Dear Friends,

we’re not quite sure what happened with that last year, and if anybody has seen it, please let us know. In the meantime, we are proud to return from our involuntary hiatus with a splendid new issue – mono.kultur #40, no less – with the wonderful British ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal.

Edmund de Waal is a potter. His pots, plates, and vessels are the result of craft and mastership, but they are also so much more than that: they are experiments in form and function, abstractions of thoughts on silence and space, on repetition and failure, on substance and fragility, on memory contained.

Edmund de Waal is an artist. He arranges his objects in complex choreographies that are as mysterious as they are mesmerizing. Displayed in galleries and institutions worldwide, his considered installations play with architectural concerns, integrating ideas of space, light and obscurity.

Edmund de Waal is a writer. In 2010, his intimate memoir of a kind, The Hare With Amber Eyes, intertwined the biography of a collection of netsuke figures with the biography of his family and became a surprise bestseller, winning several awards. His latest book, The White Road, presents a highly personal and engaging research into the history of porcelain.

Whether he sculpts with words or with clay, what Edmund de Waal works with are concepts, ideas, and desires. In a body of work that is at odds with our times and yet oddly successful, his writings and objects overlap and integrate each other in an attempt to understand and transcend our complex relationship with objects and our surroundings.

In an interview with mono.kultur structured like an A-Z of notes and ideas, Edmund de Waal talked about his rules of attachment, the impossibility of repetition, and why ‘doubt’ is the most beautiful word.

Visually, the issue takes inspiration from that most perfect of materials: porcelain. Printed entirely in double-sided splendour, the two finishings of the paper – shiny gloss and smooth matt – evoke the texture of ceramics before and after glazing.

All in all, a wonderfully white and considered issue for our next decade and available as usual through our online store mono.konsum or, at the trusted book dealer of your choice very soon indeed.

Enjoy and all our best,
mono.kultur

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mono.kultur #40
EDMUND DE WAAL: W IS FOR WHITE
“White has this extraordinary possibility, and it’s also profoundly about being at ends.”

Spring 2016 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 44 Pages

Interview by Mareike Dittmer
Artwork by Edmund de Waal
Design by Designbolaget

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Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, David Bowie is genderless and belongs to a time that is beyond our perception… A sad day, indeed. Rest in Stars!

Peaches – Rub (Uncensored) from Peaches on Vimeo.

In Taschen’s Erotica Universalis, there are several depictions of erotic peeing, called Urolagnia. People with joyful faces, pee on their partners – women or men… Several artists have been using ‘peeing’ in a political manner. One of them is the legendary Peaches. Things go queerly wild in her new video. Shamanic ritauals blend with 21st Century notions: rubbing, lovely gender-queer scenes with beautiful beings and urination take control.

Choreographer Keith Hennesy’s piece Turbulence addresses the issue as well. In his lecture performance at HZT Berlin in November 2014, the choreographer explained the use of piss in his work:

‘I pushed the dancers to treat the big gold sequined fabric with more respect because it was expensive, the most money I’d ever spent on an object for performance (around $700). So immediately someone proposed that it be pissed on… and since that day, piss has leaked into almost every performance. After trying pissing in buckets, pissing on people, and pissing on the gold fabric, we decided that pissing in one’s clothes was best…. We though about pissing in fear, the humiliation and infantilization of pissing in one’s clothes, pissing in queer and SM sex and power play, golden showers, the metaphor of taking the piss (making fun of)… and then of piss as astringent, antibiotic, and even healing. We re-read Shock Doctrine and found a description of pissing oneself after electroshock therapy. It seemed that piss was a ready-made poem evoking paralysis, torture, value, domination, intimacy, and healing.’

Superheroes never pee. However, Indonesian photographer Edy Hardjoe tells the story as if they would. And as with any ordinary photo shooting, light is shed quite a bit, nicely documented in this behind-the-scenes piece:

BoredPanda has more of this.

How come all the “unlikely” Warp artists, the ones you don’t get at first, the ones you get insanely addicted to later, the ones that are so wild and crazy and out there in unexpected ways, how come they all have to die so young?

Few things are better than Oldham doing Kelly, but then again, P.T. Anderson doing Pynchon might be just that: better than Oldham doing Kelly.

The song is good, but the video is wonderful. Fueling the beats and lyrics with Parallax-inspired stop motion, Nelson de Castro’s take on Digitalism’s Wolves is insanely addictive, and rather than sapping the viewer’s interest, the cinematic trope increases the hallucinatory momentum of the visuals, culminating in a cryptic Pop Rocks stare-off. How I’d like to end every night.

Ray King

Ray King

Since relocating back to sunny Philadelphia (guys, the sunny part is a joke), I’ve been wanting to shed some love on one of Anerica’s most underrated art-poli. Because it’s been so gloomy recently, I feel particularly drawn to the work of Ray King–no pun intended–whose iridescent, delicate structures have been exhibited in multiple countries.  Their precise geometric forms are maps of the photo spectrum of their locales, translating shifts in light into color and value.

Coincidentally enough I ran into him when I got knocked on the wrong door–he’s also a nice guy!  This leads me to conclude: it’s always funny in Philadelphia.