A showreel of films opens this exhibition. One of them, ‘Unclassified Material’, features the pages of dozens upon dozens of encyclopaedias flipping across the screen at dizzying speed. It turns out to be a smart move; the sense of being overloaded with ideas and information acts as a forewarning of what you should expect in this survey of the late British conceptualist John Latham. Hard work, to say the least.
At the heart of Latham’s work is something he called ‘Flat Time Theory’: a belief that if the universe is viewed in time-based rather than spatial terms, then a way could be found to unify art, science, philosophy, economics and pretty much everything. And if that sounds nigh-on unfathomable, then don’t worry: you’re not the only one. As you wander around his diverse output – painting, sculpture, text, film, performance – you get the sense of someone using anything at his disposal to send the contents of his head out into the world.
There are books. Lots of books. Latham distrusted these arrogant little slabs of organised knowledge, and would chop them in half, tear them up, entomb them in plaster and even – in a 1966 ‘art action’ which cost him his teaching post at St Martins – chew them and spit them out. It’s tempting to think of him as the kind of person who might wear a tinfoil hat to keep out government radio signals and that kind of thing. But Latham was no crackpot recluse: he believed artists needed to play an active role in society, and co-founded the Artist Placement Group, which sought to find artists jobs in government offices. After bagging himself a residency at the Scottish Office in 1975, he set about trying to get a series of industrial waste heaps classified as ‘process sculptures’. God knows what his colleagues made of him.
Make no mistake, this exhibition requires some mental heavy-lifting. The gallery’s decision to eschew text panels that might ease you into Latham’s ideas is a bit iffy; many visitors are bound to walk out after 30 seconds. But in a city whose institutions seem to be growing more and more risk-averse with their programming – and in thrall to art that looks nice on Instagram feeds – the Serpentine deserves credit for putting on a show of someone so bold, uncompromising and influential. (The accompanying exhibition in their Sackler space brings together four artists who all pay tribute to Latham.) If you dare take the plunge into Latham’s art, you may well leave looking at the world in a completely different way.