The John Latham Foundation and Archive is known as Flat Time House, after the artist’s theory of flat time. The house is structured as a body – the archive being the mind, the garden the hand, the gallery space (the head)? It was a literal description of the etymological reading of Archive by Derrida at the start of Archive Fever- Arkhe – the house within which information is stored, and those within it, literal guardians of the archived life of another.

The house itself – the place where the artist lived and worked, had become a “living” archive, as such – in the following ways:

1.     turning into a foundation and museum and thus transforming the contents into archival objects

2.     activating the archive through exhibitions, happenings in and out of the space etc..

3.     the digital archive now being created with a team at Camberwell who are organising information the way Latham had organised it

Latham had organised the Archive himself, in a very particular way that not even the curator and director could understand. He had taken great pains in separating the Latham archive with his work for APG (Artist Placement Group). In this sense, this is a genuine archive, in that all material came from one person, about one person (see SCAM). This recalls the notion of subjectivity within the archive on two levels – one the fact that archivists are often known to deal with information subjectively, and in this case, this is a quintessentially subjective archive (at first glance) and two, it recalls the editing of the archive as “future history” – Latham organised things before his death – just as people have been invited to archive their lives on Facebook.

History and memory have a profound affect on our immediate existence and situation. Issues that surround the problematic of history and the day-to-day troubles of memory are extensive. Often, such issues are reflected in the archive, which has to deal with not only a multitude of potential information, but also the thorny matters of truth and knowledge production;

(Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 237-238)

Much like our awareness of memory, Carolyn Steedman recognizes the ways in which the archive works, more often than not. She recognizes that the archive is not so much an obvious gold mine of information; rather, it consists of a great accumulation of seemingly mundane information. The presence of this information is regularly informed by the characteristics of the archivist. While the archive itself is often unclear in its production of a narrative (although I would not deny its existence), it is even more noticeable after selected material is used. Often the archive is utilized as a great library of information from which particular documents, objects etc. are selected and used in order to establish a narrative of one sort or another. It is at this point that the archive leaves it static position and becomes fluid, through engagement from an outside body. However, there is then a point through which the archived material becomes embedded in a narrative and this narrative is arguably even more static than its original components. The second hand nature of such a narrative makes dangerous gestures towards an intrinsic ‘truth’.