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.
2021, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - Out of stock
Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.
November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a “mentally ill person” suffering from “gender dysphoria,” Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's “Report to an Academy,” in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.
Speaking from his own “mutant” cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era—an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.
Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.
Paul B. Preciado is the author of Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics, and Pornotopia, for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France. He is currently Curator of Public Programmes at the Palais de Tokyo and lives in Paris.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21.7 x 14.7 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
A leading activist museum director explains why museums are at the center of a political storm and how they can be reimagined.
In an age of protest, cultural institutions have come under fire. Protestors have mobilized against sources of museum funding, as happened at the Metropolitan Museum, and against board appointments, forcing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders to resign at the Whitney. That is to say nothing of demonstrations against exhibitions and artworks. Protests have roiled institutions across the world, from the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim to the Akron Art Museum. A popular expectation has grown that galleries and museums should work for social change.
As Director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York muni- cipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that doubled as political protests. Then in January 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials. This public controversy followed the museum’s responses to Donald Trump’s election, including her objections to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence.
In this lucid and accessible book, Raicovich examines some of the key museum flashpoints and provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding conservative, capitalist values. And she suggests ways museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.
“Culture Strike is a must-read account of how museums have positioned themselves as progressive while working hard to maintain the status quo. Written by someone who knows the ropes and drawing on interviews and conversations from all corners of the art world, it is a road map of how we’ve gotten where we are, a blueprint for change, and a love letter to museums for their potential to change the world if only we would think differently about them.” — Aruna D’souza, author of Whitewalling
2021, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - In stock -
COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned?
The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.
“The pandemic has laid bare the frailties, failures, and fissures of the contemporary world. The Revenge of the Real offers a clarion call for organising ourselves differently. It is forceful, engaging, and thought provoking, and I expect it to prove immediately influential.” — Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism
"When anti-lockdown stances such as the one espoused by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, QAnon’s conspiracies, anti-vaxxer propaganda, and a return to an innocent relation between the humans and the planet are a match made in hell, the rise of crypto-fascism variants is the least of our concerns. We are indeed witnessing a fundamental erosion of the contemporary left’s capacity to respond to planetary-scale emergencies. This inability to systematically think about and act upon the plights brought upon this planet is what Benjamin Bratton calls the lack of planetary competency. Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real is a sober yet enthusiastic analysis of how and why some strains of the left continue to be appropriated by individualistic libertarianism if not by crypto-fascism. Yet Bratton’s work is more than that, it sets a way out for the left by mapping the scale of planetary events and what it means to think and intervene at that scale.” — Reza Negarestani, author of Intelligence and Spirit
“Bratton’s is an incisive intervention: at once polemic and productive. A counter to the self-imposed ineffectuality of certain strands of theory, The Revenge of the Real provides buoyant and zesty rebuttal to the suspicious mode in philosophizing, all whilst in search of more pragmatic alternatives.” — Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk
2021, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
A new field of counterinvestigation in journalism, human rights, art and law.
Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes and technological domination. At the same time, areas not usually thought of as artistic make powerful use of aesthetics. Journalists and legal professionals pore over opensource videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call “investigative aesthetics”: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture and other such practices in order to speak truth to power.
Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology; evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art; and examines radical practices such as those of WikiLeaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. These new practices take place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a new common sense.
Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman have here provided an inspiring introduction to a new field that will change how we understand and confront power today.
2020, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 14 x 21cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination?
In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental concepts of possibility, potency, and power. Overcoming any temptation of giving in to despair or nostalgia, Berardi proposes the notion of futurability as a way to remind us that even within the darkness of our current crisis, still lies dormant the horizon of possibility.
2011, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 13.4 x 21 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$32.00 - Out of stock
After the Future explores our century-long obsession with the concept of the future. Beginning with F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the worldwide race toward a new and highly mechanized society that defined the Century of Progress, highly respected media activist Franco Berardi traces the genesis of future-oriented thought through the punk movement of the early '70s and into the media revolution of the '90s. Cyberculture, the last truly utopian vision of the future, has ended in a clash, and left behind an ever-growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war.
Our future, Berardi argues, has come and gone; the concept has lost its usefulness. Now it's our responsibility to decide what comes next.
Drawing on his own involvement with the Autonomia movement in Italy and his collaboration and friendship with leading thinkers of the European political left, including Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Berardi presents a highly nuanced analysis of the state of the contemporary working class, and charts a course out of the modern dystopian moment.
Franco Berardi, better known in the United States as Bifo, is an Italian autonomist philosopher and media activist. One of the founders of the notorious Radio Alice, a pirate radio station that became the voice of the autonomous youth movement of Bologna in the late 1970s, Bifo is the author of multiple works of theory, including the recently published The Soul at Work and The Post-Futurist Manifesto.
2018, English
Softcover, 266 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Punctum Books / Goleta
$42.00 - In stock -
Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.
At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.
By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.
1974, English
Newspaper, 28 pages, 41 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Incorporated Newsagencies / West Melbourne
$90.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Rare February 1974 issue of The Living Daylights, a radical, riotous weekly counter-culture magazine out of North Melbourne in the 1970's, edited by Oz magazine founder Richard Neville, along with Terence Maher, Michael Morris, and graphic designer Laurel Olszewski, and published by Neville's fellow OZ colleague, Richard Walsh, between 1973-4. The Living Daylights was packed with all happening things in youth counter-culture, filled with articles, cartoons, artwork, sex, drugs, rock n roll and protest. A provocative, humorous and controversial anti-establishment bulletin in the tradition of Oz, regularly featuring the artwork of Martin Sharp, Michael Luenig, Dickie, and Neil McLean! This issue features 186 Years of Penal Outrage, activists against the closure of Lameroo "Free Beach" in Darwin, Bondi photography by Syd Shelton, dodgy Adelaide drug squad, Melbourne marijuana activists, Nimbin news, female singers, women's liberation and beauty trends by Margaret Smith, Confessions of a Working Class Shit Eater by poet Eric Beach, Taiwanese actress Angela Mao, Fritz the Cat, and so much more.
A wonderful, very seldom seen, historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing.
Very Good copy with light wear/tanning.
1974, English
Newspaper, 28 pages, 41 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Incorporated Newsagencies / West Melbourne
$90.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Rare March 1974 issue of The Living Daylights, a radical, riotous weekly counter-culture magazine out of North Melbourne in the 1970's, edited by Oz magazine founder Richard Neville, along with Terence Maher, Michael Morris, and graphic designer Laurel Olszewski, and published by Neville's fellow OZ colleague, Richard Walsh, between 1973-4. The Living Daylights was packed with all happening things in youth counter-culture, filled with articles, cartoons, artwork, sex, drugs, rock n roll and protest. A provocative, humorous and controversial anti-establishment bulletin in the tradition of Oz, regularly featuring the artwork of Martin Sharp, Michael Luenig, Dickie, and Neil McLean! This issue features Ian Stocks in conversation with science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke, a guide to smuggling, Allen Ginsberg on cocaine and Abbie Hoffman, Heroin, Pentridge prison, Magic Mushrooms, police brutality against black Australians, Cherry Ripe on the pioneering drag queen anarchy of Sylvia and the Synthetics, meditation, Veronica Perry on the ecology of Shit, the Bitch newspaper, Miles Davis, and so much more.
A wonderful, very seldom seen, historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing.
Very Good copy with light wear/tanning.
1973, English
Newspaper, 24 pages, 43 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cosmos Periodicals / Cremorne
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce inaugural issue (June 1973) of Cosmos, The Living Paper, published in Cremorne, Victoria in the 1970s and edited by leading Australian occultist Nevill Drury with Peter Glasson. A magazine dedicated to "the other side" of the counter-culture, "seeking to change society, not by forcibly ramming its ideas into unwilling minds, but by peacefully stressing the need for change in each and every individual as a prescription to the world's ills". Each issue is packed with articles and artwork around subjects such as cosmic music, occultism, ecology, astrology, organic gardening, alternative living, sexuality, theosophy, the arts, literature, politics, and awakened, back-to-the-earth Australia. A wonderful historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing. "From Soil to Psyche."
Good copy with fold and edge wear, tanning (which looks worse in our images than in person).
1974, English
Newspaper, 16 pages, 43 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cosmos Periodicals / Cremorne
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce April 1974 issue of Cosmos, The Living Paper, published in Cremorne, Victoria in the 1970s and edited by leading Australian occultist Nevill Drury with Peter Glasson. A magazine dedicated to "the other side" of the counter-culture, "seeking to change society, not by forcibly ramming its ideas into unwilling minds, but by peacefully stressing the need for change in each and every individual as a prescription to the world's ills". Each issue is packed with articles and artwork around subjects such as cosmic music, occultism, ecology, astrology, organic gardening, alternative living, sexuality, theosophy, the arts, literature, politics, and awakened, back-to-the-earth Australia. A wonderful historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing. "From Soil to Psyche."
Good copy with fold and edge wear, tanning (which looks worse in our images than in person).
1977, English
Newspaper, 20 pages, 43 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cosmos Periodicals / Cremorne
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce August 1977 issue of Cosmos, The Living Paper, published in Cremorne, Victoria in the 1970s and edited by leading Australian occultist Nevill Drury with Peter Glasson. A magazine dedicated to "the other side" of the counter-culture, "seeking to change society, not by forcibly ramming its ideas into unwilling minds, but by peacefully stressing the need for change in each and every individual as a prescription to the world's ills". Each issue is packed with articles and artwork around subjects such as cosmic music, occultism, ecology, astrology, organic gardening, alternative living, sexuality, theosophy, the arts, literature, politics, and awakened, back-to-the-earth Australia. A wonderful historical piece of Australian counterculture publishing. Includes cover feature on Christiania, the intentional 'Free Town' commune in Copenhagen, Australian ancient indigenous art, and animal liberation, and much more! "From Soil to Psyche."
Good copy with fold and edge wear, tanning (which looks worse in our images than in person).
1977, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 27.5 x 18.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Cyber-communard and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand's 1977 visionary compendium, "Space Colonies". A special book edition of Brand's legendary CoEvolution Quarterly, Space Colonies took up the question of whether space might be colonized by the year 2000, going to where no media on the subject of space travel has gone before. A visionary and controversial assemblage of articles, illustrations, information and opinions on space colonies, inspired by the culture of the Whole Earth Catalog, with contributions from Buckminster Fuller, Richard Brautigan, Ant Farm, Carl Sagan, Lynn Margulis, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, David Browner, Paolo Soleri, Eric Drexler, Rusty Schweickart, and many more... interviews with Jacques Cousteau, Gerard O'Neill, Carl Sagan, Lynn Margulis, and many more, all organized into three sections - Vision, Debate and Space.
"This book is about how to take Space personally. Gerard O'Neill's vision of Space Colonies has turned the universe inside out for people. Instead of seeing the space program as a "boondoggle for scientists" (Herman Kahn), suddenly they can see Space as a path, or at least a metaphor, for their own liberation. And those who are critics of high technology — who abound in this book — can leverage their arguments from Space industrialization as the quintessence of what they are fighting. What's new is that people are extrapolating from the future and outside instead of just from the past and inside."
Very Good copy, with some light tanning/wear.
1977, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 27 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Point / Sausalito
$60.00 - Out of stock
Summer 1977 issue of The CoEvolution Quarterly, with covers by Robert Crumb. A descendant from the 1970s' counterculture bible, "The Whole Earth Catalog," The CoEvolution Quarterly was published in Sausalito, California, 4 times annually between 1974—1985. It mixed articles with ads and reviews about all things alternative living, environmentalism, going back to the land, sustainable living, self-sufficiency, politics, challenging the system, community living, nomadism, and soft revolution. Includes comic by Crumb and many illustrations throughout.
Very Good, general cover wear, tanning.
2016, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Tobias Berger, Guy Brett, Simon Groom, Sophia Yadong Hao, Lisa Le Feuvre, Ma Lin, Markus Miessen and Federica Bueti, Tom Morton, Vanessa Joan Müller, Wang Nanming, Paul O’Neill, Edgar Schmitz, Gemma Sharpe
Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers, and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology, and how infrastructures are invented against its background. In 2012, the forum was staged sequentially at Cooper Gallery (Dundee), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Goldsmiths University of London, and operated as a satellite event to Edgar Schmitz’s exhibition “Surplus Cameo Decor,” curated by Sophia Yadong Hao at Cooper Gallery.
The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader; it juxtaposes documents, negotiations, and reflections from and on these conversations. The publication also includes a preface by Andrea Phillips, a new image sequence by Schmitz, and a suite of reflexive annotations exchanged between Hao and Schmitz.
Design by Marco Stout, Stout/Kramer
2016, English / German
Softcover, 288 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Zoe Butt, Kevin Chua, Patrick D. Flores, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Tony Godfrey, Yin Ker, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Seng Yu Jin, Simon Soon, Nora A. Taylor, David Teh
This publication focuses on the practice of curating in Southeast Asia, a region experiencing a time of increased global visibility as well as nation and institution building. How do curators engage with the intricacies of a particular place, and how do they respond to the specificities of the local under the expectations of the international? The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems. What emerges is a highly diverse art system that shifts away from traditional formats to embrace new or alternative platforms—from symposia to fieldwork—with the aim of emphasizing curating as a process of critical thinking that goes beyond presentations and representations.
The Jahresring series is edited by Brigitte Oetker and published on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V.
Design by Surface
2014, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 82 color ill., 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Contributions by Manuela Ammer, Julie Ault, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Gerry Bibby, Jennifer Bornstein, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Dragana Bulut, Katarina Burin, Françoise Cactus, Leidy Churchman, Ann Cotten, Juan Davila, Dominic Eichler, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yusuf Etiman, Isa Genzken, Susanne Ghez, Margaret Harrison, Daniel Herleth, Annette Kelm, Janette Laverrière, Adam Linder, Lee Lozano, Charlie Le Mindu, Shahryar Nashat, Gina D’Orio, Stephen Prina, Dean Spade, Ming Wong
The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality. In this sense, a “PS” or postscript might be understood as a place where relations or realities not explicitly stated in the main body of any given text, but nevertheless underpinning them, are revealed. A “PS” is a place of interpersonal agency; a compelling textual gesture that might add a “by the way” and an “also” and a “you know what we’re really talking about.” By its nature, a “PS” is contextualized and contextualizing. Though it may parade as the last word, it never is.
The Jahresring is published annually on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V.
Design by Lambl/Homburger
2018, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Texts by Mara Ambrožič, Anastasia Chaguidouline, Nicola Guastamacchia, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Camma Juel Jepsen, Johanne Løgstrup, Clarissa Ricci, Camilla Salvaneschi, James Schofield, Trine Friis Sørensen, Sevie Tsampalla, Marianna Tsionki, Andy Weir; with Michael Birchall, Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Jacob Lund, Simon Sheikh, Angela Vettese
Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” Gathering together artists/ curators/researchers through an open call, we asked how the temporal complexity that follows from the coming together of different temporalities in the same present could be made known in the context of contemporary art research, and particularly through practices that involve exhibitionary forms. The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 10
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
2019, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$29.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Curatorial projects are increasingly understood as research projects with extended time frames and complex interactions across diverse sectors. This book presents “100 Years of Now,” a research project taking place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 2015 to 2019, as a critical investigation into the temporality of contemporaneity—both in terms of its structure and content. To address the expanding temporality of the now, the book argues for the need to include other forms of knowledge in curatorial process, and for contemporary cultural institutions to facilitate the development of collective curatorial processes and research practices.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 11
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action. They all persuasively describe a breakdown of former historical categories but paradoxically end up understanding this breakdown as the end of politics tout court. Analysis and “position” thus merge, and the analytic diagnosis of a disavowal of the future (and the past) ends up as a disavowal of politics.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 09
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
2011, English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
In 1668, Queen Christina of Sweden was greeted in Rome with three spectacular banquets that surpass all historical precedents and successors in the register of extravagant gastronomy. As the first publication of her series, On the Table, Charlotte Birnbaum presents Antonio degli Effetti’s newly translated seventeenth-century text, which elaborately describes the three feasts in all their sumptuous and performative glory. The original text, dotted with quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, outlines the lavish preparations for the celebrations, the dining experience—designed by Bernini, no less—and the delectably boundless menus themselves. The text is contextualized by two essays and a foreword by Charlotte Birnbaum.
2018, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
What Is Different? is the title of this year’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on truth study centre, a cycle of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts.
Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?
Tillmans interviewed scientists, politicians, journalists, and social workers, highlighting the issues at stake from various angles. The publication also contains analytic texts and studies that shed further light on what happens in our brain, ethics, and online behavior when we are confronted with statements that oppose our political beliefs. Tillmans associated these texts with his own images as well as visual material found in print and online. While designing this year’s Jahresring, he has created photocopy works using the four-color scan process on a machine from the 1990s—an early digital collage technique that resonates with the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in today.
The 64th Jahresring includes texts by Philipp Hübl, Jonas Kaplan, Joe Keohane, and Michael Seemann, and interviews with Lionel Barber, Carolin Emcke, Sigmar Gabriel, Bianca Klose, Stephan Lewandowsky, Brendan Nyhan, and Wolfgang Schäuble.
Design by Wolfgang Tillmans
2021, English
Hardcover, 616 pages, 21 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
During the Cold War, modernist art became a flagship of freedom and democracy in the West, and took on the role of a symbolic overcoming of fascism. Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War examines the cultural diplomacy of this period, particularly the activities and magazines of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization funded by the Central Intelligence Agency that was tasked with steering the left away from Soviet Communism and toward a new world order established under the aegis of the United States. This book analyzes how the organization’s activities in the non-European world were a major force behind the culturalization of economic liberalism on an international scale. With extensive archival documentation and recent responses by artists and writers, this book is a rich reference for readers interested in challenging the structural conditions of contemporary art and the prevailing canons of modernism.
Edited by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, Antonia Majaca
Contributions By Savita Apte, Doug Ashford, Michael Baers, Ivana Bago, Lene Berg, Annett Busch, Rhea Dall, Peter Delius, Kodwo Eshun, Jenifer Evans, Anselm Franke, Andrea Giunta, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, Stacy Hardy, Barnor Hesse, Michael Hochgeschwender, Emmanuel Iduma, Iman Issa, Voluspa Jarpa, Gabi Ngcobo, Alexander Keefe, Hyunjin Kim, Christian Kravagna, Antonia Majaca, Porter Mccray, Sylvester Ogbechie, Rasha Salti, Erhard Schüttpelz, Chinmay Sharma, Yashas Shetty, Quinn Slobodian, Karin Zitzewitz
2021, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 14 x 21.1 cm
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$36.00 - In stock -
In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century.
Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time.
We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.