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Introduction - Editorial
Issue 17 - Sixth Anniversary Edition
Formed by the Soanyway editing team, advisors and collaborators.
It is six years since we relaunched Soanyway in its current format, following its original incarnation which was published between 2009 and 2013. This Autumn's Issue is a celebration of our sixth anniversary for which we invited the direct involvement of our advisory team. We begin with a conversation between Soanyway's current editors, Gertrude Gibbons and Derek Horton, as well as Lisa Stansbie and John Christopher. (Lisa, with Derek, was the co-founder and editor of the original version of the magazine, and John is our current associate editor.)
John Christopher: So what is it you want me to do? A few lines on soanyway? Conversation dialogue reply, that kind of thing? Crossing disciplines and interests and stuff like that? The lovely hubbub of it all? Or what about the several times I’ve picked up my phone to call you or you me and whoever answers says Wow, that’s so spooky, the phone is literally in my hand, I was just about to call you. Hey.
Derek Horton: I’m not sure how much I’ve ever told you about how Soanyway began, in 2009, which feels to me like a long time ago now (and probably seems even longer for you). I had co-founded and co-edited the early issues of another online magazine since 2005, and by 2008, especially since I left my full time career in institutional academia that year, I was tiring of what felt like that magazine's increasingly heavily theorised and academic approach. I wanted to make something equally seriously but more fun; something less specialised, more accessible, and more focused on narrative. The opportunity arose through my connection with Lisa Stansbie. Lisa was just completing a PhD that I had supervised, about the construction of fictional and non-fictional narratives through web-based [dis]information. (Incidentally, this was the first ever entirely web-based PhD in the UK, and possibly even the world!) Our friendship and shared interests were a natural starting point for a magazine that right from the start Lisa and I always defined in terms of ‘telling stories’ in the widest sense of that phrase
Gertrude Gibbons: Yes, I remember parts of the story when you introduced me to Soanyway's history in 2017. I didn't know its foundational connection to such early web-based explorations, this makes sense and how fascinating! I was drawn with excitement to the idea of story-telling and the name of the magazine. When we discussed relaunching it from January 2018, we agreed to take the name as a centre-point for describing the objective of the magazine, and I think that's brilliant how one word can hold such a concept, be descriptive and also spurr conversations. No doubt because I was studying literature at the time, I spent a long time dissecting and brainstorming around this invented word/phrase. You first told me about Soanyway after reading a response piece I wrote about the Barry Flanagan exhibition curated by Jo Melvin at &Model in Leeds. I think in this piece I was mixing up Shakespeare and Flanagan, visual art and literature, fun and sincerity, and was quite digressive in my thinking. It was with the idea of digression, conversation and interdisciplinarity within story-telling stemming from the original iteration of Soanyway that we got started on the relaunch. You were clear with your desire to make it accessible, open and inviting. I have always been more of a 'paper' person, so I wanted to keep the design simple and clear and somehow resembling turning the pages of a magazine without flashing interruptions or obscurification, in one smooth scroll, a singular page, while utilising the fact that we could include mediums impossible to put on paper! It took a while to digitally resemble the original logo, but I was determined to keep as much as possible, as this original design of the word itself reflected on the name too.
Lisa Stansbie: Not many people (perhaps only me and Derek) know the story of the Soanyway logo. Derek and I sat together at my office desk, Derek on the spare chair to my left, in the office at my Leeds house (as would become the custom for each edition of Soanyway at that time). We deliberately picked seemingly random typefaces for each individual letter of s-o-a-n-y-w-a-y and enlarged the word to fill an A4 image. I’m pretty sure this was done in Word, using its available fonts, rather than using Photoshop. This was printed out on A4 and then later, after Derek had gone, I scratched the lettering out of a black scratch-art board, revealing a golden yellow layer that I then re-scanned. I still find those scratch off picture sets in places like Hobbycraft extremely seductive. I can’t really say why – and I’m not even sure if I should publicly admit to it! Around the time we made the Soanyway logo these sets were rarer, so mine was purchased off eBay. I was also making artworks with scratch boards at the time, ironically making reproductions of eBay pages, trying to replicate their relatively novel and ever-changing web pages of the era as static drawings made using very basic analog methods. I liked somewhat futile labour involved in scratching away with the aim of trying to make the lines perfect, which is always impossible with the scratching stylus provided as there’s always a little too much black stuff that peels away leaving the kind of fuzzy edges that we retained in the logo.
This story was going to have a beautiful and narratively appropriate ending, as I remembered I used to keep my scratch art, including the Soanyway logo, in a 1980s Samsonite briefcase (one of the only objects I have belonging to my late father). Only this morning I found the briefcase in our spare bedroom having recently moved house, so I expectantly opened it to find my Ebay scratchings, but no Soanyway logo. I have a vague recollection I gave it to Derek to keep, but maybe I imagined this. I still have the re-scanned original image though (reproduced above).
Derek Horton: I don’t think I have it either, so I guess the handmade original is lost forever! That story about the briefcase is a nice reminder that our very first issue was called Somewhere and Nowhere! After that each issue was themed around a similar figure of speech such as Over and Over, Now and Then, Said and Done, and Above and Beyond. Lisa and I made our last issue together in 2013, appropriately enough titled Over and Out when our other commitments got in the way – Lisa’s developing academic career, and me moving on to open &Model gallery in Leeds. But the magazine lives on! As Gertrude said, &Model became the birthplace of its second incarnation when she and I decided to work together and were able to relaunch Soanyway in a slightly different format in 2018.
The wide-ranging pieces that follow reflect the diversity of our advisory team. There are individual contributions by Catriona McAra, Grace Weir, Steve Argüelles, Yuzo Ono, Billy Cancel, Roddy Hunter, and Chris Paul Daniels. Michelle Williams Gamaker collaborated with Joey Chin; Yuzo Ono invited a contribution from Maki Hayashida; Harold Offeh invited Jak Skot, and Sara Makari-Aghdam invited Simal Rafique. In a further reflection of Soanyway’s history, the cover image is by Eoin Shea who also designed the cover for our one-off print issue in 2012.
Joey Chin & Michelle Williams Gamaker - Voices Echolocate
Catriona McAra - And Then We Saw the Daughters of Blodeuwedd
(Above and below) Stills from Daughters of Blodeuwedd
Trailer of Daughters of Blodeuwedd
“The archetype of the Wild Woman and all that stands behind her is patroness to all painters, writers, sculptors, dancers, thinkers…for they are all busy with the work of invention, and that is the Wild Woman’s main occupation.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés (1992) [1].
Daughters of Blodeuwedd (2024) is a collaborative performance-film by Misha Horacek and Samantha Sweeting, shot by Pete Telfer of Culture Colony, and site-specifically set in a Welsh forest clearing. The project stems from a Celtic myth:
Once upon a time, long ago, a woman was conjured from the essence of wildflowers. Her sole intended purpose was to serve as the bride to a local lord. Yet, as is often the case in fairy tales, she fell blissfully in love with another suitor, and was ultimately punished for her desires, transformed into an owl and doomed forever to a nocturnal existence,
beyond the sun’s reach and contrary to her flowery nature.
But what if Blodeuwedd’s transformation was “a gift rather than a punishment” as feminist writers have claimed? [2] Today, her name means “flower face” and evokes the delicate feathered edges of an owl’s facial concave. This cautionary tale, its protagonist and natural history, oral and literary variants, are now undergoing revisionary renewal in the hands of Horacek and Sweeting who seek to honour and retell her story through their distinctively allegorical mode of performance installation and mediumistic shapeshifting.
Daughters of Blodeuwedd is replete with ethereal thresholds and sacramental matters. Twinning in ceremonial costumes and matching headdresses, Horacek and Sweeting share an intimate forest ritual during which they attempt to reincarnate and summon Blodeuwedd from the very fabric of the earth. After emerging barefoot through a follow-my-leader procession, the pair coil a cat’s cradle of red threads, winding them umbilically around tree trunks in a gesture of protective binding, before amassing a pyre of branches. A clutch of fruit and intricately arranged floral tributes are then nourished and fertilised with milk poured from their mouths. The totemic, breast-like forms on their crowns further evidence their status as the custodians or priestesses of this human-animal contribution. The recipe is spellbound, primeval, intuitive. They whisper and chant in an ancient language of tongues. The heady scent of these flowers suggests a sensorial layer beyond the visual realm in addition to the provocative soundscape. The owl is present too, haunting this scene through multiple vantage points, concealed in her camouflage of bark and moss.
The collecting of “story bones,” as Clarissa Pinkola Estés puts it, occurs in the assembling of natural materials used to rebirth Blodeuwedd [3]. Indeed, this sacrament culminates in a magic circle of fruits and wildflowers, expressing the very fibre of Blodeuwedd’s being. As mythographer Jhenah Telyndru advises: “For those dedicated to Blodeuwedd, or who want to form a relationship with her, the gathering together of her flowers to create an incense to burn or an energetic elixir to take is a meaningful act of devotion” [4]. Here, a sense of gathering and assembling as both practice and tribute is palpable: the broom, meadowsweet and oak from which Blodeuwedd was originally made manifest are known to have healing properties that have endured the centuries. Here, the very constituent parts of the traditional bridal bouquet are released and reenvisaged beyond matrimonial wedlock. Telyndru proposes that we might add nettle, primrose and chestnut, among others, to this alchemical arrangement, adding conceptual weight to the little banquet of local blackberries [5]. The apples as fallen fruit meanwhile seem to represent alternative knowledge, subverting biblical narratives and original sin from the margins of lived feminine experience. The ecocritical appeal of rewilding, found throughout the solo practices and concerns of Sweeting and Horacek, is presaged by Blodeuwedd making her an obvious choice of deity or nature spirit for these creative beings to collectively worship.
As surrogate daughters, the next generation are reviving the potency of this owl-goddess and channelling her aesthetic prowess. While Blodeuwedd-related art to date has tended towards the Pre-Raphaelite terrain and persuasion due to its closeness to Arthurian legend, Horacek and Sweeting pare their vision back, preferring to take their sustenance from twentieth century feminist-surrealist and postminimalist exemplars instead. Daughters of Blodeuwedd echoes the iconography of various surrealist visual narratives, from the floral coated child-sprite of Dorothea Tanning’s The Magical Flower Game (1941) to the enigmatic mood and twinning of Leonora Carrington’s And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953). Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-1482) and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) also appear to be primary reference points for the slow-burn choreographic rhythm and seasonal cycle adopted here. The breast-like symbols on their headdresses meanwhile recall Eva Hesse’s relief sculpture Ring-Around-a-Rosie (1965) and Louise Bourgeois’ fungal Avenza (1968) sculpture that later became an artist’s costume (1975). In this respect, Daughters of Blodeuwedd functions as an otherworldly microcosm that combines allegory, nursery rhymes and archetypal feminine matters.
Notes
[1] Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman (London: Random House, 1992), 12.
[2] Zoë Brigley, Exile and Ecology, PhD thesis (University of Warwick, 2007), 9.
[3] Pinkola Estés, 17.
[4] Jhenah Telyndru, Blodeuwedd: Welsh Goddess of Seasonal Sovereignty (Alresford: Moon Books, 2021), 78.
[5] Telyndru, 70.
Grace Weir - refrAction
Maki Hayashida - Water & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society
Installation view of Water Wonderland from the series “Water Wonderland”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
My solo show Water & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society was shown as part of the 17th shiseido art egg exhibition at Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo from 30th January – 3rd March 2024. The exhibition presented photographic works from two projects: Water Wonderland (2022-2023), originally developed for my MA project at London College of Communication; and Beyond the Mountains (2019-ongoing), originally a book project. While the former considers historic coastal landfill sites in the UK and the latter illegal dumping in my home country, Japan, both share an exploration into the unintended consequences of waste management that have strongly impacted on nature.
To establish my artistic practice during my MA studies, I first and foremost questioned representation in photography. Can any photograph represent the real world as it is?
I would say that photographs have always been something we ‘make’ from the beginning of its emergence. This is because we as photographers always observe our subject matter with a conscious or unconscious bias; we always capture them with some kind of intention. On the other hand, we as viewers tend to regard photographs as reproductions of reality, particularly when looking at them without much thought. From those, I decided to develop my projects in such a way that the subject matter of the image is not the subject of the work. This not only requires me to think, but also the viewer to think. The subject matter of the photographs presented in the exhibition are the historic coastal landfill sites in the UK or the waste management facilities in Tokyo, but the overall subject is the unintended consequences of waste management.
Installation view of Water & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
Installation view of The Stacks from the series “Beyond the Mountains”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
Installation view of Re-collection from the series “Water Wonderland”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
Installation view of Water & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
Slideshow of installation views and works fromWater & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photos: Maki Hayashida.
Here are some anecdotes that I have found during my research for the series Water Wonderland and applied to my final works. All of them reveal minor differences in perception between the British and the Japanese but such differences may have contributed to the unintended consequences:
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The Japanese associate crows with the beauty of the sunset but also with garbage. Neither is the case for the British. (The work Water Wonderland is accompanied by projection of a moving image piece and audio recorded at historic coastal landfill sites, which includes the calling of crows along with ducks and other waterbirds.)
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In Japan, since glass bottles became common around 1900, they have almost never been transported directly to landfills as such. Thus, the Japanese rarely associate them with objects from landfills, but rather subconsciously regard them as something valuable that should not be landfilled. (In the work Re-collection, I photographed the fragments of glass bottles from a historic coastal landfill site as jewels.)
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Most swans in the UK have orange beaks while most swans in Japan have yellow. They are different species of swans; accordingly, their facial structures are slightly different. (The work LOOKOUT depicts the gaze of a swan on a historic coastal landfill site, which I hand-coloured yellow because a swan's beak is yellow to me.)
Installation view of Water & Mountains: A Wonder-Land on Ecology and Society, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
In the gallery space, each photographic image was presented as an installation, aiming to provide a sense of wonderland and a place for deep thought, ‘wonder-land’, at the same time. Their interpretation was open to the viewer.
Installation view of LOOKOUT #1 from the series “Water Wonderland”, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, 2024, photo: Maki Hayashida.
A catalogue on the exhibition has been released recently: https://gpabp.official.ec/items/90734018
Steve Argüelles - Portrait in Jazz
Steve Argüelles and Bumper Trio
Portrait in Jazz, music and lyrics by Steve Argüelles, includes a collage of lyric fragments from various standard songs that the pianist Bill Evans recorded in the early-1960s with his classic trio with Paul Motian and Scott LaFaro.
Bumper Trio:
Benoît Delbecq, piano
Sarah Murcia, bass synth
Steve Argüelles, drums, voice
Recorded at Plushspace, Paris, in Sept 2023.
Recorded and mixed by Steve Argüelles.
Mastering by Klaus Scheuermann.
Bumper Trio Self-Portrait
Portrait in Jazz
Witchcraft, sailboats, moonlight in heaven
Portrait in Jazz
June night, soft breeze, a perfect setting
Trio plays time, drifting drums, tender bass, rare piano
Trio plays time
Sweet repeats
Drums are dust
Lucky guys
Boom
Money and honey, the highest pleasure
Eyes that dance
Taunting melody
Haunting
Sweet and lovely
One phrase may change the light
Dancing in the dark
Don’t hurry time
Music together
Never miss a thing
How far did we travel to where we are
How high
12345
1111
Simal Rafique - Dion Kitson: Rue Britannia
Dion Kitson’s solo-exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham (10 May–8 September 2024) is a punk rendition of what are today labelled “British values”. In Rue Britannia Kitson denigrates the imagined community of the British people with an array of multimedia artworks which include sculpture, installation, film and readymade objects – such as a found trampoline, a school desk, cigarettes and fishing equipment. Reminiscent of the YBA’s ‘gag with an ironic punchline’, the show’s aesthetic is culled from references to what might be seen as the embarrassing absence of a national culture in the Isles. There are the usual clichés: a pool table nicked from a quintessential British pub, a 3D printed sculpture of young Prince Harry called Still Life (2023), and a massive recreation of a pebble-dashed council house where the artist spent his childhood in Dudley, a market town that is littered with ruins and located in the heart of the industrial Black Country, eight miles northwest of Birmingham. Nearby, the artist’s off-site commission for English Heritage intervenes in the JW Evans Silver Factory, an industrial silverware factory in Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter.
Dion Kitson, Still Life, 2023, 3D printed sculpture mannequin. Photo: Tom Bird.
In Ode to Rubbish Mountain (2011-2023) Kitson approaches the subject of ruins and industrial waste as an apt ‘metaphor for the wider state of British towns’ (according to the Ikon exhibition guide). Accompanied with a framed newspaper article and looped footage from BBC Midlands Today, the installation comprises a miniature model of a notorious 30ft landfill in Brierley Hill which was successfully removed in 2016 after an extensive local battle and a £1.4 million investment in clearance equipment. Regional endeavours to restore the Black Country landscape align closely with English Heritage’s support for Kitson’s artistic practice. Dwarfed by the rubbish mountain in front, an empty railway track anticipates the arrival of a train – the industrial machine par excellence – shifting soot and pollution onto Ikon’s whitewashed walls. Closer examination of the debris and waste accumulated on the site recalls the radical materiality of the arte povera movement in Italy, overseeing the transformation of everyday objects into works of art. In the context of the show, perhaps the integration of impoverished materials becomes symbolic for the nationwide Cost of Living Crisis that has disproportionately affected artists based in the North. A visit to Dion Kitson’s online shop adds ‘made in Dudley, London prices’ to ensure that the authenticity of the artist’s working-class aesthetic remains intact under the promise of ripping off London clients.
Dion Kitson, Ode to Rubbish Mountain, 2011-2023, scale model, newspaper article and looped footage form BBC Midlands Today. Photo: Steve Russel Studios.
Like trainspotting, watching television also becomes an act of waiting that suggests ruination and decay through the passing of time. For Take Back Control (2024) Kitson has glued rhinestones onto an electric easy chair to make a sparkly Union Jack, a sunset bursting with dotted rays and the pro-Brexit slogan ‘TAKE BACK CONTROL’ is spelt out in red letters. On the back, rhinestones form a mosaic-like icon of Britannia, the national personification of Britain since classical antiquity, identified by her trident and Union Jack shield. In a possible reference to the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Kitson’s bedazzled armchair-cum-throne demonstrates the aestheticization of politics as a form of theatricality indistinguishable from the likes of Reality TV and the kitschiest kitsch of domestic furniture. Following Labour’s historic landslide, visitors in the gallery reflect on the out-of-date slogan for Britain’s departure from the European Union as a timely reminder of the national disappointments endured during the Conservative Party’s disastrous fourteen years in government.
Dion Kitson, Take Back Control, 2024, electronic easy chair and rhinestones. Photo Tom Bird.
Walking through Dion Kitson’s whirlwind tour of a broken Britain, I encounter a kinetic sculpture which encapsulates these disappointments. Rule Britannia! (2024) is a music box composed of a tatty school desk and shatter-resistant rulers which have been screwed on to resemble the keys on a piano. Doodles and pen marks spread across the wooden surface. Thomas Arne’s patriotic melody, I am told by a gallery assistant, ought to be ringing through the exhibition room on a never-ending loop. Today there is no sound; the imperial swansong is over.
Dion Kitson, Rule Britannia! (detail), 2024, kinetic sculpture with rulers and school table. Photo Tom Bird.
Jăk Skŏt - Pipework/Echography
Jăk Skŏt makes work (often collaborating with artists such as Harold Offeh) that explores ideas of selfhood and the mystery of the other. In this context, the text 'Pipework' and the accompanying image series 'Echography' both celebrate and critique club culture and the communal liberation of dance, while invoking ideas of surrender, states of being, and the complex relationship between the individual and the crowd.
Pipework
Half limp you writhe awake in the pit, come to and weakened you waken to move, to squeeze out between the edges of the soaked, squeeze manoeuvred attempts to penetrate and push out of the throb, slip the throng, channel a line and glide on the pearling dew of humid ghosts, dense scent of saturation clinging to fabric plastered rib impressions. Feel exhausted, like, all the body, every limp fibre off fleek, a physical exhaustion from hours awake, from ecstasy, from trauma, from muscular motions /step count/ it’s adrenal fatigue 101, crack down on all supplies, drained dry the body sweats, heart sweats, cochlear sweats as you flow through the crowd and the half ton of orgone energy, the mass, the omnipresent substance of body on bodies that are half-bodies, half-shapes on the pulse, penetrating half-faced under strobe stretching thin the putty of locked limbs, stretching sub-atomic, the follicular, the molecular, speakers beating mass on mass of Sunday mass, a trash compactor, compacting the life out of lungs, compacting you in stranger danger, compelling the body to move, to take flight, quick flighted direction of chaotic stumble, stammered stumble, staggered wide-eyed, red-eyed pleas, treating the exoskeleton of your soul’s captivity to the full force of emotive action, the mind’s essence already 10, 20 deep ahead, dragging the husk by force of will, with arms out reaching for a good ol’ void, a good ol’ vacuum, for a dense dark dream of isolation, of space behind space, of clear air, clean breeze, pulling all last reserves to the forefront of motor movements until it’s you in the L’Oréal waterfall commercial, the secluded grove of hydration, the blissful gravitational pour, except it’s you by the water bar downing cup after cup after iced gasped breaths and grasps of the counter, calling for more as liquid tracks lines over lips, overflowing the mouth when head tilts back, glistening rivulets running over chest bone as, part-sated, you take tide from the tap up to the balcony, making leatherette wet as you slide in to the stall, to hang head in hands in high defence, washing in fevered half-opened-eyed malaise, tapped-out tiredness on to the Formica table top, compelling sleep well, rest well, whilst crowd clapped cries recede faintly below, bellows coasting on the thick fog of a muffled anthem, with white light, red light, cut light, beacons roving in the semi-matte black, high voltage rotations radiating on closed lids, clipping into the dark vent and pipework of the submerged.
Echography
Yuzo Ono - Mono-ha: opacity, surroundings, and rawness
Mono-ha stands for ‘school of things’ in Japanese. Just as Impressionism began as a derogatory term in art history, "Mono-ha" initially seems to have been viewed similarly. Perhaps because of this, the artists involved in the movement themselves did not use "Mono-ha" as their description. However, over time the term has spread, and ironically is now used favorably outside Japan. Its initial derogatory use suggests it was a major break from the flow of art history up to that point and, in that sense, innovative.
Mono-ha, a Japanese art movement, originated and developed in Japan, might be said to be a way of thinking that is in some respects the opposite of Western art. To briefly describe the characteristics of their work, I would say it involved creating arrangements of materials such as wood, stone, and iron in their original form. To help readers understand Mono-ha I have taken extracts from the statements of three major Mono-ha artists: Lee Ufan, Kishio Suga, and Katsuro Yoshida. Although Lee was born in Korea, he moved to Japan in his youth and has been involved with Japanese Mono-ha artists.
Lee Ufan, Relatum, 2007, stone, iron plate. Source: http://the-mirror-ginza.com/未分類/lee-ufan/
In his book The Art of White Space, written in Japanese, Lee Ufan writes of the Japanese haiku poet Basho:
Basho has a haiku that goes, "An old pond, a frog jumps in, the sound of water." In this small, momentary event, the poet senses the vast resonance of the universe.
My work is also about bringing stimulating events into this banal everyday world. I hope this will evoke poetic inspiration.
However, what differs from Basho's poetry is that my work does not rely on words, but is a metaphor concerning opaque objects and mutable spaces, and so it could be said that direct encounters are emphasized rather than indirect images.
(The Art of White Space, Misuzu Shobo, 2000, p. 23)
Lee notes Basho and his own works share a common goal: to create something out of the mundane quotidian that resonates in the larger universe. If, as Lee says, works of Mono-ha have something in common with specifically Japanese or Eastern art forms such as those of Basho, it contrasts with Western art trends. Mono-ha differs from Western classical art and from forms that were contemporary with them in ways that at first glance appear similar. Land Art, Earthwork and Arte Povera were contemporary with them, but Mono-ha artists unanimously claim that these movements are completely different. Lee points out, for example, that these movements "use a variety of materials, but they still strongly have internal structures and closed images," and that as a result, "no matter how far they go, their works are an extension of the artists themselves" (Mono-ha 1994, Kamakura Gallery, 1995, p.24). On the other hand, he says of Mono-ha, "among those who attempt to express something, I cannot imagine people who are as greedy as the so-called Mono-ha. They don't just confront their own ego, but have a tremendous ambition or desire to be somehow connected to the universe" (ibid., p.22). It is worth noting that here too Lee mentions the "universe"; it suggests he believes the Mono-ha movement and Basho's haiku had the same objective in this sense.
Lee writes of Earthwork and Arte Povera, compared with Mono-ha:
Rather than being influenced by Western trends, "Mono-ha" had a commonality and simultaneity of a self-criticism toward preceding modernity, and on the other hand, showed a unique development in its translucency and otherness that connected it to the outside world.
(The Art of White Space, Misuzu Shobo, 2000, p. 264)
This notion is shared by many Mono-ha artists. For example, Kishio Suga writes:
The crucial flaw in the works currently known as Conceptual Art and Land Art is that it ignores the fact that the things used for actual works are not supposed to satisfy the conditions and intentions of the artists, but that the exact existence of things is a condition and a constraint.
(Kishio Suga - Around the Gaze Catalogue, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990, p. 32)
Anyone can be there, and anything can be there. However, Japanese people think that if you look at a place as a realm, you can overlay your recognition that it is "a little different from the norm." However, Westerners have a different approach; the characteristics emerge when they move there themselves, go around and recognise the spatiality. For example, Richard Long: He walks around, places various stones, and then chooses the places he walks through, turning them into artworks. There is nothing else. When he enters and visually thinks of the place as a realm, he recognizes a unique position.
(Kishio Suga 1997-1998, Yomiuri Shimbun, 1997, p. 276)
Kishio Suga, Accumulation of Void and Effects, 2021, stone, rope. Source: https://www.fashion-press.net/news/7381
The perspectives of Lee and Suga are similar; while Land Art is a “self-criticism toward modernity," in the end there is no "otherness" in it, but rather it is an "extension of the artists themselves," with "ego" and “intention.” Mono-ha works are different; the artist is not necessarily necessary, and what is important is the "thing itself," which, in the extreme, has a universality. Both Lee and Suga also share the view that such characteristics of Mono-ha are linked to the characteristics of spatial perception in Japanese culture.
Following this line of thought, it could be argued Western culture sees the world from a self-centered perspective, while Eastern culture sees the world from an object-centered perspective, and this is reflected in the contrast between Land Art and Mono-ha. This explanation is not just a discourse about Mono-ha, but also something often mentioned as a contrast between Western and Eastern culture, so it seems an extremely convincing explanation.
However, it is not that simple. The Mono-ha artist Katsuro Yoshida also points out the contrast with contemporary Western artists who were known as Earthwork artists, just like Lee and Suga, but he explains it differently. Mentioning Robert Smithson and others, he says:
Although I can admit that those artists have a certain high level of sensitivity (thinking), they make the same mistake as the Minimalist artists. Their work, in which they dig holes in the earth and pile stones directly on the earth, shows a very backward-looking sentimentalism about the act of making things when they face nature. It places too much importance on nature.
(Production Notes 1969-1978, Suiseisha, 2024, p. 55)
In short, Yoshida says that the problem with Land Art and the like is that it places too much emphasis on nature. This seems to be opposed by Lee and Suga, who argue that the shortcoming of Land Art is that it places too much emphasis on the self. In this case, the dichotomy of East and West regarding Mono-ha appear more complex. A statement made by Yoshida may be the clue to solve this mystery:
Up until now, I have been working with things. However, rather than focusing on the materiality that the thing itself possesses, I have tried to work from the perspective of the human being, not the thing, and to focus on what lies between the thing and the person looking at it (what is generated between the sight and the thing). So when the name "Mono-ha" is slapped on me, I feel really strange. What I have been doing should have been more appropriately called “school of sight" or "school of in-between" than "Mono-ha."
(Production Notes 1969-1978, Suiseisha, 2024, p. 143)
He asserts that Mono-ha does not focus on things at all, but on "what is generated between sight and things." If Mono-ha can be defined as placing importance on the concept of "in-between," then there may be something in common between Lee and Suga's assertion that Land Art places too much importance on the "self," and Yoshida's assertion that it places too much importance on "nature." Suga has also repeatedly mentioned this concept of "in-between":
My things are something between a person and a verb.
("Kishio Suga Production Notes 1967-2008", HeHe, 2023, p.106)
Immersing most of your life in art is, in a sense, just as easy as living a life unrelated to art. I usually think that it's best to be "in-between," or to wander around "the border." What kind of "border" is it? It could be between existence and emptiness, meaning and meaninglessness, use and non-use, whole and part, the visible and the invisible, tension and relaxation... but above all, there seems to be no place where more complex and diverse aspects are revealed than the "border" between natural space and man-made space. The attitude of not leaning too much toward either natural or man-made space may be an important key for me to continue doing art.
("Kishio Suga Production Notes 1967-2008 ", HeHe, 2023, p. 567)
Taking something and turning it into a work of art does not necessarily emphasise either nature, or the artist's intention. Rather, the work is created at the boundary between the thing and something else. Thinking that way, the superficial contradiction in Lee’s, Suga's, and Yoshida's statements about Land Art is not a contradiction at all. Rather, the essence of the problem may be that the Land Art artist and nature are connected by what Yoshida calls "backward-looking sentimentalism," which means that no "in-between" exists between them. If we carefully follow what these three artists say about their works, we can see that each of them is struggling to find the right words to express this concept of "in-between." For example, Yoshida calls it “raw” or “raw immaterial abstract thinking":
For example, I bring out the "rawness" of the state of placing a stone on paper. The act of placing a stone on paper, or that state, is separated from the material aspect of the stone when it is laid out as a stone. An immaterial meaning that is not material but is purely a matter of human involvement (I know it is a strange expression) emerges, and this connects more strongly the stone and the paper, and although the stone as a thing and the paper as a thing still exist, their existence is erased, and the "raw" immaterial abstract thinking is extracted.
(Production Notes 1969-1978, Suiseisha, 2024, p. 51)
Katsuro Yoshida, Cut-off (paper weight), 1969, stone, paper. Source: https://www.art-annual.jp/column-essay/essay/79867/
Yoshida must have been attracted to the "in-between" that appears in his work, combining stone and paper, and you can see that he is struggling to put what he felt into words. On the other hand, Lee also uses stones in many of his works, and his method (such as combining stones with iron plates) is similar to Yoshida's. Lee wrote this about bringing stones to an exhibition venue:
Once brought to the exhibition space, the stones, regardless of size, generally turn into feeble, abstract lumps. Thrown into a foreign space, the stones get confused. As the space is settled through adjusting various combinations, orientations, and separations in relation to iron plates, the stones begin to reveal their own character and existence.
Thus, while the stones awaken me to their relationship with space and other things, they also leapfrog me, sometimes forcing me to revise my concept. The size, orientation, and the stones’ relationship with other things gradually confuse me and make me opaque. The stones try to return to nature more and more, to break away from my thoughts and from stones in general, and to reign there with an elusive distance. This uncontrollable elusiveness drives me crazy. Nature is opaque.
(The Art of White Space, Misuzu Shobo, 2000, p. 371)
It is interesting that Lee uses the word "opaque" – in the aforementioned comparison with Land Art, he clearly defines the characteristics of Mono-ha as "a unique development in its translucency and otherness that connected it to the outside world." What Lee calls both "opaque" and "translucent" occurs in the place that "connects with the outside world," that is, the “in-between,” similarly to what Yoshida calls "raw non-material abstract thinking." If it were "transparent," there would be no resistance in viewers’ sensation. However, "opacity" and "translucency" provide a presence or resistance that is difficult to explain, and a tactile sensation that is very close to the presence of "rawness" that Yoshida speaks of. If "translucency" and "opacity" are words linked to perception and cognition, then this perspective also connects with Suga's thinking, because he often uses the word "surroundings" to talk about his own works.
I define the "surroundings" as "the area where perceptible and imperceptible elements are intermingled." The "surroundings" are somewhere between finiteness and infinity, possessing both at the same time. They are also places where things move and stop moving seemingly without any context. In order to grasp wholeness, it is necessary to consciously create the "surroundings". The "surroundings" itself should be constructed and materialized. I am obsessed with it now.
(Kishio Suga - Around the Gaze Catalogue, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990, p. 29)
Based on this argument, Suga adds, "making artwork is, so to speak, a part of creating the surroundings." For him, artworks can only come into existence in this kind of "in-between" space, that he calls the "surroundings." For me, Lee’s references to “translucency" and “opacity,” Yoshida’s to “rawness” or "raw immaterial abstract thinking," and Suga’s to "surroundings," all seem essentially to refer to the same thing. A texture that is somewhat rough, grainy, or rugged, and makes the viewer feel uneasy, occurs "between" a thing and a person, or between a thing and something manufactured. Such a sensation is common to the works of the "Mono-ha" movement, including these three artists. In that sense, Yoshida was right in pointing out that the movement should not be called "Mono-ha (school of things)", but "school of in-between." This is because such a sensation never arises from the thing itself, but always from the relationship surrounding the thing, that is, from the "in-between" space.
In this sense, the idea that the difference between Land Art and Mono-ha reflects the difference between Eastern and Western thought appears surprisingly accurate. Lee clearly positioned Mono-ha's works as being close to Basho's haiku. Not only in haiku but in Japanese art and culture in general, there is a tendency to place importance on the "in-between" and seek out the resistant texture that is generated from "in-between" in the work.
Although Mono-ha differs significantly from Land Art and other Western movements of the time, its approach should not be explained in easy-to-understand dichotomies such as things and people, nature and artificiality, or object and subject. Mono-ha was established in a place of "in-between" that is difficult to explain with existing dichotomies, and this must be described with somewhat elusive keywords such as opacity, surroundings, or rawness, which is why Mono-ha harbours a distinctly Japanese or Eastern essence.
*All quotations translated by Yuzo Ono.
Billy Cancel - Four poems
Roddy Hunter - 'R E - R E C O R D I N G' (THE ATTIC ARCHIVE), digital collage, 2024.
Since 2021, curator Judit Bodor and artist Roddy Hunter have been exploring how to curate The Attic Archive (1980-2020), established by artist Pete Horobin at 37 Union Street, Dundee, Scotland as a self-historicisation project of work produced under four different identities, namely Pete Horobin (1980-89), Marshall Anderson (1990-99), Peter Haining (2000-09), and Ae Phor (2010-19). Responding to the archive's historical formation through peer-to-peer networked correspondence art and its present dispersal across collections in Scotland, Ireland and Hungary, Bodor and Hunter are establishing an open-source, user-generated web platform built and maintained by an open and inclusive network of care of artists, archivists, curators, and researchers internationally to share and generate work, correspondence and ephemera related to the archive.
As part of this project, entitled 'Curating The Digital Attic Archive: A Case Study For Open-Source Approaches To Artists' Archives', Roddy Hunter created 'R E – R E C O R D I N G', a new dual monitor video installation work with live performance directly investigating Pete Horobin's 'Digestive Biscuit Action' (1986), where he video recorded himself in the DATA Attic between 12:30-2:22 pm on 29 March 1986 attempting to eat an entire pack of digestive biscuits, dedicating each one to a person who had corresponded with him so far that year. The work is a meditation on personal and cultural history and an observation of the economy and politics of everyday reality. In 'R E – R E C O R D I N G', Roddy Hunter replays this 1986 video footage on a vintage CRT monitor while recording himself on MiniDV, preparing and repeating the attempt between 4:00-5:52 pm on 4 April 2024 in the Matthew Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee. This work, made especially for Soanyway's anniversary edition, is a document of that action.
Chris Paul Daniels - An ode to onion skins
At 9:25pm, on Halloween 1992, BBC One presented Ghostwatch in the Screen One drama series. In the format of a live broadcast, with a cast including famous and familiar (at the time) TV personalities such as Sarah Greene, Michael Parkinson, and Craig Charles playing themselves. It was presented as a ‘real’ documentary, investigating ‘Pipes’, a poltergeist living in the basement of a suburban house who eventually took over the TV studio, leaving Michael Parkinson possessed at the programme’s abrupt ending. The apparent reality of the drama resulted in tens of thousands of calls to the BBC switchboard on the night it was screened, in a furore often compared to Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, which caused nationwide panic in the United States. Ghostwatch was shown once and never repeated on UK television. For many who saw it though, it remained to haunt their memories, dwelling in the shadows of paranoia and anxiety.
A ghost haunts my life
It still follows me around.
Plays tricks on me,
watches me sleep from the corner of the room
scratches at the face, the skin, the eyes, the flesh.
To remember its name is to conjure another.
Is it really called pipes? Or is it shame?
Pipes! As home invasion,
The ghost literally in the machine - messing about with the order of things.
Speaking in voices, cold calling on the Going Live! phone number
Laughing about the Mother Seddons’ story, dodgy lodgers and baby farmers.
Agh, so layered
So breadcrumbed
Round and round the garden – like a teddy bear
A face in the light on the bathroom cupboard
Noises from behind the wardrobe,
The onion skin says Dr Pascoe,
it gets deeper and more dark
The menace of this plot.
Pipes is powerful and pre-emptive.
Ahead of the game
Pipes has grand designs.
Call 081 811 81 81
Pipes took the face of the mainstream
It creaked in your floorboards
just out of sight
It knew your interiors,
Your home as haunted house
Don’t invite it in
Don’t spread it through the channel
Something unwanted
sodden carpets and bangs of the boiler.
Clang of the heating, cracks in the Artex.
It changes the clocks, and stops the watches.
Trick or Trap
It leaves a residue, it’s in the details.
It’s in the edit.
Someone at school said they saw cats gutted in the back yard
Someone at school laughed at how it had ‘ghost- played by’
Someone at school had to have a babycom connected to their parents’ room
A friend’s dad turned the power off to the whole house before the credits
A decade later someone punched me for making them be Pipes in the Rizla game (forehead detective)
Pipes broke George’s printer
That ghost is a bastard, it’s not friendly, it’s no fun – it is spiteful, and it is taking the piss
It’s what you wanted isn’t it?
It’s what you wanted.
PIPES! Say its name.
Toying with the trust in the telly.
The great disruptor. The instigator. Manipulator!
Nasty, layered, half glimpsed.
A collective experience.
It left its mark:
Don’t trust everything
Pay attention to the details
There can be nuance
The screen retains power
There is an authority in the television
Invisible directors and ghost writers
A stepping stone. A bridge.
A virus. A curse. A pirate broadcast.
A story can disrupt reality
and the affects that linger, follow us into the dark
Pre - post truth.
The audience was baited, switched.
All eyes on the remote controllers
Scrub the footage and select the loops
Picking up the frequencies
Cathartic cathode rays
Of other generational ghosts. I Saw your Final Destinations and heard your Screams –Sinister, Insidious, Paranormal Activities. All too theatrical – omnipotent cameras and manipulative scores. GW was grunge, pieced together from familiar faces and formats –
hospitalwatch,
badgerwatch,
crimewatch.
Reflexive. Acknowledged the viewers, who were complicit and cursed like Sakado’s Ringu, or the transmitted infections of Videodrome. Ghostwatch took the box of your home and the box of the TV set and made them a platform for a malevolent ghost. Pipes came knocking on your central heating, it was in the corner of your bathroom mirror or in the abstraction of a patio door.
Fears magnified, focussed, amplified.
It knocked me over, there is a before and after – what an event.
PIPES! Pushed me through a portal towards epiphanies
Grand revelations of self-realisations
Pipes was a manifestation of upset, disruption.
something awakened would not rest
Malicious, Malignant, Mocking
I fought this fiction much longer than I should
The name still feels like a summoning, a dangerous invite
It’s not Candyman, it’s not bloody Mary - but I hate to tempt fate.
Wears your face and speaks your tongue.
Gets into your head and under the skin
How does it still stick?
It was decades ago
In 1992 Halloween, I would have been eleven.
One of the Chuckle Brothers used to live a road away from us. They were on BBC One at 08:15 that morning.
Then Sarah Greene with Phillip Schofield for Going Live!
Real demons were on a Saturday tea time; Rolf’s cartoon club. Thatcher had ended but Section 28 remained. Jim’ll Fix it.
GW was billed as a drama, but heavily marketed.
I’d set the tape for after Casualty, it was to run before Match of the Day.
It was after the water-shed.
Pipes as a catalyst,
Pipes as a many camera-angled one.
BUT ALSO
I was a ghost to myself
I was hiding, squirming, trying to not be seen
I was desperately performing as a Maltby Comp Lad
My attempt at cold machismo, would win no BAFTAS.
The worst thing would be to show weakness or fear
But I was afraid of the dark, and the light, and the outside, and the inside.
It would take longer to give up the ghost.
There was something behind the curtains.
What had I let in? What possession was this?
A slow reveal of things buried deep,
The mirror was broken, and it was in the reflection
disturbed, distressed, disrupted, what was hidden was now in full view:
It was not a skeleton that was in the closet.
…it would take a while.
Agh, to learn to love pipes!
To see the powerful medium
To still bow to these memories of childhood fears, I was stunned and static.
What power we give to fictions
Distractions from reality
Unmentionable, unsayable,
The things you invite into your head
Mess with the interiors
Pipes is a catalyst for catharsis
Don’t trust everything shown through the screen(s)
Everything was by design, authored, selected
- I had fallen for the traps, and would be transformed
– this power of storytelling, of illusion, steering through details and observations. It wasn’t Pipes playing me, but Steven Volk, Leslie Manning, Ruth Baumgauten,
Parkinson, Smith, Greene, Charles
The skill, the script and the direction, the collaborative efforts.
Never to be repeated. To be locked in its own vault. Kept under the stairs.
A heckling not a haunting
A script not a séance
Acting not Actualising
Take a bow Pipes!
Raise the curtain Mother Seddons
We applaud you Raymond Turnstall
Foxhill Drive, drives us forward
The curtain calls.
So an ode to the Onion Skin
The saliva on the mackerel
The spit on the shoe
It’s the nuance, the details, the edit
Palms still sweat. I ramble into the darkness
A ghost haunts my life, long after I believed the Mother Seddons story
So I write this as a ritual to make peace with older ghosts that stalk decades old memories, that linger on the shame and fears of my eleven-year-old self.
It’s hard to make peace with a ghost of yourself
The ghost of who you once were
So witness this exorcism:
To lose the guilt and the shame and the upset of a former self
It’s OK that I was scared.
But there was strength not weakness to be frightened by fictions
when the world looked much more terrifying,
So to that sensitive soul.
The shamed kid, scared stiff, startled with the world, it was easier to be haunted by fictions than face the reality. Confront the fears.
And to those unspeakable ghosts of shame and fear
I am letting you go
These portals and doors are only for the living.
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Cover image by Eoin Shea