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.
2005, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
iUniverse / US
$34.00 - Out of stock
Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. This book provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment.
Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.
Oliveros is recognized as a pioneer in electronic music and a leader in contemporary music as composer, performer, educator and author. Her works are performed internationally and her improvisational performances are documented extensively on recordings, in the literature and on the worldwide web.
2022, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 14 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
A vivid account of life on the margins and Tokyo's 1970s underground culture from a Japanese folk legend.
Tokyo in the 1970s was a magnet for young musicians, poets and painters. Among them was Kazuki Tomokawa, a prolific singer-songwriter from Japan's northern provinces, whose guttural vocals and incisive lyrics earned him the unofficial title of "screaming philosopher."
The stories in this memoir—originally published in 2015 in Japan and now appearing as the first English translation of Tomokawa's writing—are told with a rambler's wit and wisdom, bringing together his memorable reflections on six decades of day labor, drinking, gambling, acting, singing and writing. Figures such as Kan Mikami, Nobuyoshi Araki and Shūji Terayama drift through this down-and-out vagabond's memoir, which observes the turbulence of postwar countercultures and the explosion of Tokyo's underground film and music scenes.
Translated by Daniel Joseph, Introduction by Damon Krukowski
Kazuki Tomokawa (born 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryū Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his debut in 1974, he has released more than 30 albums. He is additionally known as a poet, painter, keirin enthusiast and inimitable drinker. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning 40 years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.
Damon Krukowski is a musician and writer based in Cambridge, MA. His most recent book is Ways of Hearing (MIT Press, 2019) and his latest album is Damon & Naomi's A Sky Record (202020, 2021).
Daniel Joseph is a translator, editor and musician. He holds a master's degree from Harvard University in medieval Japanese literature, and recently contributed translations to Terminal Boredom (Verso, 2021), a collection of stories by science fiction pioneer Izumi Suzuki.
2009, English
Softcover, 9 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$20.00 - In stock -
In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies.
He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.
"Like all of Jacques Rancière's texts, The Future of the Image is vertiginously precise."―Les Cahiers du Cinema
"Ranciere's writings offer one of the few conceptualizations of how we are to continue to resist."—Slavoj Zizek
VG.
2021, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$29.00 - Out of stock
The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?
“It’s clear that Jacques Rancière is relighting the flame that was extinguished for many—that is why he serves as such a signal reference today.” — Thomas Hirschhorn
1970, English
Softcover (staple bound), 84 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$180.00 - Out of stock
Issue number one of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche. Featuring Joseph Beuys on cover. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring James Turrell, Keith Arnatt, Douglas Davis, Luis Fernanda Benedit, Paolo Soleri, Isaac Witkin and William Wegman; "Interview: Carl Andre"; "Interview: Jan Dibbets"; "Retrospective: Richard Long"; "Pace and Process," by Robert Morris; "Portrait: Joseph Beuys," by Skunk-Kender; "Body Works," by Willoughby Sharp; "Museums: MOCA, San Francisco"; "Galleries: Reese Palley, San Francisco"; "Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson," by Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson. Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, designed by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1971, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 114 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue number 2 of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Winter 1971. Cover features Bruce Nauman. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Bas jan Ader, John Perreault, Vito Acconci and Paul Kos; "Interview: Bruce Nauman"; "Interview: Terry Fox"; "Klaus Rinke Retrospective"; "Documents: John Van Saun"; "Documents: Dennis Oppenheim"; "Documents: Richard Serra"; "Yves Klein," by Shunk-Kender; "King for a Day," by Bruce McLean; "112 Greene Street," by Alan Saret and Jeffrey Lew; "Mrs. Burke, I Thought You Were Dead," by William Wegman; "Drifts and Conversions," by Vito Acconci; "A Discussion with Acconci, Fox, and Oppenheim," by Vito Acconci, Terry Fox and Dennis Oppenheim. Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, designed by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1971, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 94 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue three of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Fall 1971. Cover features Barry Le Va. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Jackie Winsor, William Wegman, Allen Ruppersberg, Gilbert & George and Philip Glass; "The Art of Searching," interview with David Tremlett; "Ululations," by Bill Beckley; "Soap," by Joel Fisher; "Jacks," by Gordon Matta-Clark; "Observatory," by Robert Morris; "Christ & Pythagoras," by Italo Scanga; "A Metal Ring Encircling a Tree," interview with Ulrich Ruckriem; "Outcrops," by George Trakas; "Discussions with Barry Le Va," by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp. Edited by Liza Béar, published by Willoughby Sharp, design by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 84 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue number four of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Spring 1972. Cover featuring Lawrence Weiner. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Bill Beckley, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Buren and Hanne Darboven; "Jackie Winsor: An Interview," by Liza Béar; "Sol LeWitt: Page Drawings"; "Howard Fried: The Cheshire Cat," by Liza Béar; "Alice Aycock: Four 36-38 Exposures"; "Stanley Brouwn: Steps"; "Franz Erhard Walther: First Workset"; "Hanne Darboven: Words"; "Walter de Maria" ; "Lawrence Weiner at Amsterdam," by Willoughby Sharp. Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, designed by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 66 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue number five of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Summer 1972. Cover features Yvonne Rainer. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Hiro Kosaka, Trisha Brown and Marcel Broodthaers; "Braco Dimitrijevic: Casual Passers-by I Met"; "Direct Demokratie: Joseph Beuys Talking at Documenta 5"; "Structure and Sensibility: An Interview with Jannis Kounellis," by Willoughby Sharp; "Phil Glass: An Interview in Two Parts" by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp; "Illustrated Time - Proscenium II," by Keith Sonnier, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Richard Landry and Kurt Munkacs; "The Performer as Persona: An Interview with Yvonne Rainer". Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, designed by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 66 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Special issue of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche focusing on the work of Vito Acconci. Includes performance descriptions written by artist and documentary photographs, biography, and bibliography. Interview between the artist and Liza Bear. Sections: "Introduction: Notes on Performing a Space"; "Early Work: Movement Over a Page"; "Early Work: Moving My Body into Place"; "Body as Place - Moving in on Myself, Performing Myself"; "Peopled Space - Performing Myself Though Another Agent"; "Occupied Zone - Moving in, Performing on Another Agent"; "Concentration - Container - Assimilation"; "Power Field - Exchange Points - Transformations"; "Excerpts from Tapes with Liza Bear"; "Biography"; "Bibliography"; "Index." Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, design by Boris Wall Gruphy, Henry Post, Richard Falk.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 84 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue number seven of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Winter Spring 1973, featuring a William Wegman cover. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Chris Burden, Jennifer Bartlett and Urs Lüthi; "The Gold-diggers of '84: An Interview with General Idea" by Willoughby Sharp, Ron Gabe, Jorge Saia, A.A. Bronson, Granada Gazelle, P.J., Noah Dakota, Marcel Idea, Ms. Paige, Myth Honey and Ms. Generality; "Different Strokes for Different Folks: An Interview with Van Schley," and includes a bound in portfolio of loose elements; "Shuck and Jive: An Interview with Lowell Darling" by Willoughby Sharp; "... a kind of Huh? A interview with Edward Ruscha" by Willoughby Sharp; "Man Ray, Do You Want To... An Interview with William Wegman". Edited by Liza Bear, published by Willoughby Sharp, designed by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 448 pages, 15.4 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.
“Transfixed by Prehistory delivers a stunning reconceptualization of the relationship between time and technology in industrial capitalism.” —Devin Fore
“From Cézanne to Smithson via Paleolithic mandibles, Stavrinaki mobilizes an unlikely group of artifacts to explore the core hermeneutic questions of an Anthropocene epoch in which the symbolic and the geological have become intertwined, if not indistinguishable. Through readings that are not just anecdotally rich and methodologically exemplary but also utterly compelling formally, Transfixed by Prehistory delivers a stunning reconceptualization of the relationship between time and technology in industrial capitalism.” —Devin Fore, Princeton University
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 312 pages, 23.2 x 15.9 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist forms of temporality—the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book’s analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art, design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and exhibition documentation.
The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance. The book’s main protagonists are, in order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg, architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the sixty-eighters).
“Adapting the cinematic and temporal processes of flashback and eclipse recruited by Italian artists and film directors in the 1960s, Golan creates her own montage, in which art and politics, history and criticism, as well as the memory and actuality of Fascism become enmeshed through techniques of ‘mimetic subversion.’ The result is a dazzling mosaic that stages contemporary auteurs, like Pistoletto and Antonioni, in conversation with the historical figures of Aby Warburg and Giordano Bruno. Based on this subtle historiographic strategy, Flashback, Eclipse not only challenges prewar and postwar periodizations in Italian art, but also reevaluates the performance of anachrony in the writing of art history.” —Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University
“Romy Golan explores the historical unconscious of 1960s Italian art as she opts for a new kind of temporality that is nonlinear and fractured. With a great command of film history, graphic design, and exhibition history, she presents us with an unprecedented study of Italian artworks experienced through their mediation, suggesting that we ought to look at the filters — the mirror images, hues, and experimental mise-en-page — that obliterate and reveal these works.” —Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Professor of Art History, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York
“This masterful book reveals the richness and complexity of a poly- centric, dispersed, even anarchic art scene — the Italy of the 1960s — that no institution was powerful enough to unify, label, and export. It was known that Italy had been the laboratory of some of the most radical political experiments of the twentieth century, for better or for worse. Here we discover that, around 1968, it delivered the unexpected elements of a new political economy of the arts.” —Patricia Falguières, Professor of Renaissance Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
2021, English
Softcover, 500 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Het Nieuwe Instituut / Rotterdam
$62.00 - Out of stock
The More-than-Human reader brings together texts by writers across a wide array of disciplines that serve to reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings. Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around us, and underfoot.
Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive compendium on the topic (which would be virtually impossible), More-than-Human provides a cross-section of the breadth and vitality of a literary, scientific, and conceptual milieu where multiple strands of work intersect even as they are frequently regarded as belonging to separate disciplinary discourses.
The book includes a collection of thirty-four texts published between 1990 and 2020 and is "dis-organized" into five sections: Assemblages and Proliferations, Queering More-than-Human, Towards More-than-Human Justice, Technologies, With and Through the More-than-Human. The act of reprinting these texts allows readers to explore how anthropological, legal, philosophical, poetic, and scientific inquiries often share common concerns, motivations, and challenges, despite the critical, ontological, and methodological differences in the fields from which they have emerged.
Edited by Andrés Jaque (architect and scholar, Office for Political Innovation / Columbia University, GSAPP), Marina Otero Verzier (director of research, Het Nieuwe Instituut), Lucia Pietroiusti (curator of General Ecology, Serpentine Galleries)
Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, Ramon Amaro, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Georges Canguilhem, Marisol de la Cadena, NASA History Department, Silvia Federici, Scott F. Gilbert, Édouard Glissant, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Myra J. Hird, Kristina Lyons, Patricia MacCormack, John T. Maher, Michael Marder, Timothy Mitchell, Reza Negarastani, Jussi Parikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paul B. Preciado, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Isabelle Stengers, Elly R. Truitt, Anna L. Tsing, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Jason Wallin, Kathryn Yusoff and Joanna Zylinska.
Co-published by Het Nieuwe Instituut, Office for Political Innovation, General Ecology Project at Serpentine Galleries and Manifesta Foundation
2022, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 13 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$52.00 - Out of stock
Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, in which an African American writer is transported from 1970s Los Angeles to the antebellum South to save the life of the child of a slave-owner who is also her ancestor, the concept of the unpayable debt—a debt someone owes but that is not hers to pay—relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation. Focusing on the philosophical basis of these renderings of value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes how coloniality and raciality operate in the juridical, ethical, and symbolic systems that facilitate the expropriation of labor and extraction of land essential for the accumulation of Capital.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is also a Visiting Professor at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London.
2021, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 20.3 x 25.9 cm
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
On the work of three contemporary artist's-book publishers who have developed fresh ways of broaching politics in publishing
This book documents Publishing as Practice, a residency at Ulises—a curatorial platform based in Philadelphia—that explores publishing as an incubator for new forms of editorial, curatorial and artistic practice.
Over the course of two years, three publishers activated Ulises as an exhibition space and public programming hub, engaging the public through workshops, discussions and projects. Residents included Hardworking Goodlooking, the publishing arm of Philippines-based, social-practice platform The Office of Culture and Design; Dominica, an imprint run by Martine Syms dedicated to exploring Blackness as a topic, reference, marker and audience in visual culture; and Bidoun, a non-profit organization focused on art and culture from the Middle East and its diasporas.
The book features a preface by David Senior, an essay by Gee Wesley and Ulises Carrión's 1975 publishing manifesto "The New Art of Making Books," alongside documentation of the works produced.
2022, English
Softcover, 340 pages, 17.8 x 24.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$46.00 - Out of stock
Back in print! And in a more affordable softcover edition.
Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and the zine, DIY, and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue-or even medium-for art. Art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the culture's "linguistic turn." Today, art publishing confronts the internet and the avalanche of language and images that it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. Publishing Manifestos gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.
The book begins in the last century, with texts by Gertrude Stein, El Lissitsky, Oswald de Andrade, and Jorge-Luis Borges. But the bulk of the contributions are from the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on diversity, including contributions from Tauba Auerbach, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ntone Edjabe, Girls Like Us, Karl Holmqvist, Temporary Services, and zubaan. Some contributors take on new forms of production and distribution; others examine the political potential of publishing and the power of collectivity inherent in bookmaking. They explore among other topics, artists' books, appropriation, conceptual writing, non-Western communities, queer identities, and post-digital publishing. Many texts are reproduced in facsimile-including a handwritten "speculative, future-forward newspaper" from South Africa. Some are proclamatory mission statements, others are polemical self-positioning; some are playful, others explicitly push the boundaries. All help lay the conceptual foundations of a growing field of practice and theory.
Contributors
AND Publishing, Oswald de Andrade, Archive Books, Art-Rite, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Michael Baers, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Ricardo Basbaum, Derek Beaulieu, Bernadette Corporation, Riccardo Boglione, Bombay Underground, Jorge Luis Borges, bpNichol, Kate Briggs, Broken Dimanche Press, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Urvashi Butalia, Ulises Carrion, Mariana Castillo Deball, Paul Chan, Chimurenga, Arpita Das, Anita Di Bianco, Guy Debord, Constant Dullaart, Craig Dworkin, Ntone Edjabe, Zenon Fajfer, Marina Fokidis, General Idea, Annette Gilbert, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, Marianne Groulez, Alex Hamburger, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Mahmood Jamal, Tom Jennings, Ray Johnson, David Jourdan, Sharon Kivland, Kione Kochi, Kwani?, Bruce LaBruce, Tan Lin, El Lissitzky, Alessandro Ludovico, Sara MacKillop, Steve McCaffery, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Mosireen, Leon Munoz Santini, Takashi Murakami, Deke Nihilson, Aurelie Noury, Johnny Noxzema, Clive Phillpot, Michalis Pichler, Seth Price, Riot Grrrl, Carlos Soto Roman, Allen Ruppersberg, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Paul Soulellis, Matthew Stadler, Gertrude Stein, Paul Stephens, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic, Katja Stuke, Temporary Services, Nick Thurston, TIQQUN, Elisabeth Tonnard, V. Vale, Eric Watier, Erik van der Weijde, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Weinmayr, Jan Wenzel, Stephen Willats, Gil J Wolman, zubaan
Copublished with Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair
1967, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 23 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$18.00 - Out of stock
William Ivins, probably more than anyone else, has been responsible for the twentieth-century reconsideration of the significance of the significance of graphic techniques. As the first Curator of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he prepared in 1929 a ground-breaking exhibition of prints, of which Notes on Prints is the book form. The work presented ranges in time and style from anonymous religious pieces, to Pollaiuolo and Mantegna, to the German school of the late fifteenth century. At the time of the exhibition, Ivins had written short but pointed introductory comments which accompanied the prints; with minor changes, they also appear here.
Includes the works of Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Mantegna, Hendrick Goltzius, William Blake, Goya, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, William Hogarth, Jacques Callot, Eugène Delacroix, Manet, Degas, Francesco Bartolozzi, Jean Duvet, J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Paul Gauguin, Whistler, Jean Morin, Peter Paul Rubens, Christoffel Jegher, Marcantonio Raimondi, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Lucas van Leyden, Lambrecht Hopfer, Martin Schongauer, and many more.
Average/Fair, worn copy of the 1967 MIT Press edition of this classic title.
2014, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Pm Press / Oakland
$46.00 - Out of stock
The Day the Country Died features author, historian, and musician Ian Glasper (Burning Britain) exploring in minute detail the influential, esoteric, UK anarcho punk scene of the early Eighties.
If the colorful '80s punk bands captured in Burning Britain were loud, political, and uncompromising, those examined in The Day the Country Died were even more so, totally prepared to risk their liberty to communicate the ideals they believed in so passionately.
With Crass and Poison Girls opening the floodgates, the arrival of bands such as Zounds, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Subhumans, Chumbawamba, Amebix, Rudimentary Peni, Antisect, Omega Tribe, and Icons of Filth heralded a brand new age of honesty and integrity in underground music. With a backdrop of Thatcher's Britain, punk music became self-sufficient and considerably more aggressive, blending a DIY ethos with activism to create the perfectly bleak soundtrack to the zeitgeist of a discontented British youth.
It was a time when punk stopped being merely a radical fashion statement, and became a force for real social change; a genuine revolutionary movement, driven by some of the most challenging noises ever committed to tape. Anarchy, as regards punk rock, no longer meant "cash from chaos." It meant "freedom, peace, and unity." Anarcho punk took the rebellion inherent in punk from the beginning to a whole new level of personal awareness.
All the scene's biggest names, and most of the smaller ones, are comprehensively covered with new, exclusive interviews and hundreds of previously unseen photographs.
2018, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 12.7 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, Limbo is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can’t get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors – including the author’s older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world – to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and its opposites. From the Headington Shark to radical behavioural experiments, from life aboard a container ship to Sun Ra’s cosmology, Limbo argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.
Dan Fox is a writer, musician, and co-editor of frieze magazine, Europe’s foremost magazine of art and culture. He is based in New York.
2018, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - In stock -
An essay with the reach and momentum of a novel, Kate Briggs's This Little Art is a genre-bending song for the practice of literary translation, offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking on reading, writing and living with the works of others. Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes's lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter's translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between Andre Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.
2018, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 12.7 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called ‘monsterhood’. Ready or not, here they come...
‘My friend Bruce Hainley had told me about a new book coming out called “This Young Monster,” by Charlie Fox, but I had forgotten all about it until the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in London sent me this beautifully designed French-flap-style paperback original. Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic’s voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is really something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.’
— John Waters, New York Times
‘This Young Monster is a hybrid animal in its own right, suturing biographical essays with stranger things: a “dumb fan letter” to the Beast, a meandering confession from Alice, bombed out after her many years in Wonderland. ...There’s not enough of this sort of playfulness and frank enthusiasm in art criticism.’
— Olivia Laing, New Statesman
‘Surreal and provocative, This Young Monster is both a poignant portrayal of life on the margins, and a joyful salute to a group of people who embraced their misfit status to lead beautifully unconventional lives.’
— Lucy Watson, Financial Times
‘A Rimbaud-like moonbeam in written form.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
‘Charlie Fox writes about scary and fabulous monsters, but he really writes about culture, which is the monster’s best and only escape. He is a dazzling writer, unbelievably erudite, and this book is a pleasure to read. Fox’s essays spin out across galaxies of knowledge. Domesticating the difficult, he invites us as his readers to become monsters as well.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
‘A performance as original and audacious as any of the characters within – it crackles off the page, roaring and clawing its way into the world, powered by a brilliant vagabond electricity.’
— Chloe Aridjis, author of Book of Clouds
‘Charlie Fox is a ferociously gifted critic, whose prose, like a punk Walter Pater’s, attains pure flame. Fox’s sentences, never “matchy-matchy”, clash with orthodoxy; I love how extravagantly he leaps between different cultural climes, and how intemperately – and with what impressive erudition! – he pledges allegiance to perversity. Take This Young Monster with you to a desert island; his bons mots will supply you with all the protein you need.’
— Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Humiliation
‘Charlie Fox has a cardsharp’s diamond-eye for cataloguing the shapeshifting face of the sublime. His essays slither through skins over the warm flesh where so many mythic worlds and realities connect, from that of Twin Peaks to Diane Arbus, Fassbinder to Columbine, which somehow in their amassment ventriloquise a tender, enchanted endnotes for our black present. Put on this mask and breathe.’
— Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000
‘Central to the book is the corporeal home in which we find ourselves, the alien feelings that occur in an obstinate body and the forms of expression born of this contradiction. Fox writes as a surrealist conversationalist. At times the reader is invited to perform a role, somewhere between ventriloquist and historian, talking yourself into a beast.’
— Tank Magazine
‘[This Young Monster] is a paean to the queer transformative power of art.’
— Mònica Tomàs White, Totally Dublin
Charlie Fox is a writer who lives in London. He was born in 1991. His work has appeared in many publications including frieze, Cabinet, Sight & Sound, ArtReview, The Wire and The White Review.
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 12.5 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$36.00 - In stock -
Foreword by Frances Wilson
Boldly combining the highly personal with the brilliantly scholarly, In the Dark Room explores the question of how memory works emotionally and culturally. It is narrated through the prism of the author's experience of losing both his parents, his mother when he was sixteen, his father when he was on the cusp of adulthood and of trying, after a breakdown some years later, to piece things together. Drawing on the lessons of centuries of literature, philosophy and visual art, Dillon interprets the relics of his parents and of his childhood in a singularly original and arresting piece of writing reissued for the first time since its original publication in 2005, and including a new foreword from prize-winning biographer Frances Wilson.
‘It is the deeply emotive nature of his “journey into memory” that presents Dillon with such a formidable task. Yet he not only succeeds in translating his personal experience into a book of immense, disturbingly lucid insight, but in doing so has written a meditation on the nature of memory that, in many places, could compare to the most open-hearted writings of Roland Barthes. It is an amazing achievement in terms of prose style alone.’ — Michael Bracewell, Daily Telegraph
2022, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1930 in an edition of one hundred copies, Gertrude Stein's Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein's circle to create an exceptional artist book exploring written and visual portraiture.
Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity.
With a new introduction by the writer Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Guillaume Apollinaire, Christian Berman, Eugene Berman, Bernard Fay, Georges Hugnet, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, and Kristians Tonny. Originally printed in an edition of one hundred copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.
About the Authors
The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for 40 years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now-celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the "Lost Generation" to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. She and her brother Leo were among the first collectors, patrons, and supporters of many modern and cubist artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Her own work shares the goals of that of her contemporaries-for example, similar to cubist works, her writing shows a proclivity for simplification, repetition, and fragmentation. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein's best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write(1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933] (1956).
Lynne Tillman writes novels, including, most recently, Men and Apparitions (2018); short stories, including the collection The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and essays and art and cultural criticism, including contributions to the catalogues Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2018) and Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work (2017) and publications such as Aperture magazine. Her book-length autobiographical essay, Mothercare , is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing. Tillman is a professor and writer in residence in the English department of The University at Albany. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.