Collection: John Latham

John Latham (1921–2006) was a British artist whose work consistently challenged the dominance of vision and object in art, proposing instead a practice grounded in time, event and what he called the ‘least event’ — the smallest unit of occurrence from which all experience is constructed. His spray-painted book reliefs from the 1950s and 1960s treated the book as a physical and cultural object to be destroyed, defaced and reassembled. His 1966 work Art and Culture — in which he borrowed Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture from the library at St Martin’s School of Art, chewed pages from it with students and guests, fermented the pulp, and returned the residue in a labelled jar — resulted in his dismissal and became one of the defining gestures of British conceptual art. Latham was also a founder of the Artist Placement Group, which sought to place artists within government departments and industrial organisations.