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MONO.KULTUR #35: MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

Thursday, November 21, 2013, posted by kvr.

Dear Friends,

it is safe to say that Marina Abramović is one of the most controversial, provocative and polarising contemporary artists practising today, which is already in itself no mean feat – and all the more reason we’re so excited to have her grace the pages of our new issue #35, out as of now.

Personifying performance art like no other artist, Marina Abramović has been attracting praise and criticism in equal and abundant measure ever since her beginnings in the early 1970s. Whether it was for the intense and confrontational nature of her iconic and haunting early work exploring the boundaries between audience and artist, the limits of the body and the possibilities of the mind to often shocking effect, which was often deemed too radical and intense, or for her revived art stardom since the overwhelming success of the 2010 retrospective at the MoMA in New York and subsequent flirting with the worlds of pop and fashion – Marina Abramović continues to surprise, confuse and irritate.

Frequently using her own body as a starting point, she has subjected herself to ordeals testing physical and psychological boundaries, as she did most famously during the 736 hour-performance The Artist Is Present, where visitors were invited during the course of her large retrospective to sit opposite Abramović and share a silent but intense contact that often caused a highly emotional response – an act that in its very simplicity can be seen as a radical culmination of a 40 year-process of reduction and concentration. Marina Abramović is currently preparing the Marina Abramović Institute, a space dedicated to performance and immaterial arts due to open in the city of Hudson, New York, in 2015.

In a satisfyingly frank and belligerent conversation, Marina Abramović talked with mono.kultur about the nature of invisible energy, the many criticisms she has been facing and what cosmetic surgery has to do with art.

Graphically, the issue is an exercise in friction and restraint, by setting up the three elements of text, images and subtitles on different grids and letting chance run its course. All works were selected by Marina Abramović as personal milestones in her career.

As usual, the issue is available through our online store mono.konsum, and at the trusted book dealer of your choice very soon indeed. Makes for perfect autumn entertainment, preferably with a warm cup of tea in bed.

Watch this space for our launch event in early December, and all our best,
mono.kultur

–––

mono.kultur #35
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: ARMY OF ME
“I’ve been attacked and ridiculed all my life.”

Autumn 2013 / English / 15 x 20 cm / 48 Pages
Interview by David Levine
Introduction by Anna Saulwick
Artwork by Marina Abramović
Design by Nirit Binyamini & Gila Kaplan


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MARK COHEN

Thursday, November 21, 2013, posted by scg.

Looking at Mark Cohen’s photographs does not induce the normal response to street or snapshot photography. There is no life that continues beyond the caught moment of the frame, or flight of imaginative identification with the depicted subject. The viewer cannot escape into less oppressive or disturbing narratives, as is often possible with Nan Goldin or Larry Clark.

Cohen’s photographs are hauntingly, traumatically fragmentary, with little to can grab onto or make sense of. Broken teeth, mismatched socks, dirty feet, old, blurry snow; details like these constitute much of subject matter, and if he allows more into the frame, it’s never enough. Faces are cropped at the nose, or bodies at the waste.

He apprehends things in select (but not choice, and certainly not prime) bits, details that communicate the reality of reality, never its fantasy. Cohen does away with illusion, and we, as viewers, are the better for it. Dark Knees, an exhibition of his work, is now on view at LE BAL, in Paris. A gorgeous catalogue of the same name is also available.

Mark Cohen
Dark Knees (1962-2012)
On view through December 8
LE BAL
6 Impasse de la Défense
Paris

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PURPLE IS THE NEW BLACK

Wednesday, November 20, 2013, posted by mc.

This month’s most fashionable music video is definitely BLK WICCAN by Zebra Katz, which was premiered – no wonder – on Purple magazine. The crisp visual treatment is by fashion photographer and videographer Mara Zampariolo, founder of boutique production agency MEDIUM GREY. Voguing, lingering in bizarre perfection and dressed to incredible outfits. See for yourself!

BLK WICCAN // Zebra Katz from MEDIUM GREY on Vimeo.

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DESIGN DETAILS: MONO.KULTUR #34 BRIAN ENO

Wednesday, November 20, 2013, posted by kvr.

Design obviously plays a huge part in mono.kultur, and there is a lot of thought that goes into the production of each issue as we redesign it from scratch according to each individual artist we feature, so we thought it’s time to share a little bit more about the design concept of each issue. And with our new issue just around the corner, why not a quick glimpse back to summer, when we put together our still current issue #34 with Brian Eno.

The starting point for each issue is always the content of the interview, and since Brian Eno talked extensively about his interest in how art can trigger emotions rather than convey a clear message, we wanted to set up a similar experiment in using images not in a literal way, but as a setting for different moods. Eno, of course, thinks in the bigger picture and also likes working with bright colours – another element he talks about in the issue – so it seemed only logical to make use of the entire colour spectrum to observe how the different background colours affect not only the typography, set entirely in 100% yellow, but also how one reads and relates to the content of the interview. An effect which was a little difficult to control in advance, but ended up working surprisingly well, and certainly turned out to produce our most colourful issue to date. Interestingly, one book dealer complained that the issue had no images and was hence difficult to sell, to which we can only say that it’s exactly the opposite: it’s our only issue that has a full-bleed image on every single page! A paradox that Mr. Eno certainly would find amusing.

Since the conversation in itself is beautifully tender and entertaining, the typography was not meant to interfere too much, which is why we ended up setting the entire text in our house font, Akkurat – the only concession being that it was laid out in a very tight 3-column grid, usually not too pleasant to read, but which generates a somewhat breathless pace in reading, a little bit what we imagine Brian Eno’s brain to work like… The different heights of the columns, on the other hand, reminded us of inverted panels of an equalizer – another of these little random thoughts that make us smile after spending too many hours in front of the screen.

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ALTERNATIVES IN PRINT: DAY JOB MAGAZINE

Tuesday, November 19, 2013, posted by svk.

Day Job Magazine

Day Job Magazine

For all of you who feel like your job is pointless or lame, doomed to vanish in the rising tide of white collars and blue chips…well maybe it might be, but Day Job Magazine doesn’t care.  A rather sociological songbook for the unsung heroes of everyday life started in 2012, it features utomechanics, barbershops, calligraphers, and so on…perhaps you’ll be next.  You can order it from its online store–hope to see more of it.

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GILDA, ARE YOU DECENT?

Monday, November 18, 2013, posted by gk.

It is crucial to choose the right topic while procrastinating. Old movies, especially Rita, Ginger and Fred would be the ones to cure the Sunday/Monday blues with their charm and dances!

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MONO.KULTUR #35 / SOUNDBITE 03

Sunday, November 17, 2013, posted by kvr.

Coming up next week (and it’s a hard one): mono.kultur #35.

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BROKE FOR NONE

Friday, November 15, 2013, posted by svk.

Broken Fingaz -Graffiti Stop Motion from Broken Fingaz on Vimeo.

Broken Fingaz

Broken Fingaz

So I was minding my own business on Warshauer…you know, just loitering…when a blast of fuchsia and chartreuse, conjoined in the oscillating razor gaze of a floating beheaded B(e)ard grabbed my eye.  This looks even better than it sounds.  Then today, I was looking out on the wasteland of S-Bahn tracks on the other side of the street since there’s nothing better to do in such a gloomy day.  Lo and behold, limon and cherry hues washed over unsuspecting me.  The image: a psychedelic sunset blessing a very distressed looking gentleman literally trapped in the surreal.

Lads and gents, I hype the work of Broken Fingaz, who were visiting Berlin until last week.  For your information, the street art collective, known separately under pseudonyms of Tant, Deso, Kip, and Unta, hail from Tel-Aviv and have graced the walls across three continents.  Their style, luscious, hallucinatory, and applied with clashing yet oddly cooperative hues, recall the grandiloquence lines and selective eye for super-realistic detail in pre-90s comic books, and indeed, a lot of their work lay out on the wall separated as if in or actually in frames.  Brazen shock though perverse sexuality (think Panda) and other cultural symbols can often be found in their artwork, yet while their work isn’t explicitly political, like that of BLU (or even Robert Montgomery, if you think about him as a kind of street artist), Broken Fingaz don’t just flaunt technique for hipsters needing stuff.  Their larger meticulous, regimented compositions often appear like (ahem) postmodern dissections of clashing narratives and symbols, daring the sleepy pedestrian to reconstruct meaning their clues.

Best known for their street art, they work across a range of medium, non-commerical and commerical..such as stickaz.

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MONO.STUDIO: TSESAY WEBSITE

Friday, November 15, 2013, posted by kvr.

Today is a good day. As is every day when something one has been working on for a few months is finally seeing the light of day, and so we’re happy and relieved that the new website we developed, in collaboration with programming wizard Christian Frey, for New York fashion label tsesay is online as of now. Building on the visual language we developed for their latest advertising campaign, it’s a simple yet catchy affair. Enjoy.

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WHITE FASHION

Wednesday, November 13, 2013, posted by kvr.

As autumn is in full swing, there seems to be in abundance of book launches these days, and good ones, too. After all, what better to do than cuddle up with a good read now that temperatures are dropping fast… And so Thursday night sees a return of the fine folks at The White Review to Motto for an evening of performance poetry and prose, hey hey, whereas on Friday evening, former Spex editor Jan Kedves will present his lovely Talking Fashion in a talk with documentary film maker Loic Prigent at Do You Read Me?!’s Reading Room, whoopee!

Click on the images for details.

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