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.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.
Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?
A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
2020, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
In his 1989 book on Balthus - the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century - Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.
Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport's distinct reflections on Balthus's paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.
Arguing that Balthus's figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, "The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin's naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus's, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction." Davenport's critique helps us understand Balthus in our times-something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.
2021, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Virgina Woolf’s collection of writings on visual arts offer a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.
Introduction by Claudia Tobin
Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, her circle, and her relationship with the visual arts, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books’s ekphrasis series collects such essays including “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), “Pictures” (1925), and “Pictures and Portraits” (1920).
These formally inventive texts examine the connection between the literary writer and the visual artist and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and modern art as experienced in picture galleries. In these essays, Woolf looks at the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and the relationship between art and writing.
An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.
2019, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism.
Introduction by Michael Bracewell.
Subtitled Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon Wilde’s own belief in art’s freedom from societal mandates and values, and a quizzical Gilbert. With his playwright’s ear for dialogue, Wilde champions idleness and contemplation as prerequisites to artistic cultivation. Beyond the well-known dictum of art for art’s sake, Wilde’s originality lays argument for the equality of criticism and art. For him, criticism is not subject to the work of art, but can in fact precede it: the artist cannot create without engaging his or her critical faculties first. And, as Wilde writes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own.”
The field of art and criticism should be open to the free play of the mind, but Wilde plays seriously, even prophetically. Writing in 1891, he foresaw that criticism would have an increasingly important role as the need to make sense of what we see increases with the complexities of modern life. It is only the fine perception and explication of beauty, Wilde suggests, that will allow us to create meaning, joy, empathy, and peace out of the chaos of facts and reality.
About the Author
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of London’s most popular writers in the early 1890s. Graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, and later Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde embarked on a hugely successful lecture tour of America in 1882. Two early melodramatic tragedies, Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880) and The Duchess of Padua (1883), were written during these years, paving the way for later stage classics such as A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
Wilde also continued to write prose and criticism for popular daily newspapers such as The Pall Mall Gazette, as well as The Woman’s World, a Victorian women’s magazine that he edited between 1887 and 1889. Though often controversial, his flair for journalism and nose for scandal ensured these writings were widely read. His bold essays on aesthetic philosophy, published together in the collection Intentions (1891), were known for their wit and play with motif. Together with his plays and poems, these writings on art remain important and influential meditations of the nature of art criticism itself.
2021, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.
In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor’s book Cathedrals of France, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way Rodin thought about his art: he saw them as visual metaphors for the human figure, among the finest examples of craftsmanship known to modern man, and as a model for how to live and work-slowly, brick by brick.
Here, Corbett takes the fire at Notre Dame and the concerns over its restoration as an entry point in an exploration of Rodin’s cathedrals. Rodin adamantly opposed restoration, as he felt it often did more damage than the original injury. (Many of the cathedrals that Rodin looks at in his texts were, in fact, bombed during the war.) But while he rails against various restoration efforts as evidence that “we are letting our cathedrals die,” the book, with its tenderly rendered sketches and written portraits, is itself an attempt to preserve these cathedrals. The selection of texts in this volume is a reminder-as is the tragedy of Notre Dame-of why we ought to appreciate these feats of architecture, whether or not they are still standing today.
About the Authors
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is known for an innovative sculptural style in which the traces of his working process are conserved in the works' final form. His career began in Brussels and later shifted to Paris, where he undertook public commissions that dovetailed with academic trends affirming clarity in sculptural language. These afforded him the support to pursue bolder aesthetic experimentation in private. Rodin's attention to partial figures and fragmentation and his privileging of emotive pathos over allegory are hallmarks of his groundbreaking and influential style.
Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, which won the 2016 Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. Her essays and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, New York magazine, and other publications. She wrote the introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Painter (2017), published by David Zwirner Books.
2013, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 14.5 x 21.8 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$29.00 - Out of stock
After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.
2022, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 14.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
Reader is the first anthology to gather Constance DeJong’s diverse body of writing. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, the publication features eighteen works by DeJong, including out-of-print and previously unpublished fiction, as well as texts emanating from her new media sculptures, sound works, video works, and public art commissions.
An influential figure of the 1970s and ’80s downtown New York writing and performance scene, Constance DeJong has channeled time and language as mediums in her work for the last four decades, expanding the possibilities of narrative form and literary genre. From the earliest work collected here—a manuscript of DeJong’s 1982 prose text I.T.I.L.O.E.—to the digital project Nightwriters (2017-18), Reader assembles a range of experimental texts by the artist. The volume includes such works as the 2013 publication and performance, SpeakChamber and the script for Relatives (1988), a duet between a television and a performer made in collaboration with artist Tony Oursler. Never-before-published works including texts created for re-engineered vintage radios, aphorisms commissioned for a Times Square digital billboard, and transcripts for sound works originally installed along the Thames and Hudson rivers are also featured in the book.
Taken together, these works showcase how DeJong has helped define and push the boundaries of language in the visual and performing arts. The artist’s sustained exploration of language blurs the lines between many fields, and DeJong’s work has also had a long life in the literary world. In the late 1970s, she self-published the critically acclaimed novel Modern Love on her short-lived Standard Editions imprint. On the 40th anniversary of the novel’s original publication, the book was published in facsimile form by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, and has gone on to sell over 10,000 copies since its release in 2017.
Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed internationally. Her work has been presented at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at the Dia Art Foundation; The Kitchen, Thread Waxing Space, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1983 she composed the libretto for Satyagraha, the Philip Glass opera, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York; the Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, New York; London; and Seattle. DeJong has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977; Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E. (Top Stories, 1983), and SpeakChamber (Bureau, 2013), and her work is included in the anthologies Up is Up, But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Science, 1974-1991 (NYU Press, 2006); Blasted Allegories (New Museum/MIT, 1987), and Wild History (Tanam Press, 1985).
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 21.9 x 28.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$90.00 - In stock -
Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political.
Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience. Fried compares Menzel's art with that of the 19th-century's two other great realist painters, Courbet and Eakins. Analyzing paintings, drawings and prints from all stages of Menzel's long career, he asserts that the distinctive quality of Menzel's realism is found in his concern with evoking the multi-sensory, fully-embodied relationships of persons with the universe of physical objects, tools and situations.
Fried establishes connections between Menzel's work and a broad array of extra-artistic contexts, among them the writings of the empathy theorists, Kierkegaard on reflection and the everyday, Helmholtz on vision, Fontane's "Effi Briest", Duranty's art criticism, Simmel on modern urban life, E.T.A. Hoffmann's "art of seeing", and Benjamin on traces. He also explores the complex relationship between Menzel's version of "extreme" realism and the exactly contemporary technology of photography. The resulting work establishes Menzel as a key artist of modernity.
Out-of-print, Fine—As New copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
11:11 Press / US
$44.00 - In stock -
LIKE A RECOVERED PYRAMID TEXT IN WHICH ALL THE ANCIENT MYTHS WE THOUGHT WE UNDERSTOOD HAVE BEEN RECAST, EVAN ISOLINE’S DƐVDMVTH IS A DISORIENTING PHANTASMAGORIA OF GENRE-SHATTERING FORMS AND STYLES, TEARING LIKE BLITZKRIEG THROUGH ITS UNHINGED IMAGINATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS SPACE BEHIND ALL TIME. SPASTIC, BATTY, UNRELENTING, ABSURD, PROVOCATIVE, INCANTATORY, AND PROFANE ON EVERY PAGE, CONSIDER MAKING THIS THE LAST GIFT YOU EVER GIVE THE PEOPLE YOU CALL YOUR PARENTS.
—BLAKE BUTLER, AUTHOR OF ALICE KNOTT
DƐVDMVTH is a mythographical-rhetorical work, a book of flowers, of arcadian theophanies & semiopathic assaults. In sur-rendering its totems & mementoes of Western arcana to the agency of their own dissolution, DƐVDMVTH brings the dead into rebellion, constructs a monument to an uninterpretable key in a ruin of obsolete modes.
1997, English / Dutch
Softcover, 500 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
SUN / Nijmegen
$45.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics / Voorbij ethiek en esthetiek, a 500 page book based on the experiences during the formation, realization and evaluation of the exhibition: I + the Other. Art and the Human Condition, in the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam 1994. Edited by Ine Gevers and Jeanne Van Heeswijk.
"Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics has been compiled in the knowledge that it is impossible to avoid a history in which the meaning of ethics and aesthetics has already been fixed. Rooted in tradition, these notions determine the space and scope of contemporary practices such as fine art, exhibition-making and theory. Whenever an attempt is made to cross the dividing lines, for instance in trying to connect art with life, it becomes immediately apparent how unproductive it is to continue to com-ply with structures that are no longer functional in a technology- and information-based, postmodern society. This is particularly true when it becomes clear that notions such as ethics and aesthetics, which are basically idealistic, often have a controlling and, in this sense, limiting function. With this book we want to draw attention to the sometimes subtle, though often radical attempts to escape from the way modernity has divided the world into manageable and relatively safe specializations. The continuing institutionalization, 'museification' and 'mediaization' of our society provides an example. They seem to pull the above-mentioned obstructions even sharper into focus." — from book introduction
With contributions by Oscar van Alphen, Ute Meta Bauer, Yvonne P. Doderer, Marianne Brouwer, Martin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Simon Critchley, Helmut Draxler, Jean Fisher, Avital Geva, Ine Gevers, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Tijs Goldschmidt, Roy Villevoye, Multiple Autorenschaft, Jouke Kleerebezem, Viktor Misiano, Everlyn Nicodemus, Sadie Plant, Martha Rosler, Rob Schroder, Jorinde Seijdel, Barbara Steiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ross Sinclair, and more.
Good copy with some cover wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.9 x 15 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Cute tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, The Cute explores the ramifications of an aesthetic 'of' or 'about' minorness - or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening - on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology is the first of its kind to show how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, and in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but reshape their own artistic practices.
Artists surveyed include Peggy Ahwesh, Cosima Von Bonin, Nayland Blake, Paul Chan, Henry Darger, Adrian Howells, Juliana Huxtable, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dean Kenning, Wyndham Lewis, Jeff Koons, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Tala Madani, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Charlemagne Palestine, Mika Rottenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo Nara
Writers include Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Ian Bogost, Lauren Berlant, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Bridget Minamore, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, John Roberts, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa
is the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard, 2005), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard, 2012), and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Belknap/Harvard, 2020). She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
2020, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 - Out of stock
A collection of writings on art by Barry Schwabsky.
"Many consider Barry Schwabsky to be the critic on painting today, even if he does write copiously on other art forms," write editors Rob Colvin and Sherman Sam in their foreword to this selection of Schwabsky's writings. Written since the turn of the millennium, the texts in The Oberver Effect include meditations on the broader context of painting today alongside reflections on such well-known American painters as Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, and Dana Schutz, as well as practitioners from Europe and beyond—Bernard Frize, Tal R, and Ha Chonghyun among them. As Colvin and Sam point out, the book "documents a dialogue between abstraction and the image" in which "images serve less to represent their described subject than to articulate the sort of painting each one desires to be."
2022, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
In these essays and conversations, Daniel Birnbaum explores what conceptual artist Daniel Buren referred to as the ‘frames of art’. As a director of institutions, Birnbaum has organized events inside and outside some of the most significant art institutions in Europe, including the Venice Biennale, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Moderna Museet and the Centre Pompidou. Like few other curators he has pushed the boundaries of the studio, the exhibition, and the museum in an attempt to find new ways to ‘frame’ art. This volume contains examples of curatorial approaches to education, exhibition-making and the presentation of collections.
Daniel Birnbaum, born 1963 in Stockholm, is a Swedish art curator and an art critic.
1986, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
ICA / Boston
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of this long out-of-print seminal catalogue published by MIT Press on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the ICA Boston in 1986, curated by Yve-Alain Bois and Elisabeth Sussman.
The six illustrated essays by some of today's most noted art historians and critics which comprise Endgame provide the first comprehensive discussion of reference in contemporary art and the commodification of the art object. The interrrelated concerns of painters Sherry Levine, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe — who ironically adapt the visual strategies of earlier modern artists—and those of sculptors Jon Kessler, General Idea, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, and Haim Steinbach—who use consumer objects and their mode of representation as the raw material of their sculpture—are the sources of the authors' varied and acute arguments on this theme of the political and social economy of the image.
Contents: The return of Hank Herron / by Thomas Crow; Painting, the task of mourning / by Yve-Alain Bois; The last picture show / by Elisabeth Sussman; Modern leisure / by David Joselit; The future of an illusion, or, The contemporary artist as cargo cultist / by Hal Foster; Notes on new media theater / by Bob Riley. Includes an exhibition checklist. Preface by David A. Ross
Good copy, with some tanning to cover, light wear/marking.
2022, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$55.00 - Out of stock
We’re all trapped. No matter how hard you try to delete apps from your phone, the power of seduction draws you back. Doom scrolling is the new normal of a 24/7 online life. What happens when your home office starts to feel like a call center and you’re too fried to log out of Facebook? We’re addicted to large-scale platforms, unable to return to the frivolous age of decentralized networks. How do we make sense of the rising disaffection with the platform condition? Zoom fatigue, cancel culture, crypto art, NFTs and psychic regression comprise core elements of a general theory of platform culture. Authored by media theorist Geert Lovink and designed by Irene Stracuzzi, ‘Stuck on the Platform’ is a relapse-resistant story about the rise of platform alternatives, built on an understanding of the digital slump.
2016, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.7 x 20.2 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors--models, as he called them--and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career, Bresson dedicated himself to making movies in which nothing is superfluous and everything is always at stake.
Notes on the Cinematograph distills the essence of Bresson's theory and practice as a filmmaker and artist. He discusses the fundamental differences between theater and film; parses the deep grammar of silence, music, and noise; and affirms the mysterious power of the image to unlock the human soul. This book, indispensable for admirers of this great director and for students of the cinema, will also prove an inspiration, much like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, for anyone who responds to the claims of the imagination at its most searching and rigorous.
2010, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - In stock -
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. "In Danger" is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and through the mid-'70s, Pasolini's writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and where journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at the age of fifty-three; "In Danger" includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death.
Jack Hirschman (1933 – 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translated nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
2002, English
Softcover, 38 pages, 11.6 x 16 cm
Published by
Post Apollo Press / US
$28.00 - Out of stock
In/somnia explores fissures within words as places where thought enters. Sleepless sleepers, we dream among ever more complex and hallucinatory realitites: `in/tense/in/season'—Rosmarie Waldrop.
2020, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 14 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
Shifting the Silence breaks the taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short, unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan grapples with the breadth of her life at ninety-five, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own approaching death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, the ongoing war in Syria, Mars missions, and Adnan’s view of the sea out of her window in Brittany in a poignant, often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.
“When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? Of course, nothing.” Adnan’s prose-poetic rumination on death would strike a chord at any time, but it feels especially apt in this moment of protracted grief. Peppered with questions—“There are so many islands I dreamed of visiting, where have they gone?”—Adnan’s lamentations are recursive and soothing. To live is to die, and the poets can ease the passage. - Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
1977, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1977 edition of this essential masterpiece of jazz history by renowned photographer and music historian, Val Wilmer.
In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture.
Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra in their broader political and social context, Wilmer evokes an era of extraordinary innovation and experimentation that continues to inspire musicians today.
As vital now as when it was first published in 1977, As Serious As Your Life is the essential story of one of the most dynamic musical movements of the twentieth century.
About the author
Val Wilmer is an internationally acclaimed photographer, journalist, author and black music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. In that time she has interviewed and photographed almost every significant figure in post-war jazz, blues and R&B, from Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler via Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin. As a photographer, her work features in the permanent collections of the British Library, the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery; as a writer and historian, she has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography and the New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz. She lives in London.
Good copy, solid binding.
2019, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 11 x 16 cm
Published by
Ignota / UK
$15.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Donna J. Haraway
Illustrated by Lee Bul
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.
2010, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.6 x 15.2 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$38.00 - Out of stock
Derek Jarman’s stunning account of his life and art
From his sexual awakening in postwar England to life in the sixties and beyond, Derek Jarman tells his life story with the in-your-face immediacy that became his trademark style in his films and writing. Accompanied by photographs of Jarman, his friends, lovers, and inspirations, the candid accounts in Dancing Ledge provide intimate and vivid glimpses into his life and times.
The clarity with which Derek Jarman offered up his life and the living of it, particularly since the epiphany—I can call it nothing less—of his illness was a genius stroke, not only of provocation, but of grace.—Tilda Swinton
2009, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$39.00 - Out of stock
This text is the iconoclastic and controversial filmmaker Derek Jarman's candid journals from 1989 to 1990. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.
Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living.
'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' — Hans Ulrich Obrist
2015, English
Softcover, 96 pages. 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Fordham University Press / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
"Like Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Hervé Guibert's hospitalization diary speaks with moonlit clarity about the threshold between life and death; with this heartbreaking and exemplary book Guibert has earned literary immortality."—Wayne Koestenbaum, Author and Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY
By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed.
This new edition includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the quotidian aspects of terminal illness.
Translated by Clara Orban
Afterword by Todd Meyers
Introduction by David Caron
Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was a French journalist and photographer before becoming a prominent literary figure in the early 1980s. He published nearly two dozen works in his lifetime, several of which deal with HIV/AIDS.
David Caron is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV.
Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.
Clara Orban is Professor and Chair of French and Italian at DePaul University.