For British artist John Latham (1921–2006), the book assemblage was the medium through which he challenged authority, hierarchy and didacticism. For the audience, his assemblages may be viewed as a shocking, controversial and violent mistreatment of the book.
Latham’s process involved piercing, scorching, twisting, ripping, slicing, submerging and levitating his books. The process and the outcome can be deemed destructive; however, it is through this destruction that the work comes into being. It is no longer about being able to read the contents of the book, to leaf through its pages, to obtain information from it in an ordered and cogent way. Instead, the book becomes reconfigured as an art object foregrounding materiality and process, as well as the conceptual underpinning of Latham’s practice.
In Latham’s book assemblage Table with the Law (1988), he presents six law books severed and trapped in eight shards of glass. The books are a series of commentaries on the laws of England published by English legal writer Henry John Stephen in the 1840s. Each book consists of a red hardcover and off-white pages; the books are positioned on a wooden dining table where perhaps the writings of the law are to be debated. They are placed at various heights and angles creating the illusion that either the books and their pages have been trapped in the fragments of glass, or that each pane of glass has been punctured by the book.
The artwork asks the viewer to consider whether the glass has aggrieved the book, or the book the glass. Is it the glass which is responsible for slicing the books? Or perhaps the books are defining the scope of the glass? The assemblage invites the viewer to observe forces of power both literally, the glass and the book, and metaphorically, in the wider context of law. Constructed using legal books dating back to the nineteenth century, this assemblage arguably presents a challenge to archaic judiciaries whose laws are often responsible for the oppression and mistreatment of those without power or privilege. Latham holds these legal books to account conceptually, and in their presentation, as they are held to account in the glass itself. The books have been imprisoned and silenced; they are now suspended in a spectacle as the viewer ponders the types of power wielded by the law.
March 2024
