John Latham
Full Stop is a monumental painting comprising a large circular black spot in the approximate centre of an unprimed canvas. The spot was created by repeated action with a spray gun, its curve delineated using weighted sheets of newspaper cut to the correct shape and, as a result, traces of rectangular forms are faintly visible outside the circumference. The circle’s edges are blurred, particularly on the left side where a sprinkling of tiny and slightly larger dots emerge from the dense black of the large spot. The semi-mechanical process of making the spot, in which many dots are applied to the canvas at the same time, suggests the mechanical process of printing rather than the more traditional painting processes normally associated with a canvas. The painting’s canvas is unstretched and is displayed pinned to the wall in the manner of a wall-hanging evoking signage and heraldry. The title, Full Stop, refers to text, and evokes the printed word. At the same time, the blurred edges of the spot and the slight halos around some of the larger dots at its circumference recall a solar eclipse, a black hole or the negative of photographs of light reflecting off planets in the dark galaxy.
Born in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Latham studied painting at Chelsea School of Art (1947-51). He created dark-toned quasi-allegorical oil paintings until, on a revelatory day in October 1954 (referred to in his later writings as ‘Io54’ or ‘Idiom of 1954’), he used a spray gun filled with black paint to make his first ‘process sculpture’. In the dense black area of sprayed paint, composed of millions of tiny dots of pigment, Latham saw a new way of understanding time and matter through a unifying atemporality. He elaborated a complex philosophy of time – the Time-Base Theory – combining physics, philosophy and art and described the significance of the mark-making process permitted by the spray gun in a text entitled The Mark (1954):
Use of a paint-spraying device enables a unit Least Mark, (quantum of a mark) to serve as a representational accretive historical process. This has opened up several new approaches to form. A drawing by accretion of points proposes a dimensionality that eliminates action in clock time (departing from the current action painting techniques of the day). It suggests a geometry of atemporal sources of some kind and a continuum visually perceivable as an atemporal omnipresent . the credibility of which is under challenge in an extended time context.
(Quoted in Art after Physics, p.106.)
In the early 1970s Latham went on to use this process in a series of One Second Drawings (see Tate T02070 ), in which he sprayed sixty boards for one second each with black acrylic paint. The action embodies the idea of what he called a ‘least event’, the very action of making elementary marks in an empty space (in this instance on a blank white board) manifesting itself as an elemental – or quantum – structure. Latham created Full Stop during a three month period spent working in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, during his first visit to the USA. His ‘quantam’ theories are contemporaneous with and similar to the processes of American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt who, during this period, was establishing a series of such modular structures fundamental to representation in two and three dimensions as the line and the cube. However Latham differed in his concern with the dimension of time, more completely expressed in his complex work, Time-Base Roller 1972 (Tate T11975 ).
At once seeming to make a statement about endings – the end of culture or at least the end of the language of painting – in another sense, Full Stop speaks of beginnings. The painting embodies the emergence of matter in empty space, a concept central to Latham’s art, which he also expressed using the binary system of 0 and 1, later formulated as the ‘state nought – state one’ or ‘0 1_1 0’ idea. This duality emulates the yin and yang power diagrams of Eastern art and Zen Buddhism. In Latham’s later works, such as God is Great #2 1991 (Tate T11969 ), these dualistic concepts are expressed using sheet glass (emptiness) and books (matter) in a commentary on religious belief systems.
Further reading:
John Latham: Art after Physics, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart 1991, p.13, reproduced p.8, cat.no.20
John Latham: In Focus, exhibition brochure, Tate Britain, London 2005, [pp.7 and 10], reproduced front cover in colour
John A. Walker, John Latham: the Incidental Person – his Art and Ideas, London 1995, p.60, reproduced p.61
Elizabeth Manchester
March 2006
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ROUND & ROUND: CIRCLES IN ART
Known as ‘Tondos’ in Renaissance art and favoured by Raphael for madonna paintings, circular works of art have been created by artists since Greek antiquity when they were used to decorate vases and the bottom of wine glasses.
Circles as shapes are ever present in the art of many a contemporary artist from painters to print makers to sculptors.
In English art, the term Tondo it is used for paintings and sculpture over 60cm in diameter excluding the miniature circular portraits , made popular in the 16th century.
Held in the Tate Britain collection is Ford Maddox Brown’s painting ‘The Last of England’ which depicts a couple leaving Britain to seek their fortune in Australia in 1852. He chose this format to extenuate their unity.
Whilst teaching at the Bauhaus 1922 -1933, Russian artist and theorist Wassily Kandinsky, became focused on Geometrical in both his teaching and painting—particularly the circle and half-circle. His careful balance of shapes in his works demonstrate absolute harmony.
The spot paintings of Damien Hirst are by far the most recognisable of his works but he also favours circular canvases with series of work such as his Spin paintings.
These artists following on in the tradition of Tondo painting have played a vital role in influencing the contemporary artists on DegreeArt.com whose clever use of circles intrigues and inspires us.
Why are Circular Canvases Rare?
Traditional canvases use wedges to ensure tautness but these cannot be used after stretching circular or elliptical canvases. Therefore only highly skilled craftsmen create these canvases. A smooth, taught surface is achieved by ensuring the canvas or linen is stretched extremely tightly and can only be stretched with un-primed and pre-sized canvas or linen.
This is as easy if not simpler than hanging traditionally shaped art and pieces will almost always come ready to hang unless otherwise states.
The Salacious Violence of Lucio Fontana’s Slashed Canvases
Many of the most revered midcentury abstractionists became famous for a particular stylistic flair. Hear the name Jackson Pollock and the mind conjures splatters. Barnett Newman is renowned for his “zips,” the vertical stripes that line his canvases. On a recent museum visit with my sister, she asked why every art museum has “one of those paintings with the rectangles.” It was a Mark Rothko. These artists would turn in their graves if they knew how frequently they’re associated with such reductive, one-word identifiers. Yet these easy classifications have also secured the artists’ popular legacies; they give novice art viewers a simple shorthand for the who’s who of the modern canon.
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The Argentinian-Italian artist Lucio Fontana, however, is best known not for a distinctive mark on top of his canvases, but into them. His name is now synonymous with his “Cuts”: a series of monochrome paintings made between 1958 and his death in 1968 that he methodically slashed. This action created slivers that appear like one-dimensional lines from afar and only reveal their depth upon closer examination. The “Cuts” are indeed some of Fontana’s best works, superior to the lumpen sculptures he made as a young artist and more influential than the immersive light installations, which he called “Environments,” that he made throughout his career. Fontana’s fissures—like the splatters, zips, and rectangles of his peers—are more than a gimmick or attempt at self-branding. They literally and figuratively opened his canvases to myriad interpretive possibilities, disparate associations that range from sex to the space race.
If artists such as Pollock had already promoted the importance of the individual gesture in painting, Fontana’s work took that concept to new levels of aggression. Fontana’s assaults on his canvases began not with cuts, but with holes. Notably, he didn’t reach this aesthetic solution until late in his career, when he was 51 years old. Spatial Concept (1962), one of my favorite paintings in the current Met Breuer exhibition “Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” hails from his “Holes” series—many of which were produced contemporaneously with the “Cuts”—and pinpoints why Fontana’s formal innovation of lacerating his canvases matters.
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept, 1962. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fontana coated Spatial Concept with a glossy, sickly sweet, bubblegum-pink oil paint. Around its center, he incised a rough, circular outline. Inside, he tore two misshapen gashes into the canvas. The gashes are surrounded by swishes in the paint that resemble claw marks, suggesting a painter tearing at the fabric of his work with his own hands, brutally—carnally?—yanking apart the threads.
The artist’s decision to highlight his physical engagement—and significant struggle—with his materials creates a grotesque and even shudder-inducing effect: As the viewer approaches Spatial Concept, the jagged tangles of thread and thick paint begin to look as though a body has been torn apart. (Such works have earned Fontana allegations of misogyny. But when’s the last time you were really, viscerally disconcerted by an abstract painting?)
Practically, Fontana had to develop a new, rigorous methodology to create such evocative slashes. While the paint was still wet, Fontana would cut into his canvases with a Stanley knife. Once the paint dried, he manipulated the rips, using gauze to hold them in place. This process involved his brushes and hands, as well as non-traditional art tools. Fontana became a surgeon, his canvases the patients. It was an abusive relationship: To create his paintings, he had to scar them first.
Fontana’s foray into such a violent form of artmaking was inspired by an unlikely source. Throughout the 1940s, as color television was becoming more commercially available, Fontana became particularly interested in the idea of screens. In 1946, after decades of teaching art in Italy and Argentina while making sculptures shaped like underwater plant life or female busts, he co-authored The White Manifesto. The treatise advocated for “Spatialism”—a form of artmaking that aimed to eliminate the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and painting, and embrace scientific achievements.
