Introduction (Extract)
Gareth Bell-Jones

This book complements an event ‘Aerial Landscapes’ that took place at Flat Time House on Saturday 19 October 2019, between 12 noon and 4pm. The event followed an earlier symposium at University College London, both the result of long gestation, the product of an in-depth research project by Onya McCausland. The event was also shaped by dialogues between two artists and two art historians, all working in the archive of Flat Time House. The four presentations that became the essays for this publication took place in the kitchen of Flat Time House; the room John Latham called the Body-Event, the bowels of the ‘living sculpture’. The essays presented here derive from those talks and expand on the discussions and conversations of that day.

At the heart of this publication is the concept that ‘context is half the work’; a philosophy that was the central axiom to Barbara Steveni and John Latham’s co-founding of the Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1966. Whether we refer to artwork, ideas, great people, movements or societies, nothing stands isolated from the environment that shaped and formed them. A broader perspective simply reveals the links and interrelationships that were always present and yet cannot be seen when one is too close. It was a central aim of APG to make this context visible. It would puncture the shell of its host and permeate its structure. The artist would create distance and reveal what we cannot see for ourselves.

Appropriately, the essays collated in this publication approach the subject of Aerial Landscapes from a range of positions. Katherine Jackson analyses how the political and theoretical concept of the ‘Distant Observer’ emerged from APG’s methodology, framing the work within Latham’s thinking. Onya McCausland uses her own immediate and first hand account of the industrial spoil heaps, known in Scotland as ‘bings’, to reveal an encounter which embodies the thinking of APG and incidental practice. Joy Sleeman suggests, through a study of gendered topography, that just as landscape itself changes over time, so too do our modes of understanding and considering the landscape. Nicky Bird takes us back into the archive. Her study inspects an aerial image that pre-dates the ones Latham originally used, photographs taken at the time of his working, contemporary imaging and mapping techniques, which reveals her own artistic process. Together the texts convey four distinct perspectives on a single subject that combine the investigative and first hand with the archival and historical.