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WELCOME TO THE EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS MAY NEWSLETTER
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Our Spring Charity Auction in aid of Homeless Action In Barnet raised £1300 - many thanks to all those that took part
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And not forgetting this year we will be running our normal
Artists Open House Weekends
in the Summer
25/26 June and 2/3rd July
We also have exhibitions at the Phoenix Cinema and the Original Gallery in Crouch End later in the year
If you are viewing on gmail remember to click 'display images' and 'view entire message' when you reach the bottom.
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MONO-HA - And now for something completely different!
MIKE COLES writes
Mono-Ha (Japanese - translated as ‘The School of Things’) was an art movement that emerged in Tokyo in the mid- 1960’s. Arte Povera (poor art) was a similar movement in Italy at about the same time.
If you look at a landscape, is it a piece of art or does it need a human to ‘make’ it a piece of art by saying it is? – or even in more understandable terms, perhaps take a colour photograph of precisely the same view and perspective put it in a frame in a gallery – is there any difference? Is seeing the view in real life and seeing it as a photograph in a gallery equally valid as designating it as a piece of art? Conventional logic would say that a human (the photographer, an artist), ‘selected’ the view and therefore it was ‘made’ art.
Now let’s say a construction worker is digging a hole with a JCB. He’s gone off to lunch and left the hole with a pile of earth beside it. An artist comes along and observes the hole and the pile of earth as a relationship of space and materials – (you could throw in the JCB as well), and therefore a piece of art. Can art be some relationship of ‘things’ and ‘materials’ that someone, identifying themselves as an artist, designates? We are pretty sure the JCB driver had no artistic intentions – does that disqualify the work?
Here is the piece of work considered the first piece of ‘art’ in the Mono-Ha movement
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Phase – Mother Earth in Kobe’s First Open Air Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition in 1968
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The formation of the movement began in 1968 and is attributed to the exhibition of Sekine Nobuo’s Phase – Mother Earth at the first Kobe Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition (in Japan) and is most often used to illustrate Mono-Ha’s philosophy and experimentation.
It was a two metre cylinder of earth that stands next to its shell in the ground. Despite appearing to have been lifted out of the ground by a machine, Phase-Mother Earth was dug by hand by Sekine Nobuo and several other artists. The objective of this work was, essentially, to activate an awareness of the connectedness of material and location,
“Immersing the viewer in physical perception rather than visual. Through careful juxtaposition and topology, Sekine Nobuo and his contemporaries critically address subjectivity and the separation of positive and negative space.”
Sekine described the moment when they removed the mould: “Faced with this solid block of raw earth, the power of this object of reality rendered everybody speechless, and we stood there, rooted to the spot… I just wondered at the power of the convex and concave earth, the sheer physicality of it. I could feel the passing of time’s quiet emptiness. That was the birth of ‘Mono-ha’.”
This work captured the interest of artist and critic Lee Ufan, soon to become the artist most associated with the Mona Ha movement. Theorizing Sekine’s work as a direct “encounter” with the natural world, Lee’s writing reflected on the fascination of material and spatial experiences devoid of any specific meaning. There is a distinct deceit here in that from the concept of the piece to its final viewing as part of the ‘natural world’, there was a process – involving a man with a JCB, lots of people fashioning the cylinder of earth and strengthening it with concrete, cleaning the whole thing up before revealing the final work and inviting the public and critics to look at it. Viewers and critics can only judge what’s in front of them and relate it to whatever context they are told and/or based on their knowledge and experience. The man with the JCB and the muddy workers are long gone and are of no particular interest to them and the process may play no part in their assessment of the work.
Interestingly, for the artist the process was part of the artistic experience.
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Top Left; Lee Ufan - Relatum 1968 version (reproduced by the artist several times since) Top right and centre left - Ufan - Requiem for the Sun Centre right - Ufan - Iron Field 2018 version (also made in 1969 and 1994) Bottom left - Kishio Saga 'Left Behind' 2013 version - (also made in 1972) Bottom right an Ufan arrangement 2011 (original made in 1971)
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Although the Mono-Ha movement was loose, and lasting only around 5 years from 1968, with many artists with different interpretations, it may be worth at this point tying down some sort of broad definition of what it stood for. I have read a dozen different versions of this but maybe, broadly speaking, this might give you a clue.
Mono-ha is an aesthetic theory originating in Japan that rejected values of Western modern art, specifically the importance it placed on the discrete art object created by a unique, individual artist. Korean artist Lee Ufan popularised the movement through his writings, proposing instead that objects acquire meaning and are given shape through space and location. In turn, specific locations gain meaning through the objects situated in them. Could we be thinking of Henry Moore in, for instance, Kenwood?
Their work was stridently anti-modernist - primarily sculptures and installations that incorporated basic materials such as rocks, sand, wood, cotton, glass and metal, often in simple arrangements with minimal artistic intervention. More experiential than visual, Mono-ha works tended to demand patience and reflection. Many were also ephemeral. For both artistic and practical reasons, the often site-specific pieces were usually destroyed. There were no buyers, and the artists couldn’t or wouldn’t preserve them. In other words, Mono-ha was deeply at odds with what today’s market craves most: brand-name, high-gloss art with instant visual appeal and sold-out exhibitions in major cities. Mono-ha artists emphasized materiality primarily through framing and juxtaposition, placing emphasis not only the nature of the object (mono) but on the interdependency of matter”.
It’s worth remembering at this point that Japanese aesthetics and sensibilities are different from European ones so we consider Mono-Ha from a different perspective from the one it was intended. Young Mono-Ha artists discussions, (they were mostly recent graduates, apart from Lee Ufan, who was older), revolved around questions of how to transcend Western Modernism by ending representation, a sentiment endemic to post-war Japan, a re-examination of indigenous culture to bring attention to the physicality of “things,” and the limits of creativity.
Like Arte Povera, a similar movement at the same time in Italy (a few words about that later), the artists in the Mono-ha movement did not, strictly speaking, constitute a group; their processes were in parallel and they worked alone, in an uncoordinated manner. They shared a wish to create a dialogue between natural and manufactured objects.
“Contrary to the mainstream anti-art tendencies of avant-garde art, Mono-ha attempted to reconfigure art through the reduction of objects to their primary form. Unaltered, natural matter and objects were considered not as material, but in and of themselves significant and autonomous. Attempts were made to draw out a kind of artistic expression from matter by directly engaging in its being, perception, and relations”
“No longer was the importance placed on the visual interpretation of the artist, but on the world around us, and the bringing to the front the ‘natural forces’ that were considered the most important creators of the world”. Make of that what you will.
This need to understand and reflect upon the world was the governing force behind the motivation and the creation of different works within the Mono-ha group. Their importance is seen, not only in the choice of the materials used, or the ephemeral quality that the materials produced but also in the production of the new school of thought that became internationally recognized.
The sculptures of chance that are revealing of the materials used, invite the action of reflection in the viewer and the artist himself. The natural materials, sometimes juxtaposed with industrial materials, produce the objects that reflect on the surrounding space and creation of the situations, a product of the relationship between the ‘things’, was one element that this group experimented with.
Maybe something lost in translation here!
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Left; Lee Ufan creating a version of Relatum at the Guggenheim in 2017 (the original called Phenomemon was 1968) The artist, who is still alive, has reproduced it many other times
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Born in Korea in 1936, Mono Ha’s best known artist is Lee Ufan who, in a similar way to Sekine Nubuo, took natural materials such as stone, glass, rubber, iron plates and cotton and presented them in juxtaposition, so as to reveal the 'physical materiality' of the work and allow the materials to establish their own relations independent of artistic intervention.
Lee’s work Phenomenon and Perception B (1968), the title of which he later changed to Relatum consists of a sheet of glass that has cracked under the weight of the large stone block placed on top of it. About this work, he explained:
“If a heavy stone happens to hit glass, the glass breaks. That happens as a matter of course. But if an artist’s ability to act as a mediator is weak, there will be more to see than a trivial physical accident. Then again, if the breakage conforms too closely to the intention of the artist, the result will be dull. It will also be devoid of interest if the mediation of the artist is haphazard. Something has to come out of the relationship of tension represented by the artist, the glass, and the stone. It is only when a fissure results from the cross-permeation of the three elements in this triangular relationship that, for the first time, the glass becomes an object of art.”
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Left; a version of Phase Mother Earth in Los Angeles, centre: another in Dallas - both supervised by Sekine Nobuo (right)
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So why are we writing about Mono-Ha now? Well, surprise, surprise! Mono-Ha has been rediscovered over the last decade with works now fetching more seven figures.(over £2,000,000 in Lee Ufan's case) From the commercial market point of view this has led to a problem. Much of Mono-Ha work was created and then destroyed (intentionally), so some works have had to be recreated by the original artists. The re-creation of pieces raises questions when trying to establish value.
The curator of one recent Mono-Ha exhibition noted that while “it was very natural for the artists to install their works and then discard them, such practices are not compatible with the values of preservation and originality that are so important to museums and collectors.” For the first time, ownership agreements and certificates of authenticity are being drawn up with the artists or their estates.
“The key is that everything is being done according to the artists’ wishes and specifications. It would be a tragedy for those works to exist only in photographs.” Ker Ching!
Critics have got really stuck in to Mono Ha - here are some concepts that pop up:
"the art of mingling with space - co-subjective events - ambivalent point of contact between things and space - the revelation of the pluralistic aspect of existence - Multifarious - overvalued - ephemeral gesticulations of resistance - passive attitude towards the processes unifying craft and imagination - pocket phenomena doomed to oblivion - the quasi monistic inclination towards nature and the erasure of the vision - art existing within a certain state of mind - the body of the viewer becomes a part of the artwork, essentially completing the work of art through their presence - playful, performative and often accidental compositions"
We may reasonably infer that the Mono-Ha movement began as a reaction, but quite coincidentally common social and artistic backgrounds were to bring forward similar movements such as ‘Arte Povera’ in Italy and a group of students at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, and as 'Process Art' in the United States.
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Arte Povera - left; Untitled by Jannis Kounellis 1968 right: the 1977 version of 'Potate' - it's been reproduced by the artist many times (not with the same potatoes)
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A few notes about Arte Povera from the Tate Gallery
“Arte Povera means literally ‘poor art’ but the word poor here refers to the movement’s signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble. Materials used by the artists included soil, rags and twigs. In using such throwaway materials they aimed to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system.
The term was introduced by the Italian art critic and curator, Germano Celant, in 1967. When referring to Arte Povera, Celant wasn’t really talking about a lack of money, but rather about making art without the restraints of traditional practices and materials. His pioneering texts and a series of key exhibitions provided a collective identity for a number of young Italian artists based in Turin, Milan, Genoa and Rome. Arte Povera emerged from within a network of urban cultural activity in these cities, as the Italy was seized by economic instability once more. The heyday of the movement was from 1967–1972, but its influence on later art has been enduring. It can also be seen as the Italian contribution to conceptual art. In Japan, the mono-ha group looked into the essence of materials and stepped away from technological modernism. In the United States, the terms anti-form and post-minimalism were used to describe work that rejected the fixed industrial shapes and sleek forms of minimalist sculpture”.
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Incidentally. When Sekine Nubuo dug his round hole and put the cylinder of earth next to it in 1968 he did it without any permission. He was pretty sure that if he had sought permission, it would have been denied, in case there were underground pipes, health and safety etc. (some attempts to recreate the work did come up with these very problems) – although recreations have been achieved, particularly in more recent times
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HAMPSTEAD GARDEN SUBURB ART FAIR
Our friends at Hampstead Garden Suburb Art Society have their Annual Art Fair returning on the 21st and 22nd May. We hope you can go along to support it
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If you are a fan of Slow Television (i.e. watching paint dry), then you will love this!
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At the top of the tower block at the London Met University in the Holloway Road is a nesting Peregrine Falcon and the University have rather sneakily set up a camera which transmits a continuous stream of the nest activity (generally not very much).
Log on to have a look at: https://hml.londonmet.ac.uk/Live/34
In 1965 Andy Warhol made a film 'Empire' which was 8 hours and 5 minutes long and just a shot of the Empire State Building in slow motion. Warhol explained that the purpose of the film was 'to see time go by'
At the time of writing I think I have seen up to four chicks (maybe three). However, I have not yet seen Mr Falcon turn up with any food, but he must do at some time.
I hope they are all still there when you log on - hours of fascination!
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MEMBERS NEWS - CHRISTINE WATSON PS and DAWN FINN
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Internationally recognised pastel artist Christine Watson has had two pastels selected for The Society of Graphic Fine Art 101st Annual Open Exhibition 17th May to 21st May at the Mall Galleries. For more information see: https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/
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Below; Dawn's unique intaglio ink rolled monotype, 'A Jewelled Shoreline'.
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If you are looking for a birthday or anniversary treat from your friends you might consider a private tour of Tate Modern with a qualified Art Historian. This facility is not very well advertised but, for instance, you can arrange a private tour for 15 people for £180. Many other options are available at:
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/group-visits/private-tours-groups-tate-modern
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THE WORLD WE LIVE IN - COURTESY OF READERS DIGEST
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ABOUT EAST FINCHLEY OPEN ARTISTS
Find out about us on our website www.eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
There you will find details of all our current members plus photo's of their work and contact details plus information on recent and upcoming exhibitions
MEMBERSHIP: If you are interested in joining East Finchley Open Artists please contact the Membership Secretary at membership@eastfinchleyopen.org.uk
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