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John Latham: THE LISSON GALLERY DOES NOT EXIST FOR 100 YEARS

5 May – 5 June 2010

John Latham: THE LISSON GALLERY DOES NOT EXIST FOR 100 YEARS

Forty years on from John Latham's first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in 1970, the gallery revisits works and actions from that seminal show in the wider context of the artist's work through the 1970s, a period of extraordinary innovation, productivity and influence.


The work Latham made during this decade, beginning with the Lisson show, confirmed his position at the forefront of the new conceptual and event-based artistic practices. Through the diverse work he was producing in sculpture, film, painting, text, and performance, he also began to distil his 'Time-Base Theorem'. At the heart of the theory is a scale or spectrum, a cosmological system for understanding all phenomena - physical and metaphysical - in terms of time and event. The current exhibition attempts a physical embodiment of Latham's concept of the Time-Base spectrum within the landscape of the gallery, from the smallest measurable event to the greatest.


In 1970, a motorcycle escort transported Latham's glass sphere work Least Event as a Habit through central London to Bell Street. This incredibly fragile object, constructed from one glass vacuum inside another larger glass vacuum, was so minimal as an object as to be almost nothing - a 'not nothing', no 'it', or 'noit' in Latham's terminology - and it embodied Latham's concept of Least Event - an event of the least duration measurable in science. Least Event as a Habit survived its first perilous journey but not its second. The work has been refabricated for this exhibition.

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