World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2021, English / French
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$32.00 - Out of stock
I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack… — Felix Bernstein
Finally, a new issue of long standing favourite May revue, with a cover feature on American filmmaker, actor, performance artist and pioneer of underground cinema, Jack Smith (1932 –1989)!
Jack Smith (Michael Krebber, Felix Bernstein, Enzo Shalom, Branden W. Joseph), Gary Indiana, Bruce Hainley and Sohrab Mohebbi, Jean-Luc Godard by Ferdinand Gouzon, Leilah Weinraub by Juliana Huxtable, Nina Könnemann by Megan Francis Sullivan, Louise Lawler by Nick Irvin, Claire Fontaine by Anita Chari, Robert Malaval by Valentin Gleyze, Afuma (Stefan Tcherepnin & Taketo Shimada) by Keith Connolly, Park McArthur by Noah Barker, Ken Okiishi by Felix Bernstein...
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, twice a year, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisment typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.
2017, English
Softcover (die-cut), 244 pages, 19 x 26 cm
Published by
Walker Art Centre / Minneapolis
$88.00 $50.00 - In stock -
Edited with text by Fionn Meade. Foreword by Olga Viso. Texts by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Robert Wiesenberger.
Question the Wall Itself examines ways that interior spaces and décor can be fundamental to the understanding of cultural identity. It showcases 23 international artists who explore the political and social dimensions of interior architecture as well as its complicated relationship to history and their own backgrounds. The featured artists are Jonathas de Andrade, Uri Aran, Nina Beier, Marcel Broodthaers, Tom Burr, Alejandro Cesarco, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Theaster Gates, Ull Hohn, Janette Laverrière, Louise Lawler, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Lucy McKenzie, Shahryar Nashat, Walid Raad, Seth Siegelaub, Paul Sietsema, Florine Stettheimer, Rosemarie Trockel, Cerith Wyn Evans, Danh Vo and Akram Zaatari.
The book and the exhibition it accompanies take as its guiding principle what Marcel Broodthaers termed “esprit décor”: a critique of ideas of nationality, globalization and the space of the institution through constructed interior scenes. Recasting our conception of interior space and design, the featured works exist between art, prop, and set or stage. Espousing this mise-en-scène approach, Question the Wall Itself plugs readers into material that expands the show in the form of book-as-exhibition. It includes an extensive photographic walk-through of the installations, and essays by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Fionn Meade, and Robert Wiesenberger, as well as contributions from participating artists.
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 15.1 x 21.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$38.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art.
In an era of fitness programs, increasing antidepressant usage, nutrition counseling and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, dictating every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined western scientific paradigms; contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, critically tackling illness and impairment in their practice while challenging ableist institutional dynamics. In this volume, artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies.
At a moment at which epidemics and global warming menace all forms of life, we see clearly how health intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, class, and coloniality. By reclaiming other realities, beyond a state of health as a norm, this book questions the myths, stigmas, and cultural attitudes that shape normative perceptions, revealing the interdependence of our entangled existences. The book includes four newly commissioned texts: by artists Mahmoud Khaled and Patrick Staff, by curator Clare Barlow on disability in the museum, and by curator Portia Malatjie on the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape. It also features two texts on the current COVID-19 pandemic, by Anne Boyer and Filipa Ramos.
Artists surveyed include :
Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Lorenza Böttner, Canaries & Taraneh Fazeli, Grupo Chaclacayo, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Patricia Domínguez, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Luke Fowler, Alice Hattrick, Tamar Guimarães, Joseph Grigely, Gran Fury, Johanna Hedva, Mahmoud Khaled, Mujeres Creando, Carolyn Lazard, Simone Leigh, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques, Tabita Rezaire, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, David Wojnarowicz
Writers include :
Aimar Arriola & Nanci Garín, Clare Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Dodie Bellamy, Anne Boyer, Rizvana Bradley, Eli Clare, Taraneh Fazeli, Theodore (ted) Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, R.D. Laing, Miguel A. López, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Portia Malatjie, Margarida Mendes, Peter Pál Pelbart, Naomi Pearce, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Susan Sontag, Paul B. Preciado, Mary Walling Blackburn, Simon Watney & Sunil Gupta
Copublish by MIT Press with Whitechapel Gallery, London
2016, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 21.9 x 28 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$44.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This wide-ranging and thought-provoking compilation explores the idea of nonconformity in art, religion, and philosophy. The book features 55 contemporary artists who work outside the norms of current practice, alongside both newly commissioned and previously published texts which, taken together, provide an astute sampling of recent perspectives on art and ideas. Among the artists whose work is featured are Margit Anna, Clayton Bailey, Tony Cox, Abu Bakarr Mansaray, Birgit Megerle, Philip Smith, and Keiichi Tanaami. The accompanying texts include classic works by Sigmund Freud and Leo Steinberg, reprinted with new commentary by Mark Edmundson and Joshua Decter, respectively; a recent essay on unorthodoxy in Judaism by Alan T. Levenson with a response by Jack Wertheimer; and a previously unpublished meditation on Aby Warburg’s art history by Georges Didi-Huberman.
Artists included: Margit Anna, Austė, Clayton Bailey, Brian Belott, Meriem Bennani, Adolfo Bernal, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Michael Buthe, Tony Cox, Olga de Amaral, Brian DeGraw, Marie-Louise Ekman, Brenda Fajardo, Christina Forrer, Valeska Gert, Stephen Goodfellow, Zach Harris, Margaret Harrison, Tommy Hartung, Nadira Husain, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Cyrus Kabiru, E’wao Kagoshima, Gülsün Karamustafa, Keiichi Tanaami, Július Koller, Jirí Kovanda, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Boris Lurie, Alice Mackler, Abu Bakarr Mansaray, f.marquespenteado, Park McArthur, Birgit Megerle, Jeffry Mitchell, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Masatoshi Naito, Hylton Nel, Zoë Paul, Nick Payne, Christina Ramberg, Bunny Rogers, David Rosenak, Erna Rosenstein, Xanti Schawinsky, Max Schumann, Leang Seckon, Diane Simpson, Philip Smith, Hajime Sorayama, Jeni Spota, Miroslav Tichý, Amikam Toren, Endre Tót, William T. Vollmann
2018, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 22 x 21 cm
Published by
Secession / Vienna
$75.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue accompanies "Other Mechanisms", a major group show at Secession in Vienna, 2018, that continues on from the exhibition "Mechanisms", held at CCA Wattis in San Francisco.
"Other Mechanisms" points to a present moment when machines don't look much like machines. Many aren't even called machines. Heavy and greasy machinery is absent from the smooth surfaces of digital interfaces and the weightlessness of cloud computing. Tool, appliance, device, apparatus, instrument, computer, hardware, software, program, server, processor, microchip, setting, algorithm, infrastructure, system, logistic, protocol, parameter - the terms for today's machines accumulate, evolve, and overlap.
Machines are part of the air we breathe, overseeing our lives and our bodies, from the way we communicate and consume to the way we trade and travel. Some are made of metal, but many others are made of rules or algorithms, which are infinitely more fluid and flexible. Some are objects or devices, but others are systems and infrastructures - a machine can be a thing as well as a method for organizing things. Objects yield to infrastructure. Work turns to management. Machines become mechanisms.
The works in this exhibition reflect on what it could mean to contest the regime of the machine. They compromise its tools, misuse its technologies, reroute its engineering, complicate its measurements. These other mechanisms add detours or dead ends to circulation routes, or insert delinquent trajectories that create distortions over time. They are made of knots, blanks, and incompatible settings. They demand more from their "users," forgoing protocols of convenience and immediate intelligibility. They reinsert the awkwardness of the human body, with all of its irregularities and inefficiencies.
Art can't stop the machine - nothing can. The question is not whether or not to embrace the machine - it's too late for that - but how to complicate it by testing existing systems with impossible tools and elaborate protocols that misalign outputs from their inputs.
Texts by: Jennifer Alexander, Franco Berardi, Benjamin H. Bratton, Gilles Châtelet, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Keller Easterling, Vilém Flusser, Sigfried Gideon, Martin Heidegger, Anthony Huberman, K.G. Pontus Hultén, Maurizio Lazzarato, Pamela Lee, Les Levine, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert King Merton, Meredith Meredith, Lewis Mumford, Gerald Raunig, Nishant Shah, Robert Snowden, and Joseph Vogl.
With works by artists: Zarouhie Abdalian, Lutz Bacher, Nairy Baghramian, Eva Barto, Patricia L. Boyd, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Howard Fried, Aaron Flint Jamison, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Frederick Kiesler, Pope.L, Louise Lawler, Sam Lewitt, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Cameron Rowland, Sturtevant, and Danh Vo.
2017, English
Paperback, 288 pages, 22 x 21 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$75.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue accompanies a major group show at CCA Wattis in San Francisco, curated by Anthony Huberman. It reflects on ways the “machine” determines how we live and what we believe in. A machine is also a mechanism, not just a physical object but also an abstract ideology. The artworks point to the forms and instruments that make up our technological infrastructure, as well as to the values they are designed to enforce. Contesting a world that rewards efficiency, speed, and productivity, the participating artists test existing systems with inefficient machines, impossible tools, wasted time, and elaborate protocols that misalign outputs and inputs.
Artists: Zarouhie Abdalian, Terry Atkinson, Lutz Bacher, Eva Barto, Neïl Beloufa, Patricia L. Boyd, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Richard Hamilton, Aaron Flint Jamison, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Louise Lawler, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Pope.L, Charlotte Posenenske, Cameron Rowland, Danh Vo
Designed by Julie Peeters and Scott Ponik this catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes an essay by the curator as well as sections created by each artist. It is co-published with Roma Publications (Amsterdam).
2018, English / German
Softcover, 176 pages, 21.5 x 27 cm
Published by
Mumok / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
$49.00 - Out of stock
Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann do not see their collection as just private property or a prestige object, but rather as an item of cultural value that needs exchange with the public. Their collection has been constantly growing since the late 1970s, and it provides an incomparable view of the development of contemporary art from the 1980s onward. This is a progressive statement on behalf of contemporary art that is anchored in social issues and sees itself as a form of communication. The rationale behind the collection, which is held in Herzogenrath near Aachen and in Berlin, is both creative and productive, and the two collectors’ practice can be described as a particularly free-spirited form of cultural production. The act of collecting is realized less in the processes of keeping and completing artworks and is instead understood mainly as an invitation to participate in the public production of connections. This very pragmatic and hands-on approach is manifested in sensual and unconventional gestures of presenting, including the principle of “comparative seeing.” In this sense, the Class Reunion exhibition, the title of which refers to a 2008 installation of the same name by Berlin artist Nairy Baghramian, will unravel an exciting, humorous, and surprising dialogue between the diverse artistic positions in the collection, establishing unexpected points of contact. One focus in this is on Viennese influences on this international collection and its networks.
This book has been published to document the collection on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Wilhelm Schürmann at Mumok, Vienna, June 23, 2018 - November 11, 2018.
Edited by Karola Kraus and illustrated throughout in colour, with accompanying texts and full collection catalogue.
Participating artists:
Nairy Baghramian, Silvia Bächli, Monika Baer, John Baldessari/Meg Cranston, Francesco Barocco, Jennifer Bornstein, Nicola Brunnhuber, Ernst Caramelle, Kate Davis, Heinrich Dunst, Marina Faust, Morgan Fisher, Jef Geys, Ralph Gibson, Julian Göthe, Trixi Groiss, Gerhard Gronefeld, Julia Haller, Rachel Harrison, Lone Haugaard Madsen, Georg Herold, Nicolas Jasmin, Raimer Jochims, Mike Kelley, , Martin Kippenberger, Silke Otto Knapp, Alwin Lay, Brandon Lattu, Michael Light, Sonia Leimer, Anita Leisz, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Chris Martin, Park McArthur, Paul McCarthy, Meuser, Lisette Model, Oswald Oberhuber, Albert Oehlen, Anna Oppermann, Anna Ostoya, Jens Preusse, Rebecca Quaytman, Susanne Paesler, Laurie Parsons, Stephen Prina, Deborah Remington, Lin May Saeed, Pentti Sammallahti, Stefan Sandner, Arlene Shechet, Sigune Siévi, Michael Simpson, Michael E. Smith, Lewis Stein, Jana Sterbark, Esther Stocker, Walter Swennen, Alice Tippit, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Nora Turato, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Miriam Visaczki, Franz West, Tristan Wilczek, Christopher Williams, Heimo Zobernig
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 448 pages, 171 x 241 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
New Museum / New York
$79.00 - Out of stock
The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions.
The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps,” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.
Contributors
Lexi Adsit, Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Kai Lumumba Barrow, Johanna Burton, micha cárdenas, Mel Y. Chen, Grace Dunham, Treva Ellison, Sydney Freeland, Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, Stamatina Gregory, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, Robert Hamblin, Eva Hayward, Juliana Huxtable, Yve Laris Cohen, Abram J. Lewis, Heather Love, Park McArthur, CeCe McDonald, Toshio Meronek, Fred Moten, Tavia Nyong’o, Morgan M. Page, Roy Pérez, Dean Spade, Eric A. Stanley, Jeannine Tang, Wu Tsang, Jeanne Vaccaro, Chris E. Vargas, Geo Wyeth, Kalaniopua Young, Constantina Zavitsanos
About the Editors
Reina Gossett is an artist, activist, and 2017 Activist in Residence at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She directed The Personal Things (2016) and, with Sasha Wortzel, wrote, directed, and produced Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2017), a short film about legendary performer and activist Marsha P. Johnson.
Eric A. Stanley is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, and, with Chris E. Vargas, director of the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2016).
Johanna Burton is Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum in New York and the series editor for the Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture.
2014, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 16.5 x 23 cm
Ed. of 1,000,
Published by
Bookworks / London
$30.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Always subject to change, invasion, adaptation, and enhancement, the body is our most essential material, our primary limit. Touch, meanwhile, is the body’s only unmediated form of acquiring embodied knowledge, constantly experiencing the texture of the present tense.
The Happy Hypocrite – Heat Island seeks to understand how our hands (as both digital and analogous devices) and our bodies physically traverse and negotiate knowledge. This issue comprises a temporary assembly of individuals who are acutely and intelligently aware that what we choose to do with our bodies, how we express it alone or with others, can provide valuable cultural openings and resistances to bodily regulation, whether self-imposed or via external legislation.
With contributions and new work by Park McArthur, Duncan Marquiss, Dena Yago, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Giuseppe Mistretta, Francis Sanzaro, Allison Gibbs, Will Holder, Mary Simpson, Charlotte Prodger, an interview concerning 'adjustment' between Anna McLauchlan and Gerry Kielty, and reprinted material by Paul Nash and Stow Print College, Glasgow.
2015, English / Italian
Softcover (newspaper), 302 pages, 37 x 26 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$18.00 $10.00 - In stock -
In this issue:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Art and Literature, Darja Bajagić, Walter Dahn, Fiction in Reality, Have We Become the Internet?, Lynn Hershman Leeson, The History of Exhibitions, Intimacy in Art, Nicholas Mangan, Park McArthur, The Multiplication of Moving Perspectives, Opening up to the Unexpected, Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, Systems Prosthetics, Time as Material, The Withdrawal of the Artist, Betty Woodman, Steina and Woody Vasulka.
Driven by the energy of art writing and artists' writing, contemporary literature seems to be consciously migrating into the art world. Some artists exist halfway between the two worlds and are evolving the most innovative characteristics of the literary canon. Brian Dillon attempts to analyze this type of writing, its practice and its potential.
Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, a philosopher, writer and activist at the helm of the Independent Studies Program of the MACBA, raise ground-breaking questions ranging from the coercion of the public by the institution to processes of disidentification from dominant sexual identities, in a conversation conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Starting in the 1990s, the history of exhibitions has taken on greater resonance in art writing. One precursor of this fundamental type of research was Bruce Altshuler, with his The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. Altshuler, Jens Hoffmann and Elena Filipovic engage in an extensive conversation on the history of exhibitions and the role artists have in organizing them.
Chus Martínez analyzes the beauty of an ecology of events of little interest for the market, but driven by an energy that might pressure the system to open to the unexpected, to balance out the impulse to guarantee results before any attempts have been made to break new ground.
The work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan reveals how the forensic linguistics applied to test the accents of political asylum applicants is often unreliable, on a par with the many audio charlatans hired to ascertain the origins of individuals. The artist discusses all this with Mihnea Mircan.
Youthful transgressions, previously fueled by romantic literature, have been transformed into desire for extreme self-assertion modeled on "first-person-shooter" video games and action movies. Ingo Niermann wonders about how it might be possible to reverse this trend, through the introduction of a positive kind of transgression.
What does it mean to be human in the light of increasingly pervasive technological developments? Omar Kholeif moderates a conversation between Constant Dullaart, Zach Blas and James Bridle, artists who have reflected at length on the impact of the integration of software and algorithms on everyday life.
Michael Wang explores the aesthetics of an art that actively engages with different systems, and the perspective of artists as they consider the objectives, limits and structure of a work that is no longer a matter of objects, but nimbly moves through the folds of these systems as energy.
A handful of artists over the last 50 years have "self-absconded" from the public eye and the social whirl of the system. Martin Herbert discreetly tracks several of them to formulate a hypothesis that reflects an increasing schism between the needs of artists and those of the art world.
Lynn Hershman Leeson's work is an incessant exploration of the nature of consciousness and its extension via technology. Kathy Noble gives an exhaustive overview of her versatile output, from the early pieces to films on identity, cloning and feminist politics featuring Tilda Swinton.
Confession in art can lead to works plagued by egocentric attitude or can bring results of genuine "alongsideness," where the social becomes visible without recourse to reconstruction. Lauren Cornell and Johanna Burton analyze works and artists that have been able to make critical use of intimacy.
Nice to Meet You:
The theme of access and the tensions involved in its possibility are the fulcrum of Park McArthur's production and the focus of this interview with Daniel S. Palmer.
Natalia Sielewicz talks to Darja Bajagić whose work recontextualizes saucy images seen as stereotypes by Western eyes, granting them a sort of liberating ambiguity.
Steina and Woody Vasulka are leading exponents of the video experimentation that began in the late 1960s. Elyse Mallouk analyzes their works from various decades in the light of our growing relationship with the inorganic systems that nurture our relationships of feedback.
Joan Jonas, Ken Okiishi, Jennifer West, and Lucy Raven meet on the common ground of work located at the intersection between visual arts, moving image and performance. In a conversation introduced and moderated by Filipa Ramos they share their ideas and discuss their practice and its relation to time, history, popular culture, theater and narrative.
Australian artist Nicholas Mangan talks to Mariana Cánepa Luna about his work that investigates the troubled relationship between man and the natural environment, and analyzes contexts and objects capable of freeing up narratives that take stock of reality.
Andrew Berardini visits the big clay-dusted studio-vase of Betty Woodman. Her chubby ceramic odalisques, with their alluring forms, covered with fragments of precious stones, embroideries and miniatures, tug him into a grand theater of forms and colors, wild things and aquatic creatures.
Walter Dahn indicated a path for art after conceptualism with his new way of thinking about painting. Daniel Schreiber met with the artist in his home in Cologne to talk about the artist's story and recent works, a series of silkscreens linked to the revolutionary power of music.
After the linear perspective of the Renaissance, new perspectives have been explored, starting with chronophotography and the overturning of vertical or bird's-eye perspective. Jennifer Allen investigates these various perspectives in relation to a number of contemporary artists who have reached multiple, mobile and fragmented visions.
The Artist as Curator
Issue #6 an insert in Mousse Magazine #47
Mel Bochner, Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, 1966
Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let's Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1966