In Hanna Liden’s Ghost Town, a wonderful new series of photographs now on view at Maccarone, everything is covered with some kind of downtown detritus. Faces are masked in Have A Nice Day plastic bags, bodies clothed Canal Street Fuck You t-shirts, flowers painted Terrence Koh Black, classical busts etched with graffiti. Even the images of umbrellas and leather jackets, the most austere and abstracts works on view, bulge with hidden goods. There is always beauty to found in your surroundings, even in the knocked-off, rat-trodden world below Houston.
Hanna Liden: Ghost Town
May 2nd – June 16th, 2012
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street
New York
In Germany, we sort of take it for granted that every bigger city has at least one traditional art book store to satisfy your craving for printed matter in art, design, architecture and photography. They are usually run by grey-haired men in cardigans and thick glasses, or ladies smelling of cheap perfume, who all know exactly what to find where among hundreds of books piling up in every available corner – something that the Internet will never ever do for you.
It’s only when you go to other countries that you realize that this is not necessarily the case everywhere, so let’s raise our glasses for a moment to the old art book dealer of your neighbourhood, the ones you start missing only when they have disappeared. Sautter + Lackmann is a point in case, which has been holding up the torch for 42 years now in Hamburg, and gloriously so. It’s the place to go for digging into your monographs on Baselitz and Warhol, but for a long time, it was also the only store in Hamburg that was selling mono.kultur, pretty much from the very beginning – so much for stuffiness. And it’s always nice to know that there are some things you can still count on.
When I went to Helsinki, I was really surprised by the amazing quality of food there. I mean, we all know that Scandinavians appreciate a drink or five, but in terms of food, well… But not Finland, oh no, they are something like the France of Scandinavia when it comes to culinary delights (I’m serious, and just in two words: Reindeer Sashimi). So it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Finns would be the inventors of a treat that is called Restaurant Day. The idea is simple: You open your own restaurant – for a day. You choose the location – your home, your mom’s office, a rooftop – and your menu – vicious omelettes, killer cakes, vodka pickles – and voilà, off you go.
Restaurant Day happens about every three months, and has spread from Helsinki to over 50 different cities worldwide, boasting more than 300 restaurants within just one year. And yes, Restaurant Day is about to happen again, this Saturday, May 19 (and there is still time to sign up). It has even been imported to Berlin, albeit only in one spot so far: the tempting-sounding Blick Burger in Neukölln, on a private balcony with a beautiful Blick over, erm, Neukölln.
The Watching Humans Watching series, by Swedish photographersInka and Niclas, is very much indebted to Martin Parr’s famous photos of people taking photos. But while Parr’s flash-lit images match perfectly their content – scenes of hyper-mediated contemporary tourism – Inka and Niclas’s cool, deadpan images startle with their melancholy, compassion, and humanity.
The contemporary style they seem to be working in too often creates emotionless, sterile images, disconnected from any real human experience, but not here. Whether in groups or alone, the people on view seem lost in a very familiar kind of contemplation of nature. We all have felt that flash of loneliness and insignificance and wonderment, looking out at the majestic, slightly surreal vistas that only nature can present us with. It’s nice to know that contemporary photography can still document those feelings.
This one is in eigener Sache, as we say, as in: it’s personal – and it’s political. German government prides itself in supporting innovation, in promoting Germany as a ‘Land of Ideas’, and in nurturing the famous Mittelstand – the small companies and budding freelancers that push boundaries, develop new ideas and approaches. And a new approach is certainly needed when it comes to the social system and a pension scheme that will doubtlessly crack in the next decades due to the changing demographics. It’s been a long time coming and everyone knows it, and yet it’s a complex topic that no party dares to touch.
Certainly not a new approach is the proposed ‘Rewarding Life’s Work’ Law scheduled for 2013, which will force freelancers from the very beginning of their career to pay a fixed tax of at least a monthly €350 into the country’s pension system – a tax that increases with age, but is not related to your income. Needless to say, this will have some crucial effects on Germany’s cultural landscape. We are not politicians, and it’s not that we know the answers to a huge problem, but we do know that a magazine like mono.kultur would not exist if such a tax were in place.
Find out more here, or if you are registered in Germany, sign the petition for stopping the ‘Rewarding Life’s Work’ tax here.
I’m not sure how puppets relate to the content of This, the new single of Berlin’s thumping Modeselektor with vocals by none other than Thom Yorke, but then again, who cares? It’s a surprisingly great track, with pretty visuals courtesy of Brighton-based futuredeluxe.
Sometimes being small is not that bad – economical depression hits hard, suddenly everyone becomes poorer, future perspectives start to shrink, but somehow all this can still feel quite feasible. Of course you can become very angry, as the political class seems to get dumber and dumber, with big cuts in education and culture, and nothing seems to change or there’s not even the hope things will become better – but you know where your strengths are, you know they exist and they’re visible and there to teach and educate the generations to come, assuring a continuity to a cultured and educated country. And you don’t expect these references to disappear, because you’re counting on them and they’re the only thing you’re left with, the only thing guaranteeing that the future won’t look worse than the present, at least.
Bernardo Sassetti, Portuguese pianist and composer, died yesterday, after falling from a cliff, in Lisbon outskirts, while making some photos. Bernardo’s name may sound unfmailiar, but he was in fact widely known within international music circles, having played along with names as the likes of Al Grey, Frank Lacy, Andy Sheppard, Paquito D’Rivera, Benny Golson or Guy Barker. Along music and photography, cinema was also a passion, leading Sassetti to compose for some of the best (and few) Portuguese directors left (I specially recall the beautiful soundtrack for Alice). Sassetti was a versatile pianist, he played not only jazz; in the last few years he also collaborated with musicians from other areas, from hip hop to fado.
‘If there’s something that can make a country poorer and sadder, more so than having less money for a comfortable life style, it is seeing the wrong people dying’, someone said to me yesterday.
You have arrived at mono.blog by mono.kultur magazine. mono.blog is a rather eclectic summary of the things that are currently on our collective minds.
The Watching Humans Watching series, by 
