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.
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Empty Shops, 2013-2018 is a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by David Wadelton, the sixth in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022, in an edition of 50 copies.
David Wadelton’s work is at once a form of archaeological recording and a love letter to Melbourne. His photographs of our city are part celebration, part salvage operation. They are in this, a vital contribution to our civic record and our artistic endeavour.
Wadelton’s work stands proudly in a long line of photographers who have recorded urban architecture with enormous dedication and purpose: historical figures such as Charles Marville and Eugène Atget, Walker Evans and Bern and Hiller Becher. However, Wadelton is perhaps not as clinical and classical in his describing of the built world as these forebears each of whom, more or less, aspired to be a Vitruvius of the vernacular. Wadelton takes all of these measures on board and adds a hint of a more playful meta-photographic element via his longstanding appreciation of the marvellously inventive Lee Friedlander and the equally intrepid Stephen Shore, and the so daft as to be cool and conceptual recording of Melbourne’s own, Robert Rooney. Tellingly, Wadelton’s seemingly neutral records are recognisable, personal signature records that are accessible to all.
Wadelton’s photographs are brimming with information and life. The photographs are not pointing out a world of lowbrow leftovers but instead, celebrate a peculiarly suburban milieu recorded in its fast-fading glory. Full of detail and content rich, his work is deeply generous.
— Patrick Pound 2022
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Brunswick Street, 1981 is a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by Craig McGee, the fifth in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022, in an edition of 50 copies.
These images of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne were taken by Craig McGee in the early 1980s when that street had a very different feel to what it has today. McGee called the series The Silent Shops. McGee notes: “There never seemed to be anybody around. Shop doors were often half open and the view inside was often dark and uninviting. They were mostly used by small businesses associated with the rag trade - back when Melbourne had manufacturing industries. The shops were very dilapidated but held the charm of when Fitzroy was a busy working-class suburb”.
For over 40 years McGee has been taking photographs of places that are generally considered unsightly, the outer suburban wastelands, shopping malls, caryards, dirty industry, and the people who live amongst these backdrops. He studied photography at Prahran College, graduating in1981. His work has been exhibited at; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Adelaide Centre for Photography, Adelaide; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACCA, Melbourne; and is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and NGV, Melbourne.
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Ed. of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
THE BOYS, 2005–2007 is a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by Konrad Winkler, the fourth in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022, in an edition of 50 copies.
This series of photographs is from an exhibition at Until Never Gallery in Hosier Lane in Melbourne in 2007. The Boys are artists and writers who dedicated their lives to their passion, art of one kind or another. They didn’t make great careers or a lot of money, but they are the believers, whose lives were determined by this choice earlier in their lives, sometimes with detrimental effects. Portraits without the usual props of studios and easels. Just their heads, and more telling of themselves for that reason.
Konrad Winkler is a Melbourne photographer who has been exhibiting in commercial and public galleries since 1995. Born in Angaston, South Australia in 1948 he studied at Melbourne and New England universities before working in the Northern Territory as a teacher, and later as photographer and graphic artist with the Commonwealth Teaching Service.
His work is often intensely personal, but with a sense of humour to undercut any elements of self importance or maudlin feeling. He has photographed a number of people in extremis, i.e., the artist Julie Goodwin in the depths of postnatal depression, struggling to cope with her career and motherhood. The large photographs of his mother in law, Leila Guymer after the death of her husband are shot on bright, colour saturated Kodak film to show her sense of style and energy and perhaps make the point that death is not the end.
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
The fish and chip town, Eden/Yuin country 2008-2014 is a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by Ruth Maddison, the third in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022.
"The fish and chip town, Eden/Yuin country 2008-2014 combines two separate projects. Fishing and timber, both contentious industries, have underpinned the economy of Eden for decades. In a small coastal town of approximately 3,000 people, employment is a complex issue. Rent, food, mortgages, cars, kids, education all must be dealt with. Both industries have been largely cut back for the benefit of the planet since I made these works. But there are downsides for the whole town.
I shot the commercial fishermen portraits on a medium format camera using black & film. The original timber worker images are colour digital files. All the original text was printed but I chose to handwrite for the zine. It’s more intimate."
Ruth Maddison has been documenting domestic, working, and recreational lives since 1976. Her first solo exhibition was in 1979. Since moving from Melbourne to Eden in 1996 her work has expanded to include moving image, large scale prints on fabric, objects in vitrines and early cameraless photography. Her most recent solo exhibition, a large survey show and a new body of work, was in 2021 at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography.
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Waste, c.1995 -2005 is a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by Stephen Bram and Andrew Hurle, the second in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022.
The bottle bongs shown in Waste were collected during walks we took with our dogs Bea and Harry through marginal areas of parks, by rivers and creeks and through abandoned industrial areas in Melbourne; places which offered some seclusion and refuge and gave some license, however temporary and conditional, to simply be.
Stephen Bram's works in various media in relation to points in space (perspective paintings, objects, environments, prints) have been exhibited in a variety of contexts since 1987. Recently, exhibitions of or from other bodies of work have been held at Guzzler (Unstable Painting, 1991), Conners Conners, and Anna Schwartz Gallery.
Andrew Hurle is an independent artist and researcher born in Australia who now lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
2022, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Life Drawing, 2022, a 16 page zine of 16 black and white photographs by Janina Green, the first in a series of six artist zines published by Light of Day Books, Melbourne, 2022.
Janina Green, the daughter of Ukrainians, was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1944. Her family migrated to Gippsland, Victoria in 1949 and she spent her childhood in the small country town of Yallourn North. For twenty years she worked as a secondary school art and crafts teacher. She received a Diploma of Printmaking from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and pursued further studies in fine arts at Melbourne University. J. Green is also an influential photography teacher, lecturing at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University.
J. Green has been practising photography since the 1980s. Her series ‘Reproduction’ (1986) and ‘Vacuum’ (1993) have made significant contributions to feminist enquiry and photographic innovation. Her constructed, delicately hand-coloured silver gelatin prints place the female body centre stage, inviting the viewer into a critical dialogue about societal roles and gendered performance. Whether it is the bittersweet passing of time expressed in the portrait series of her daughters’ teenage friends, the enduring beauty of unfurling roses, or the loneliness of a country road at night, J. Green’s photographs express the emotional drama underlying everyday moments. By highlighting the complex psychological relationship of the home and the subtle differences between a mother or child’s vision, her photographs draw attention to voices and perspectives underrepresented in art history. Grounded in the beauty of the domestic, she prioritises the perspective of the woman as artist.
Her first exhibition ‘Reproduction’ in 1986 at Artist Space Gallery (Melbourne), reprised in 1987 at the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), was pivotal for her career. The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra acquired three works, and the shows’ success allowed her to purchase a large format camera which became central to her practice. The National Gallery of Australia hold works from several exhibitions including ‘Still Life’ (1988), ‘Reproduction’ (1986), and ‘Maid in Hong Kong’ (2009). In 1993 the exhibition ‘Vacuum’ toured nationally. ‘Dark Matters: Selected Photographs by Janina Green’, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2016) and ‘Janina Green in Conversation with the Collection’, Castlemaine Art Museum, Victoria (2019-2021) confirm J. Green’s ongoing significance as a feminist photographer.
— Emily Donehue
(https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/janina-green/)
2017, English
Hardcover, 640 pages, 21 x 22 cm
Published by
Edition Patrick Frey / Zürich
$175.00 - Out of stock
Around 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a mysterious, elaborate and yet effortless looking 600-page book of black-and-white photographs entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi (Theorema 1981). According to some reviews of the time this is the most Pasolinian publication to date (Alberto Farrasino), an indispensable tool for future research (Tullio Kezich), not just an illustrated book but a unique model of critique (Adriano Aprà).
With its relentless and yet playful classification of some 2,000 film stills ranged under the categories of “bodies” and “places”, whatever page we turn to, Mancini and Perrella stage an ever-shifting space. With a hidden reference to Walter Benjamin and a correspondingly revolutionary attitude, quotation here is understood as a form of “appropriation”, as a practical use of an archive.
In keeping with the great filmmaker’s credo, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi is a colossal attempt to take this enormous amount of material, in book form, where it wants to go. In the introduction, Mancini and Perrella describe their approach similar to the «analytic field» that they see in the film set: «Through film Pasolini is able to elicit out that sort of unconscious, never talked about code through which in daily life we operate and relate to the world. He makes visible a miscellany of aphasic and hidden practices, a ‹primitive› realm normally concealed from our ‹enlightened› societies.»
Entitled Pasolini’s Bodies and Places and translated by Ann Goldstein and Jobst Grapow, this new quasi-facsimiled edition in English is a first step towards an exploration of the original. Mancini and Perrella introduce their compilation of quoted images with a compilation of texts by Pasolini where he describes his own research of bodies and places for his films. These text were unpublished prior to Corpi e Luoghi. With Stephen Sartarelli’s translations in the present edition they now are fully available in English. (Benedikt Reichenbach, 2017)
The book contains also the original text in Italian / contiene testo italiano.
2021, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 18.4 x 26 cm
Published by
Atelier EXB / Paris
$99.00 - Out of stock
In 1977, Masahisa Fukase turned his lens toward his cat, Sasuke, spending a year "crawling on my stomach to be at eye level with a cat and, in a way, that made me a cat." A year later, he acquired a second cat, Momoe. Featuring tipped-on cover images, this gorgeously made book is arranged in four chapters, organised around the timeline of Fukase’s life with his cats. They become for the Japanese photographer a boundless experimental field leading to an extraordinary body of work in its technical and visual inventiveness. As so often in his work, these tender images also express the photographer’s subjectivity and his connection to his subject. The cat, a faithful companion who never leaves him, takes the place of his wife, eternal heartache, later represented by the iconic fleeing crows of his masterpiece
Ravens series.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 136 pages, 26.3 x 26.3 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$175.00 - Out of stock
Consistently proclaimed as one of the most important photobooks in the history of the medium, Ravens by Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase was first published in 1986 and the two subsequent editions were both short print runs that sold out immediately. This bilingual facsimile of the first edition contains a new text by founder of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tomo Kosuga. His essay locates Ravens in Fukase’s wider work and life, and is illustrated with numerous recently discovered photographs and drawings. Fukase’s haunting series of work was made between 1975 and 1986 in the aftermath of a divorce and was apparently triggered by a mournful train journey to his hometown. The coastal landscapes of Hokkaido serve as the backdrop for his profoundly dark and impressionistic photographs of ominous flocks of crows, which are said to serve as an allegory for postwar Japan.
Blind embossed clothbound hardback in a silkscreen printed carton slipcase.
Original afterword by Akira Hasegawa [1986] and a new text by Tomo Kosuga [both bilingual].
2019, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 80 pages, 31 x 23 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$115.00 - In stock -
‘My entire family, whose image I see inverted in the frosted glass, will die one day. This camera, which reflects and freezes their images, is actually a device for archiving death’. – Masahisa Fukase
For three generations the Fukase family ran a photography studio in Bifuka, a small provincial town in the northern Japanese province of Hokkaido. In August 1971, at the age of 35, Masahisa Fukase returned home from Tokyo, where he had moved in the 1950s. He realised that the Fukase Photographic Studio, which his younger brother managed, combined with the growing family members, constituted the perfect subject for a series of portraits. Between 1971 and 1989, he returned regularly and used the family studio, the large-format Anthony view camera and the changing family line-up as the basis for the series. True to his style, Fukase often introduced third-party models and humorous elements to juxtapose the ineluctable reality of time passing and the dwindling family group. He continued the series through his father’s death in 1987, up until the closure of the Fukase studio due to bankruptcy in 1989, and the consequential dispersion of the family.
Family (Kazoku) was released in 1991, and was Fukase’s last book. It begins with a photograph of the family studio and the following 31 images are family portraits made in the studio in chronological order. The book includes an extensive text written by Fukase himself and a modern essay by Tomo Kosuga.
2019, English / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 13.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Shelter Press / France
$40.00 - Out of stock
This book has been conceived as both a prism and a manual. Following the “traditional” arc of electroacoustic composition (listen—record—compose—deploy—feel), each of the contributions collected together here focuses in on a personal aspect, a fragment of that thrilling territory that is sonic and musical experimentation. Although the term “experimental music” may now have be understood as referring to a genre, or even a particular style, we ought to hold on to the original use of this term, which was based more on an approach than on any particular aesthetic line to be followed. The experimental is first and foremost a spirit, the spirit of the exploration of unknown territories, a spirit of invention which sees musical composition more as a voyage into uncertain territories than as a self-assured approach working safe within the bosom of fully mapped out and recognized lands.
Authors : Félicia Atkinson, François Bayle, François J. Bonnet, Drew Daniel, Brunhild Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, Stephen O’Malley, Jim O’Rourke, Eliane Radigue, Régis Renouard Larivière, Espen Sommer Eide, Daniel Teruggi, Chris Watson
2021, English / French
Softcover, 196 pages, 13.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Shelter Press / France
$40.00 - Out of stock
'To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again—with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals.
Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, remaining always identical, it is actualised in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. Such is the multitude of resonances evoked in the pages below: a multitude of occurrences, events, sensations, and feelings that intertwine and welcome one other. Everyone may have their own history, everyone may resonate in their own way, and yet we must all, in order to experience resonance at a given moment, be ready to welcome it. The welcoming of what is other, whether an abstract outside or on the contrary an incarnate otherness ready to resonate in turn, is a condition of resonance. This idea of the welcome is found throughout the texts that follow, opening up the human dimension of resonance, a dimension essential to all creativity and to any exchange, any community of mind. Which means that resonance here is also understood as being, already, an act of paying attention, i.e. a listening, an exchange.
Addressing one or other of the forms that this idea of resonating can take on (extending—evoking—reverberating—revealing—transmitting), each of the contributions brought together in this volume reveals to us a personal aspect, a fragment of the enthralling territory of sonic and musical experimentation, a territory upon which resonance may unfold.
The book has been designed as a prism and as a manual. May it in turn find a unique and profound resonance in each and every reader.' — The Editors
Contributors : Maryanne Amacher, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, Pali Meursault, Jean-Luc Nancy, David Rosenboom, Tomoko Sauvage, The Caretaker, David Toop, Christian Zanési
2022, English / French
Softcover, 236 pages, 13.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Shelter Press / France
$40.00 - Out of stock
The expression 'ghost in the machine' emerged within a particular context, namely as a critique of Cartesian dualism's separation of soul and body, and thus served to revive a certain mechanistic materialism. In simple terms, this review denies the existence of an independent soul (the 'ghost') contained in a corporeal organism (the 'machine'). It asserts, on the contrary, that the 'soul' is just a manifestation of the body—that ultimately they are one and the same. Although this remains a fraught question, always accompanied by the risk of slipping into the register of belief, it is resurfacing today in relation to the emergence of artificial intelligences: Can there be such a thing as an artificial intelligence? Can such an intelligence really add up to something more than the sum total of the binary operations that generate it? And what exactly is the 'artificial'? The artificial always brings with it the fantasy of emancipation and autonomy, and a break with a supposedly natural order of things. It is subversive. AI, precisely in so far as it is artificial, embraces this subversion, hybridizing the Promethean and the Faustian, heralding as many promises as potential dangers, and raising the stakes as high as the survival or extinction of humanity itself. In this respect, the domain of musical creation constitutes a kind of front line, at once a terrain of exploration for possible applications of AI and a domain that boasts an already substantial history of the integration of machines and their calculative power into creative processes. From algorithmic composition to methods of resynthesis, from logical approaches to the creation of cybernetic systems, from the birth of computer music to neural networks, for more than half a century now music has been in continual dialogue with the binary universe of electron flows and the increasingly complex systems that control them. Each of the texts included here, in its own way, reveals a different facet of the strange prism formed by this alliance. Each project its own particular spectrum—or spectrum; each reveals a ghost, evokes an apparition that is a composite of ideas, electricity, and operations. This book, then, does not set out to cut the Gordian knot constituted by the question of the possible mutations and becomings of binary logic, and in particular its most recent avatar, AI. On the contrary, it seeks to shed a diverse light upon the many possible ways of coming to grips with it today, and upon the dreams, promises, and doubts raised by these becomings, whether actualized in the creation of codes and programs to assemble sounds or infusing a whole compositional project; whether they reveal the algorithmic dimension of the human being, or directly take over the writing of the text itself, rising to the authorial level. Above all, though, what is at stake here is to discover how these developments resonate together, and how this resonance manifests itself through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these modes of creation and of living.
—The Editors
About
The expression "ghost in the machine" originated in a particular context, that of the critique of the Cartesian dualism separating the soul and the body, thus reconnecting with a certain mechanistic materialism. To put it simply, this approach denies the existence of an independent soul (the ghost) that would be conveyed by a corporeal organism (the machine). It affirms, on the contrary, that the “soul” is only a manifestation of the body and is one with it. If this question is still difficult to decide, risking at any time to slip into the register of beliefs, it is now being updated around the emergence of artificial intelligences: does such intelligence exist? Is it not reduced to the sum of the binary operations which generate it? And what exactly is the artificial? The artificial always carries within it a fantasy of emancipation, autonomy and a break with a supposedly natural order of things. He is subversive. AI, precisely as artificial, embraces such subversion, hybridizing Promethean and Faustian mythos, auguring just as much promise as potential danger, pushing the stakes as high as the survival or extinction of the humanity. As such, the field of musical creation is an outpost. It is both a field for exploring the possible applications of AI and a field that already has a fairly long history in the integration of machines and their computing power in the creative process. From algorithmic composition to resynthesis methods, from the logical approach to the creation of cybernetic systems, from the birth of computer music to neural networks, music, for more than half a century, has entered into a dialogue uninterrupted with the binary universe of electron flows and the increasingly complex systems that govern them. The texts to come tell, each in their own way, a different side of this strange prism that such an alliance forms. They each project a particular spectrum, reveal a ghost, and evoke a composite appearance of ideas, electricity, and operations. This book is therefore not intended to try to cut the Gordian knot that constitutes the question of the possible becomings and mutations of binary logic, and in particular of its latest avatar, AI. On the contrary, it proposes to shed multiple light on the possible ways of seizing them, the dreams, the promises and the doubts that these becomings raise, that they are actualized in the creation of codes and programs to overlap the sounds, that they inspire a whole compositional project, that they reveal the algorithmic in humans or even that they directly take over the writing of the text itself, raising themselves to the height of the author. But more than anything, the challenge here is to establish how these becomings can resonate and how this manifests itself, through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these ways of creating and being in life. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers promises and doubts that these becomings raise, that they are actualized in the creation of codes and programs to overlap sounds, that they breathe life into a whole compositional project, that they reveal the algorithmic in humans or even though they directly take over the writing of the text itself, raising themselves to the height of the author. But more than anything, the challenge here is to establish how these becomings can resonate and how this manifests itself, through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these ways of creating and being in life. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers promises and doubts that these becomings raise, that they are actualized in the creation of codes and programs to overlap sounds, that they breathe life into a whole compositional project, that they reveal the algorithmic in humans or even though they directly take over the writing of the text itself, raising themselves to the height of the author. But more than anything, the challenge here is to establish how these becomings can resonate and how this manifests itself, through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these ways of creating and being in life. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers whether they reveal the algorithmic in humans or whether they directly take over the writing of the text itself, raising themselves to the height of the author. But more than anything, the challenge here is to establish how these becomings can resonate and how this manifests itself, through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these ways of creating and being in life. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers whether they reveal the algorithmic in humans or whether they directly take over the writing of the text itself, raising themselves to the height of the author. But more than anything, the challenge here is to establish how these becomings can resonate and how this manifests itself, through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these ways of creating and being in life. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers of all these ways of creating and being alive. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers of all these ways of creating and being alive. Because the artificial, the artefact, is always the non-human child of a human, all too human dream. Publishers
— Publishers.
Authors : Keith Fullerton Whitman, Émilie Gillet, Steve Goodman, Florian Hecker, James Hoff, Roland Kayn, Ada Lovelace, Robin Mackay, Bill Orcutt, Matthias Puech, Akira Rabelais, Lucy Railton, Jean-Claude Risset, Sébastien Roux, Peter Zinovieff
1991, French / English
16 colour postcards, 15 × 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Le Consortium / Dijon
$180.00 - Out of stock
Out of print sealed postcard set produced on the occasion of Michael Asher’s exhibition at Le Consortium Dijon, 7 June – 27 July 1991.
The work on show in Dijon depicted the heating systems in the basements of sixteen of the well-known architectural landmarks in a city famous for its tourism. On the walls of the exhibition space Asher exactly reproduced the schematic engineering diagrams of interior axial cuts for the heaters belonging to each of the buildings chosen. Painted in black at the same height as the actual heaters, the diagrams, on a purely formal level, presented eccentric shapes and seemingly abstract designs while expressing vigilant precision and regulated linearity.
A set of colour postcards, meant to have been sold in the city at souvenir stores and available for viewing and purchase at the reception desk, completed the exhibition as a whole. The photographs of the heaters-displayed on postcards as if they were historic monuments or scenic views-correlated with the schematic wall drawings, grounding them in the functional reality of furnaces composed of oil burners, water heaters, pressure tanks, gages, pipes, and so on.
Photography by Pascal Pique.
Michael Asher (1943–2012) is an internationally renowned pioneer of institutional critique and conceptual art. Since the mid-1960s he has explored how museums and other institutions frame the art experience for viewers and influence the cultural dialogue. His interventions use elements that exist or existed at the site.
Still sealed, As New copies. Limited edition.
1992, English / French
Softcover, 190 pages, 27.4 x 22.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Le Consortium / Dijon
$69.00 - In stock -
The book presents an exhibition of Michael Asher at The Consortium, Dijon, France, June 7 - July 27, 1991. The book reproduces 16 postcards, installation photography of the exhibit, plus texts (english/french) by Frederik Leen and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
Michael Asher was born in 1943, the artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
1991, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 23 x 23 cm
1st edition / Out of print title / As New,
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$55.00 - In stock -
"The dwelling, the walls, the windows, the roof, the furniture, the pictures, the ornaments, the dress, the fence or hedge-all act constantly upon the imagination and determine its contents."—Charles Henderson
In 1990, Asher, armed with his characteristic incisive wit and critical intellect, set out to dig through the historical foundations of the Renaissance Society's Bergman Gallery at the University of Chicago. This exhibition marks Asher's shift from physically altering gallery spaces to using text and documentation as a manifestation of the ideological backgrounds for exhibitions. Revealing the underlying intellectual and social coordinates of the Society by juxtaposing writings from early University of Chicago scholars of the American Arts and Crafts Movement with the U.S. patent numbers for various gallery fixtures, Asher's exhibition was a brilliant contribution to the movement of institutional critique.
With detailed and thorough reproductions of the installation alongside scholarly essays by Birgit Pelzer and Anne Rorimer, this publication offers an intensive analysis of Asher's project for the Renaissance Society. It is an essential addition to the library of anyone with an interest in museum studies or site-specific art practices.
2012, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 22.5 x 27 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$120.00 - In stock -
Now out-of-print, this is the first monograph on the influential 20th-century artist Alighiero e Boetti and his groundbreaking works.
Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994) has emerged as one of the most significant figures of postwar European art whose practice is having an unfolding impact on younger artists. His powerful influence can be attributed to the material diversity of his work, its conceptual ingenuity, and his political sensibility. His work, though usually associated with the Italian Arte Povera group and Conceptual Art, has never quite fit into these contexts. Boetti ceased making Arte Povera–type objects in 1969 after a few years of association with the group, and his later choice of materials (embroidery, calligraphy, mosaic, kilims) put a gulf between his work and that of most artists of the 1970s and 1980s.
Boetti had an idiosyncratic style of working, and he often collaborated with or commissioned others to execute his ideas, including his celebrated maps of the world, colorfully embroidered by women in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He tended to create several divergent bodies of work at once in series that he continued throughout his life. Alighiero e Boetti is the first monograph covering the whole career of this crucial artist to be published in English. Rather than present a linear account of the artist's creative practice, the book contains linked chapters that expound on the key subjects of Boetti's art and position this work in relation to that of his European and American contemporaries.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 80 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$42.00 - In stock -
Wesley Brown narrates the day when trumpeter Miles Davis was assaulted by the New York Police Department. A dramatic and humorous story, told from multiple perspectives including that of Frances Taylor, Davis's wife, and the musicians in Davis's bands: a timely meditation on the psychological impact of police brutality, through the lens of a day in the life of Miles Davis.
The latest work from the veteran novelist called "one hell of a writer" by James Baldwin and "wonderfully wry" by Donald Barthelme, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, mere weeks after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis's temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse— reckons with her disciplined upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his sports car. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he's left behind.
"Wesley Brown is a writer's writer. His dialog in Blue in Green is remarkable. He knows the varieties of the American language in and out. We get fascinating portraits of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Clark Terry, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Eartha Kitt, and others. An insider named Freeloader provides comic relief. Before the salespersons dictated trends in Black literature, a major publisher would have published this book. Thanks to Blank Forms and other midsize presses, the Black literary tradition, whose fictional standards were set by Brooks, Wright, Himes, Polite, Bambara, and others, is alive."
—Ishmael Reed
"Wesley Brown attempts a difficult thing with this book: He attempts to walk inside the consciousness of Miles Davis at a very complex point in his very complex life. Beaten by police for smoking a cigarette outside Birdland, married to a brilliant and accomplished dancer, leading a sextet that has genius at every station, and fending off demons that are co-authors of his being, Brown's Miles is a man who is troubled and proud. This novella is lyrical, insightful, and beautiful."
— A. B. Spellman
"Blue in Green is a gorgeous jazz composition. In love and in torment, Miles Davis and Frances Taylor are co-creators and lead soloists. Brown surrounds them with an ensemble of brilliant friends, rivals, and mentors: Monk, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Katherine Dunham, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt. All have their say—shrewd, ebullient, dissonant. When I closed the book, I wanted to begin it all overagain: see, hear, and re-experience every note of Wesley Brown's wonderful prose music."
—Margo Jefferson
Wesley Brown (born 1945) is an Atlanta-based writer and educator whose work spans fiction, poetry, biography, theater, and film. His oeuvre is distinguished by its attention to the musicality of speech and its balance of humorous, ironic, and political engagement with American history. In 1956, while a student at State University of New York at Oswego, Brown joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, moving south to register voters with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party near the Tennessee border, where he first began to write poetry. After an arrest at a demonstration in Jackson, Mississippi, he graduated college and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1968, where he became an active member of the Black Panther Party before returning to his native New York City to join writing workshops led by Sonia Sanchez and John Olliver Killens. In 1972 he was arrested as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; in a statement to the draft board he quoted the Panther's Ten Point Program, adding, with his signature use of idiomatic expression, "If you can't relate to that, you can walk chicken with your ass picked clean." He served an eighteen month sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which informed the writing of his recently reissued first novel, Tragic Magic (Random House)—edited by Toni Morrison and released to wide acclaim by writers including James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme, and Ishmael Reed in 1978. His short fiction and essays have been published widely, from movement publications such as Liberator to glossies including Essence. For twenty-six years Brown taught literature and creative writing at Rutgers University in New Jersey. During this time he was involved with the National Association of Third World Writers; co-edited celebrated collections of multicultural American literature, authored the historical novel Darktown Strutters (Cane Hill, 1994) and award-winning plays including Boogie Woogie and Booker T. (1987) and Life During Wartime (1992); and wrote, with Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, the screenplay for W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1996). After retiring, he relocated to New England, where he taught at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts and Bennington College in Vermont, and authored his third novel, Push Comes to Shove (Concord Free Press, 2009), and the short story collection Dance of the Infidels (Concord ePress, 2017).
2019, English
Softcover, 82 pages, 12.8 x 19
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$42.00 - In stock -
One of the world’s most singular guitarists, Loren Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades, Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstraction that defines his current work, Connors has earned the admiration of many, leading to collaborations with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O’Rourke, Keiji Haino, and Kim Gordon.
In the mid-80s, Connors took a partial break from music and focused instead on the art of haiku, for which he received the Lafcadio Hearn Award in 1987. With his wife Suzanne Langille he also co-wrote an article on blues and haiku, “The Dancing Ear,” published in the Haiku Society of America’s journal. It was during this period that Connors penned the material that appears in Autumn’s Sun, a chapbook first published by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s Glass Eye in 1999. The text features diary excerpts from 1987, lyrically fragmented observations interspersed with haiku-like poems that paint an idyllic impression of the passing seasons in his home of New Haven, Connecticut. With synesthetic perception, Connors gazes from tranquil domestic streets. Sycamore, elm, and catalpa trees are activated by the breeze and made to rustle in unison with their natural and artificial surroundings, including the howling dogs from which Connors derived his ‘Mazzacane’ moniker. As summer fades to winter, Connors portrays death as an undramatic certitude, the flux of his own maturation reflected in musings on his son’s. Like his music, Autumn’s Sun is tender without being sentimental, conjuring those rare, delicate moments when time stands still.
This edition includes “The Dancing Ear” and an introduction by Lawrence Kumpf.
2018, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 20 × 15.5 cm
Published by
RVB Books / Paris
$46.00 - Out of stock
In Bleu Melody, the photographer Tony Frank brings together his complete archive of photographs and documents from 1971 when he shot the cover of Serge Gainsbourg's most mythic album.
Featuring contact sheets, slides and proofs, as well as accounts by Frank that reveal the story behind the photo, the book sheds new light on an image that went on to become famous worldwide.
1970 / 1977, English
Softcover, 340 pages, 22.5 x 14 cm
Published by
New Left Books (NLB) / Surrey
$20.00 - In stock -
1970 edition, 1977 printing of Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, published by NLB (New Left Books), and translated from the original French by Ben Brewster.
Establishing a rigorous program of "symptomatic reading" that cuts through the silences and lacunae of Capital to reveal its philosophical core, Louis Althusser interprets Marx's structural analysis of production as a revolutionary break-the basis of a completely new science. Building on a series of Althussers's conceptual innovations that includes "overdetermination" and "social formation," Etienne Balibar explores the historical and structural facets of production as Marx understood them, scrutinizing many of the most fundamental points in Capital, as though for the first time.
Good—Very Good copy. Light wear, tanning to pages.
1996, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 13.7 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$35.00 - In stock -
This is the work in which Louis Althusser formulated some of his most influential ideas. For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of "structuralist Marxism" which was presided over by the fascinating and enigmatic figure of Louis Althusser. Structuralism constituted an intellectual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and radically transformed the way philosophy, political and social theory, history, science, and aesthetics were discussed and thought about. For Marx was a key contribution to that process and it fundamentally recast the way in which many people understood Marx and Marxism.
This book contains the classic statements of Althusser's analysis of the young Marx and the importance of Feuerbach during this formative period, of his thesis of the "epistomological break" between the early and the late Marx, and of his conception of dialectics, contradiction and "overdetermination." Also included is a study of the materialist theater of Bertolazzi and Brecht and the critique of humanist readings of Marxism. Since his death in 1990, Althusser's legacy has come under renewed examination and it is increasingly recognized that the influence of his ideas has been wider and deeper than previously thought: reading For Marx, in its audacity, originality and rigor, will explain why this impact was so significant.
First English Verso 1996 edition, now out-of-print. Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 392 pages, 13.5 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Walter Benjamin is one of the most fascinating and enigmatic intellectual figures of this century. Notwithstanding the enormous impact made by his critical and philosophical writings, he was a thinker who shattered so many disciplinary and stylistic conventions that it is almost impossible to place him neatly in any particular category of writing or any specific and exclusive theoretical tradition. This collection, introduced by by Susan Sontag, contains the most representative and illuminating selection of his work over a twenty-year period, and thus does full justice to the richness and the multi-dimensional nature of his thought. Included in these pages are aphorisms and townscapes, esoteric meditation and reminiscences of childhood, and reflections on language, psychology, aesthetics and politics.
1999, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 1088 pages, 16.5 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$120.00 - In stock -
“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.”
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris—glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism—Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Dream City,” “Photography,” “Catacombs,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution,” “Baudelaire,” and “Theory of Progress.” His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things—a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.
The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
Translated by Kevin McLaughlin and Howard Eiland.
First 1999 deluxe hardcover Belknap/Harvard edition, now out-of-print.