Title: suture

Author/Artist: Ed. Jack Sargeant

Publisher: Creation

Media: Book

Reviewer: James Marriott

I really wanted to like this - the book looks great, with colour Trevor Brown illustrations on front and back set against a matt black cover, and has the first article I've seen on Suehiro Maruo, creator of Mr Arashi's Amazing Freakshow, which has to be a good thing. It's a real shame, then, that it just doesn't live up to expectations.

The stated purpose of the collection is to 'examine and explore (those) zones which have been ignored for far too long'. A laudable aim, for sure, but I hardly think Lydia Lunch has been underexposed, or really Joe Coleman for that matter. Ironically one of the most interesting pieces is on John Hillcoat, director of Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead and To Have and to Hold who, with two features to his name and probably a couple of Sight & Sound pieces, can hardly be considered 'underground'. He has some interesting things to say, though, and is allowed to say them by the interviewer, Billy Chainsaw, who fortunately employs a minimal interviewing technique far removed from that of editor Jack Sargeant, who seems to hold his own agenda to be more important than that of the interviewees.

The other pieces are on Dame Darcy, Romain Slocombe, Marne Lucas/Jacob Pander, Mark Hejnar, Trevor Brown and James Havoc.

The book suffers from a lack of variety in terms of format, being with only minor exceptions a series of articles followed by interviews. Illustrations are minimal, and it would have been good to see more of them, and a colour section, especially for the price. This problem's exacerbated by the fact that most of the interviews are overlong and often repetitive, and some of the material is of severely limited interest. A tighter edit would have been very welcome. Of the illustrations, Lydia Lunch's recent photos look excellent, and I wish there were more of them. The Joe Coleman repros look a little murky, though, and the screen grabs used to illustrate the piece on Mark Hejnar, director of Affliction, are terrible.

The collection is, to its credit, exhaustively researched. You want a comprehensive listing of Romain Slocombe exhibitions? Works of Suehiro Maruo (little of which has been published outside Japan)? It's all here.

Some of the writing in the essays is however, I'm afraid, risible. It often reads as though Sargeant has swallowed a dictionary of critical theory and is bringing up what he can't digest. Almost all of them feature 'what the fuck?' passages such as the following: It does not seek to reproduce a mimesis of 'reality', rather it creates a phantasmagorical trope based on the bio-physical response of the body to stimulation. The film is an exegesis of fuck manifested via a thermo-physiological cartography of the body.

Trevor Brown is the only person featured who draws attention to Sargeant's over-determined interpretations, and comes across all the better for it. Here the distance between the aims of interviewer and interviewee is most clearly defined, with Trevor Brown's disarming modesty and down-to-earth manner in violent contrast to Jack Sargeant's humourless, theory-ridden prose. Sargeant's footnote on the Chapman brothers made me laugh out loud and wonder if it's a pisstake - after describing their work as 'characterised by a morphogenic eruption in which bodies are distorted becoming twisted chimera', he writes: 'These distortions are made all the more strange due to the fashionable sporting shoes the figures are wearing.'

There's a telling quote during the Mark Hejnar piece, in which Sargeant states: It seems to me that maybe that (sic) there is a 'trend' in the underground by people to document the underground, but the document is in itself part of an underground mode of expression. Maybe Adam Parfrey and Apocalypse Culture started it.

This collection clearly wants badly to be a document on the scale of Parfrey's book. Parfrey's, however, drew attention to a whole host of unknowns - the truly marginalised - while here there are no surprises. The people featured are all interesting enough, and I did enjoy some of the pieces - especially those on Slocombe and Brown - but it doesn't open any new doors. In a way it's a problem which dogs a lot of the underground (I hate the word, but it's a convenient shorthand) press - the same people, the same obsessions recycled again and again. Looking at this collection and at the material on display at a lot of underground outlets, you could be forgiven for thinking the underground more narrow-minded and conformist within its own ranks than any more dominant culture.

You'd also be forgiven, looking at this, for believing that the underground is an almost exclusively North American domain. There are people doing interesting work who have been ignored by the underground press - who's seen a piece on Arthur Lager? - and a collection like this should be a forum for introducing them to a wider audience. It's a pity that it's not.