Applying Artists' Methodologies to Archiving: a Case Study of John Latham's Archive

Key documents of an artist's archive have played an important role in the development of his work, therefore it is important to study such material. In this paper we describe our methodology for digitising and publishing the personal archive of John Latham (1922-2006), a pioneering artist who strongly believed that artistic methodologies can be applied to other disciplines. Because of the importance of the artistic methodology in Latham's work and life (his house was conceived as a living sculpture), we felt that the methodology applied to the digitisation and study of his archive should, if possible, follow the same principles. Therefore, our main challenge was to develop an archiving methodology based on the artist's practice and theory.
In this paper, we explain the artist's main theory, the “Flat-Time” theory, and we explain how we plan to organise the archive documents so that their classification fits this theory. We investigate the use of the open source content management system “Drupal” for implementing the classification. We conclude with a summary of our proposal and a technical section on the digitisation methodology of the documents.