Flat Time House: John Latham Foundation and Archive
March 23, 2011
PART 1
Claire Louise Staunton: […] They are sort of all the working documents [pointing to the archive boxes] that John collected over the years. The way, in which it is archived, the boxes that it is in the organization comes from the way in which John actually has organized it, so he started archiving his own material, and so in a lot of this it was not very clear why things were organized in specific boxes; it was clear to him. But that’s the way it has been kept and each one of the documents has been archived properly, it’s been catalogued, and there is the conservation department at Camberwell, who is responsible for archiving and conserving each piece of paper or actually, not photographs, but they are in the process and so there is some boxes missing. They are in the process of taking images and uploading them to an online archive. The online archive is sort of an art project in its own, so that there are different ways of accessing it. They are using directly John Latham’s theory and his language in order to find your way through the archive and to find objects so its quite a sort a complex exercise with multiple access points depending on how complex you want a document to be or the search to be. And these are being used constantly by researchers, by curators. It is open to the public if you just let us know we can usually find what it might be you are looking for and you can go through and there are out in the storage in the back there are a number of John’s works so they don’t constitute the archive, they are the collection.
Kiki Claxton: So what is it actually within the archive so what particular documents is it is the correspondence, is it particular artworks, is it exhibitions you have here is it all of it?
CLS: Well no I mean the exhibitions that we have here doesn’t contribute. I mean, it’s our own archive.
KC: So you have two separate archives in the effect?
CLS: One is archived, one is catalogued and one is a box of all the activities we have had here since 2008. Because there is a very specific funded project, what is allocated as archive material doesn’t count, there are some boxes that are just not within that so although they are part of our archive they are not part of the catalogue, registered, conserved, uploaded archive. I mean I am not sure if John [Hill] can elaborate further, but it was sort of a process that was started by John, and is continuing in a more sort of professionalized organized…
Stephanie Bailey: So there is a separation between the objects and the documentation as such, is that so?
John Hill: The [Camberwell digital] archive is all paper documents. So everything is, I guess the collection of the house, but not part of the archive…
SB: And that affects the funding?
CLS: Not the funding of the house.
SB: Right, but the archive is outside that specific part?
CLS: Well I mean its weird. It’s obviously not our side. But the sort of, that process belongs to Camberwell. Like I mean the web server – as far as I know. The archive itself does not belong to them but the project of archiving is theirs. But I mean we are working with them and the objects are ours.
JH: But I mean it comes back to what Latham decided was his archive. When I guess like it was organized around a key group of a number of documents that Latham decided this is, this is my archive which […] doesn’t include things like the slide collection or the photographic documentation of his work weren’t things he said, this is my archive, so the project is focusing strictly on what Latham declared to be his archive. Even though there is a lot of material outside of that, of this qualification…
CLS: I don’t know if you are familiar with the Artist Placement Group (APG) that was a sort of a major part of John Latham’s life, and the entire archive of that is at Tate.
KC: So in that case is that is your archive quite like stagnant? Is there no new material coming in because it was what John Latham decided? Or is there room for it to kind of expand…
JH: I mean there is in the development of the online archive, the online portion of the archive, there is capacity for, I guess, for certain people to kind of provide additional information on the documents and the description of the documents and the understanding of what these documents are, but then beyond that also to contribute additions to it. But it is a very difficult process when you are still in the process of cataloguing one archive to be allowing additions to it. You need to have that solidification before you …
CLS: But I think you are making a sort of more bureaucratic distinction because we as working in the house would refer to it always being the archive but what will be available online quite soon that is catalogued, is within that that thing, and if there is more funding to do the rest that will become part of that thing. I am quite interested by you saying it was stagnant.
KC: I mean I did not mean my question to be quite critical I was struggling to find the right terminology but […] whether it just involved with what John Latham decided. I just wanted to clarify that. But as you said more people can add information so it is inclusive.
CLS: I mean I have not even thought or discussed with any one like the house existing as a sort of a public gallery and what that would become.
KC: Ok.
[…]
------
Part 2
[…]
SB: Aside from Latham’s archive are you guys keeping an archive of the space since it was opened in 2008?
JH: Yes, there is a box.
SB: So that is interesting because the digital archiving is sort of something new. We have have been exploring archives at Tate Britain and British Museum to find out that the digital came quite late. It would be quite interesting to see how you deal with the digital platform as a place to store the information.
JH: It is the same way as everyone else.
SB: And how is everyone else…
JH: You don’t think that these things as archived until you have to make them public, I guess. It’s a box. I mean I don’t know …
SB: When you said that you don’t think of them as archive until they are public, that’s quite an interesting distinction.
CLS: I think the computer archive. I mean, what I would say was an archive is something that is given identification and is organized. So in a very active creative way the computer is an archive. In terms of the printed matter that comes out with every exhibition that has happened since 2008 we have a box and it’s organised chronologically simply being stuff that is being posted one after the other and that’s a way for me to see what happened with the space before I came here. It’s on the shelf with all the other stuff so it’s treated separately because it’s not John’s archive.
JH: […] I think a lot of what this archive is, comes out of the fact that it was separated from the APG archive. In the very active kind of finding all the APG stuff to be part of the APG archive as separate to his own..
SB: Which specifically related to John?
CLS: That’s how it has been separated. In the APG archive you have all of the archive material, communication from each one of the artist’s placements and John was one of the artists but also one of the founders. So there is stuff in here that relates like John did a performance or something at an APG event and its here. I don’t know how they have decided.
JH: No
SB: But then I guess it was just very personal things he organized it. So he made the decision how and for whatever reason he made that decision in how he organized his archive, so it’s subjective…
JH: Yes, I mean I don’t actually know what was involved in all of that, in any of that process. It just seemed that it is mostly everything. But it is obviously everything that Latham decided was related to his practice…
SB: It’s kind of interesting that in terms of the value of the archive, when you said that this is separate from the collection as such, or the art objects, and that the funding affects this distinction between document archive and object archive…So there is a value placed on the archive in that recognition of funding. But then it’s also how John Latham valued his own documentation…
CLS: I think he valued his ideas incredibly highly, not in terms of an arrogant way: I don’t mean anything like that […]
SB: In terms of the online archiving project, you said it is being arranged in relation to Latham’s ideas of flat time?
CLS: The archiving by the archivist is based on John’s ideas
JH: They had to come up with an archiving system, which was sensitive to the material. There are those kind of three ways of dealing with the material which are all kind of taking different approaches from Latham’s ideas […] But Latham’s organization of what is in the boxes - I mean I don’t understand it - it’s not chronological and it’s vaguely systematic […]
SB: Has it been useful for you?
JH: The archive?
SB: I mean both of you have you find use in the archive?
CLS: Oh yeah all the time. I am doing a project that takes its starting point from a performance that John made so it’s were it comes from but also it’s weird because this house exists in a lot of cases for the archive and the access to it.
SB: So this is actually an archive, I mean the whole thing, the house. I think you maybe said that when making the distinction that this is an archive and that this is part of him has a practice or him as a person? Because you said this is a space as the body.
CLS: Not his, it is a body, but I don’t know whether you can take it so literally. It is sort of a living organism in time…
JH: It is interesting because Barbara Steveni, who was founder of the Artist Placement Group […] so part of the APG archive got acquired by Tate and part of her reaction to that was that these are all paper documents, so she is doing a project which was called “I am an archive” so in somewhat rejects the idea that the documents constitute the archive […]
Galia Kirilova: Do you think that this space here is actually an archive? Do you feel the space [Flat Time House] itself is an archive? Because actually before it was a house and now it is something else.
JH: I never would use that terminology. […] There is plenty of far more interesting words
SB: Like what?
JH: Like a house or like a sculpture. […] I mean it is a museum and there and in a certain approach it is not a museum. I guess that is how you can approach a relationship to objects and ideas and the way of kind of housing them […] even the archive is looked after by using it, it is not looked at by looking after it.
SB: That is interesting because when we were asking other archivists about their education as archivist, if they had any theoretical framework within it they could talk about the environment, the very rational aspects of it but than we looked at Derrida and he says that archive comes from ‘arkheion’ which means ‘house’ which is a place in a house so it’s kind of interesting when you talk about the object being housed. […]
JH: One of Latham’s ideas is quite embedded in theory and it’s always in the context of the score, which is like in the unmarked canvas you have - this is my extrapolation of this theory. Latham talks about the unmarked canvas as a score so the information is there and it is definitely about something being dormant and then being activated and then going back to being dormant which comes up a few times in the way Latham talks about performance, about ideas, talks about the painting. So Latham’s conception of an event is that there is a score or a like a kind of underlying…
SB: Structure?
JH: Structure. And that it requires impulse to enact it, to make it happen, but then it is still there and was there before. So the event comes from that presence a-temporal but still it is very temporal.
GK: Is there any private bits of the archive, like correspondence or something, which is more related to Latham’s private life or is it just related to work?
JH: I believe there are some things marked not for public. There are personal letters…
GK: It is interesting what kind of archive it is. If it is just one person…
SB: Yes, because there is the awareness that it is going to be public in the end…that would mean a self-awareness.
JH: I mean there are some letters to his parents. […] There is personal things related to people who are still alive and we might not make them public. Legally, not for us, but for example, for Tate, these protection laws, which means you have to take out a phone number on a document […]
SB: Yes, we are talking about this and it is so interesting because you have on the one side the Freedom of Information Act but that you have the Data Protection Act and you have constantly to negotiate between the two. […] Do you think it would be possible to make contact with the team at Camberwell to learn how they are dealing with the online archive. Do you think they would mind if we went to speak to them?
CLS: I know that the guy who is in charge at the moment is in Greece […] are you in a rush?
SB: I guess we have enough to deal with from what you have here and than we can move on to the digital.
GK: Thank you very much.
SB: One other thing. We have a blog, would you mind if we posted what we’ve talked about in this session?
CLS: No.
March 23, 2011
PART 1
Claire Louise Staunton: […] They are sort of all the working documents [pointing to the archive boxes] that John collected over the years. The way, in which it is archived, the boxes that it is in the organization comes from the way in which John actually has organized it, so he started archiving his own material, and so in a lot of this it was not very clear why things were organized in specific boxes; it was clear to him. But that’s the way it has been kept and each one of the documents has been archived properly, it’s been catalogued, and there is the conservation department at Camberwell, who is responsible for archiving and conserving each piece of paper or actually, not photographs, but they are in the process and so there is some boxes missing. They are in the process of taking images and uploading them to an online archive. The online archive is sort of an art project in its own, so that there are different ways of accessing it. They are using directly John Latham’s theory and his language in order to find your way through the archive and to find objects so its quite a sort a complex exercise with multiple access points depending on how complex you want a document to be or the search to be. And these are being used constantly by researchers, by curators. It is open to the public if you just let us know we can usually find what it might be you are looking for and you can go through and there are out in the storage in the back there are a number of John’s works so they don’t constitute the archive, they are the collection.
Kiki Claxton: So what is it actually within the archive so what particular documents is it is the correspondence, is it particular artworks, is it exhibitions you have here is it all of it?
CLS: Well no I mean the exhibitions that we have here doesn’t contribute. I mean, it’s our own archive.
KC: So you have two separate archives in the effect?
CLS: One is archived, one is catalogued and one is a box of all the activities we have had here since 2008. Because there is a very specific funded project, what is allocated as archive material doesn’t count, there are some boxes that are just not within that so although they are part of our archive they are not part of the catalogue, registered, conserved, uploaded archive. I mean I am not sure if John [Hill] can elaborate further, but it was sort of a process that was started by John, and is continuing in a more sort of professionalized organized…
Stephanie Bailey: So there is a separation between the objects and the documentation as such, is that so?
John Hill: The [Camberwell digital] archive is all paper documents. So everything is, I guess the collection of the house, but not part of the archive…
SB: And that affects the funding?
CLS: Not the funding of the house.
SB: Right, but the archive is outside that specific part?
CLS: Well I mean its weird. It’s obviously not our side. But the sort of, that process belongs to Camberwell. Like I mean the web server – as far as I know. The archive itself does not belong to them but the project of archiving is theirs. But I mean we are working with them and the objects are ours.
JH: But I mean it comes back to what Latham decided was his archive. When I guess like it was organized around a key group of a number of documents that Latham decided this is, this is my archive which […] doesn’t include things like the slide collection or the photographic documentation of his work weren’t things he said, this is my archive, so the project is focusing strictly on what Latham declared to be his archive. Even though there is a lot of material outside of that, of this qualification…
CLS: I don’t know if you are familiar with the Artist Placement Group (APG) that was a sort of a major part of John Latham’s life, and the entire archive of that is at Tate.
KC: So in that case is that is your archive quite like stagnant? Is there no new material coming in because it was what John Latham decided? Or is there room for it to kind of expand…
JH: I mean there is in the development of the online archive, the online portion of the archive, there is capacity for, I guess, for certain people to kind of provide additional information on the documents and the description of the documents and the understanding of what these documents are, but then beyond that also to contribute additions to it. But it is a very difficult process when you are still in the process of cataloguing one archive to be allowing additions to it. You need to have that solidification before you …
CLS: But I think you are making a sort of more bureaucratic distinction because we as working in the house would refer to it always being the archive but what will be available online quite soon that is catalogued, is within that that thing, and if there is more funding to do the rest that will become part of that thing. I am quite interested by you saying it was stagnant.
KC: I mean I did not mean my question to be quite critical I was struggling to find the right terminology but […] whether it just involved with what John Latham decided. I just wanted to clarify that. But as you said more people can add information so it is inclusive.
CLS: I mean I have not even thought or discussed with any one like the house existing as a sort of a public gallery and what that would become.
KC: Ok.
[…]
------
Part 2
[…]
SB: Aside from Latham’s archive are you guys keeping an archive of the space since it was opened in 2008?
JH: Yes, there is a box.
SB: So that is interesting because the digital archiving is sort of something new. We have have been exploring archives at Tate Britain and British Museum to find out that the digital came quite late. It would be quite interesting to see how you deal with the digital platform as a place to store the information.
JH: It is the same way as everyone else.
SB: And how is everyone else…
JH: You don’t think that these things as archived until you have to make them public, I guess. It’s a box. I mean I don’t know …
SB: When you said that you don’t think of them as archive until they are public, that’s quite an interesting distinction.
CLS: I think the computer archive. I mean, what I would say was an archive is something that is given identification and is organized. So in a very active creative way the computer is an archive. In terms of the printed matter that comes out with every exhibition that has happened since 2008 we have a box and it’s organised chronologically simply being stuff that is being posted one after the other and that’s a way for me to see what happened with the space before I came here. It’s on the shelf with all the other stuff so it’s treated separately because it’s not John’s archive.
JH: […] I think a lot of what this archive is, comes out of the fact that it was separated from the APG archive. In the very active kind of finding all the APG stuff to be part of the APG archive as separate to his own..
SB: Which specifically related to John?
CLS: That’s how it has been separated. In the APG archive you have all of the archive material, communication from each one of the artist’s placements and John was one of the artists but also one of the founders. So there is stuff in here that relates like John did a performance or something at an APG event and its here. I don’t know how they have decided.
JH: No
SB: But then I guess it was just very personal things he organized it. So he made the decision how and for whatever reason he made that decision in how he organized his archive, so it’s subjective…
JH: Yes, I mean I don’t actually know what was involved in all of that, in any of that process. It just seemed that it is mostly everything. But it is obviously everything that Latham decided was related to his practice…
SB: It’s kind of interesting that in terms of the value of the archive, when you said that this is separate from the collection as such, or the art objects, and that the funding affects this distinction between document archive and object archive…So there is a value placed on the archive in that recognition of funding. But then it’s also how John Latham valued his own documentation…
CLS: I think he valued his ideas incredibly highly, not in terms of an arrogant way: I don’t mean anything like that […]
SB: In terms of the online archiving project, you said it is being arranged in relation to Latham’s ideas of flat time?
CLS: The archiving by the archivist is based on John’s ideas
JH: They had to come up with an archiving system, which was sensitive to the material. There are those kind of three ways of dealing with the material which are all kind of taking different approaches from Latham’s ideas […] But Latham’s organization of what is in the boxes - I mean I don’t understand it - it’s not chronological and it’s vaguely systematic […]
SB: Has it been useful for you?
JH: The archive?
SB: I mean both of you have you find use in the archive?
CLS: Oh yeah all the time. I am doing a project that takes its starting point from a performance that John made so it’s were it comes from but also it’s weird because this house exists in a lot of cases for the archive and the access to it.
SB: So this is actually an archive, I mean the whole thing, the house. I think you maybe said that when making the distinction that this is an archive and that this is part of him has a practice or him as a person? Because you said this is a space as the body.
CLS: Not his, it is a body, but I don’t know whether you can take it so literally. It is sort of a living organism in time…
JH: It is interesting because Barbara Steveni, who was founder of the Artist Placement Group […] so part of the APG archive got acquired by Tate and part of her reaction to that was that these are all paper documents, so she is doing a project which was called “I am an archive” so in somewhat rejects the idea that the documents constitute the archive […]
Galia Kirilova: Do you think that this space here is actually an archive? Do you feel the space [Flat Time House] itself is an archive? Because actually before it was a house and now it is something else.
JH: I never would use that terminology. […] There is plenty of far more interesting words
SB: Like what?
JH: Like a house or like a sculpture. […] I mean it is a museum and there and in a certain approach it is not a museum. I guess that is how you can approach a relationship to objects and ideas and the way of kind of housing them […] even the archive is looked after by using it, it is not looked at by looking after it.
SB: That is interesting because when we were asking other archivists about their education as archivist, if they had any theoretical framework within it they could talk about the environment, the very rational aspects of it but than we looked at Derrida and he says that archive comes from ‘arkheion’ which means ‘house’ which is a place in a house so it’s kind of interesting when you talk about the object being housed. […]
JH: One of Latham’s ideas is quite embedded in theory and it’s always in the context of the score, which is like in the unmarked canvas you have - this is my extrapolation of this theory. Latham talks about the unmarked canvas as a score so the information is there and it is definitely about something being dormant and then being activated and then going back to being dormant which comes up a few times in the way Latham talks about performance, about ideas, talks about the painting. So Latham’s conception of an event is that there is a score or a like a kind of underlying…
SB: Structure?
JH: Structure. And that it requires impulse to enact it, to make it happen, but then it is still there and was there before. So the event comes from that presence a-temporal but still it is very temporal.
GK: Is there any private bits of the archive, like correspondence or something, which is more related to Latham’s private life or is it just related to work?
JH: I believe there are some things marked not for public. There are personal letters…
GK: It is interesting what kind of archive it is. If it is just one person…
SB: Yes, because there is the awareness that it is going to be public in the end…that would mean a self-awareness.
JH: I mean there are some letters to his parents. […] There is personal things related to people who are still alive and we might not make them public. Legally, not for us, but for example, for Tate, these protection laws, which means you have to take out a phone number on a document […]
SB: Yes, we are talking about this and it is so interesting because you have on the one side the Freedom of Information Act but that you have the Data Protection Act and you have constantly to negotiate between the two. […] Do you think it would be possible to make contact with the team at Camberwell to learn how they are dealing with the online archive. Do you think they would mind if we went to speak to them?
CLS: I know that the guy who is in charge at the moment is in Greece […] are you in a rush?
SB: I guess we have enough to deal with from what you have here and than we can move on to the digital.
GK: Thank you very much.
SB: One other thing. We have a blog, would you mind if we posted what we’ve talked about in this session?
CLS: No.