John Latham's ERTH, from 1971

Over twenty-five minutes, prolonged periods of deep black are interrupted with the voice, while occasional glimpses of our planet come into view. Evoking a journey through the cosmos and through time itself, the film culminates with a montage of every page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. With a page per frame, the dizzying display of all human knowledge is terse by comparison and a sense of our temporal place in the universe is lamented.
The film holds true to Latham’s theory of ‘flat-time’ whereby time and space are not expanding from a singular origin but condensed into a non-linear event structure. The film collapses space and time, both physically and cinematically into a direct encounter.
The opportunity to present this film at Breese Little as a singular event allows us to further invoke the reflexive nature of the work. Through both the film’s content and its staging, the subject is revealed through the physicality of its own production, its durational and self-referential nature revealing an ontological perspective.
John Latham’s ERTH is on show from 23 September – 24 September 2016 at Breese Little gallery, London. More information is available here.

Tom Seymour

Tom Seymour is an Associate Editor at The Art Newspaper and an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication. His words have been published in The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wallpaper* and The Telegraph. He has won Writer of the Year and Specialist Writer of the year on three separate occassions at the PPA Awards for his work with The Royal Photographic Society.