Issue 2: Autumn 2008: Spanish Avant-Garde Film
John Latham's Encyclopedia Britannica
John Latham's Encyclopedia Brittanica is exhibited as part of the Bookish exhibition at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork, until October 24th.
Books had a central but torturous part to play in much of John Latham's work, from the late 1950's right up until his death in 2006. From his notoriety as the artist who digested a copy of Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture back in 1966, through to sculptural works featuring books scissored with glass or plastered to canvas - Latham has arguably done more than any other visual artist in the late twentieth century to put books through processes that didn't befit their design.
But if books were an evident and recurring object in Latham's artwork, they were also a way of referring to a broader set of ideas and concepts. In Latham's work, books came to signify the compounding of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas that purported to articulate the world we live in, and life beyond. It is no surprise therefore, that Latham was drawn to the Encyclopedia Britannica - a book that once grandly proclaimed itself the ‘sum of all human knowledge' and which became a one-stop-shop of facts, general worldly descriptions, and a chart of celebrities, Kings, Queens, and dictators; standard to all schools and households before the rise of Wikipedia. There were Latham's ceremonial ‘skoob tower' burnings of the book in the 1960s, and also 16mm film works such as Erth and Encyclopedia Britannica, both from 1971.
Although by all accounts a separate film, Encyclopedia Britannica wholly consists of one 6 minute sequence that appears in the longer, 25 minute, Erth. In this sequence, Latham presents the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica, page by page, at an accelerated pace which reduces each page to a flicker. The speed of each successive page cancels the previous, to a point where text reduces to a pale blur, and images barely register: the entire book devoured by the force and duress of its own pages.
The affect of watching Encyclopedia Britannica (or the sequence as it appears in Erth), is one of initial anxiety in trying to make legible what is happening too quickly. But this illegibility of the book as a text or as a resource soon gives way to an overwhelming and mesmeric visuality, perhaps what could be loosely described as a mode of reading that transcends into a mode of viewing.
While Encyclopedia Britannica deserves considerable attention in itself, it is also interesting to consider the inclusion of the same sequence within the broader conceptual parameters of Erth. Curiously, Erth was funded by the National Coal Board in the UK, as part of the Artist Placement Group (APG) initiative that Latham co-founded. The film presents a journey from outer space to the centre of the Earth; a journey that is predominantly black, but occasionally illuminated by still images of the Earth getting ever closer; a voice dryly counting years in German, adding to the journey a sense of time being compressed as the film ticks over in its blackness. At a point in the journey where we imagine contact with the Earth's surface, Latham introduces the 6 minute sequence of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as described above. This sequence over, the journey continues then into the blackness below the surface of the Earth, this time occasionally illuminated by images of tunneling miners (coal miners, we might assume).
Although Latham became more significant to the histories of sculpture and conceptual art as it emerged in the UK from the 1960s onwards, his film works are no mere supplement in the scheme of his work. His interests in books and their physical and durational properties, as well as his interests in the universalizing tendencies in the languages of scientific, philosophical, and religious ideas: all this had a particular and significant address to the medium of film.
- Matt Packer
The Glucksman Gallery: http://www.glucksman.org/