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
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2022, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Small Press / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
"In movies by Buñuel, Visconti, Bertolucci, and Pasolini, Pierre Clémenti was ravishing, a louche angel and devil, unreachable, unknowable, beautiful. In A Few Personal Messages, Clémenti claims your head and heart when he writes: "You think if you lock up your nightmares, you'll feel better." Imprisoned in Italy, his cri de cœur resonates with Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, both men inside for their "sins." Inside, Clémenti is ravaged and assaulted by jail's daily inhumanities and barbarisms. "In a society built on repression," he says, "who is innocent?" Here, Pierre Clémenti must be a modern-day secular saint, whose manifesto is profound, unforgettable, and like him, beautiful.—Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy and Men and Apparitions
Pierre Clémenti is one of my greatest heroes and role models. These legendary prison journals, in which he details his dedication to visionary, adventuring art and the fraught life his commitment induced, are a call to arms for daringly inclined artists of every stripe. Their long-awaited English birth is key and huge.—Dennis Cooper
Pierre André Clémenti (1942—1999) was a French actor. Born in Paris to an unknown father and Rose Clémenti, a Corsican concierge whose surname he took, Clémenti had a difficult childhood and took refuge in literature and the theatre. He studied drama and began his acting career in the theatre. Working as a telegraph operator and messenger to finance his acting studies at the Theatre National Populaire, Clémenti came to motion picture prominence as a seductive young criminal in Luis Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour' (1967). Thereafter, he was often employed by avant-garde film makers and typecast in intense roles, often as characters with a complex or dark past, working in some of the leading films of the era with directors such as Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Rivette, and many others. In 1972 his career was suddenly derailed when Clémenti was arrested in Rome for possession of LSD and cocaine. He spent 17 months in prison before being acquitted by an appeals court and released. He later authored a book about this chapter of his life. After his release he played the ever-optimistic sailor of the Potemkin in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974) and the role of Pablo, the seductive saxophone player, in Fred Haines's Steppenwolf (also 1974) adapted from the novel by Hermann Hesse. Pierre was married to actress Margareth Clémenti, mother of his son Balthazar, born in July 1965. Later he was married to Nadine, mother of his second child, Valentin Clémenti-Arnoult. Throughout his career he continued to be active in the theatre and with the French underground film movement, directing several of his own films which often featured fellow underground filmmakers and actors.
1992, English
Softcover, 255 pages, 15.7 x 22.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Polity / US
$25.00 - Out of stock
This book provides a lively introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century's most important literary and cultural theorists. The book covers all aspects of Barthes's writings including his work on literary theory, mass communications, the theatre and politics. Moriarty argues that Barthes's writing must not be seen as an unchanging body of thought, and that we should study his ideas in the contexts within which they were formulated, debated and developed.
Very Good copy.
1991, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 22 .5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
The Hysterical Male is designed as a thematically focussed exploration of gender politics in the 1990s. Initiated as a companion volume to Body Invaders it provides an intense, provocative and creative theorization of feminism under the failing sign of male hystericization.
First edition, 1991. Very Good copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$45.00 - Out of stock
Slavoj Zizek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Zizek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of looking awry that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.
Zizek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject--at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Zizek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Zizek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.
Good copy, some corner creasing to cover, light marking.
2022, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Introduction by Mónica de la Torre.
Selections and playlists by Jeffrey Lependorf.
An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery—a prolific poet and art critic—pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library.
This book places poetry by Ashbery, gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to it while writing, the “playlists” here present samplings of music from these same years, culled from his own library of recordings.
Ashbery’s poetry is frequently described as ekphrastic, though, rather than writing a poem “based on” or “inspired” by the content of an artwork or piece of music, he engages with how the experience of seeing it and the artistic strategies employed offer ways of thinking about it and through it. Many observations from Ashbery’s art writing also provide keys to how we might read his poetry. Many recordings he listened to feature contemporary classical works that emphasize complex textures, disparate sounds, and disjunct phrases—qualities which are mimicked in his poetry.
In exploring this ekphrastic book project, the reader is invited to discover how, for Ashbery, these three forms might illuminate and inform one another. In Mónica de la Torre’s introduction, she explores the connection between the three muses of music, art, and poetry, and the ekphrastic experience of reading Ashbery.
2000, English
Softocver, 404 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press / New York
$69.00 - Out of stock
Sexuality and Space's interdisciplinary essays address gender in relation to architectural discourse and critical theory, focusing on finding the close relationships between sexuality and space hidden within everyday practices. The contributors are Jennifer Bloomer, Victor Burgin, Beatriz Colomina, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Ingraham, Meaghan Morris, Laura Mulvey, Molly Nesbit, Alessandra Ponte, Lynn Spigel, Patricia White, and Mark Wigley.
"A milestone in the evolving discourse of architectural history and criticism.... These essays raise crucial questions about design and the experience of architecture, and many attempt to engage ... the rich critical literature of cultural studies." - Alice T. Friedman, JSAH
"Sexuality and Space is important, even necessary.... Both timely and well worth the time." - Thomas Keenan, Newsline
2022, English
Softcover, 220 pages, 10.8 x 18.2 cm
Published by
Warehouse / Amsterdam
$25.00 - Out of stock
"With the Warehouse Review series, we aim to give a proper analysis and contextualisation of certain contemporary fashion phenomena, but not only through an essayistic approach. Instead, we deploy various methods of research and analysis to zoom in on specific aspects that make – in our estimation – a fashion phenomenon into what it is. Our first edition of Warehouse Review, entitled ‘People Wearing Off-White’, was a thorough study of the fashion label Off-White and its immense popularity. With this second edition of Warehouse Review, we are taking a more meta approach: we are reviewing the fashion review, and in specific, those of the Louis Vuitton fall 2020 womenswear collection.
In his fall 2020 collection, Nicolas Ghesquière, the creative director of Louis Vuitton womenswear, explored notions around time. Talking to Nicole Phelps, the Director of Vogue Runway, he stated: “I wanted to imagine what could happen if the past could look at us.” With that sentiment in mind, the contributors of this Warehouse Review interrogated these, now historical written records, that collectively make up a response to Louis Vuitton fall 2020 presentation. Through this meta-critique, we hope to explore what we might learn about these past examples of catwalk writing as a way to move the discipline forward. As McNeil and Miller declared “…the reviewer is the critic!” it is now time to critique the critic and to review the review."
With contributions by: Aïcha Abbadi, Chinouk Filique de Miranda, Dal Chodha, Femke de Vries, Hanka van der Voet, Isabel Mundigo-Moore, Johannes Reponen, Laura Gardner, Megan Wray Schertler, Ricarda Bigolin and Sophie Barr.
Edited by Hanka van der Voet & Johannes Reponen.
Design by Line Arngaard.
Edition of 700 copies.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 10.8 x 11.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$56.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Bart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther Zonsheim
According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge.
Fedorov’s call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov’s ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program.
This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries.
Published in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle
Design by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick
2020, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$56.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Creativity has been hailed as the driving force and most important skill of the twenty-first century–a power to be taught, understood and deployed on all levels of society. Debate concerning the origins and potential of creativity is mostly confined to the realms of the natural and social sciences, with insights ranging from neurology to theoretical physics to psychology and educational sciences. Here, using insights from these fields, and also delving into the ideas of Parmenides, Spinoza, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Bergson, Deleuze, Spivak, and many others, Jeroen Lutters argues that creativity should be explicitly enforced in education and society, to open up new perspectives. Creative Theories of (Just About) Everything explores and defines a ‘possible world’ in which creativity is part of everything in nature. Knowing and using this creative source should be a formative force, not only in the arts and in education, but in rethinking our society at large.
2010, English / German
Softcover, spiral-bound, 182 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Kölnischer Kunstverein / Köln
Walther König / Köln
$55.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
With statements from Judith Barry, Joseph Beuys, Paul Chan, Mel Chin and the GALA Committee, Jaime Davidovich, Simon Denny, Kalup Linzy, Christoph Schlingensief, Ryan Trecartin, Francesco Vezzoli, Andy Warhol.
"Forbidden Love: art in the wake of television" observes television's methods of seduction, with its "garish mannerisms" and describes it as a world of experience with the most varied of formats. The catalogue does not aim to analyse the content or morals of television, rather it is interested in an aesthetic, "camp" approach-as described in Susan Sontag's essay Notes on "Camp"-to the medium of television and its affects.
Out-of-print.
2016, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket) 188 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
John Douglas Millar’s Brutalist Readings: Essays on Literature is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.
Design by Present Perfect
2016, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 13 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Traction argues that contemporary art is defined by a moral economy of indeterminacy that allows curators and artists to imagine themselves on the other side of power. This self-positioning, in turn, leaves us politically bankrupt, intellectually stagnant, and aesthetically predictable. In his memoir-polemic, curator and writer Tirdad Zolghadr candidly reflects on his own experiences and the work of others. He also drafts possibilities for a logic and a support structure that can offer some purchase of their own, beyond the gravitational pull of business as usual. Ultimately, Traction calls for a renewed sense of profession, somewhere within the corridors of power where, for better or worse, contemporary art has long arrived.
Design by Aude Lehmann, Zurich
2020, English
Softcover (cloth), 284 pages, 16.5 x 10.4 cm
Published by
Office / Melbourne
$27.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
The Politics of Public Space is a quarterly publication of transcripts that speak directly to the city and the way we read it.
The second volume addresses the effects of COVID-19, including the sudden changes in the way we interact and view our public spaces. It contains excerpts from Myria Georgiou, Saskia Sassen, Jack Self, Brooke Holmes, Ian Strange and Alfredo Brillembourg.
This publication curates a series of global perspectives as we all come to terms with a new way of life due to the virus. Myria Georgiou observes the emergence of digital solidarity groups throughout the UK as inequalities and vulnerabilities are foregrounded. World-renowned sociologist Saskia Sassen reveals the pervasiveness of power as the fragility of our global connectedness is further disclosed. The true publicness of our cities is revealed in Jack Self’s account of protest and opposition to the political structures. Brooke Holmes depicts an interconnectedness between the health of the city and it’s citizens traced back to antiquity. Australian artist Ian Strange unpacks his understanding of the home as he recounts a decade of practice into the subject. And Venezuelan architect Alfredo Brillembourg calls to arms the architecture profession to deal directly with issues of injustice within the built environment.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
David Pestorius / Brisbane
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $2.00 - Out of stock
CityCat Project 2006–2016 is the record of an extraordinary collaboration between American artist Dave Hullfish Bailey and senior Aboriginal writer and activist Sam Watson. The collaboration is structured around Maiwar Performance, in which the CityCat ferries that ply the Brisbane River (Maiwar) execute unannounced maneuvers near a site of significance to the Aboriginal people who lived on the lands around Brisbane before British colonization in the early nineteenth century.
After its first iteration in 2006, Watson designated the event a “Dreaming,” which meant that it should be periodically repeated. The performance has since been restaged in 2009, 2012, and 2016, with Watson seeing it as an important act of Indigenous empowerment: a way of restoring agency to the local Aboriginal people in bringing their past alive and allowing them to think that the future has not been definitively determined.
Parallel to this recurring event is an evolving body of works in diverse media. At its core is Bailey’s lateral research-based process, which combines a highly reflexive approach to language with granular descriptions of material and cultural systems. The call-and-response collaboration between Watson and Bailey and the many irreducibilities within it, generates an articulation of place that is playfully extrapolative, yet politically and intellectually resistant.
This publication includes an introduction by its editor, Rex Butler, and an essay and detailed timeline by CityCat Project curator, David Pestorius, which covers the activities of Bailey and Watson both before and throughout their work together. In addition, art historian Sally Butler reflects upon Watson’s literary production, while curator Michele Helmrich sheds light on the local historical context that significantly informs the collaboration.
Edited by Rex Butler
Texts by Rex Butler, David Pestorius, Sally Butler, Michele Helmrich
Graphic concept by Heimo Zobernig
Design by Michael Phillips
Copublished with Australian Fine Arts/David Pestorius, Brisbane
2019, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - Out of stock
The first hardcopy Memo publication, collecting the 52 reviews from 2017 published by Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
Contributions by Rex Butler, Jane Eckett, Giles Fielke, Chelsea Hopper, Helen Hughes, Beth Kearney, Kylie King, Paris Lettau, Julia Lomas, Ian McLean, Anna Parlane, Victoria Perin, Francis Plagne, Audrey Schmidt, Kate Warren, Anthony White , Amelia Winata. Design by Warren Taylor and Joanna Leucuta, with copy editing by Genevieve Osborn.
2022, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 20 x 26 cm
Published by
gta Verlag / Zürich
$132.00 $80.00 - Out of stock
Our time is an urban age. More people than ever before are living in cities, cities are becoming bigger and denser than ever, and urbanity has reached an unprecedented level of complexity. This urbanization boom, which can be observed around the globe today, began at the turn of the 20th century, when technical progress and the extraction of seemingly unlimited natural resources drove urban development. With the steady growth of urban populations, architects and planners not only had to deal with the design of living space and public space, but also new social challenges such as (geo-) political tensions, the reconstruction after two world wars, decolonization, economic crises, responding to growing climatic problems and cultural changes. By analyzing more than one hundred richly illustrated urban planning projects and initiatives, the book offers the first comprehensive story of how these challenges have continuously generated new attitudes and approaches in the urban planning discipline since the early 20th century.
2020, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 15 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$62.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Forces of Art investigates the way in which artists, artworks and cultural organizations affect people and their social environments, and explores how cases of creative practice have been operational in empowering people, communities, and societies in their given contexts. It is a dense, multi-layered, polyvocal compendium of current thinking about the impact of art on civil society and social change, and contains a large number of essays and case studies located all over the world, from Central Asia to Meso and Latin America, from Africa to Central Europe, from South and South-East Asia to the Middle East. The driving force is the shared concern and responsibility for societies worldwide, with regards to culture and the well-being of its communities. Considering the question of how art can be consequential, the book challenges the reader to think beyond art as representation, as merely aesthetical, or as simply an object or commodity. Instead, it stirs thinking of art in terms of a force that has the ability to transform.
Editors: Carin Kuoni, Jordi Baltà Portolés, Nora N. Khan & Serubiri Moses
Contributors: Mariam Abou Ghazi, Kobina Ankomah-Graham, Jordi Baltà Portolés, Ilka Eickhof, Fernando Escobar Neira, Fatin Farhat Maya Indira Ganesh, Rocca Holly-Nambi, Miranda Jeanne Marie Iossifidis, Nuraini Juliastuti, Nora N. Khan, Višnja Kisić, Diana T. Kudaibergenova, Carin Kuoni, Kabelo Malatsie, Jenny Mbaye, Zayd Minty, Nadia Moreno Moya, Serubiri Moses Judith Naeff, Laura Nkula-Wenz, Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, Arnout van Ree, Naomi Roux, Vaughn Sadie, Anna Selmeczi Nishant Shah, Lenneke Sipkes, Rike Sitas, Cristiana Strava, Goran Tomka, Kasper Tromp, Minna Valjakka, Paulina E. Varas Mark R. Westmoreland, Kitty Zijlmans
Design: Lu Liang
2021, English
Softcover (cloth), 266 pages, 16.5 x 10.4 cm
Published by
Office / Melbourne
$27.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
In July, Melbourne experienced a second wave of the virus and the introduction of further restrictions forced the city to a standstill. Workplaces, student accommodation and universities remained empty as local businesses were also required to close their premises. The structures of the state, city and its residents were again laid bare. This third volume of the quarterly publication addresses many of these issues by gathering talks held prior to the pandemic alongside recent interviews. Kate Shaw shows how the recent lockdown of the housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne reveals the government’s underlying attitude towards public housing tenants. Tony Birch used the Shrine of Remembrance as the site for his talk on the Indigenous protest movement Camp Sovereignty and the significance of monuments in shaping collective values. Nicole Kalms outlines the experiences of women in Melbourne’s public spaces through data gathered by XYX Lab. Sarah Lynn Rees discusses the complexities of engaging and working respectfully with Traditional Owners when intervening in the built environment. Andy Fergus & Brighid Sammon expose the failings of planning in the modern development of Melbourne, and Philip Brophy declares the general failings of the built environment profession at large.
2022, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 21 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Warehouse / Amsterdam
$24.00 - Out of stock
This edition of A Magazine Reader, that took place at MA Critical Fashion Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts in collaboration with Chet Bugter and graphic designer Zuzana Kostelanská, revolves around the idea of the ‘culture of emotions’, self-help, therapy and self-transformation within the construct of fashion. Besides our constantly changing looks, that are expressions of fluid identities, our minds and ‘inner selves’ are also ever changing and the idea of transformation is pushed beyond changing clothes or moving between traditional forms of status in society. Being responsible for our own emotional state of mind as something that should be transformed to a higher sense of being, todays fashion is strongly focussed on self-care, therapy and self-transformation and has connected this to symbols, object and situations. The fashion magazine is one of the cultural formats in which this societal focus becomes clearly visible and commodified.
Editors: Femke de Vries, Hanka van der Voet, Chet Bugter and Lianca van der Merwe
Art Direction: Femke de Vries and Hanka van der Voet
Authors: Alessandra Varisco, Annabelle Boer, Beau de Bruijn, Dalila de Vroom, Lianca van der Merwe, Sohyun Yoon, Wei-Chi Su, Yi-Jing Chen, Chet Bugter, Femke de Vries, Hanka van der Voet
Graphic design: Zuzana Kostelanská
Edition of 200 copies.
A Magazine Reader is an ongoing research trajectory and series of zines initiated by Femke de Vries and Hanka van der Voet. It revolves around the analysis of a mainstream and high-end fashion magazine and its translation into an alternative new zine to provide insight into the cultural power and forms of value production that is at the core of fashion media. In it, the reader becomes an active actor in the construct of fashion. Re-reading the magazine by dissecting it, analysing the words, images, materiality, the items shown on the pages and the strategies of the specific magazine changes the way we read fashion.
In the workshop one specific magazine is selected. This magazine is thoroughly read, dissected and critically analysed on elements such as models, topicality, advertisements, material, brands, distribution, imagery, items, narrative, monetary value, colours, words and order of pages. By not starting from the perspective of the fashion system as a whole, but from the simple act of reading a fashion magazine, the reader gains an active role. Having the material in hands, seeing the images, how brands are being represented on the pages, reading the words and tracing the page numbers, but also feeling the paper, the weight and being able to smell the magazine creates an awareness of the magazine as a material object. Something that embodies and communicates the process of value production in fashion. A material representation of fashion’s ephemerality, dream worlds and fantasies.
The readers in the workshop use the material of the original ‘source magazine’ to create a new zine that provides insight into the cultural power and forms of value production that is at the core of fashion media. The existing material is elaborated on by connecting with other material (theories, visuals, artistic explorations). As such, A Magazine Reader focuses on the reader as an active participant – someone with agency rather than a passive consumer – in the process of creating fashion. Reading becomes making.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 24 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Warehouse / Amsterdam
$32.00 - Out of stock
Press & Fold | Notes on making and doing fashion is an independent fashion magazine that aims to explore alternative fashion forms and narratives. The magazine provides a platform for critical fashion practitioners who actively seek out the cracks and fissures in the current fashion system to propose new opportunities for making and doing fashion.
With this Press & Fold issue on Resistance, we show a series of critiques of and propositions on resistance. Many fashion houses and labels have been incorporating concepts of ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’ in their clothing and collections over the years: from the protest T-shirts created by Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett in the 1970s and 1980s to the Chanel Spring/Summer 2015 show, featuring ‘traditional’ models (skinny and mainly white) carrying protest signs emblazoned with texts such as “Ladies First”, “Women’s Rights Are More Than Alright”, and “History Is Her Story” while wearing thousand-euro outfits, and the Dior Fall/Winter 2018 show which attempted to channel the resistance culture amongst students of the 1960s to advocate for women's equality. However, considering fashion’s entanglement with capitalism, we must wonder: how seriously should we take these statements? Rather than a genuine attempt at protest and resistance, the examples mentioned present a palatable and aestheticised version of the action, which allows the consumer to buy into a narrative of activism, rather than actually doing something concrete.
People have been adapting their clothing styles to show signs of protest and resistance for many years without having to buy (into) the fashion industry’s notion of it. From the suffragettes’ white dresses in the early 1900s and the Indian Khadi movement in the 1920s to the black berets of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, from the pink pussy hats of the 2017 Women’s March and #metoo movement to the green bandana of the pro-choice movement in Argentina in 2018, and the COVID facemasks with “I Can’t Breathe” written on them of the 2020 BLM protests: clothing has enabled wearers to show their political affiliations and solidarity with people and movements through visual signs and sign systems. But often, co-option by the fashion industry looms. Missoni created an expensive version of the pink pussy hat for their Fall/Winter 2017 collection, and the Black Panthers black beret appeared on Dior’s catwalk that same season.
This Press & Fold issue on Resistance presents conversations, propositions and imaginations of fashion and resistance outside of fashion’s industrial context. For protest and resistance to become effective, it depends on community to generate, support and further it: with this issue we think further on these ideas of protest, activism and resistance in and around fashion, and not only in terms of clothing, and how it is portrayed in (fashion) imagery, but also in terms of how fashion is structured and organised: is fashion only able to thrive within a capitalist structure, or are there other possibilities as well? What ideas, initiatives and structures can be developed for fashion to become inclusive and generous to all participants? What needs to be resisted and what needs to be embraced? In that sense this issue of Press & Fold, as well as the previous issues, is a world-building exercise, and wants to show what we can do without, and what we need to move fashion towards becoming a generous to all participants involved?
Edited by Hanka van der Voet.
With contributions by Andrea Chehade, Aurélie Van de Peer, Chet Bugter, Chinouk Filique de Miranda, Elena Braida & Francesca Lucchitta, Emma Singleton, Emmeline de Mooij, Femke de Vries & Lyndon Barrois Jr., Floriane Misslin, Gleb Maiboroda, Karolina Janulevičiūtė & Kasia Zofia Gorniak, Line Arngaard & Rosita Kær, Patricia de Vries & Elisa van Joolen, Rainbow Soulclub, Ricarda Bigolin & Kate Meakin, Stepan Lipatov, Tory Van Thompson & Yuchen Chang, Youngeun Sohn.
Cover by Youngeun Sohn. Design by Beau Bertens with assistance of Emma Singleton.
Text editing by Melanie Bomans.
1989, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$40.00 - In stock -
Construction of the Aesthetic intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic of existence: 'not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image.' Editorial Reviews Philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist, Adorno (1903-1969) published this as his first major work in 1933. By then he had been studying Kierkegaard for nearly 20 years and would continue to refer to the life and work of the 19th-century Dane throughout his own intellectual career. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic is the first of three stages in one's interior development, and Adorno concerns himself with revealing the not-always-conscious course by which Kierkegaard came to this formulation. While of importance to scholars of existentialism, intellectual history, and Adorno, this book is not for lay readers.—Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903—1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.
As New copy, first edition, 1989.
2002, English
Softcover, 760 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$60.00 - Out of stock
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and - more than any other subject - music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and, the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.
1995, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pluto Press / London-Sydney
$25.00 - In stock -
Louis Althusser is one of France's foremost intellectuals of the postwar period. Controversial and influential, his writings and reputation have extended beyond the boundaries of his own country to leave a lasting mark on the ideas of others. In turn, Althusser found inspiration in many of Lenin's ideas and, in the first significant study of this association, Majumdar offers an objective reevaluation of Althusser's overt espousal of Leninism during the two decades up to the end of the 1970s. Focusing specifically on Althusser's attempt to rehabilitate Lenin as an academically respectable philosopher, rather than as a politician, Majumdar takes the assessment forward to evaluate Lenin's legacy today. Althusser's neglect of the significant contribution Lenin made to political theory and his subsequent shift away from Leninism at the end of the 1970s are also examined.
Margaret A. Majumdar teaches French Political Thought at the University of Westminster and is a member of the University of Westminster Francophone Africa Research Centre. She co-edits the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and has written widely on politics and philosophy.
Very Good—Fine copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 13 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher's work in 1953. The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser's engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.