare stated that the sensitive climate made the work's display inappropriate. Latham reproached the museum for the suppression of the piece, with which he intended to rebuke just such violence by emphasizing the commonality of three major world religions. In an interview with Marianne Brouwer in December 2004, he said the "God Is Great" works (he made many versions) evolved from the notion "that underneath the theologies is a real source from which they all are extruded," as the books are extruded from the glass. (1)

A recent survey of Latham's work at New York City's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center prominently displayed a 2005 configuration of the work God Is Great (#4), comprising the three holy books situated in an expansive field of broken glass. (It also appeared in the 2005 Venice Biennale.) The various renditions of "God Is Great," originally conceived in response to the 1990 Gulf War, and particularly salient with the rise of religious fundamentalism, were the artist's opportunity to consider "who the hell it is that people think that they're talking about when they use their particular word for the Almighty." (2)

Thirty-six works, dating from 1960 to the present, made up "Time Base and the Universe," curated by P.S.1 international adjunct curator David Thorp and organized in conjunction with John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, England, where it appeared in the summer of 2006. Latham participated in the selection and in decisions about the display before his death. The exhibition offered a succinct overview of most of the major themes of his oeuvre and highlighted key summation pieces that function as comprehensive statements of earlier discoveries.

Latham was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and sent to English boarding schools. He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and, upon his return, attended art school in London. In 1954, Latham began an association with Clive Gregory and Anita Kohsen, an astronomer and a psychologist respectively, who directed their efforts toward mending social ills through the union of mind and matter, psyche and cosmos. Initiating the Institute for the Study of Mental Images (ISMI), the two researchers and Latham agreed that society had reached a state of intellectual crisis; 20th-century physics was hopelessly conflicted, and art had been brought full circle with the blank canvases of Rauschenberg's 1951 "White Paintings." In 1959, ISMI published Gregory and Kohsen's The O-Structure: Introduction to Psychophysical Cosmology, a treatise formulating many of the concepts that underlay the artist's subsequent art and writing.

In the 1950s Latham started to use a spray gun to make paintings (he is said to have been the first artist in England to use one). He considered the works the first visual embodiments of his newfound understanding of the world, namely the conjecture that time, rather than space, structures the universe. In the spray-gun paintings, the white ground serves as the context and the spray of black paint is the event. A single burst of paint from the gun was what Latham called a "Least Event." Longer or multiple sprays were more complex time-based events. The P.S.1 show included five examples from the 1970s of these spray-gun paintings. He often referred to them as "noits." The meaning of the neologism is twofold: "no it" as in no-thing, and "-tion" (a suffix often used to convert verbs to abstract nouns) spelled backwards. Two Noit. One Second Drawing (1970-71) consists of a delicate spray of black dots on a board cut into a quadrant of a circle mounted on a 24-inch-square panel. Several hearty drips punctuate the spray. Latham imprinted the panels, at first on the back and later (as in this work) on the front, with a customized stamp reading "noit" followed by a place to write in the exact time and date of their making and the initials of the creator or "operator." (3)

Three materials were central to Latham's practice: the spray-paint gun, books and glass. Books began to appear in his work in the late 1950s. He affixed books to the surfaces of his paintings in every imaginable position. Plaster of paris and black spray paint often entirely obscured titles and text, turning the books into readymade building blocks of form. He scoured cheap bins at secondhand bookstores, making selections based on size, thickness, shape and condition as well as intriguing content.