Still from Jeff Keen Marvo Movie, 1967. 16mm film. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London

Assaults on Perception
Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise (London to Brighton 1959-1969)

FLAT TIME HOUSE – STUDIO & HOME OF LATE BRITISH ARTIST JOHN LATHAM.

24 June – 25 July 2010
Curated by David Toop and Tony Herrington

David Toop is a musician, writer and sound curator. He’s published four books in six languages, including Rap Attack, 1984. His first album was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975 and he has since released seven solo albums and curated five compilations for Virgin Records. He has appeared on Top of The Pops with the Flying Lizards and collaborated with a variety of musicians from Prince Far I to Talvin Singh.

David first met John Latham as a student at Hornsey College of Art; Latham had been invited by students to screen his 16mm films Talk Mr Bard (1961) and Speak (1962).

Run Riot met with David at the Whitechapel Gallery café last Thursday to discuss Blow Up, the current exhibition at Flat Time House in South London, which he co-curated with Tony Herrington of The Wire.

The exhibition features material from AMM, Better Books, Bob Cobbing, DIAS, Coleridge Goode, Joe Harriott, James Joyce, Jeff Keen, John Latham, Annea Lockwood, Gustav Metzger, John Stevens, Val Wilmer and others.

This autumn at Whitechapel Gallery in London there will be a special performance of a newly commissioned piece by David Toop for the launch of a new DVD of John Lantham’s films. The DVD will have previously unseen material and is co-published by LUX & Lisson Gallery.

Saturday 4th September 2010, 4pm – Whitechapel Gallery


Still from Jeff Keen Marvo Movie, 1967. 16mm film. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London

Can you tell us how this exhibition came about?

I did a sound installation at Flat Time House last year called The Body Event and The Body Event was based on a collaborative piece I did with John Latham in 2004. It was his last Lisson Gallery exhibition before he died. I had recorded a conversation with John at Flat Time House. He had this exhibition coming up and was deciding what work should go in it and I suggested that I make a sound piece based on the conversation that we had had. He was happy with that.

It was suggested to me that I recreate that sound piece in Flat Time House, which is where I did the original recording. It was almost like a palimpsest, a re-working of the conversation with John, which would be reintroduced into the space where it had originally been recorded, as a sort of distributed body, which linked in with what his original idea of what the body was.

The Body Event was not just the idea of a singular integrated physical object with thinking and feeling functions, but as an event that had an extremely long duration - the DNA of a human being or continuation of ideas into the future.

I had a conversation with Noa Latham, John’s eldest son, at the opening of the Lisson Gallery show. And Noa said to me, did you know that John asked Joe Harriott, Jamaican born jazz musician, to do a soundtrack for his film Speak? I didn’t know it at all, I was totally amazed. I knew that John had asked Pink Floyd to make a soundtrack, which he had rejected because it was too musical, and Noa said that Joe Harriott had made a sound track and John had rejected it as well.

So that kind of sat there for a while in my mind, it was just a kind of seed that was growing there.

Then The Wire ran a piece about the filmmaker Jeff Keen.

While I was still at school in 1966 I went to the ICA, when it was still at Dover Street before it moved to The Mall. I bought a copy of this comic; a single page comic by Jeff Keen called Amazing Rayday. I had kept the poster and it made me rethink the relationship of that work. And also the relationship of Jeff Keen’s film Marvo Movie to sound poetry work by Bob Cobbing and Anna (now Annea) Lockwood. They had done the soundtrack. And the whole idea of the word, almost an assault on the word at that time, which John Latham had been involved in - Gradually these ideas all slowly coalesced - the ideas of the Destruction in Art Symposium, around Gustav Metzger’s ideas, John’s ideas,

As part of the Auto-Destructive movement?

Yes, it fascinated me when I was still at school. I bought the Art and Artists special issue of Auto Destruction and I started burning stuff on canvases. I was roughly 17 years old at the time. I was interested in that brief moment of destruction that came through in rock music like when The Who performed. I used to go see Jimi Hendrix play and I saw him smash stuff up. This was very formative material for me when I was a teenager.

I went to Gustav Metzger's show last year at the Serpentine and I was amazed when I saw the original 1959 manifesto for Auto Destruction on the wall and he’d written in this thing about how amplified sound could also be part of the destructive process. And really all these ideas were just kind of circling around and gradually it was like they were orbiting and they started coming closer and closer together.

Eventually I said to Elisa Kay, the resident curator at Flat Time House, I think there’s this exhibition there waiting to be done about all these ideas, and I think Flat Time House would be a great place to do it.

When the Jeff Keen article came out in The Wire I wrote a letter to the magazine where I said I thought I’d never taken Jeff seriously enough. I mentioned the poster and I said, you know there’s a history there, which is a hidden history. Its the same as the whole Joe Harriott story, you know the Joe Harriott Quintet was very important because this group of mostly black musicians from the Caribbean were pioneers of free improvisation in this country.

So through writing this letter about this hidden history I came to Tony Harrington, the managing editor of The Wire. He came back to me and said there are some interesting ideas here. I felt that Tony would bring something else entirely. He’s got a very broad knowledge and a very interesting take on things, and I like collaborations as well. I think they generate material that is unforeseen.

It’s interesting that it started off with a discovery, something that you weren’t aware of about someone you knew so well, that created this domino effect which eventually lead to Blow Up.

Absolutely, it was a lot of ideas circling around. And you know this conversation with Noa - the thing about this conversation is that nobody else can verify that it’s true. Joe Harriott is dead, John is dead. Maybe it's a myth. Its like the Pink Floyd story, maybe it's a myth.

“Pink Floyd were said to have recorded a track actually titled John Lantham on a the master tape box, but then the session was abandoned, or alternatively, the results were again, ‘too musical’ for Latham.”*

They don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean anything, It could be that they genuinely don’t remember. There’s lots of things that those of us old enough to be doing things in the 60’s don’t remember, for various reasons, one of them is that it was a long time ago.

The other thing is maybe; you never know with very successful bands like that, they have all sorts of hidden agendas. Maybe they do know where it is and maybe they’re planning to bring it out in a box set in the future. Or maybe they genuinely don’t know and there is genuinely no sign of it.


Still from John Latham, Speak, 1962. 16mm film. Courtesy the Estate of the artist
and LUX, London

Pink Floyd played Speak at their performances? Did you see it?

Speak was often shown in the early days when they were performing.

I used to go see Pink Floyd in the Syd Barrett days. There’s another funny connection in that I had this English literature teacher at school and she was married to a playwright that was quite famous at that time. I was doing light shows and sound events at school, and she came to a show and she said my brother does light shows for Pink Floyd, a guy called Peter Wynne Wilson. I wrote to Peter Wynne Wilson and he lived with Syd Barrett in this famous place on Cambridge Circus, and he wrote a letter back to me which sadly I didn’t keep. I used to go and see them play and mostly it was Peter Wynne Wilson’s light shows, but they also worked with Hornsey Light and Sound Department and I did my foundation at Hornsey in ‘67/ ’68.

So there are all these incredible connections that are part of my history and in some sense you could say I’m making some sense of all these interconnections.

And it's a nice echo of Latham’s theories as well.

Yes that’s right. There were very strong connections with me. All of these characters were very closely interconnected at one time. There was a point where they sort of were the counterculture and then the counterculture was completely taken over, but there was a point where it was artists and people associated with artists, and there were a few groups of people who were brave enough to be experimental.

From an excerpt, interview conducted Thursday 15th July 2010.

*Pg 3 Exhibition Catalogue Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise (London to Brighton, 1959 – 1969) (Notes from Rob Chapman’s biography of Syd Barrett, A Very Irregular Head)

John Latham / Flat Time House
210 Bellenden Road
London SE15 4BW
+44 (0)207 207 4845
info@flattimeho.org.uk
...

Flat Time House is the home and studio of the late British artist John Latham (1921 - 2006).

Much of Latham’s work was founded upon his personal beliefs surrounding physics and time.

Latham's work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in collections including Tate Collection and MoMA. His work has been represented by Lisson Gallery since 1970.