Mono.Kultur 27

Mono.Kultur 27, Ryan McGinley

Mono.Kultur 27, Ryan McGinley
Softcover, 44 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$10.00 · out of stock

Light, space and time. Those are the classic ingredients for photography, which have been reinvented, rediscovered and rearranged again and again for almost 200 years. And just when you thought that the subject might have exhausted itself, that nothing new could be done, someone comes along and interprets them in a way that hasn’t been seen before, not quite like that. As it happens, this latest someone is called Ryan McGinley.

Ryan McGinley’s steep ascent within the world of photography appears almost as effortless as his images: Born in 1977 in New Jersey, he moved to New York in 1996 to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design, where almost by accident he discovered his love for photography. Incessantly shooting his friends and surroundings, McGinley inadvertently documented the microcosm of youth culture in New York at the turn of the millennium in a body of work that stood out for its energy and optimism, despite the grit and rawness of the images — a style that should later draw comparisons to the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Robert Frank. In the meantime, McGinley befriended a group of local artists and creative types — among them his close friends Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow — that would soon be hyped as a ‘new movement’ by the press, a label based more on the excessive lifestyle the three had in common than their actual and quite disparate work.

And so for the past ten years, McGinley has continuously been one step ahead, and is already taking the next corner of his young career — like the teenagers in his images, like youth itself, always on the run, always looking for the next thing, but always with the unmistakable energy and optimism and lightness that ultimately characterizes all of his work. Because no one these days sculpts light, space and time quite in the same way as Ryan McGinley.

Mono.Kultur 26

Mono.Kultur 26, Manfred Eicher - Recording ECM

Mono.Kultur 26, Manfred Eicher — Recording ECM
Softcover, 42 pp., offset 1/1, 200 x 150 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 · out of stock

Born in 1943 in southern Germany, Manfred Eicher dedicated his life early on to music, learning violin as a child, and studying double bass and classical music at the Academy in Berlin. On parallel tracks, he pursued an equally traditional self-education in jazz: through relatives in America, records bought in G.I. stores, The Voice of America, listening to Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard, playing double bass in German jazz bands and with visiting musicians including Marion Brown, Leo Smith and Paul Bley.

In 1969, a meeting with the American jazz pianist and composer Mal Waldron led to Eicher’s first impromptu production and official release, Free at Last. The immediate success of the record beckoned for more, encouraging Eicher to move backstage and from then on to dedicate his life to finding and producing new music rather than performing. On the outskirts of Munich, with little financial backing, less strategy and no experience in production or managing a record label, Manfred Eicher launched ECM Records as a platform for jazz, a primarily American phenomenon on its wane.

Mono.Kultur 25

Mono.Kultur 25, Dave Eggers

Mono.Kultur 25, Dave Eggers
Poster and wrap-around cover, offset 3/3, 150 x 200 mm [700 x 1000 mm unfolded]
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 ·

Dave Eggers is a busy man: not only an appraised author since his biographic debut novel ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’, Eggers also founded the highly successful literary magazine The Believer, single-handedly revived the short story with his publishing imprint McSweeney’s, founded permanent writing workshops for disadvantaged youth all across America, and recently scripted the acclaimed Hollywood productions ‘Away We Go’ by Sam Mendes and ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Spike Jonze. In short: Eggers is the man who will leave no stone unturned to lure you back to the printed page. His unique tone of writing provides the perfect soundtrack to the confusion and disillusionment of his generation, oscillating wildly between hyperactive optimism and lethargic melancholy. With mono.kultur, Dave Eggers talked about the rendez-vous of fiction and life, how to be political on eye level and why there’s never been a better time for literature than now.

Mono.Kultur 24

Mono.Kultur 24, Cyprien Gaillard

Mono.Kultur 24, Cyprien Gaillard
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 ·

It was late January when Cyprien Gaillard arrived, the time of year when the city is cold and grey. Yet the weather could not dampen his enthusiasm for urban exploration. He could hardly wait to wrap up the installation of his exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts to see Columbus, the state capital of Ohio. In line with his artistic interests in the contradictions of our contemporary landscapes, his list of must-sees included structures and places that others would rather ignore, and sites where contemporary claims to history have given rise to surprising visual manifestations.

We had started the day with a drive-by tour of fraternity and sorority houses — a staple of any North American university campus. Equipped with a Polaroid camera, Cyprien Gaillard began to survey the facades: Clustered together in an area of old, tree-lined streets, the architecture borrowed liberally from various periods and styles: Lily-white, Greco-Roman temple fronts alternated with Colonial-style brick facades, Tudor half-timber and 1960s austerity. The buildings laid bare the friction between the grandiloquent desires of the past and the rather more mundane present. Just as we were about to leave, a handful of student revellers emerged from one of the fraternities with beer cans in hand and posed for a photograph in the brisk morning air.

Mono.Kultur 23

Mono.Kultur 23, Sissel Tolaas

Mono.Kultur 23, Sissel Tolaas
Softcover, 44 pp., offset 4/1, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 ·

Mono.Kultur 23 features Norwegian scientist and artist Sissel Tolaas who has dedicated her life and work to the world of smells. And what an issue it’s going to be — Mono.Kultur 23 contains no visual imagery but clears the page for our most primary sense: the magazine is impregnated with 12 scents curated by Sissel Tolaas. And we’re not talking about perfumes either, but what Tolaas would coin ‘difficult smells’. With a special technique called microencapsulation, the scents are literally printed into the magazine — you rub the paper to release them.

Meanwhile, Sissel Tolaas is a phenonemon in herself: born and raised between Norway and Iceland, with degrees from Scandinavia, Poland and Russia in sciences, chemistry and fine arts, Tolaas has become an expert on everything related to scents, odours, smells. She is a professor at Harvard Universiy for invisible communication, while working on hospital and research projects as well as for commercial clients; while exhibiting the results of her research in museums such as the MoMA New York, the National Musem of Beijing or the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. A vibrant and determined character with a unique expertise and biography, Sissel Tolaas is everything we could have hoped for in our forthcoming issue.

Mono.Kultur 16

Mono.Kultur 16, Miranda July

Mono.Kultur 16, Miranda July
Softcover, 16 pp. + poster, offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

out of print

July does not have any art school or professional training — but nor is she wholly self-taught, having learned from and alongside an improvised network of artists, musicians, and writers she has worked with over the last fifteen years. After dropping out of college, July moved to Portland, where she lived for the next decade. She began performing spoken-word pieces at rock clubs; gradually, she transitioned into alternative art spaces, telling ever more complex stories that integrated audience participation and visuals ranging from slide shows to digital video.

During this time, she also founded Joanie 4 Jackie (formerly Big Miss Moviola). Joanie 4 Jackie was a non-commercial distribution system for women video-makers in the pre-YouTube mid-1990s. Any woman could submit a video short and July would put it onto a compilation tape with nine other videos; she then re-circulated these new ‘chain letter’ tapes so each video-maker could see what others were making. Joanie 4 Jackie was an explicitly feminist project, stemming from the anti-consumerist ethos of third wave feminism. Feminist concerns are also evident in July’s early short video works, which explored mother/daughter dynamics, voyeurism, and female spectatorship. In her videos The Amateurist and Nest of Tens, her characters hunt for or establish patterns, imposing their own personal systems of control onto the bewildering world around them. She extended these themes of unexpected longing and loss in Me and You, her short stories, and her recent performances.

Mono.Kultur 22

Mono.Kultur 22, Ai WeiWei

Mono.Kultur 22, Ai Weiwei
Softcover, 40 pp. + poster, offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 · out of stock

Ai Weiwei grew up under horrible conditions, living literally underground in a burrow in the Chinese regions of Manchuria and Xinjiang. Born in 1957 in Beijing, Ai Weiwei was the son of Ai Qing, a renowned poet denounced by the Chinese Communist Party and during the Cultural Revolution forced into exile in a labour camp. Under strong political control, his father had to clean public toilets.

Mono.Kultur 21

Mono.Kultur 21, Tilda Swinton
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 ·

“The honest truth about me is that it’s really a mistake me being a performer at all.”

—Tilda Swinton

Mono.Kultur 20

Mono.Kultur 20, Dries van Noten
Softcover, 40 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 · out of stock

The conversation with Dries van Noten took place in a setting reminiscent of an old Flemish still life painting: at a very long table prepared for lunch in the company’s renovated warehouse in Antwerp, in the historic part of the harbour once built by Napoleon.

Mono.Kultur 19

Mono.Kultur 19, Michael Ballhaus
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$8.00 ·

In 2007, Ballhaus announced his retirement from Hollywood after 47 years and more than one hundred films, which turned his eye for light and spaces, his sense for evocative and moving pictures into a legend. He grew up as part of his parent’s theatre in Bavaria, completed a classical photographer’s training and got into German television in the 60s, a time of change. Young filmmakers such as Hans W. Geißendörfer and Fassbinder had declared the old cinema dead and were creating new material, new faces and new pictures whose depth Ballhaus brought into focus from behind the lens.

Mono.Kultur 18

Mono.Kultur 18, MVRDV
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$8.00 ·

What we gain in pondering MVRDV is insight into the richness of a practice that is embedded as much in reality as it is in the theoretical dimensions of the virtual –- a position many of us find ourselves straddling as our own lives negotiate between the anxieties of a warring world and the vast frontiers of cyberspace.

Mono.Kultur 17

Mono.Kultur 17, Pawel Althamer
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/1, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$8.00 ·

Mono.Kultur 14

Mono.Kultur 14, David Adjaye
Softcover, 32 pp., offset 4/4, 140 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$8.00 ·

From within the architecture profession, Adjaye seems to be at its periphery, but from without, at its centre. These parallel perspectives allow him to be simultaneously critical and engaged. In fact, being comfortable with not fitting in is something Adjaye seems to have learnt growing up. As the son of a Ghanaian diplomat, he was born in Tanzania and had lived in Libya, Cairo, Beirut and Saudi Arabia by the time he moved to London aged nine. And as an architecture student at the Royal College of Art, he spent more time with Fine Art students, including Chris Ofili, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, who later became his collaborators and clients.