Skoob

In the late 1950s, John Latham began incorporating actual books into his paintings and coined the term "skoob" —"books" spelled backwards—for his book-based art. He altered individual books into sculptures, like the one shown here, that he called "soft skoobs". Latham trimmed its edges into fanciful curves that prevent any conventional reading of the disrupted flow of printed text.

In 1964, John Latham began a series of "Skoob Tower" ceremonies in which tall stacks of books were ritually burned, in one instance at London University and another in front of the British Museum. Latham did not alter the books before burning them, but he selected titles from different disciplines in the arts and sciences that he felt were symbolically appropriate to the burning site. Latham did not see these performances as anti-intellectual attacks but rather as affirmations of his belief that the foundations of Western culture, symbolized by the printed word, had ceased to have meaning for modern life.

This skoob was probably used in a Skoob Tower ceremony. Its pages are partly burned along the edges, but in addition it been altered later by the addition of new soft canvas covers. Such works by Latham, much like the artifacts and objects of the contemporaneous Fluxus movement and American happenings of the 1960s, are relatively rare artifacts of ephemeral performances.