Photos: APG members at Documenta 6 in Kassel, 1977, from left to right: Ian Breakwell, Barbara Steveni, Nicholas Tresilian, John Latham and Hugh Davies, copyright APG/Tate Archive; From of the Flat Time House, 210 Bellenden Road, copyright Ken Adlard/FTI-lo

Home of the late British artist John Latham turned art space, the Flat Time House has an interesting exhibition program. This summer Mathieu Copeland mounted a photocopied ‘bootleg’ version of the 1964 ICA exhibition “A Study for an Exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art” alongside other studies of violence in music. You can download the exhibition catalogue here. 

Latham was a founding member of the Artist Placement Group (APG), a collective that worked to integrate artists as experts in businesses and industries in the late 1960s and 70s as a way of re-imagining the role of the artist in society. With the social inclination and redefinitions of artistic labor in recent work, there has been a surge of interest in the group. See the APG timeline by the TATE as well as Claire Bishop’s thoughtful essay “Rate of Return” (Artforum, October 2010), Peter Eleey’s essay (Frieze, 2007) and this re-published series of APG reports by John Walker at artdesigncafe.

Latham’s most infamous project was to have his students at St. Martin’s School of Art chew up and spit out (literally) Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture in 1966, but he had a fascinating, if obscure, philosophical theory of time and events. Two particularly relevant ideas he developed in various texts in the mid-1970s were “a change of time-base” and “a new accounting system,” both of which sought to re-orient the blind presentness of flowing capital. He discussed investing in the future rather than participating in the economic imperative to concentrate on the present, short-term needs and adopting a system that measures levels of self-awareness and “units of attention” rather than GDP. If only the US could adopt some of these concepts…