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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
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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.
2006, French
Softcover (+ audio cd), 232 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Fondation Dubuffet / Paris
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition, out-of-print catalogue, the first book (+ CD) published by Cahiers de la Fondation Dubuffet to accompany a major exhibition tracing the "musical experiences" of Jean Dubuffet, curated by Sophie Duplaix for the Dubuffet Foundation, Paris.
Protean artist, Jean Dubuffet has always been interested in the world of music. His preoccupations with music echo the development of his discourse on the subversion of culture, sweeping away cultural acquisitions in favour of ever freer improvisation. It was with his interest in jazz in the 1940s that parallels between music and painting began to emerge, but it was not until the early 1960s that these theoretical parallels took shape in "musical experiences" which consisted of recording sessions taking advantage of the flexible handling of magnetic tape. Dubuffet links these experiments to the research he conducts on the pictorial plane. However, it was more than ten years later that he truly achieved, with Coucou Bazar, a vast "animated tableau" and the culmination of the "L'Hourloupe" cycle, the osmosis of which he had gradually established the principles.
The main body of the book, "An Anthology in Three Times" (175 pages) — three profusely illustrated chapters — is a selection of texts, letters, documents, presented by Sophie Duplaix — curator of the exhibition presented at the same time — allowing understand the context and the challenges of the musical creations of Jean Dubuffet.
An accompanying audio compact disc is offered with the book with 7 unpublished recordings by Jean Dubuffet, a selection commented on by the German musicologist, Andreas Wagner, in the chapter "A selection of unpublished works".
The work is completed by a comprehensive directory of the original tapes kept at the Dubuffet Foundation, a discography, a selective bibliography and a short biography of the artist.
"The musical experiences which occupied me for several months in 1961, then later again in 1974, aim at a total oblivion of all cultural musical conditioning. They aim at erasing all that has received until now the name of music and to start anew. The principles which form the basis of all traditional music are revoked, and therefore first of all the sounds of the scale, then rhythm and time. any clearly discernible melodic song.[.] A music therefore where speech is withdrawn from the singer expressing his affective or passionate moods, and restored to the cosmic rumors delivering their wild noise."—Jean Dubuffet.
Texts in French.
As New copy complete with audio CD.
2015, English
Softcover, 478 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Feral House / Los Angeles
$49.00 - Out of stock
Expanded edition with introduction and new material by Colin Wilson. Expanded afterword by Peter Sotos.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley's spree of torture, sexual abuse, and murder of children in the 1960s was one of the most appalling series of crimes ever committed in England, and remains almost daily fixated upon by the tabloid press. In The Gates of Janus, Ian Brady himself allows us a glimpse into the mind of a murderer as he analyzes a dozen other serial crimes and killers.
Criminal profiling by a criminal was not invented by the dramatists of Dexter.
Novelist and true-crime writer Colin Wilson, author of the famous and influential book The Outsider, remarks in his introduction to Brady's book that one must first explore the depraved reaches of human consciousness to truly understand human character.
When first released in 2001, The Gates of Janus sparked controversy attended by a huge media splash. The new edition, the first in paperback, provides the reader with a decade and a half of updates, including Brady's letters to the publisher, both providing information regarding his own demented history along with demands that Feral House remove its unflattering afterword written by author Peter Sotos.
2022, English
Softcover, 436 pages, 23.4 x 28 cm
Published by
Third Man Books / US
$79.00 - In stock -
In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand - and the world's - great independent music labels. Hundreds of full color & black and white photos illustrate the story! Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd in Christchurch, New Zealand, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of music that had an impact around the world.Needles and Plastic is the first comprehensive history of the early years of the label and its bands covering the critical period from 1981-1988 when many of the most influential and critically acclaimed artists emerged on Flying Nun, bands like - from The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines, Straitjacket Fits and Bailter Space.
The influence of the obscure label became apparent in the 1990s, when big-time indie acts like Pavement, Cat Power or Yo La Tengo started covering Flying Nun bands. In entries on over 140 records from The Clean's 'Tally Ho!' 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines Bird-Dog LP in 1988, Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. His book draws on years of in-depth research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs, and the audience, with a host of significant characters contributing along the way - Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour and many more.
In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one the world's great independent music labels.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 387 pages, 21.59 x 28.58 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
US Games Systems / US
$90.00 - Out of stock
First volume of Stuart R. Kaplan's The Encyclopedia Of Tarot, published by Kaplan's own U.S. Games Systems imprint in 1978. The first major reference work of its kind, this comprehensive volume traces the history and origins of the earliest extant tarot, tarocchi, and tarock decks. Written with authority, and sharing a wealth of information, Kaplan's chronological presentation takes readers from the earliest hand-painted cards, through the historical developments of printed cards, and surveys twentieth century tarot interests. Included are discussions and photographs of 3,200 cards from decks dating from the 15th to the 20th century, plus 100 references to the origins of tarot and playing cards. Annotated bibliography of over 1,700 entries.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket, small tears and light wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 15 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$66.00 - Out of stock
A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.
Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher. Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.
Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.
2022, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 12.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$58.00 - Out of stock
The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing. While craft’s claims of authenticity and anti-consumerism are in question, its role is poised for optimization within the contemporary climate. Amid new economies of making, craft is moving from “modern craft” to “post-craft.” Through essays, conversations, and projects by designers, artists, and scholars, the third volume in the EP series examines not only the practice of post-craft but also its mediation and interpretation.
With contributions by 6A Architects, Glenn Adamson, Assemble, Jeremy Deller, Peter Dormer, Tanya Harrod, Martina Margetts, Clare Twomey, John Roberts, Catharine Rossi, Richard Sennett, Flore De Taisne.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Museo Nivola / Orani
$66.00 - In stock -
What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?
For forty-six years, Peter Fend has argued that art premonitions material culture, therefore the means of production, ensuing changes in social relations. Hence, in his view, works by Marcel Duchamp, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Beth Edelson, Paul Sharits, and others, can prefigure ecological restoration and cohabitation. In the late 1970s, artists in New York initiated teams—first Colab, The Offices, and later Ocean Earth and Space Force—to move from critique into effecting real-world change. Initiatives came from Jenny Holzer, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Taro Suzuki, Joan Waltemath, and Eve Vaterlaus, among others, who linked up with scientists to produce reports and analyses with satellite imagery for news media.
Africa-Arctic Flyway: Physiocratic States gathers documents of Peter Fend’s efforts through Ocean Earth for a planet organized according to hydrology—water basins—rather than national and colonial borders. It lays out tools and technologies derived from art, architecture, and science to replace fossil fuels, dams, nuclear industry, and industrial farming. The ensuing proposal for governance builds on what is identified as the first school of economic thought: physiocracy. Here, via satellite-aided eco-taxation, governance pursues an increase in the numbers of fish, marine mammals, migratory birds, and insects. For instance, ideas from Earth art are applied to restoring wetlands and flyways in three swaths—the Americas, East Asia, and Eurafrica—converging on the Arctic. This book focuses on the Eurafrica flyway and surveys four decades of work. It asks, “How do we go from visual art to reality?” Fend answers: “Through architecture.”
Edited by Elisa R. Linn, Lennart Wolff
Foreword by Eve Vaterlaus & Joan Waltemath
2016, English
Softcover, 74 pages, 21 x 16.5 cm
Edition of 500,
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
From his first books of the 1960s – such as Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers and Eden, Eden, Eden – to his recent books such as Coma, 2006, Pierre Guyotat’s seminal work has deeply marked and transformed that of innumerable artists and writers in many countries beyond France itself. With its focus extending from his novels to his work in film, art and performance, this illuminating collection of seven texts – drawn from encounters and conversations with Pierre Guyotat over a period of close to thirty years – explores his driving preoccupations and experimentations, with corporeality and vision, conflict and warfare, sex and the entity of language, activism and revolution, hallucination and aberration.
Series editors Catherine Petit and Paul Buck.
Edition of 500 copies.
2019, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 18.5 x 13.1 cm
Published by
Vauxhall&Company / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Paul Buck & Catherine Petit.
Apropos of Van Gogh, magic and spells: all the people who, for two months now, went to see the exhibition of his works at the Musée de l’Orangerie, are they really sure they remember everything they did and all that happened to them every evening of the months of February, March, April and May 1946? Was there not a certain evening when the atmosphere of the air and the streets became liquid, gelatinous, unstable, and when the light from the stars and the heavenly vault disappeared?
And Van Gogh who painted the café in Arles was not there. But I was in Rodez, which means, still on earth, while all the residents of Paris must have felt, for one night, very close to leaving it.
A new English language translation and the first time this essay has been available as a single publication.
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
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).
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.
1987, English
Softcover, 168 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 edition.
"Technologies of Gender builds a bridge between the fashionable orthodoxies of academic theory (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al.) and the frequently-marginalized contributions of feminist theory...In sum, de Lauretis has written a book that should be required reading for every feminist in need of theoretical ammunition-and for every theorist in need of feminist enlightenment."—B. Ruby Rich
"...sets philosophical ideas humming...she has much to say." -Cineaste "I can think of no other work that pushes the debate on the female subject forward with such passion and intellectual rigor."—SubStance
This book addresses the question of gender in poststructuralist theoretical discourse, postmodern fiction, and women's cinema. It examines the construction of gender both as representation and as self-representation in relation to several kinds of texts and argues that feminism is producing a radical rewriting, as well as a rereading, of the dominant forms of Western culture.
Very Good copy.
1993, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13.8 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1993 edition.
Without doubt, Jean Baudrillard is one of the most important figures currently working in the area of sociology an dcultural studies, but his writings infuriate as many people as they intoxcicate. This collection provides a wide-ranging, measured assessment of Baudrillard's work. The contributors examine Baudrillard's relation to consumption, modernity, postmodernity, social theory, feminism, politics and culture. They attempt to steer a clear course between the hype which Baudrillard himself has done much to generate, and the solid value of his startling thoughts. Baudrillard's ideas and style of expression provide a challenge to established academic ways of proceeding and thinking. The book explores this challenge and speculates on the reason for the extreme responses to Baudrillard's work. The appeal of Baudrillard's arguments is clearly discussed and his place in contemporary social theory is shrewdly assessed. Baudrillard emerges as a chameleon figure, but one who is obsessed with the central themes of style, hypocrisy, seduction, simulation and fatality. Although these themes abound in postmodern thought, they are also evident in a certain strand of modernist thought - one which embraces the writings of Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Baudrillard's protestation is that he is not a postmodernist is taken seriously in this collection. The balanced and accessible style of the contributions and the fairness and rigour of the assessments make this book of pressing interest to students of sociology, philosophy and cultural studies.
Very Good copy.
1988, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$55.00 - Out of stock
A philosophical treatise which finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture.
In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise—polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work—appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960’s. Sloterdijk’s finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.
With Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as enlightened false consciousness—a sensibility “well off and miserable at the same time,” able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the cynicism of antiquity—the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic—the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler’s ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.
"Sloterdijk can hardly be surpassed in his imaginative and vivid description of the experiences of a generation. . . . [He] not only wants to describe the thing he himself has experienced so personally, but also to explain it. Inasmuch as he explains the aftermath of the shattered ideals of 1968 with means he borrows from philosophical history, he gleans from the pile of rubble a piece of truth. He calls this truth the cynical impulse."—Jürgen Habermas, in a review of the German edition
Foreword by Andreas Huyssen. Translated by Michael Eldred.
Peter Sloterdijk holds a doctorate in German literature from the University of Hamburg and has published two other books in Germany, on literature of the Weimar Republic and on Nietzsche.
Very Good copy. First 1988 edition.
2007, English / Portuguese / French
Softcover (w. CD), 250 pages, 27 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$140.00 - In stock -
Scarce and wonderful, out-of-print, comprehensive monographic catalogue on François Dufrêne (1930 – 1982), the French Nouveau realist visual artist, Lettrist and Ultra-Lettrist poet. Francois Dufrene joined Isidore Isou and the Lettrist movement in 1946 and continued to participate until 1964. Dufrene's talent was evident in the fact that he was already a member of the Lettrist Group at only 16 years old. He is primarily known as a pioneer in sound poetry and for his use of décollage within Nouveau réalisme, the art group he helped found in 1960 with friends Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, Hains and Villeglé. He is considered one of the important artists in that Neo-Dada art movement. Published in 2007 on the occasion of a major survey exhibition at Museu Serralve, Porto, this volume is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with Dufrêne's works alongside many texts in English, Portuguese, French by Alain Jouffroy, Guy Schraenen, Joao Fernandes, and others, accompanying audio CD of sound works.
Very Good copy of book and CD.
1980, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 21.5 x 13.9 cm
Published by
Leete's Island Books / U.S.
$20.00 - Out of stock
An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combining an acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.
Translated from original Japanese to English by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker.
Foreword by Charles Moore.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1886—1965) was a Japanese author who is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in modern Japanese literature, writing numerous acclaimed books, including "The Makioka Sisters "and "Naomi: A Novel." The tone and subject matter of his work ranges from shocking depictions of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions to subtle portrayals of the dynamics of family life within the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently, his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of the West and Japanese tradition are juxtaposed. He was one of six authors on the final shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, the year before his death.
1986, English
Softcover, 348 pages, 21 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schocken Books / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1986 edition, published by Schocken Books, New York. Edited with an introduction by Peter Demetz.
"This book is just that: reflections of a highly polished mind that uncannily approximate the century's fragments of shattered traditions."—Time
A companion volume to Illuminations, the first collection of Walter Benjamin's writings, Reflections presents a further sampling of his wide-ranging work. Here Benjamin evolves a theory of language as the medium of all creation, discusses theater and surrealism, reminisces about Berlin in the 1920s, recalls conversations with Bertolt Brecht, and provides travelogues of various cities, including Moscow under Stalin.
Benjamin moves seamlessly from literary criticism to autobiography to philosophical-theological speculations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest and most versatile writers of the twentieth century.
Very Good copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 15.3 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$25.00 - In stock -
How do the concepts border, exile, and diaspora shape individual and group identities across cultures? Taking this question as a point of departure, this wide-ranging volume explores the ways that people create and represent a home away from home. Throughout, the authors emphasize the multiple subjectivities, cultural displacements, and identity politics that have characterized the postcolonial and post-World War II eras. They simultaneously affirm and challenge previous understandings of these three terms, and they investigate their malleability the extent to which they apply to diverse communities. Once the idea of diaspora is dissociated from the historical experiences of a particular group of people, it becomes a universal designation, applicable to all displaced groups. This understanding of diaspora also allows for the creation of a nonnormative intellectual community, one experienced by many contemporary critics and with which they identify. In the postcolonial context, a global middle voice emerges that incorporates the critic and his or her identity as the participant-observer of the discourses on identity.
As personal narratives transcend the autobiographical, they become indispensable guarantors of a free theoretical field, without a priori boundaries. The diaspora s voice is thus national and cultural, but it lacks the nation or the geographical definition that would constrain its subject.
This book has 18 papers including: writing Germanness after the holocauust: a Jewish hermaphrodite & cross Dresser in Wilhelmine Germany; central Europeans in Hollywood in the 1940s; African style in Los Angeles; coming of age in Zambesia: Artaud's itinerary through exile & insanity; poster art & transgressive citizenship in France 1968-1988.
Very Good copy. First edition 1998, out-of-print.