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The Mattress Factory is an artist-centered museum, international residency program and renowned producer and presenter of installation art. We say “yes” to artists, offering time and space to dream and realize projects in our hometown, Pittsburgh, PA. We invite audiences from around the world and around the corner to step inside, immerse and connect with the artistic process.

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John Latham

Skoob Tower

1996

This play is a reflection on the (im)possibility of accepting diversity and the other. The fragmented body of the neoplasm—the fruit of unstable conditions—overcomes barriers, loves and denies itself and others, wanders around, forgetting its profession. It frequently and with pleasure divides, goes through dangerous palpation, questions the possibility of contact with the experience of the other. Poorly brought up but very successful, it invites us to a trans-species transition.

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Latham created a tower of old encyclopedias on a base of angle irons. He burned this tower of books--spelled backward, skoob--at the opening reception. "The book tower was a formal sculpture and intended in every way to be an extension of the tradition of sculpture. It was not in any degree a gesture of contempt for the books or literature. What it did intend was to put the proposition into mind that perhaps the cultural base was burnt out. Thus with the towers it seemed more logical to make a sculpture which disintegrated by fire--as the more dignified statement." John Latham quoted in an essay by Marion Keiner in John Latham: Art after Physics, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1991.

Exhibition

John Latham: May 30, 1996 – March 2, 1997
About The Artist

John Latham was a pioneer of British conceptual art, who, through painting, sculpture, performances, assemblages, films, installation and extensive writings, fueled controversy and continues to inspire. His emphasis on process in action and language, and his theories which have focused on time and event over the object, have provided models for a generation of younger artists. A visionary in mapping systems of knowledge, whether scientific or religious, he developed his own philosophy of time, known as ‘Event Structure.’ In this doctrine he proposed that the most basic component of reality is not the particle, as implied by physics, but the ‘least event,’ or the shortest departure from the state of nothing. The entire universe is to be viewed as a system of events in time, rather than objects in space. Thus, for Latham all artworks were considered events and were activated as such through diverse processes ranging from spraying, chewing, shredding or spitting to simply declaring.

His work resides in collections at the Arts Council Collection, London; Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano, Milan, Italy; National Gallery of Modern Art, Belfast; Modern Art Museum, Caracas, Venezuela; Newark Museum, Newark, NY; Tate Collection, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, MN.

More from this Artist

Long Glass

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More from this Exhibition

Long Glass

Long Painting

Documentation

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