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.
2016, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$69.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
The role of photo agencies remains a blind spot in the history of photography. Emerging in the beginning of the 20th century to “satisfy the picture-hunger of modern man” (Tschichold), they transformed photography into a commodity. As catalysts for the picture market and through the creation of systematic collections, these companies shaped our western visual culture. The 1920s, 1930s and 1990s, in particular, ushered a paradigm shift in the economy of the medium, marked by major technological developments and the rise of new markets. Taking the example of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis – one of the world’s largest photo agencies, founded by Bill Gates – the book Banking on Images inquires into the criteria used in selecting these images, the way in which the value of a commercial “image bank” is determined, and the concept of photography that lies behind it.
2016, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 15.24 x 20.23 cm
Published by
Kadist Art Foundation / San Francisco
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit / Detroit
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$65.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
This publication documents the exhibition “United States of Latin America,” held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in collaboration with the Kadist Art Foundation. Bringing together their shared and ongoing engagement with artistic practices from Latin America, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra have assembled one of the most significant contemporary survey’s of recent art from the region.
Hoffmann and de la Barra’s project draws attention not only to the geographic territories of Latin America itself, but also to its relation within the wider scope of the Americas, and its position in a global artistic context. This book offers a framework for critical insight into artworks dealing with crucial social, industrial, or ecological concerns, and also for interrogating the very categories and terminologies used to construct the notion of Latin America.
Edited by Jens Hoffmann. Contributions by Stefan Benchoam, Fernanda Brenner, Eduardo Carrera, Jens Hoffmann, Pablo Léon de la Barra, Camila Marambio, Heidi Rabben, Marina Reyes Franco
This catalogue includes a conversation between Stefan Benchoam, Fernanda Brenner, Eduardo Carrera, Camila Marambio, and Marina Reyes Franco (moderated by Heidi Rabben), a glossary, a reflective essay by Hoffmann “after the fact,” and images from the exhibition.
Copublished between Sternberg Press, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Kadist Art Foundation
Design by Jon Sueda/Stripe SF
2016, English
Softcover, (w. dust jacket), 430 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Future Imperfect critically examines the role played by cultural institutions in producing present-day and future contexts for the production, dissemination, and reception of contemporary art in the Middle East and North Africa. It offers historical contexts for discussions that have become increasingly urgent in recent years—the role of culture in a time of conflict and globalization—and an in-depth critique of the state of cultural institutions in an age of political upheaval, social unrest, exuberant cultural activity, ascendant neoliberal forms of privatization, social activism, and regional uncertainty. Based on collective input from numerous contributors and interlocutors, this volume brings together internationally renowned academics, critics, activists, filmmakers, artists, and other independent cultural practitioners to consider how new infrastructures and institutions can effectively emerge within such fraught and dynamic contexts. What is needed in terms of infrastructure for cultural production today, and how, crucially, can we speculatively propose new infrastructures and institutions in the context of present realities?
Contributions by Leila Al-Shami, Monira Al Qadiri, Hoor Al-Qasimi, Anahi Alviso-Marino, AMBS Architects, Stephanie Bailey, Eray Çaylı, Rachel Dedman, Elizabeth Derderian, Anthony Downey, Karen Exell, Reema Salha Fadda, Wafa Gabsi, Hadia Gana, Adalet R. Garmiany, Baha Jubeh, Suhair Jubeh, Amal Khalaf, Kamel Lazaar, Jens Maier-Rothe, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Doreen Mende, Lea Morin, Jack Persekian, Wided Rihana Khadraoui, Rijin Sahakian, Gregory Sholette, Tom Snow, Lois Stonock, Nile Sunset Annex, Ania Szremski, Christine Tohme, Toleen Touq, Williams Wells, Ala Younis, Yasmine Zidane
Visual Culture in the Middle East Vol. 3
Supported by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation
Design by Zak Group
2014, English
Hardcover, 528 pages (350 color and b/w ills.), 17 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$89.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print, now collectible.
Sweet Sixties Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-Garde Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts in Europe, the Middle East, western and central Asia, Latin America, and northern Africa. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.
In the 1960s, the landscapes and cities of protectorates and former colonies from India to the Maghreb, from the Soviet Republics to the new states in the southern hemisphere were replete with the spirit and forms of modernity, forms that transmogrify and then dissolve into the thin air of the vernacular. The star maps that are used to survey these artificial worlds often serve to navigate the boundaries between private and public domains. The world full of eerie displacements, gestures of the uncanny, and the constellation of the real exists in a plethora of doubled forms. Question marks and meanderings are all part of this picture. Instruments of communication emerge and are locked away before they have a chance to become immaterial, disappear, and corrode in postmodernity.
The air of the 1960s echoes a spirit of emancipation. And the newly arising art-scapes are interspersed with double agents: diasporas bring their academies; the streams between Soviet, North and South American, Western European, Non-Aligned, etc., are full of interlocutions, hidden pathways, and narratives of trade routes beyond the seemingly stable hegemonies of the blocs.
The stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde, whose silhouettes have yet to be found on the walls of the Western canon, are the theme of this publication.
As New with some general shelf wear.
2013, English
Softcover, 96pages, 16.5 x 23 cm
Published by
Book Works / London
$30.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
‘I think: Protect me from people who want to protect me; but more, save me from people who know what upsets others.’ – Lynne Tillman
Issue 6 of The Happy Hypocrite challenges the restraining notions found in art and writing about who and what can and cannot speak. What can and cannot be said or thought. In part a response to Kafka – to that which we don’t know has damaged us – freedom is presented as an important and urgent concept, and a complicated word, in which and beside which hypocrisy also resides. (Hypocrisy can be construed as a freedom). The Happy Hypocrite offers its pages to ingenious fictional, nonfictional, and visual responses to the various meanings of ‘freedom’.
There is a range of new contributions, from Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Gabriel Coxhead, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El Rashidi, Chloé Cooper Jones, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Robin Coste Lewis, the late Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Abdellah Taïa, an interview between Lynne Tillman and Thomas Keenan, a cover by Susan Hiller, and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.
Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer and critic based in New York. Her sixth novel, Men and Apparitions, was published by Soft Skull Press 2018; Peninsula Press (UK) 2020; her previous novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was said to be, by The Millions, one of the best books of the new millennium. Other novels include Haunted Houses and No Lease on Life, a National Book Critics Circle finalist in Fiction. Her most recent collection of stories and essays, her fifth, is The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (Semiotexte). Her stories and essays appear frequently in magazines and artists’ books/museum catalogues, most recently: on Stephen Shore, On Kawara, Anne Collier, Andy Warhol, Susan Hiller, Laurie Simmons, Steve Locke, Amy Sillman, and Kaitlin Maxwell et al. She lives in New York.
2016, English / German
Softcover, 186 pages, 20 x 26 cm
Published by
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Luca Lo Pinto, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Anne-Claire Schmitz, with contributions by Saâdane Afif, Jacques André, Marie Angeletti, Thomas Bayrle, Barbara Bloom, Herbert Brandl, Andrea Büttner, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Camille Henrot, Michaela Maria Langenstein, Pierre Leguillon, Hanne Lippard, Maurizio Nannucci, G. T. Pellizzi, Max Renkel, Michael Riedel, Hubert Scheibl, Yann Sérandour, John Stezaker, Johannes Wohnseifer; with images by Marie Angeletti
Photographs, books, and knickknacks: artists collect a variety of objects. While artists generate personal collections, which often address different formal, aesthetic, or conceptual concerns, it is difficult to separate this activity from their artistic practices. Over time, whether intended or not, such accumulations of items may become works of art.
Individual Stories considers the collection as a portrait of its collector and also as an artistic method—as a process rather than an end result. The act of collecting is multifarious—it can be an expression of curiosity, a desire to transform things that have been discovered, or a systematic approach to certain objects in the world. This catalogue is a compilation of individual collections that could not be more different.
Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien to document the exhibition “Individual Stories: Collecting as Portrait and Methodology,” Kunsthalle Wien, June 26–October 11, 2015.
2017, English / Simplified Chinese
Hardcover (cloth binding), 204 pages, 16.7 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) / Shanghai
$79.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Edited by Li Qi
Texts by Larys Frogier, Heman Chong, Li Qi, Ken Liu, Xiaoyu Weng, Pauline J. Yao
The catalogue for Heman Chong’s first solo museum exhibition in mainland China, at the Rockbund Art Museum, provides an insightful and critical look into the Singaporean artist’s recent practice. To address the centrality of language, books, and the act of reading in Chong’s oeuvre, this publication features newly commissioned texts from a variety of contributors: an introduction by museum director Larys Frogier, and essays by the exhibition’s curator Li Qi, Hong Kong–based curator and critic Pauline J. Yao, and New York–based curator Weng Xiaoyu. These are rounded out with a piece of semifiction by Ken Liu, Boston-based lawyer, science-fiction writer, and translator, who played a central role in realizing Legal Bookshop (Shanghai), one of the works featured in the exhibition.
Ifs, Ands, or Buts is illustrated with images of the entirety of works included in the show at Rockbund Art Museum reproduced alongside documentation of Chong’s correspondence and collaboration with Liu, as well as a section dedicated to the humorous tabloid stories from Chong’s work Papaya Daily.
Copublished by Sternberg Press with Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai, on the occasion of the exhibition “Heman Chong: Ifs, Ands, or Buts,” January 23–May 3, 2016.
Design by Wang Jiayi
1987, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
A&D / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
April 1987 of London's esteemed Art & Design magazine (A.D.), a special issue dedicated to "The Post Modern Object". Features include : Peter Fuller — Towards a New Nature for the Gothic; Michael Collins — Post-Modern Design; Hugh Cumming — The Designed Object: An International Survey; Charles Jencks — Symbolic Objects; Volker Fischer — Post-Modernism and Consumer Design; Geoffrey Broadbent — Functionalism versus Post-Modernism; Stuart Durant — Proto Post-Modernism; Hans Hollein — Post-Modern Performance Art; and much more. Profusely illustrated throughout with the work of Hans Hollein, Memphis, Robert Venturi, Ettore Sottsass, Aldo Rossi, Tadao Ando, Michael Graves, George Sowden, Mario Botta, Arata Isozaki, Matteo Thun, Shuji Hisada, Beppe Caturelli, Michele de Lucchi, Stanley Tigerman, SITE, Helmut Jahn, Landes and Rang, Charles Jencks, Richard Meier, Robert Stern, Alessi, Takefumi Aida, Eva Jiricna, Studio 65, Paolo Portoghesi, Oscar Tusquets, Terry Farrell, Tomas Taveira, Om Ungers, Swid Powell Ceramics, Lee Payne, and more...
"This issue of Art & Design takes a critical look at the controversial area of product design, a subject which does not often receive the same serious attention as painting or sculpture, although it probably concerns more people, on a day-to-day basis, than the fine arts. The Post-Modern Object focuses in particular on developments over the past few years by designers who have pulled away from the Modernist preoccupation with functionalism as an aesthetic and created a wide range of objects — from sofas to jewellery, cutlery to kettles — which are highly original and decorative. Included in this Profile are works by celebrated designers such as Ettore Sottsass, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi and Hans Hollein."
Good ex-libris copy with light associated markings, tanning and light wear to covers.
1990, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 8 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
A&D / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
"New Art International" from 1990, a special "Art & Design Profile" edition from London's A.D. magazine. Articles/essays by Thomas Lawson, Victor Burgin, Germano Celant, Robert Rosenblum, Donald Kuspit, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, and many more. Profusely illustrated throughout with the work of Haim Steinbach, Cady Noland, Zoe Leonard, Jenny Holzer, Allan McCollum, Jannis Kounellis, Cindy Sherman, Mario Merz, Barbara Kruger, Susana Solano, Ashley Bickerton, Larry Johnson, David Salle, Peter Halley, Robert Longo, John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, Laurie Simmons, Luciano Fabro, Christian Boltanski, Thomas Schütte, Günther Förg, Annette Lemieux, Gilbert & George, Victor Burgin, Jeff Koons, Tim Rollins + KOS, Giuseppe Penone, James Lee Byars, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Thérèse Oulton, Kryzstof Wodiczko, and many more....
Very Good copy, light tanning to cover and some bumping to bottom back cover edge.
2012, English
Hardcover with dust jacket, 192 pages, 17.4 x 23.2 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements.
The 1970 IDCA marked a turning point in design thinking. The conference’s theme, “Environment by Design,” brought together venerable figures of modern design in the United States, including Eliot Noyes, George Nelson, and Saul Bass; environmental collectives and activist architects from Berkeley such as the Environmental Action Group, Sim Van der Ryn, and Ant Farm; as well as a group of French designers and sociologists, among them Jean Aubert, Lionel Schein, and Jean Baudrillard. The conference quickly escalated into a site of unresolvable conflict about communication formats and the potential role of design for environmental practices in a rapidly changing society.
The ensuing decade heralded the development of an interactive navigation system, which used the same Colorado resort town as its test site. The Aspen Movie Map—initiated by MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor to the Media Lab) and partially funded by the US Department of Defense—is an image-based surrogate travel system using footage filmed in Aspen. Meant to prepare users for quick orientation in places they have never been to, the Aspen Movie Map was a seminal prototype for today’s military and consumer navigation systems.
The Aspen Complexdocuments two versions of Beck’s exhibition—at London’s Gasworks and Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery—and brings together yet unpublished archival material and new research on the 1970 IDCA and the Aspen Movie Map.
With essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Felicity D. Scott, and Alice Twemlow
2018, English
Softcover, 139 pages, 14 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
In October 2014, Paul McCarthy’s work entered the public space of Paris. To accompany the Monnaie de Paris’s exhibition of his Chocolate Factory, a workshop producing chocolate trees and Santas, McCarthy installed the massive inflatable sculpture Tree at Place Vendôme. The sculpture’s shape was at once reminiscent of a sex toy, a Christmas tree, and a Hans Arp artwork. It caused a public outcry, the artist was attacked, and the work vandalized and ultimately removed. McCarthy’s intervention, however, became a symbol for artistic freedom.
A program was organized over the course of the Monnaie de Paris exhibition with preeminent collaborators, scholars, artists, curators, and writers, all engaged in the discussion of the possibilities of art after the assault on the artist. The participants confronted themselves with the sculpture while being given an open space to unveil their vision and research. Paul in Paris / Paris in Paul brings together these conversations, which reflect on McCarthy’s work and present a map of the city’s intellectual debates. From the fabrication of chocolate to the symbolism of coins, and from the creative process to the meaning of life, they reveal the vitality of independent thought and consider the impact of the artist’s work today.
Contributions by Michel Amandry, Philippe Artières, Bernard Blistène, Barbara Carnevali, Emanuele Coccia, Dennis Cooper, Sylvie Damiens, Tristan Garcia, Donatien Grau, Paul McCarthy, ORLAN, Chiara Parisi, Anaël Pigeat, Israel Rosenfield, Neville Rowley, Olivier Zahm
2020, English
Softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - In stock -
These are the reviews from 2018, the second year of Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
As readers engage with this second year of reviews, they might see a group of art writers coming to grips with the particular limitations and opportunities of the weekly review format and even the particularities of its online delivery. Some will track the successive mentions of the same artist or gallery space, seeing what different writers make of them. Others will follow the progress of individual writers, finding and developing their own style and argument.
Contributions by Amelia Winata, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Benison Kilby, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Eva Birch, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hester Lyon, Jane Eckett, Kate Warren, Nicholas Tammens, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Shelley Mcspedden, Sophie Knezic, Tiarney Miekus, Tim Alves, Victoria Perin.
2020, English
Softcover, 241 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - In stock -
The third hardcopy Memo publication, collecting the 52 reviews from 2017 published by Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
Contributions by Amelia Winata, Aneta Trajkoski, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Brendan Casey, Chelsea Hopper, David Homewood, David Wlazlo, Ella Cattach, Elyssia Bugg, Francis Plagne, Giles Fielke, Helen O'toole, Jane Eckett, Luke Smythe, Maddee Clark, Marnie Edmiston, Matthew Linde, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Sophie Knezic, Stephen Palmer, Victoria Perin.
2020, English
Softcover, 269 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Monash Art Projects / Victoria
$25.00 - Out of stock
These are the reviews from 2020, the third year of Melbourne's Memo Review. Memo Review is Melbourne's only weekly art criticism, publishing reviews of "a broad variety of art exhibitions at public art museums, commercial galleries and smaller artist-run spaces in Melbourne, offering new critical perspectives from an up-and-coming younger generation of Australian art scholars, writers and artists."
"There is no getting around it: 2020 was the year of COVID. It was something that all kinds of cultural activities tried to make sense of. We could quote, to show it has all apparently happened before, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year at you. Or, like everybody else, you could read some prominent philosopher or cultural theorist try to make sense of it. Slavoj Žižek wrote no fewer than two books on the subject during the year, which made us realise that at least he was doing what he usually does during lockdown."
"And we for our part at Memo Review also did what we usually do. Here are the forty-seven reviews we published during the year—a year when virtually every show we reviewed was only available online."
Contributions by Amelia Wallin, Amelia Winata, Amy May Stuart, Anna Parlane, Audrey Schmidt, Benison Kilby, Bianca Winataputri, Cameron Hurst, Chelsea Hopper, David Wlazlo, Giles Fielke, Helen Hughes, Hester Lyon, Jane Eckett, Kate Meakin, Levi Mclean, Lisa Radford, Luke Smythe, Paris Lettau, Philip Brophy, Rex Butler, Robert Schubert, Sarinah Masukor, Tara Heffernan, Victoria Perin, Vincent Le.
2021, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$44.00 - Out of stock
It's time to recognize Kathy Acker as one of the great postwar American writers. Over the decades readers have found a punk Acker, a feminist Acker, a queer Acker, a kink Acker, and an avant-garde Acker. In Philosophy for Spiders, McKenzie Wark adds a trans Acker. Wark recounts her memories of Acker (with whom she had a passionate affair) and gives a comprehensive reading of her published and archived works. Wark finds not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy's purview. As Wark shows, Acker's engagement with topics such as masturbation, sadism, body-building, and penetrative sex are central to her distinct phenomenology of the body that theorizes the body's relation to others, the city, and technology.
2020, English
Hardcover (clothbound in slipcase), 384 pages, 23 x 30 cm
Published by
The Shed / US
$130.00 - Out of stock
"Agnes Denes, the queen of land art, made one of New York's greatest public art projects ever in 1982. Now, the world might be catching up with her." — Karrie Jacobs, New York Times
Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates accompanies the largest exhibition of the artist's work in New York to date, held at The Shed in fall 2019 as part of the arts space's opening season. Presenting more than 130 works, this comprehensive publication, presented in an embossed slipcase, spans the 50-year career of the path-breaking artist dubbed "the queen of land art" by the New York Times, famed for her iconic Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), for which she planted a two-acre wheatfield in Lower Manhattan on the Battery Park Landfill, in the shadow of the then recently erected Twin Towers.
A major undertaking, this superb hardcover catalog includes a comprehensive text by the exhibition's curator, Emma Enderby, an interview with Denes by Hans Ulrich Obrist, essays by prominent scholars and curators including Caroline A. Jones, Lucy R. Lippard and Timothy Morton that examine Denes' multifaceted practice in new ways, writings by the artist and reflections by curators who have worked with Denes over the course of her career. New works by Denes commissioned by The Shed for the exhibition are presented in a special insert.
Budapest-born, New York-based artist Agnes Denes (born 1931) rose to international attention in the 1960s and 1970s as a leading figure in conceptual, environmental and ecological art. A pioneer of several art genres, she has created work in many mediums, utilizing various disciplines--such as science, philosophy, linguistics, ecology and psychology—to analyze, document and ultimately aid humanity.
"Denes's ecological artworks, which she commenced in the late 1960s, are just as prescient as this early diagnosis of climate catastrophe. Over the ensuing decades, she has been called a visionary. But such encomiums risk eliding the depth and complexity they celebrate. Denes has never been just one thing." — Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Artforum
1998, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 704 pages, 21.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
ASCII Co. / Tokyo
$140.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first edition of this bible on Electronic Music in Japan (1955-1981) by author and analogue synth collector Yuji Tanaka, published in 1998, who later also published the great follow-up "Electronic Music in the Lost World". At over 700 pages, this is the heaviest study we've ever seen on the development of electronic music in Japan, from the composers around the NHK experimental music studio (Toshiro Mayuzumi, Makoto Moroi, Minao Shibata...), the 1970 Osaka Expo, Tomita, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) and Haruomi Hosono, Toru Takemitsu, Flied Egg, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yuji Takahashi, Phew, and all between. As much about the art as the technology, this extensive chronology and discography is richly illustrated with 100s of images of LPs, but also the analogue synths and the studios themselves, making for a valuable resource on both the artists and engineers that pushed the boundaries of electric composition in Japan across avant-garde, library, ambient, fusion, soundtrack, prog, pop, disco... Includes loads of international content for context within the timeline (Xenakis, Stockhausen, Weather Report, White Noise, Ron Geesin, Tangerine Dream...) A huge labor of electronic love laid out on Wasp yellow paper stock throughout, including the original Synthesizer graphic dust jacket and obi. Warning : all text are in Japanese!
Very Good copy with original DJ and Obi-strip.
2020, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$49.00 - Out of stock
Rab-Rab Press announces the publication of Free Jazz Communism, a new book actualising Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962. Including archive material and documents, commissioned theoretical and historical texts, and interviews, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta contextualizes politics of free jazz music in light of global decolonisation movements, anti-war activism, structures of racial capitalism, and forms of avant-garde music.
By focusing on concerts of Shepp–Dixon Quartet, leading avant-garde jazz musicians from the US, in the socialist anti-colonial festival in Helsinki, the book is introducing complexities in the usual Cold War stories about the sixties, and pictures politics of jazz as something transcending boundaries of nation-state and capitalist market regulations.
Apart from the theoretical and historical overview by its editors, the book includes testimonies of the collective and international spirit of the 1962 Youth Festival, translated documents from Finnish press, a new interview with Archie Shepp, commissioned text by Jeff Schwartz on the historical context of political engagement of free jazz musicians, and reproduction of three hard-to-find texts by Shepp.
The book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
Edition of 750 copies. 2nd Edition.
1971, English
Softcover, 198 pages, 20.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Natural History Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
"... may well be one of the most important books of the century, a turning point in man's view and treatment of his environment." — Wolf Von Eckardt
1971 popular paperback edition of the prescient and pioneering Design with Nature by Ian L. McHarg, a publication that signalled the high-water mark of the ecological movement in the United States.
"McHarg, an outspoken critic of the traditional notion that urban development must be imposed upon the landscape, regardless of the ecological consequences, in Design with Nature, proves that necessary man-made structures can be accommodated within the existing natural order. Here are the foundations for a civilization that will replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating and disappearing before our eyes. In presenting us with a vision of organic exuberance and human delight, which ecology and ecological design promise to open up for us, McHarg revives the hope for a better world."
No one, before or since McHarg, has done more to shape the culture of landscape architecture and nothing better exemplifies the scale and scope of his revolutionary impact than his 1969 book Design with Nature. This landmark study was published in 1969 amid a ferment of activism and environmental consciousness erupting throughout the US. Organizers and activists were building a movement to confront the ecological crises of the time—corporate pollution, rampant suburbanization, industrial agriculture—and McHarg’s book quickly pushed him to the center of the zeitgeist. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Design with Nature helped instigate what’s become known as the environmental decade—a series of political victories that produced landmark legislation including the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (better known as the Superfund program, 1980), as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970).
With successive periods of devolutionary politics and the rise of neoliberalism that would undo many of the hard-won environmental victories of the 1970s through mass privatization and monetization of resources, these reversals in national policy and design ideology ultimately sank the world Design with Nature’s philosophy endeavored to build. Today the teachings of Design with Nature scream out with an urgency more relevant than ever before. Warnings have become alarm bells for drastic action.
Ian L. McHarg (1920 – 2001) was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. McHarg was one of the most influential persons in the environmental movement who brought environmental concerns into broad public awareness and ecological planning methods into the mainstream of landscape architecture, city planning and public policy. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning. In this book, he set forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in geographic information systems.
Average to good copy. General cover wear and chipping/bump to bottom of spine.
1979, English
Softcover, 159 pages, 28 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Published by Abrams in 1979, Images of Horror and Fantasy by art historian Gert Schiff expanded on a major group exhibition guest curated by Schiff at the Bronx Museum in 1977. The resulting publication is a perceptive critical and psychological analyses of a variety of nineteenth-and twentieth-century art that "unfolds simultaneously on the level of historical and social reality and on the level of dreams. Its purpose is to expose some of the principal anxieties of modern man and their resolution in utopian reveries and escapist fantasies." Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w throughout with the works of Alfred Kubin, James Ensor, George Grosz, Paul Thek, Sibylle Ruppert, Henry Fuseli, Paul Delvaux, Nancy Grossman, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Fernand Khnopff, Rudolph von Ripper, Max Klinger, H. R. Giger, Jonah Kinigstein, Edward Keinholz, Jean Delville, Lucas Samaras, Miriam Beerman, Willem de Kooning, Man Ray, Oskar Kokoschka, Salvador Dali, Paolo Soleri, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, Otto Dix, Pablo Picasso, Philip Evergood, William Blake, Giorgio de Chirico, Ivan Albright, Yves Tanguy, Paul Klee, Jasper Johns, Germaine Richier, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Rene Magritte, Illya Repin, Antoine Wiertz, Odilon Redon, Edward Burra, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Thomas Cole, Léon Frédéric, Matthias Grünewald, Rico Lebrun, Bruce Connor, Edvard Munch, and many more.
Gert Schiff (1926 — 1990, b. Oldenburg, Germany) was an art historian, critic, lecturer and professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. A specialist in the Romantic movement, particularly the work of Henry Fuseli and William Blake, Mr. Schiff was also very much involved with 20th-century art, organising many major exhibitions around his interests whilst authoring important studies on the arts from his dwellings at the Chelsea Hotel.
Very Good copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 13 x 20 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$52.00 - Out of stock
This publication presents a collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman, who was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music. The book investigates his legacy beyond the predominantly Western musicological format of the tonal or harmonic and the framework of what is today understood as minimalist music. By trying to complicate, deny or expatiate on the notions of the harmonic, tonal hierarchy, the triadic, or even the tonal centre, Eastman's compositions explore strategies and technologies of attaining the atonal. One might be tempted to see Eastman in the legacy of Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and others, but here too, it is worth shifting the geography of minimal tendencies and minimalism in music. It is worth listening and reading Eastman's music within the scope of what Oluwaseyi Kehinde describes as the application of chromatic forms such as polytonality, atonality, dissonance as the fulcrum in analysing some elements of African music such as melody, harmony, instruments and instrumentation. This publication constructs a non-linear genealogy of Eastman's practice and his cultural, political and social relevance, while situating his work within a broader rhizomatic relation of musical epistemologies and practices.
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism. He was among the first composers to combine minimalist processes with elements of pop music. John Cage, Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, came from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic—undoubtedly also one of the most powerful. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned—including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
Edited by Federica Bueti, Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
Contributions by Antonia Alampi, Rocco Di Pietro, Kodwo Eshun, Federica Bueti, Sean Griffin, Sumanth Gopinath, Jean-Christophe Marti, Josh Kun, Elaine Mitchener, Malak Helmy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Marie Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, Berno Odo Polzer, Pungwe, Christine Rusiniak.
2021, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$60.00 - In stock -
Effigy hanging and burning, a specific theatrical form of political protest, has become increasingly visible in the news media, particularly in protests against United States military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, in US domestic politics, and in the Arab Spring. Taking these events as points of departure, Florian Göttke investigates the conditions of this visual genre of protest, its roots and genealogies in a number of countries, its aesthetics, and politics. The book delves deeply into the different practices, iconologies, rituals, protest and media strategies, as well as into politics.
2021, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$44.00 - Out of stock
Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping. Electric Brine is a volume of poetry and critical essays by women voices from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction, each of them central to the independent curatorial research entity The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO, 2014-ongoing) and its associated online study group Matter in Flux. Conceived as an anthology and a register, it serves as a testimony to the initiative’s long-standing work of creative adaptation and ecological inquiry through a quest to situate a vision of material politics through the lens of six punctuated pieces on flow and fluids. The literary and scientific fabulations found in these pages speak of the conjunction of lived embodiment, the materialized quality of language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing. Each of these strands polyperform under TWWWO, for they can be traced, retroactively, to the themes present in the live event series, to Matter in Flux’s private study sessions, to the initiative’s collective writing work presented in public venues and publications. Also included in this volume is an appendix documenting the years of invitation and study, intricately linked to the ideological praxis of these overlaps.
Edited by Jennifer Teets
Co-edited by Elise Hunchuck and Margarida Mendes
With texts and contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker and Lisa Robertson
Introduced by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes
Design by Sophie Keij and Atelier Brenda
Co-founded in 2014 by Jennifer Teets and Margarida Mendes,* The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) is an independent curatorial research-based entity that collaborates with artists, scientists, science historians, philosophers, anthropologists, activists and more as it explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live talk-event series over the telephone and has thus expanded to other formats involving experiments with educational actions, discursive talks, and events via diverse methodologies. Read an interview with Post Brothers on TANK magazine here.
1986 / 2001, English
Softcover, 375 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Prospect Books / UK
$55.00 - Out of stock
Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 Honey from a Weed was hailed as a modern classic. A cult cooking classic by 'the high priestess of cooking' Patience Gray, filled with unusual recipes, brilliant stories, and hyper-local ingredients and methodologies. Important reading to prepare for a future living well off the land, or just living well in general.
Patience Gray was first known for the 1950s classic, Plats du Jour, but her greatest work was this passionate autobiographical cookery book Honey from a Weed. It is Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first-class novel. First published in 1986, the book is now published in the original format, but with soft covers. She shared the life of a sculptor, Norman Mommens, whose appetite for marble and sedimentary rocks took them to Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades (Naxos) and Apulia. These are the places which in turn inspired this rhapsodic text. Everywhere, she learned from the country people whose way of life she shared, adopting their methods of growing, cooking and conserving the staple foods of the Mediterranean. She described the rustic foods and dishes with feeling and fidelity, writing from the inside and with a deep sense of the history and continuity of Mediterranean ways. Her life in the Salento contrasted with an earlier, and indeed glittering, career in Fleet Street, but she sacrificed the deadlines of the past to the rhythm of wine-making, seasonal sowing and gathering. Corinna Sargood’s drawings, in another dimension, evoke the underlying spirit of the book, which has to do with the landscape, people, art, imagination, as much as with fasting and feasting.
The work has attracted a cult following in the United States, where passages have been read out at great length on the radio; and it has been anthologized by Paul Levy in The Penguin Book of Food and Drink. It was given a special award by the André Simon Book Prize committee in 1987.
Here reprinted with the beautiful original cover and drawings by Corinna Sargood and the same text in the same generous format of the original edition.