When Uncommon Matters debuted its line of couture porcelain accessories, designers Amelie Riech and Jana Patz cheekily complemented the showroom installation with a soundtrack of breaking and clattering porcelain to underscore the fragility of their award-winning designs. The “Handle with Care” collection, as it is called, adeptly merges the idea of traditional crafts and materials taking shape to become an entirely new, modern creation.
     A man’s stiff shirt collar, for instance, becomes the inspiration for a series of platinized neckpieces, creating striking — and reflective — accessories that could perhaps be seen as a variation on the “boyfriend shirt” look. An entirely porcelain necklace, on the other hand, is designed with chain links in mind, and delicately clinks and clanks when in motion. Chunky porcelain bracelets and sleek neck cuffs round out the product line, which has continually graced the pages of many a fashion editorial in 2009.

Sex is a luxury. Or so Coco de Mer, the purveyor of fine erotic objects, insists. As our society keeps loosening up about sex, erotic play becomes acceptable. No longer associated with perversion and thus banished into the sleaziness of the red light districts, sexual play is now a pastime. Like many leisurely activities, it allows room for luxury and good taste. After all, what girl wants to be satisfied with a cheap plastic vibrator bought in a seedy porn store? This is the line of thinking Sam and Justine Roddick, the co-founders of Coco de Mer, took. “One of the thoughts that came out of my involvement in a feminist rights movement,” Sam Roddick says, “was the idea that women deserve a space where they can feel comfortable and not ashamed of their sexuality. That is the type of store I wanted to create.”
     The first Coco de Mer New York store, opening today in Nolita, certainly reflects this manifesto. It is an inviting space with an intimate atmosphere, a boudoir and not a brothel, reflecting the implicit understanding that kinkiness arises out of feeling of comfort and that true pleasure only comes from the willingness to please. And there is no shortage of kinky, but sweet, touches, from the purple silk blindfold that reads, “Freedom is deciding whose slave you want to be,” to the improbably sexy lingerie.

Vin Du Select Qualitite

This week we sat down with Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle of Hot Chip to talk about their new record, One Life Stand, which hits stores in February. While our full feature is still forthcoming, we wanted to recognize a project the band says they’ve been especially loving recently: Mark McGuire. Best known for his work with the Cleveland band Emeralds, McGuire recently released an ambient acoustic record for Vin Du Select Qualitite, which calls to mind Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno. “I would normally really hate solo guitar with a loop pedal,” says Doyle, “but there is something about the way he does it that is really amazing. I’ve been listening to his music a lot this year.”

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After Fountaine Bleu, Paul Wunderlich

For decades, Paul Wunderlich has been one of the most iconic and influential artists you’ve never heard of. Utter his name outside of art circles and chances are you’d get nothing more than a lifted eyebrow and shrug of the shoulders. But one look at his visionary, surrealistic motifs and discomfitted color palettes and off go the flares of visual recognition.
     Long deemed the Father of Fantastic, or Magic, Realism, Wunderlich is sort of like the Gabriel García Márquez of modern art, lending no less than sixty-two years of his life to the study and experimentation of various art media. After perfecting his lithograph technique in Paris between 1960 and 1963, Wunderlich moved on to tackle sculpture, drawing, and painting with airbrush and gouache. Regardless of the tools, Wunderlich brought an innate curiosity and intellect to each creative mode he dallied in, paying no mind to the critical recognition the outcome did or didn’t receive. Nevertheless, Wunderlich has enjoyed long and fruitful acclaim over the course of his career, selling out solo shows across Europe, Asia, and North America. In 1994-95, a retrospective of his work was featured in a scattering of major museums all over Japan.
     But even more telling than the art itself is the vast influence his work has had on pop-culture, high fashion, photography and music.
     Long-time friend and gallery owner, Christian Hohmann sits down with PLANET to reminisce about Wunderlich, the artist and the man, shedding some much-desired light on an unsung hero of surrealism.

Photography by Enrico Sacchetti
Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment — General purpose detector capable of studying many aspects of proton collisions.

Last year, photographer Enrico Sacchetti gained exclusive access to the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. It was a two-day shoot with unlimited access to the entire facility. Sacchetti says his fascination to do the shoot came about not only because of his personal interest in science but also because the experiments (the four main ones: Alice, CMS, Atlas, and LHCb) are being done in some of the biggest and most complex machineries that humans have ever built in an attempt to discover one of the smallest particles in the entire universe — the Higgs Boson, the so-called “God Particle”. Deep below the gorgeous Swiss countryside and hidden from all of humanity, Sacchetti captures the unusual beauty of the LHC.

Images courtesy of Galerie St. Etienne, New York

Egon Schiele, an Austrian figurative painter, was a highly controversial figure. During his brief life and career at the beginning of the 20th Century he was praised for his portraits and denounced for his lascivious lifestyle. He thought highly of himself, but also suffered from persecution mania. Mixing self-aggrandizement and self-hatred, he poured his heightened sense of anxiety into his art. Much of it was made up of self-portraits, often nude and without a penis, reflecting his narcissism and dejection. Much of his other work consisted of female nudes.
     Schiele was recognized as a promising artist during his lifetime. A less known fact about Schiele is that he was an expert printmaker. In order to bring this aspect of his work to light, Galerie St. Etienne in New York has put together an exhibition of nearly fifty of Schiele’s prints, woodcuts, and etchings. Most of the work engages his already familiar themes. Schiele’s portraits, with their sad faces and contorted bodies reflect the torture of human condition, of the desire to be completely free to follow one’s instincts and the inability to do so because of social taboos. The female nudes are always overtly sexual, the stark red of their nipples emphasized against the dull colors of their twisted figures. His self-portraits reflect deeply rooted angst, half-hidden by a mask of cockiness. Angst is also the subject of Sorrow, the most powerful image of the exhibition. The listless female figure sitting on top of a rock could be a fitting illustration for Albert Camus’ seminal existentialist essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”.
     Egon Schiele As Printmaker is on view at Galerie St. Etienne until January 23, 2010.

Given the current emphasis on green design, it’s only natural that the tree stump should find its way into home décor and furniture design. Wood stumps have been a recent source of content for DIY bloggers and designers, and have even been co-opted by retail furniture stores like West Elm (in gold, of course). But Stephanie Beamer, co-founder of the all-girl furniture design crew Egg Collective, insists that their designs, including a stump side-table lamp, are rooted in architecture and are more about functionality and form than about following green trends. Citing pre-Danish modernism and French Art Deco styles, Beamer views furniture design “as a microcosm of the whole that is architecture.”
     The Egg Collective girls first met in wood shop while in architecture school in St. Louis. Upon encouragement from a professor, the ladies teamed up to begin creating innovative furniture pieces centered around ideas and creativity, not commerce and mass production. Following a particularly nasty series of storms in St. Louis, the Collective used fallen sycamore trees from local parks to create a series of limited edition side-table lamps that have since generated consistent buzz.

Nicholas Koening courtesy of Morgan Hotel

You see the influence of some people every day: Gandhi and the idea of peace, President Obama and the soon-to-be-sweeping health care reform, Carl Sagan and the thought of ourselves as small. All pretty big ideas. What you may not see or realize is that there are people who very directly influence the way you dress, the way your favorite store is decorated, and the fact that you can get away with a tie and jeans in this day and age. Enter Andrée Putman.  Blending the high and the low into a beautifully unique and practical product, Putman describes her own best works as “the perfect balance between discipline and revolt.”
     Rizzoli Publications has released a definitive look, Andrée Putman: Complete Works, at the woman who in the 1980s brought to light the idea of high-end chic mixing with plebeian materials. Her career includes redesigning hotels, department stores, residences, and, recently, an entire thirty-one floor apartment skyscraper in Hong Kong, as well as a plethora of product design. 
     The book, written by Donald Albrecht (curator of architecture and design at The Museum of the City of New York) and Jean Nouvel (award-winning architect) offer the ultimate look at all of her works in a staggeringly winsome package: perfectly-square, minimal, robust in content, and all-around attractively built — just as Andrée would want.

Photography courtesy of the Underground Library

The Underground Library thrives on many contradictory dualities: openness and mystery, transience and immortality, democratization and personalization. But its hairy outgrowths and connotations are bound by an essentially simple desire: to recreate the unique visceral experience that a work of art offers.
     After a successful test-run in May and a first grant from the public-dinner-as-arts-foundation FEAST, the Library has become a kind of asynchronous alternative to the easy and aloof mass-media saturation fostered by The Information Age. It provides this alternative by distributing original hand-bound books, all made in-house by its founders and composed of new multimedia work by its participating artists, to its members. In the cheekily faux-antiquarian parlance adopted for the project, these members, who may gain membership through donations of anywhere between $5 and $1,500 to the Library’s Membership webpage, are called heralds. Each herald is then responsible for passing the book on to others whom the herald believes may take interest in it. After the book has passed between the hands of eleven recipients (due dates are provided by the Library’s founders in the books’ library cards, with recipients’ names to be filled in as it makes its rounds) it is returned to the herald, thence a librarian in her own right. The first book in the first edition is called Forever, Michael. A memoir by Halloween’s Michael Myers, it is available in an edition of seventy-five copies.