You read in doodles the automatic writing from daydreams. That is to be the philosophy behind Akira Horikawa’s 1000Drawing Project. For five years Horikawa’s regimen of drawing out daily impressions, oneiro-ventures, chances encounters have reaped a thousand images of the funhouse delirium. Fantastic, erotic, and sometimes eerie, with blank-eyed humans stacked and arranged like board game pieces, his drawings form a visually rich compendium of the NY psyche, seeming both feverishly escapist yet urbane in their frenetic decadence. In many ways, a foreigner’s perspective on the US.
If you feel a shame-tinge when sneaking a selfie in the H&M changing room, here’s some validation. Moving Image Art FairLondon is holding a National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, featuring works by 19 new artists from Europe and the States. As they are all video works, they are a bit more complicated than the average Instagram or Vine, but the choice of medium annoit the selfie’s–ultimately self-portraiture–expanding definitions, complexity, and formal diversity, as we transition into a era of nonstatic images: GIFS, Youtube, and Vimeo.
As it is mentioned in Paper Journal, the images created in Lorenzo Vitturi’s photobook A Dalston Anatomy is reminiscent ofFischli/Weiss‘ sculptures − one may recall, especially, the selection in Venice Biennale 2013 − and Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits depicted with fruits and vegetables. The vigorous use of colours in Vitturi’s works is again tempting. Uncanniness of the series Anthropoceneis mixed with jolliness this time, flirting with the eye of the beholder.
A week ago Kelela released her first mixtape CUT 4 ME, which is being widely talked about since then. It’s been produced by the artists from the label Fade to Mind / Night Slugs, namely Kingdom, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, et al. Whilst you can definitely hear the influences of contemporary metallic beatcraft tunes, the volcas also surprisingly remind of Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano. It’s a unique mix and surely she won’t hesitate to come up with a sequel. Download CUT 4 ME for free here!
A series of photographs by Japanese photographer Kota Sake are currently on display at the artist-run 35 Minutes studio space in Araiyakushi, Tokyo. Since this past April, Sake has been mounting three animal photographs on the 8th of every month “because of the Gomadaki ritual which is performed on the 8th of each month at the Araiyakushi Temple, the largest Shingon Buddhist Temple here in Nakano-ku.” The ritual event is well-attended by the local community and the streets of this usually quiet neighborhood become busy with a surge of passersby. For this ongoing series the gallery is set up as a vitrine, with the photographs installed in the windows.
During the time of this seventh installment, Sake told me a bit more about the project in a recent correspondence, “the animals I shoot are not wild animals, I photograph animals controlled by [human] society such as at the zoo, pets, race horses, on the farm and so on. I’m interested in this strange, or inconvenient, destiny of theirs so I take portraits of them because I feel like I can capture their expressions through their faces. When people look at the animals in the imagery, they try to understand their emotions in, well, human ways. This is a ritual of communication which occurs between humans and animals or photographs that might provoke the feelings inside a viewer which no words may convey. Animals can be the mirrors of us human beings. Most of the animal images are looking at you so you must make eye contact with them, and when you see the picture, you are too seen by the picture and thinking about this relationship brought about the title, “Yakusoku” (Promise). I wasn’t only thinking about the temple and the Gomadaki ritual held every month but I also thought about how the word “promise” has such a strong meaning, and that anything can be related to its meaning. Such as the project itself, serialized throughout the year, it is a commitment to myself as a photographer as well.” Indeed, “Why Look at Animals?”
Studio 35 Minutes
5-47-8 Kamitakada, Nakano-ku, Tokyo
東京都中野区上高田５－４７－８
Who makes friends anymore? You friend them (on Facebook).
In ‘making’, you mold contract of trust with–going through the timeline–first a stranger, then acquaintance, finally, a friend and become a friend yourself. It is a position of merit, a role that necessitates a type of creativity and playfulness as you learn how to communicate according to the quirks that run through a different existence, grafting secret lexicons triggered by the odd turn of his word, a lift of her brow. Now, just as the phrase to make friends with have been contracted to the verb (or verbed as some assualtants on the English language would put it) to friend, bypassing the available if somewhat old-fashioned equivalent to befriend, relationships have similarly been flattened into a modern virtual currency. A relationship that would have been forged over a month is packaged, stamped, and delivered with a Facebook request. Fingers become trigger happy to rack up Friend numbers; everyone seems popular now.
Birgit Glatzel is a defender of making friends. An architect by training, she put on a Rolleiflex after discovering a childhood camera one day and for four years traveled 19 countries, staying first with her friends, then through them, meeting in 340 persons, crossing degrees of separation. Her massive collection of photos A friend is a friend of a friend is the result, invoking in their material immensity the question, what’s the weight of knowing another being?
We’re thrilled to be included in the coffee table book The Modern Magazine by magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie, taking an in-depth look at the diverse world of contemporary publishing (fittingly, in the opening section titled ‘What is a magazine?’). A must-have for any editorial afficionado, it provides a thorough examination of the debate of print versus the Internet, proclaiming a new golden age for publishing. And if you happen to be based in London, treat yourself to a day at the launch conference, including a mouth-watering line-up including the likes of Tyler Brulé, Richard Turley and Penny Martin.
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.
“Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen” indeed: This guy 
