Programmed alongside the John Latham survey in the Serpentine’s main gallery is this curious tribute in the Sackler space. The assembled quartet of contemporary artists all, in some form or other, have connections to the late, great godfather of British conceptual art.
Turner Prize-winner Douglas Gordon’s piece ‘Happily Ever After’ incorporates text work by Latham, and is punctuated (quite literally) by Latham’s characteristic spray-gun marks. As a piece of fan art, it’s rather sweet. A billiards table and ping-pong table look like fun, but it’s the video of Gordon in conversation with his former tutor that’s truly compelling, every last word spoken by the frail, elderly Latham riveting and profound.
Cally Spooner, meanwhile, has taken Latham’s scientific rigour and applied it to a line graph that spans the four outer walls of the gallery. They chart an odd mixture of the personal and public: one tracks Spooner’s metabolic levels, another follows the pound on the stock market.
But it’s Laure Prouvost (another Turner Prize winner) who pays the most tender homage. A series of radiators with teabags lying on their grills is surely a fond reference to the time she spent in Latham’s studio-home as his assistant; her installation ‘End Her Is Story’ is melancholy and poetic.
Lastly, there’s Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, whose film documents an artwork-in-progress: her candidacy for her country’s 2018 presidential elections. Intended as a kind of ‘If I can do it, so can you’ call to action to her fellow citizens, it’s this piece that feels closest in its DNA to Latham – who firmly believed that artists had to contribute something useful in the world – and is the high point of a rather tenuous exhibition. Teacher, employer, mentor, influence: it’s clear that Latham cast a long shadow, but one that turns out to be rather hard to escape.