John Latham was a pioneer of British conceptual art, who, through painting, sculpture, performance, film, installation and writing, mapped systems of knowledge, developing his own philosophy of time.
He proposed that the basic component of reality is not the particle, but the ‘least event,’ or the shortest departure from the state of nothing. The entire universe is viewed as a system of events in time, rather than objects in space. For Latham all artworks were considered events activated as such through diverse processes from chewing, shredding or spitting to simply declaring.
Latham maintained steadfast devotion to exploring the most complex cosmological ideas and questioning the traditional notions and structures of art, science and philosophy.
In 2003, John Latham declared his house and studio a living sculpture, naming it FTHo after his theory of time, ‘Flat Time.’ Until his death, Latham opened his door to anyone interested in thinking about art and is now a museum and centre for alternative learning.
