Page 42 - Studio International - May 1968

Where does the collision happen?

John Latham in conversation with Charles Harrison
Taken as a whole your work looks inconsistent; what's the tie up... ? the time. The unusual thing was that answers to the question began
I found I worked at an idiom for a while until I understood it. Then to run up by mistake—like in making a simple thing happen and
I'd lose interest and the work was nothing. I'd be in an off phase looking at the result. I interpreted the idioms, but after the work was
until there was another idiom that looked good. I worked on several done, in the best ones, the effect was like turning on. There's an energy
and they were all distinct from others. The biggest mine was the generator in this, we could discuss the process ad lib. Most important,
black spray and drawing one which later got to books—literature the structure notions that came from the Skoob idiom are strong
that was, but in reverse—reverse the function and the conception and enough to replace any of the old systems, the ways people talk and
see what you get. This idiom was so clearly about a structural notion think, any discipline too. The autopreservative present is keeping
that I have spent years working out what it was saying. Current talk- some marvellous blooms in the dark.
ing area is Eventstructure. SKOOB is the mathematics, and it's
visually accessible, you don't have to decode it like literary maths. What way do the idioms relate to other art, and is it important at
all ?
What first put you on to the Eventstructure idea? I think so. The way 'news' is news is by moving off a series that is
It was a question I asked myself. As a schoolprocessed 20-year-old already in experience. The series 'painting' has grown out of contra-
I was really unconvinced about that whole premise, full of em- diction of the expected. So you use the context, or it uses a particular
barrassing requirements, although I didn't realize just how much at working idiom to complete itself. Skoob is in the series 'books', and

Above diagram of Skoob box (destroyed).
Left Figure May 1956, oil and emulsion on
hardboard, 66 x 48 in.
'The spray gun idiom was a fantastic releaser on
many levels; to painters it is most intelligible in
the feeling of the whole surface coming on at
once. To the consideration of reference—what is
it about—there was another straight answer: a
manageable visual mathematics...in fact what
has developed into the notion of structure as
insistence of eventpattern, which is a radical
innovation in semantics.'