Mono-ha
After looking at the work of Susumu Koshimizu and Kishio Suga and their past work more I discovered that they are both part of an art group called Mono-ha. Although there is little written about Mono-ha I did find out a little about the group, the artists involved, and their work.
Mono-ha refers to a Japanese post-war art group primarily active in the sixties and early seventies, using raw materials in their artwork. Their aim was to bring together and combine these raw materials in a simple way, maintaining their natural ‘unaltered’ form and allowing the materials and their relationships together and the space around them to speak for themselves. The aim of the group was to use new materials and challenge the pre-existing perceptions of these materials, viewing them on a new level.
There are eight main artists associated with this loosely knit group – Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan, Katsuro Yoshida, Susumu Koshimizu, Koji Enokura, Kishio Suga, Noboru Takayama and Katsuhiko Naria.
Very little of the Mono-ha work has been seen since it was made, but in 2012 a large amount of their work was exhibited at the Blum & Poe in Los Angeles which was organised and curated by Mika Yoshitake.[1]The exhibition entitled ‘Requiem for the Sun’ displayed a large amount of their work, giving a fresh look at Mono-ha and its work.
Aside from Koshimiu and Suga, whose work at the Tate Modern led me to Mono-ha, there is chiefly one piece from the Blum & Poe exhibition that need mentioning. (It would be too lengthy to go through every artist). Lee Ufan exhibited work which was entitled ‘Relatum III’ (a place within a certain situation) (1970). Relatum III consists four large wooden blocks placed around the four sides of one of the steel support beams in the gallery. The four wooden blocks are tied to the beam with thick rope wrapped around the beam, holding them in place. Visually Ufan’s use of material is exactly alike to my own intentions, which was the initial allure to this piece, but it is Ufan’s concept of the work that sustained my interest.
A second piece by Ufan from the same series, entitled ‘Relatum’ consists of a large stone resting on the top of a large piece of glass that has cracked and broken under the pressure of the stone. Ufan comments on this pies stating as follows,
‘If a heavy stone happens to hit glass, the glass breaks. But if an artist’s ability to act as a mediator is weak, there will be more to see than a trivial physical accident…. 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.’[2]
My interpretation of this is that Lee Ufan is stating that the artist’s interaction and deliberate exploration of these materials, and their properties and physicality, proposes a reaction between the contrasting materials. It is within the artists action of deliberately making these reactions that it becomes a reaction of art, and not just a natural consequence of materials. With my own work, the pairing of materials creates juxtaposition between the materials and the space they are displayed in. I feel that it is this deliberate intention to create material combinations and joining that warrants the final object to be art. By having involvement in the material in this way, whether as the artist of the viewer, the work becomes something more than simply materials and becomes a deliberate examination of their properties.
[1] Blum & Poe
REQUIEM FOR THE SUN: THE ART OF MONO-HA
http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/requiem-sun-…
[2] Munroe, A, (1994) p.265, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, exh. Cat. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
