Dimensions: object: 2450 x 1400 x 540 mm
Copyright: © John Latham Estate, courtesy Lisson Gallery, London | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: John Latham's object, "God is Great (no. 2)," presents a rather provocative statement. I can't put my finger on when exactly it was created, but it lives in the Tate Collection. What are your initial thoughts? Editor: Well, it’s immediately unsettling, isn't it? Like a deconstructed altar…or maybe a thought experiment about faith falling apart. Curator: The stacked, charred books certainly carry a heavy symbolic weight. Do you think the glass panel is meant to represent a barrier? Perhaps between knowledge and belief? Editor: Possibly. Or maybe it's about how easily belief can be shattered, like glass. The cloud shape cut out feels deliberately naive, almost mocking. Curator: Interesting point. The fragmented books, the crude cloud...it challenges the viewer to question the very foundations upon which belief systems are built. Editor: It's definitely one of those pieces that stays with you, isn't it? Makes you want to poke around, find out more. Curator: Absolutely. It’s a powerful piece, however one interprets it.
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God is Great (#2) is a freestanding sculpture comprising a large glass panel mounted across the spines of five folio-sized hardback books forming a block in the centre. These books are bound copies of The Times newspaper from 1964. A cluster of three smaller hard-bound books appears to be protruding, at varying angles, through the glass in the centre of the work. The books have been cut in half and bonded to the glass surface on both sides with a semi-translucent silicon adhesive. Higher up on the glass a hole suggesting the profile of a half-open book has been cut, as though providing a slot for the addition of a further book. The three books are used editions of the Bible, the Koran and the Talmud. The Koran has a brightly coloured decoration on its cover; the Bible is a dull, dark brown and the Talmud is bright blue. A smaller pale copy of the Bible has been slotted, whole, into a hole cut into one side of the larger Bible. On the other side of the glass, a smaller version of the Talmud has been stuck to the cover of the Bible. Fragments of text in Hebrew have been torn from the books and stuck onto the glass and parts of the books.
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