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.
1992, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 11 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Puffin / UK
$25.00 - Out of stock
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea is a fantasy novel by the American author Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1990. It is the fourth novel set in the fictional archipelago Earthsea, following almost twenty years after the Earthsea trilogy (1968–1972), and not the last, despite its subtitle. Tehanu continues the stories of Tenar, the heroine of the second book of the Earthsea series The Tombs of Atuan, and Ged, the hero of the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea. "It is a time of growing evil and the perversion of magic. Power hangs in the balance, and uncertainty and fear are widespread, as magi and king alike seek a woman of Gont to show them the way forward. Tenar, erstwhile Priestess of Atuan, cares for Therru, a young girl who has been abused."
Tehanu won the annual Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author of speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, librettos, essays, poetry, speeches, translations, literary critiques, chapbooks, and children's fiction. She was primarily known for her works of speculative fiction. These include works set in the fictional world of Earthsea, stories in the Hainish Cycle, and standalone novels and short stories. Though frequently referred to as an author of science fiction, critics have described her work as being difficult to classify.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
First edition, edition of 160, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - Out of stock
no more poetry presents one story a day, the the debut anthology by writer Genevieve Callaghan.
First edition, edition of 160, numbered.
"…Il était une fois… an Australian woman had an idea on the plane to France. The idea was quite simple - she would write one very short story every day, and post it on Instagram. Posting the stories online would keep her accountable to any potential followers, but handwriting the stories in her often illegible script would keep her from pandering to those followers - keep her storytelling pure. Honest. Her handwriting was like her speaking voice, or her language, or her mind - some people would understand it, some people wouldn’t. C’est la vie. Aside from the artistic and practical benefits the woman thought she might gain from embarking on the project, the deeper benefit (she hoped) would be a personal one."
“the woman” reflects on one story a day.
What we have been given by Genevieve Callaghan in one story a day is an unwavering mastery of time and craft. The book offers a generous mapping of the author’s spontaneity in speculation and narrative. What we receive is therefore not just a collection of stories, questions and ponderings, but an illuminating insight into the operation of ritual and persistence. We are given an inspiring perspective on the craft of craft itself; the honed, daily practice of observation and imagination.
Sure, a day presents us with a near endless expanse of possibilities, but these possibilities are often so tightly wound within the expectations of work, time, care and place that we fail to see or act in accordance to our infinite potential. Which is to say life gets in the way. But what Callaghan reminds us is of the limitlessness of poetry and art; the expansive opportunity and delight of our own minds and how we may use this to remind ourselves of our own and other’s immeasurable potential. Or perhaps how we may use writing or art to operate on our own grief, pain, confusion or indecision. The writing is therefore both grounding and inspiring, in her own words as Callaghan states in story 28 she is ‘humming something holy to remind us where we are’.
We follow the author in her survey of all things: unwavering grief, striking humour, bountiful love, paralysing normality, professional explorations of intimacy, musical perchance, unbridled joy, lengthy pain, spiritual mundanity, quiet indulgence, failing memory, potent magic, elongated heartbreak, blind risk, chaotic bus rides, uncontrollable loss, supreme silence, unexpected fantasy, and nothing… sometimes nothing at all. We follow the author as she explores the whirlwind navigation of life through the eyes of children, construction workers, jasmine vines, pigeons, lovers, diplomats, cities, spiders, monuments, nurses, jacaranda trees, oceans, and even the humble ponderings of a concrete block. Callaghan throws us briefly but surely between time and desire. Her writing is specific and generous, at once both simple and elaborate.
one story a day delicately strings together the disparate and unifying elements of human and non-human existence; the broad mechanics of life itself. Further, through tenderness, wit and striking nuance Callaghan so gently monitors and magnifies the delightful and alluring specificities that colour such existence. As she states in story 381 ‘I eyed the world, daring it to say one fucking thing.’
Callaghan states in story 167 ‘i realise that the same things can happen anywhere’. And so here in this book we are given a few things that happen in a few places to a few people, and what a glorious few it is. no more poetry are incredibly excited to publish what will be our 13th collection and one of the most enriching and unique books to date. We are extremely grateful to Genevieve for trusting our home to let it land in.
2022, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 14.5 x 20.4 cm
First edition, edition of 200, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents eternal delight paralysis, the second publication by poet daniel ward.
First edition, edition of 200, numbered
"…a book about days and pleasure. the dizzying inaction of life’s excess. it’s an interrogation on the balance of the circle time brings. they are mostly automatic poems. the book feels to be the beginning of a dialogue/catalogue of spirit, in as much as the poems enact a pantheism in their noticing of the body of/as earth. a long ode to witnessing the patterns we lay in avoidance of suffering. it examines a philosophy of patient indifference. and so much else i can’t say, because i’ve spent too long trying to say it. life as the grand poem."
daniel ward reflects on eternal delight paralysis.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Methuen Publishing / London
$25.00 - In stock -
First published in 1988 and long out-of-print, Paraesthetics' is a neologism invented by David Carroll to unlock the extra-aesthetic relationship between art and literature in the work of Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.
Fine copy in Fine dust-jacket.
1991, English
Softcover, 404 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - In stock -
This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rudiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel-and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason." He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer's personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother's literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe's Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe's Weimar, Hegel's Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.
When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of "weeping and gnashing of teeth," during the heady "wild years" of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer's refusal to seek salvation through history.
The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.
First 1991 edition, Very Good copy.
1974/1992, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Open Court / Chicago
$35.00 - In stock -
A disciple of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer took the Kantian concept that all knowledge derives from experience and broadened it to conclude that our experience of the world is necessarily subjective and influenced by our own intellect and biases, and that reality is but an extension of our own will. This is the basis of all of Schopenhauer's thinking, and here, he offers an essential foundation for understanding and appreciating all of his work. First produced as his doctoral dissertation in 1813, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason" takes the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a reason why it is, and shows how it covers different forms of explanation or ground that previous philosophers have tended to confuse. Schopenhauer regarded this study, which he first wrote as his doctoral dissertation, as an essential preliminary to The World as Will.
Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first 19th century philosophers to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways – via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness – to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life’s meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts.
1974 edition, 1992 printing. Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 470 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare, first English edition of Petrolio, the unfinished novel found on the desk of murdered Italian author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the manuscript prepared for publication in Italy and here published in London in 1997, translated by Ann Goldstein. Includes reproductions of Pasolini's manuscripts, notes and letters.
'I have started on a book that will occupy me for years, perhaps for the rest of my life. I don't want to talk about it ...; it's enough to know that it's a kind of 'summa' of all my experiences, all my memories'—Pasolini, 1975
'He needed to live dangerously in every sense'—Paul Bailey
Suppressed for seventeen years due to its scandalous sexual and political content, Pasolini's masterpiece Petrolio is a shocking and explosive ode to the power of lust and the lust of power. Carlo, a moderately left-wing Catholic who works for the state oil company, has a schizoid personality: by day, he's Carlo 1, the smooth powermonger adept at playing the political parties and the mafia against each other; by night, he's Carlo 2, a man whose insatiable and perverse sexual desires simply have to be obeyed.
In a text that is both an exquisitely detailed homage to the libido and a ruthlessly savage political commentary, Carlo's corporate rise and sexual fall are brilliantly evoked against the backdrop of neo-Fascist bombings and the rise of the Italian far right.
Very Good copy with light creasing to cover corners and spine, tanning to page edges.
2020, English / German
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - In stock -
Who—or what—is Reena Spaulings? Since 2004 the name has stood for various collective artistic activities. Initially Reena Spaulings was the title of a novel written by an undisclosed number of anonymous authors from the circle of the artist collective Bernadette Corporation. Around the same time, a commercial gallery with an exhibition space in New York was founded, which since then has represented artists such as Merlin Carpenter, Jutta Koether, Claire Fontaine, and Klara Lidén. Also in 2004, an artist collective was formed that operates under the name of the fictional artist Reena Spaulings, creating collective paintings that are both reflective of the system and self-deprecating.
This catalogue is Reena Spaulings' first comprehensive publication and contains, among other things, a richly illustrated chronology of the collective's work to date, published following the exhibition HER AND NO at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Reena Spaulings’s first institutional collaboration with a museum. The presentation focused on the collective’s artistic work, including new works, new versions of existing series of works, and existing works that deal with the status of the artist in society in a wider sense.
Profusely illustrated with contributions from Simon Baier, Caroline Busta, Anna Czerlitzki, Yilmaz Dziewior and Claire Fontaine. Edited by curator Anna Czerlitzki.
2020, English
Flexi (cloth), 904 pages, 14 x 20 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$90.00 - In stock -
‘I open my new book. What will you tell for the next year. To bring forth a new chapter of wisdom, hopes, joys fears. I shall be honest with myself; and therewith SUCCEED.’ These lines open Eva Hesse’s 1955 diary and lay out the task of her writing. In between weekly to-do lists and personal musings, Hesse used her diaries as a space to process her experience of the world and to reckon with what it means to be an artist.
An American sculptor best known for her pioneering work with materials such as rope, latex, and fiberglass, Hesse is regarded as one of the artists who ushered in the Post-Minimalist movement of the late 1960s. This publication presents Hesse’s diaries from 1955 to 1970, providing an intimate glimpse into the artist’s psyche. Her diaries and journals, which she kept for the entirety of her life, convey her anxieties, her feelings about family and friends, her quest to be an artist, and the complexities of living in the world.
Hesse's biography is well known: her family fled Nazi Germany, her mother committed suicide when Hesse was ten years old, her marriage ended in divorce, and she died at the age of thirty-four from a brain tumor. The diaries featured in this publication begin in 1955 and describe Hesse's time at Yale University, followed by a sojourn in Germany with her husband, Tom Doyle, and her return to New York and a circle of friends that included Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Ryman, Mike Todd, and Paul Thek.
Poignant, personal, and full of emotion, these diaries convey Hesse's struggle with the quotidian while striving to become an artist.
Now in its second edition, ‘Eva Hesse: Diaries’ was first published in 2016 in association with Yale University Press and was awarded that year’s Most Beautiful Swiss Book Award by the Swiss Culture Awards Federal Office of Culture.
Edited by Barry Rosen with Tamara Bloomberg Publisher Hauser
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fuji Kikaku / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Rare first issue of Kinbiken Communications, the very special bulletin of "Kinbiken", a bondage enthusiast circle founded in tokyo in 1985 by bondage master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), and photographer Akio Fuji. The bulletin began in 1989, running for 10 years to produce 23 issues, with contributions by Chimuo Nureki, Akio Fuji, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the club. The object of the club is to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” The bulletin is illustrated throughout with examples of bondage and various acts of SM that second as a catalogue of the legendary videos the circle produced throughout the period. Merzbow himself often producing the soundtracks to these performances. The articles (in Japanese) trace the history these activities, and also contextualise and theorise BDSM into broader literary and arts culture, including Masami Akita (Merzbow) writing articles about film and experimental music in relation. Nureki's role as a writer and historian (as well as practitioner) of this culture has been very influential, and is no better documented than in his own journal here. The magazine also features the circle's other project named “Right Brain”, under the leadership of Yuri Sunohara. While Kinbiken is based upon bondage, this project explores a far more extreme realm, including hara-kiri, rubber, gas masks, etc. The imagery throughout is some of the most striking and aesthetic. A very unique magazine.
Please see first five issues posted on our website, but more later issues are available.
All issues in Very Good condition, well preserved.
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 112 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fuji Kikaku / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Rare second issue of Kinbiken Communications, the very special bulletin of "Kinbiken", a bondage enthusiast circle founded in tokyo in 1985 by bondage master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), and photographer Akio Fuji. The bulletin began in 1989, running for 10 years to produce 23 issues, with contributions by Chimuo Nureki, Akio Fuji, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the club. The object of the club is to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” The bulletin is illustrated throughout with examples of bondage and various acts of SM that second as a catalogue of the legendary videos the circle produced throughout the period. Merzbow himself often producing the soundtracks to these performances. The articles (in Japanese) trace the history these activities, and also contextualise and theorise BDSM into broader literary and arts culture, including Masami Akita (Merzbow) writing articles about film and experimental music in relation. Nureki's role as a writer and historian (as well as practitioner) of this culture has been very influential, and is no better documented than in his own journal here. The magazine also features the circle's other project named “Right Brain”, under the leadership of Yuri Sunohara. While Kinbiken is based upon bondage, this project explores a far more extreme realm, including hara-kiri, rubber, gas masks, etc. The imagery throughout is some of the most striking and aesthetic. A very unique magazine.
Please see first five issues posted on our website, but more later issues are available.
All issues in Very Good condition, well preserved.
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fuji Kikaku / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Rare third issue of Kinbiken Communications, the very special bulletin of "Kinbiken", a bondage enthusiast circle founded in tokyo in 1985 by bondage master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), and photographer Akio Fuji. The bulletin began in 1989, running for 10 years to produce 23 issues, with contributions by Chimuo Nureki, Akio Fuji, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the club. The object of the club is to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” The bulletin is illustrated throughout with examples of bondage and various acts of SM that second as a catalogue of the legendary videos the circle produced throughout the period. Merzbow himself often producing the soundtracks to these performances. The articles (in Japanese) trace the history these activities, and also contextualise and theorise BDSM into broader literary and arts culture, including Masami Akita (Merzbow) writing articles about film and experimental music in relation. Nureki's role as a writer and historian (as well as practitioner) of this culture has been very influential, and is no better documented than in his own journal here. The magazine also features the circle's other project named “Right Brain”, under the leadership of Yuri Sunohara. While Kinbiken is based upon bondage, this project explores a far more extreme realm, including hara-kiri, rubber, gas masks, etc. The imagery throughout is some of the most striking and aesthetic. A very unique magazine.
Please see first five issues posted on our website, but more later issues are available.
All issues in Very Good condition, well preserved.
1990, Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fuji Kikaku / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Rare fourth issue of Kinbiken Communications, the very special bulletin of "Kinbiken", a bondage enthusiast circle founded in tokyo in 1985 by bondage master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), and photographer Akio Fuji. The bulletin began in 1989, running for 10 years to produce 23 issues, with contributions by Chimuo Nureki, Akio Fuji, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the club. The object of the club is to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” The bulletin is illustrated throughout with examples of bondage and various acts of SM that second as a catalogue of the legendary videos the circle produced throughout the period. Merzbow himself often producing the soundtracks to these performances. The articles (in Japanese) trace the history these activities, and also contextualise and theorise BDSM into broader literary and arts culture, including Masami Akita (Merzbow) writing articles about film and experimental music in relation. Nureki's role as a writer and historian (as well as practitioner) of this culture has been very influential, and is no better documented than in his own journal here. The magazine also features the circle's other project named “Right Brain”, under the leadership of Yuri Sunohara. While Kinbiken is based upon bondage, this project explores a far more extreme realm, including hara-kiri, rubber, gas masks, etc. The imagery throughout is some of the most striking and aesthetic. A very unique magazine.
Please see first five issues posted on our website, but more later issues are available.
All issues in Very Good condition, well preserved.
1990, Japanese
Softcover, 144 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fuji Kikaku / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Rare fifth issue of Kinbiken Communications, the very special bulletin of "Kinbiken", a bondage enthusiast circle founded in tokyo in 1985 by bondage master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), and photographer Akio Fuji. The bulletin began in 1989, running for 10 years to produce 23 issues, with contributions by Chimuo Nureki, Akio Fuji, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the club. The object of the club is to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” The bulletin is illustrated throughout with examples of bondage and various acts of SM that second as a catalogue of the legendary videos the circle produced throughout the period. Merzbow himself often producing the soundtracks to these performances. The articles (in Japanese) trace the history these activities, and also contextualise and theorise BDSM into broader literary and arts culture, including Masami Akita (Merzbow) writing articles about film and experimental music in relation. Nureki's role as a writer and historian (as well as practitioner) of this culture has been very influential, and is no better documented than in his own journal here. The magazine also features the circle's other project named “Right Brain”, under the leadership of Yuri Sunohara. While Kinbiken is based upon bondage, this project explores a far more extreme realm, including hara-kiri, rubber, gas masks, etc. The imagery throughout is some of the most striking and aesthetic. A very unique magazine.
Please see first five issues posted on our website, but more later issues are available.
All issues in Very Good condition, well preserved.
2022, English
Softcover, 432 pages, 13.7 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s Assembling a Black Counter Culture presents a comprehensive account of techno with a focus on the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems—repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production.
Brown traces the genealogy and current developments in techno, locating its origins in the 1980s in the historically emblematic city of Detroit and the broader landscape of Black musical forms. Reaching back from the transatlantic slave trade to Emancipation, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Migration from the rural South to the industrialized North, Brown details an extended history of techno rooted in the transformation of urban centers and the new forms of industrial capitalism that gave rise to the African American working class. Following the groundbreaking work of key early players like The Belleville Three, the multimedia output of Underground Resistance and the mythscience of Drexciya, Brown illuminates the networks of collaboration, production, and circulation of techno from Detroit to other cities around the world.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno from a Black theoretical perspective distinct from its cultural assimilation within predominantly white, European electronic music contexts and discourse. With references to Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, among others, Brown draws parallels between movements in Black electronic music and Afrofuturist, speculative, and Afrodiasporic practices to imagine a world-building sonic fiction and futurity embodied in techno.
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and elsewhere. Assembling a Black Counter Culture is Brown’s debut book.
Editor: Rachel Valinsky
Editorial Consultant: Ting Ding and Camille Crain Drummond
Designer: Scott Ponik
Copy Editor: Madeleine Compagnon
1994, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 15.2 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
This anthology of the work of Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) presents the text of Spinoza's masterwork, the Ethics, in what is now the standard translation by Edwin Curley. Also included are selections from other works by Spinoza, chosen by Curley to make the Ethics easier to understand, and a substantial introduction that gives an overview of Spinoza's life and the main themes of his philosophy. Perfect for course use, the Spinoza Reader is a practical tool with which to approach one of the world's greatest but most difficult thinkers, a passionate seeker of the truth who has been viewed by some as an atheist and by others as a religious mystic.
The anthology begins with the opening section of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which has always moved readers by its description of the young Spinoza's spiritual quest, his dissatisfaction with the things people ordinarily strive for—wealth, honor, and sensual pleasure--and his hope that the pursuit of knowledge would lead him to discover the true good. The emphasis throughout these selections is on metaphysical, epistemological, and religious issues: the existence and nature of God, his relation to the world, the nature of the human mind and its relation to the body, and the theory of demonstration, axioms, and definitions. For each of these topics, the editor supplements the rigorous discussions in the Ethics with informal treatments from Spinoza's other works.
Baruch (de) Spinoza (1632—1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin. One of the foremost exponents of 17th-century Rationalism and one of the early and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered "one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period." Inspired by the groundbreaking ideas of René Descartes, Spinoza became a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza's magnum opus, the Ethics which contains the entirety of his philosophical system in its most rigorous form, was published posthumously in the year of his death. The work opposed Descartes's philosophy of mind–body dualism and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. In it, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely". Hegel said, "The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted Gilles Deleuze to name him "the 'prince' of philosophers".
1992, English
Softcover, 446 pages, 15.8 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
In this remarkable work, Gilles Deleuze, the renowned French philosopher, reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. He locates in Spinoza "a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse" and makes Spinoza into "an encounter, a passion."
Expressionism in Philosophy was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch) and prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari). Thus, Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's thought.
First 1992 softcover edition. Very Good copy.
1994, English
Softocver, 196 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
The work of the French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-1992) is of importance to scholars concerned with issues of representation. This text, first published in France in 1977, presents Marin's theories about the aims of painting in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers insight into the aims and effects of visual representaion.
First edition Very Good—Fine copy.
2002, English
Softcover, 214 pages, 13.7 x 19.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verso / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil.
Translated by Peter Hallward
Very Good—Fine copy.
2006, English
Softcover, 450 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
re.press / Prahran
$35.00 - Out of stock
Following the publication of his magnum opus L'etre et l'evenement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France's greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticizing Badiou's stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou's concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognized as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou's work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.
Contributors: Paul Ashton, Justin Clemens, A. J. Bartlett, Alain Badiou, Brian Anthony Smith, Zachary Fraser, Lorenzo Chiesa, Sigi Jöttkandt, Sam Gillespie, Oliver Feltham, Lindsey Hair, Alex Ling, Alberto Toscano, Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos, Dominique Hecq,
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 15 x 22.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 hardcover edition of Masochism : Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs by Gilles Deleuze, published by Zone. Long out-of-print in hardcover.
In his stunning essay Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism: their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them -- Masoch and Sade -- lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles apart.
Venus in Furs, the most famous of Masoch's novels, belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes, including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here -- fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness -- these received associations do not eclipse the truly singular and surprising power of Masoch's eroticism.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1993, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 366 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$90.00 - In stock -
Long out of print first 1993 Hardcover edition of Rosalind E. Krauss' The Optical Unconscious, published by October / MIT Press.
The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of vision itself. And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction.
The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today.
In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about smart Jewish girls with their typewriters in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard.
To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as Anti-Form. These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some wear to edges.
1986, English
Softcover, 319 pages, 175 x 229 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).
"All of her observations are unfailingly original and provocative."—Art Documentation
Very Good copy of original 1986 edition, 1993 printing.
1996, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 18 x 22.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.
Includes the work of David Hammons, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Silvia Kolbowski, Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Allan McCollum, Gerhard Richter, Richard Estes, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, John Miller, Zoe Leonard, Gran Fury, Renée Green, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Lothar Baumgarten, Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, and many more.