"There’s a long history of visual artists incorporating books into their work, from Duchamp in the early 20th century to Samuel Levi Jones today. But perhaps no artist is more associated with the practice than British conceptualist John Latham, who has integrated books into his paintings, assemblages, sculptures, and other works since the late 1950s.
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In the late ’50s, Latham first introduced books into his work, using plaster to adhere the object to his spray-painted canvases—such as in his 1958 work Burial of Count Orgaz where he recreated El Greco’s 1586 painting of the same name with collaged books and other found items. Soon after, he came up with the name for the work: “skoob”—“books” spelled backward—which he continued to use for decades after.
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In the ’80s, Latham began a new body of sculptures in which he bisected Bibles and other liturgical texts with large panes of glass—a theme he would revisit throughout the rest of his career. In his 1988 work They’re Learning Fast, for instance, he installed a text he had written four years earlier about the British government’s inadequate art funding (“Report of a Surveyor”) in a fish tank surrounded by live fish.
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For Latham, the book symbolized a variety of ideas—institutional knowledge, the transmission of information, the limits of communication. In a sense, he was also something of an open book himself. In 2003—three years before his death in 2006 at the age of 84—he announced that his home and studio were a living sculpture and instituted an open-door policy for art students and anyone else who wanted talk art."
- Kate Brown, ArtNews, 2018
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