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
Art
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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.
2020, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 13.8 x 20 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$38.00 - Out of stock
From shaming and shamefulness to shame-avoidance and shamelessness, the experience of shame influences our social behaviours, decision making abilities, and desires. Shame determines what we show and what we hide. And yet, as an emotion that begs for its own concealment, what is the structure and appearance of shame? How does shame interact with the realm of the visible, and where does it surface in visual culture? In this extensive historical and contemporary analysis of shame and its power, artist Andrea Büttner probes the definitions and representations of shame. The book includes close readings of Sigmund Freud’s writings on play and fantasy, challenges theoretical approaches to Andy Warhol’s queer performativity on film, and frames Dieter Roth’s representations of shame in his writing and moving image work.
Designed by HIT Studio.
Andrea Büttner (born 1972) is a German artist. She works in a variety of media including woodcuts, reverse glass paintings, sculpture, video, and performance. She creates connections between art history and social or ethical issues, with a particular interest in notions of poverty, shame, vulnerability and dignity, and the belief systems that underpin them.
2021, English
Softcover, 367 pages, 14 x 21.1 cm
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
Audre Lorde is an unforgettable voice in twentieth-century literature, and one of the first to center the experiences of black, queer women. This essential reader showcases her indelible contributions to intersectional feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies in twelve landmark essays and more than sixty poems―selected and introduced by one of our most powerful contemporary voices on race and gender - Roxane Gay
2021, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Kenning Editions / Berkeley
$44.00 - Out of stock
Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe elucidates Lorde's methodology as a poet, mentor, and activist during the last decade of her life. This volume compiles a series of seminars, interviews, and conversations held by the author and collaborators across Berlin, Western Europe, and The Caribbean between 1984-1992. While Lorde stood at the intersection of various historical and literary movements in The United States--the uprising of black social life after the Harlem Renaissance, poetry of the AIDS epidemic, and the unfolding of the Civil Rights Movement--this selection of texts reveals Lorde as a catalyst for the first movement of Black Germans in West Berlin. The legacy of this "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" has been well preserved by her colleagues in Germany. These selected writings lay bare struggles, bonds, and hopes shared among Black women in a transnational political context, as well as offering sometimes surprising reflections on the US American counter culture with which Lorde is associated. Many of the poems that were important to Lorde's development are excerpted in full within these pages, serving as a sort of critical anthology.
Edited by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro. Preface by Dagmar Schultz.
2021, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 11 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$52.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
In this book, Isabelle Graw lays hold of all the experiences and thoughts that don’t flow in her art-historical texts, merging memoir and social criticism in an original fashion. In elegantly written miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between 2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses. She describes how we find ourselves literally in another world after the death of our parents. With the theme of mourning as a leitmotif, In Another World is an attempt at exposing and analyzing painful emotions. Never before has Graw spoken to the reader as directly and openly as she does in these 159 notes.
“Since Walter Benjamin, we have come to view the fragment as an eminently modern form of writing. Isabelle Graw’s In Another World shows us why. In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological, and sociological all at once.” — Eva Illouz, author of The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations
“Writing in the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, Isabelle Graw examines aspects of her
daily life with the same deft intelligence that she’s brought to her studies of visual art
and critical theory. These ‘notes’ find Graw in midlife, an urban professional with a partner, an ex-husband, and a child, attempting to navigate a course between social obligations, inner voice, and creative necessity. Blindingly frank, she addresses the questions that envelop her days: work life, the arrival of refugees in Germany, art exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. In Another World is both a literary work and a philosophical experiment. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.” — Chris Kraus, author of Summer of Hate and Social Practices
“In her book In Another World, Isabelle Graw effortlessly manages the balancing act between reflection, recapitulation, and autofiction. Despite, or rather because of, her intellectual brilliance and pointed style, Graw’s collected aperçus are quite moving emotionally. They are also at times extremely funny.” — Dirk von Lowtzow, member of Tocotronic, musician, and writer
Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958-1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (2020), The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (2018), and High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (2010).
2006, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.6 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$66.00 - Out of stock
Steve Lacy: Conversations is a collection of thirty-four interviews with the innovative saxophonist and jazz composer. Lacy (1934–2004), a pioneer in making the soprano saxophone a contemporary jazz instrument, was a prolific performer and composer, with hundreds of recordings to his name.
This volume brings together interviews that appeared in a variety of magazines between 1959 and 2004. Conducted by writers, critics, musicians, visual artists, a philosopher, and an architect, the interviews indicate the evolution of Lacy’s extraordinary career and thought. Lacy began playing the soprano saxophone at sixteen, and was soon performing with Dixieland musicians much older than he. By nineteen he was playing with the pianist Cecil Taylor, who ignited his interest in the avant-garde. He eventually became the foremost proponent of Thelonious Monk’s music. Lacy played with a broad range of musicians, including Monk and Gil Evans, and led his own bands. A voracious reader and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, Lacy was particularly known for setting to music literary texts—such as the Tao Te Ching, and the work of poets including Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, and Taslima Nasrin—as well as for collaborating with painters and dancers in multimedia projects.
Lacy lived in Paris from 1970 until 2002, and his music and ideas reflect a decades-long cross-pollination of cultures. Half of the interviews in this collection originally appeared in French sources and were translated specifically for this book. Jason Weiss provides a general introduction, as well as short introductions to each of the interviews and to the selection of Lacy’s own brief writings that appears at the end of the book. The volume also includes three song scores, a selected discography of Lacy’s recordings, and many photos from the personal collection of his wife and longtime collaborator, Irene Aebi.
Interviews by: Derek Bailey, Franck Bergerot, Yves Bouliane, Etienne Brunet, Philippe Carles, Brian Case, Garth W. Caylor Jr., John Corbett, Christoph Cox, Alex Dutilh, Lee Friedlander, Maria Friedlander, Isabelle Galloni d'Istria, Christian Gauffre, Raymond Gervais, Paul Gros-Claude, Alain-René Hardy, Ed Hazell, Alain Kirili, Mel Martin, Franck Médioni, Xavier Prévost, Philippe Quinsac, Ben Ratliff, Gérard Rouy, Kirk Silsbee, Roberto Terlizzi, Jason Weiss
2021, English
Paperback, 256 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
After 8 books / Paris
$49.00 - Out of stock
Since the 1970s, Amy Sillman―a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene―has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas is the first book to gather a significant selection of Sillman’s essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman’s reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor. As Jason Farago notes in the New York Times, "Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let’s say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings."
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.
1994, Japanese / English
Softcover, 128 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Wako Works of Art / Tokyo
$45.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of this long out of print and very scarce illustrated essay by Japanese art critic Kentaro Ichihara on the work of German painter, Sigmar Polke, published in 1994 by Wako Works of Art, Tokyo. Includes the complete essay "Disguised Sublimity" in Japanese, alongside an English summary and illustrated throughout with Polke's works and historical references. Published to accompany an exhibition of oil paintings, watercolours, prints, and photographic works using printed fabrics, exhibited at Wako, Tokyo, the same year.
Table of contents : 1. The End of Art, Art as the End 2. Unimaginable? Blots and Sublimity 3. Dot! Dot! Dot! 4. In the Beginning of the World
Fine, As New.
2021, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
Donald Judd (1928–1994) was one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed new ideas about art—in both his works and writings—that challenged many of modernism's core tenets by resisting the categories of painting and sculpture. Judd described this work as “specific objects.” Critics labeled it minimalism. Perhaps because Judd's own writings provide a discursive framework for his project, some of the monographic essays on his art are not widely known. This volume collects critical and scholarly writings on Judd, examining his work as both artist and critic.
Spanning all periods of Judd's career, the essays gathered in this volume explore questions of abstraction, phenomenology, political engagement, labor, urban planning, and conservation. Written by a range of artists, architects, art historians, critics, and curators, these texts make clear Judd's relevance for a wide array of fields and disciplines, and situate him as a pivotal figure in contemporary art. They include an early consideration of Judd's work by Robert Smithson, a text on Judd's later works by curator Lynne Cooke, two essays by the art historian Rosalind Krauss, and an appraisal of Judd's writings by the artist Mel Bochner.
Contributors
Elizabeth C. Baker, Karl Beveridge, Mel Bochner, Yve-Alain Bois, Ian Burn, Lynne Cooke, Rosalind E. Krauss, Michael Meredith, Joshua Shannon, Robert Slifkin, Robert Smithson, Ann Temkin, Brian Wallis
Annie Ochmanek is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Alex Kitnick is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Dan Graham (MIT Press).
2021, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 16.5 x 26.7 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$45.00 - In stock -
A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought.
Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another.
Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility.
A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought.
This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.
2020, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 19. 7 x 13 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$40.00 - Out of stock
To think about really big issues, one must overcome not only the mountain of obstacles facing any multidisciplinary scholarship, but also the temporal parochialism of one’s own epoch and its—often baseless and irrational—intellectual fashions and mores. Thomas Moynihan succeeds in doing exactly that in this outstanding book—a true celebration of synthetic thinking about what is, almost by definition, the most important topic of the epoch. — Milan M. Cirkovic, author of The Great Silence.
Thinking about the end of everything has rarely been so enjoyable and enlightening. — Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute.
From global pandemics to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences to the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity’s future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, the twenty-first century has seen ‘existential risk’ become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry.
But this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history—one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.
Retracing this untold story, X-Risk revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction, and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery.
Thomas Moynihan shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era.
In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, X-Risk reveals how today’s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, and which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.
1986, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 14 x 20.4 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$42.00 - In stock -
Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality. Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death."
"... one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence." - Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review
"Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century." - Michel Foucault
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.
2017, English
Softcover (die-cut), 244 pages, 19 x 26 cm
Published by
Walker Art Centre / Minneapolis
$88.00 $50.00 - In stock -
Edited with text by Fionn Meade. Foreword by Olga Viso. Texts by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Robert Wiesenberger.
Question the Wall Itself examines ways that interior spaces and décor can be fundamental to the understanding of cultural identity. It showcases 23 international artists who explore the political and social dimensions of interior architecture as well as its complicated relationship to history and their own backgrounds. The featured artists are Jonathas de Andrade, Uri Aran, Nina Beier, Marcel Broodthaers, Tom Burr, Alejandro Cesarco, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Theaster Gates, Ull Hohn, Janette Laverrière, Louise Lawler, Nick Mauss, Park McArthur, Lucy McKenzie, Shahryar Nashat, Walid Raad, Seth Siegelaub, Paul Sietsema, Florine Stettheimer, Rosemarie Trockel, Cerith Wyn Evans, Danh Vo and Akram Zaatari.
The book and the exhibition it accompanies take as its guiding principle what Marcel Broodthaers termed “esprit décor”: a critique of ideas of nationality, globalization and the space of the institution through constructed interior scenes. Recasting our conception of interior space and design, the featured works exist between art, prop, and set or stage. Espousing this mise-en-scène approach, Question the Wall Itself plugs readers into material that expands the show in the form of book-as-exhibition. It includes an extensive photographic walk-through of the installations, and essays by Jordan Carter, Adrienne Edwards, Isla Leaver-Yap, Fionn Meade, and Robert Wiesenberger, as well as contributions from participating artists.
2016, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Center for Book Arts / New York
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Regine Ehleiter, Michalis Pichler, Seth Siegelaub
Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub spans an arc of tension between the works of Seth Siegelaub and contemporary cultural production. It features an interview with Seth Siegelaub, two essays by Regine Ehleiter and Michalis Pichler, and an extensively illustrated catalogue with bibliographic details.
In preparation for the project, Siegelaub and Pichler met twice in Amsterdam, where they had a long recorded conversation about books, living with books, being intimately connected with books, and producing books, and about the recent emergence of contemporary publications that show clear reference to books Siegelaub had produced, both piracies and homages, and not always to his delight.
Books by Siegelaub that are often paraphrased include the Xerox Book (1968), which was printed in offset and has since been xeroxed by various artists and publishers in many different ways, the catalogue exhibitions from 1969, as well as Lawrence Weiner’s Statements (1968). These publications are often taken as starting points for new projects, which are derivative and yet substantial artworks in their own right. Also, Siegelaub’s engagement with the Art Workers’ Coalition and subsequent draft of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement has had wide reception and reaction in contemporary art and activism.
“The works presented in Michalis Pichler’s catalogue Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub reinvent Siegelaub’s renowned distinction between primary and secondary information.”
—Annette Gilbert, editor of Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature and Publishing as Artistic Practice
“This anthology provides a welcome overview of the highly innovative exhibition and distribution practices developed by Seth Siegelaub in the late 1960s and the 1970s.”
—Alexander Alberro, author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity
“Seth Siegelaub was largely responsible for publicizing and promoting Conceptual art in the 1960s, but as Books and Ideas documents, he has continued to be a provocation and inspiration almost half a century after his abrupt exit from the art world he helped to create. Moreover, this book provides a context for Pichler’s own brand of conceptual practices. If part of Siegelaub’s genius was to reconceive exhibition as publication, Pichler gives us a catalogue of catalogues exhibiting the proliferation of mirrors which line the hall of Conceptual art’s legacy. In the pages of Books and Ideas, secondary information, accordingly, becomes primary.”
—Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium and Reading the Illegible
Copublished with the Center for Book Arts, New York
Design by Burak Yilmaz Kececiler
2021, English / German
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
The March issue of Texte zur Kunst, titled “Comedy,” investigates the comedic in art while also examining mass-media formats such as TV series and films. Comedy not only offers consolation and comfort by making the tragic seem comic; for the repressed, it also serves as a catalyst, addressing and thematizing repression through jokes, slapstick, or the grotesque. However, at a time when audiences increasingly demand political commitment and authenticity from art, comedic speech, which is inherently disingenuous, has fallen into disrepute: ironically distanced rhetoric is accused of turning a blind eye to social inequality. Together with Bert Rebhandl, author and co-publisher of the film magazine cargo, the editors conceptualized an issue that examines the role of the joke in art, the psychoanalytic dimension of the comedic, and the limits of satire in the age of Donald Trump.
With contributions by/features on Jennifer A. Greenhill, Kevin B. Lee, Matthias Dell, Glenn Ligon, Jan Böhmermann, Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Alenka Zupančič, Lynne Tillman, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Bert Rebhandl, Gregory Williams, Andrea Fraser, Lukas Foerster, Seinfeld, Larry David, Christiane Kues, Pujan Karambeigi, Amalia Ulman, Michaela Ott, Iris Därmann, Max Heinrich, Helvetia Leal, Sofia Bempeza, Talia Kwartler, Kai Althoff, Bernard Leach, Saim Demircan, Kim Jones, Samantha Ozer, Wu Tsang, Susanne Von Falkenhausen, Aby Warburg, Daniel Sturgis, Maxwell Alexandre, Genevieve Lipinsky De Orlov, Rosemary Mayer, Akili Tommasino, Howardena Pindell, Awol Erizku, Anna Voswinckel, Marianne Wex, Sarat Maharaj, Marion Von Osten, Françoise Vergès, Madeleine Bernstorff, Ross Bleckner, Douglas Gordon, Amy Sillman …
2020, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - In stock -
"Exactly three decades after the inaugural issue of TZK was published, we return to the question of where the hard-won and still-embattled rights of women* stand. With this issue, entitled ‘The Feminist’, we celebrate 30 years of controversial discussions about contemporary art and culture. We have invited 30 artists, critics, curators, and theorists of art and culture to talk about a cultural object that they believe is currently of particular interest from a feminist perspective. In highlighting feminist discourses that are especially relevant to the present moment, this issue should illustrate the plurality of thinkers who contribute to feminist projects today. A gesture to the unity and the alliances that critique grounded in solidarity can build!” —from the editorial by Isabelle Graw, Katharina Hausladen, and Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov.
With contributions by Isabelle Graw, Jeanetta Rich, Mirjam Thomann, Amanda Schmitt, Christian Liclair, Juliane Rebentisch, Jessica Aimufua, Katharina Hausladen, Nikita Gale, Beate Söntgen, Stacey Gillian Abe, Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov, Taylor Le Melle, Victoria Sin, Julia Heldt, Nadja Abt, Alina Astrova, Astrid Mania, Hanna Magauer, Brigitte Weingart, Paul Niedermayer, Keren Cytter, Steven Warwick, Bini Adamczak, Raphaela Vogel, Miriam Zeh, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Violaine Huisman, Trakal …
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
"EVIL," the theme of this latest issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST is often understood as simply the opposite of “good,” and as pure immorality, evil is everywhere today, and somehow also nowhere. It is the “other” par excellence; something we ourselves never are, but by which one always measures one’s own distance. “Evil is over there, not here, not with me.” Given its ubiquity today, we offer texts that investigate what this thing we call “evil” is, as it so often functions as the polar opposite of that which people hold to be just and right. Indeed, who could argue that point, and yet. In this issue, we look specifically at evil’s manifestations in the art world, and in film, politics, and theory, always with an eye toward evil as something potentially playful and ironic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
OLIVER PRECHT
TALKING ABOUT EVIL / Reflections on Moral Judgment
SUPERNATURE / Amanda Schmitt in Conversation with Loretta Fahrenholz, Madeline Hollander, and Monica Mirabile
MAX CZOLLEK
EVIL / Some Thoughts on the Contemporaneity of a Category
REMAIN IN DARK / Interview between Colin Lang and Stephen O’Malley
A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF SOCIAL SADISM / by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Kerstin Stakemeier
NEW DEVELOPMENT
BESEELTE GABEN IM TAUSCHSYSTEM / Überlegungen zur Malerei von Jack Whitten anlässlich der Ausstellung “Jack Whitten. Jack’s Jacks“ im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
ROTATION
BEING POROUS / Alice Blackhurst on Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs
IMPURITY AND ENTANGLEMENT / Adam Butler in Conversation with Ben Lerner
REVIEWS
A CHIROGRAPHIC IMAGINARY / Colin Lang on Edmund de Waal at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
ANDERE ORTE / Elisa R. Linn über Ariane Müller bei Schiefe Zähne, Berlin
ARCHIVING INSPIRATION / Dave Beech on Albert Oehlen at the Serpentine Gallery, London
MYALGIE / Jessica Aimufua über Diamond Stingily im Kunstverein München
GO TELL IT ON THE ISLAND / Nadja Abt über die 16. Istanbul Biennale
INTIMATE INVESTIGATIONS / Jesi Khadivi on Sharon Hayes at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin
ICH BIN ELEKTRISCH / Hans-Christian Dany über Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) in der Halle für Kunst Lüneburg
HUNGRY MINDS / Rachel Haidu on Leidy Churchman at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
VERFREMDEND NAH / Stephanie Holl-Trieu über „The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue“ in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
POETS AND ARTFANS / Pujan Karambeigi on Sarah Rapson at Essex Street, New York
EROSION UND WACHSTUM / Markues über „Soil Is an Inscribed Body. Über Souveränität und Agrarpoesien“ bei SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
MATERIAL FUTURES / Adrienne Ange Rooney on Lubaina Himid at the New Museum, New York
DIES IST KEIN PHALLUS / Francesca Raimondi über „Maskulinitäten. Eine Kooperation von Bonner Kunstverein, Kölnischem Kunstverein und Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf“
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? / Chris Reitz on Latoya Ruby Frazier at the Renaissance Society, Chicago
MAGISCHE POLITIK / Fiona Geuß über Andrea Bowers in der Weserburg, Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen
MOTHER OF PEARL / Enzo Shalom on Nicolás Guagnini at Bortolami, New York
(BE-)ZEUG DICH! / Alida Müschen über Julia Phillips im Kunstverein Braunschweig
GHOSTS NOT WELCOME / Nina Prader on Omer Fast at the Salzburger Kunstverein
CRITICAL AFFECTIONS / Sophie Goltz über „Awakenings: Art in Society in Asia 1960s–1990s“ in der National Gallery in Singapur
ZWISCHEN ALLEN STÜHLEN / Dorothea Zwirner über Senga Nengudi im Lenbachhaus, München
NACHRUFE / OBITUARIES
SARAH SCHUMANN (1933−2019) by Vojin Saša Vukadinović
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944–2019) by Marc Siegel
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944-2019) by Louise Lawler
DOUGLAS CRIMP (1944-2019) by Juliane Rebentisch
EDITION
JESSICA STOCKHOLDER
RAPHAELA VOGEL
JORINDE VOIGT
2021, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - Out of stock
Immunodemocracy offers a stimulating and profound portrayal of the epochal event that has already left its mark on the twenty-first century. Moving from the ecological question to the rule of experts, from the state of exception to immunitarian democracy, from rule by fear to the contagion of conspiracy theory, from forced distancing to digital control, Donatella Di Cesare examines how existence is already changing—and what its future political effects may be. In her own personal style, the author reconstructs the dramatic phases of what she calls "the breathing catastrophe." Coronavirus is a sovereign virus that skirts its way around the walls of patriotism and the sovereignists' imperious frontiers. And it reveals in all its terrible crudeness the immunitarian logic that excludes the weakest and hits the poorest.
The cordon sanitaire of disengagement risks expanding beyond all proportion. The disparity between the protected and the helpless—a challenge to any idea of justice—has never been so blatant. The virus has not introduced, but merely brought out into the open the ruthlessness of the capitalism that is now wrapping us in its devastating spiral, in its compulsive, asphyxial vortex. Is it our final warning? The violent global pandemic shows that it is impossible for us to survive if we don't help each other. We will need to protect ourselves from protection and the specter of absolute immunization. When breathing can no longer be taken for granted, we need to rethink our way of living together.
Translated by David Broder
Donatella Di Cesare teaches theoretical philosophy at the Sapienza University in Rome. One of the most significant voices on the Italian intellectual scene, she is an authoritative contributor to numerous newspapers, websites and journals in Italy and elsewhere. Her books have been translated into eight languages.
2021, English
Hardcover, 264 pages, 20.3 x 13.4 cm
Published by
Repeater Books / London
$33.00 - In stock -
A collection of transcripts from Mark Fisher's final series of lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016.
Edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that Fisher's death left so bittersweetly unfinished.
Beginning with that most fundamental of questions -- "Do we really want what we say we want?" — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.
For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think...
2014, English
Softcover, 245 pages, 14.2 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$39.00 - Out of stock
This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carre, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.
2019, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 12.7 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$29.00 - In stock -
Lauded by major contemporary artists and philosophers, Jacques Rancière’s work returns politics to its central place in understanding art.
In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. Covering a range of art movements, filmmakers such as Godard and Bresson, and thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno, Barthes, Lyotard and Greenberg, Rancière shows that contemporary theorists of the image are suffering from religious tendencies.
He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy, or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.
“Much of the value of Rancière’s writings on art and aesthetics arises from his initial refusal of terms that are self-evident to the point of invisibility. ”— Frieze
2020, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13.2 x 20.3 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
In these essays, the acclaimed artist, photographer, writer, and filmmaker Moyra Davey often begins with a daily encounter--with a photograph, a memory, or a passage from a book--and links that subject to others, drawing fascinating and unlikely connections, until you can almost feel the texture of her thinking. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists--Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others--in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clearheaded and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.
2001, English
Softcover, 345 pages, 15.2 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Seven Stories Press / New York
$46.00 - Out of stock
The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe first-hand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.
Many of the writers articulate difficult and socially unsanctioned maternal anger and ambivalence. In Mother Reader, motherhood is scrutinized for all its painful and illuminating subtleties, and addressed with unconventional wisdom and candor. What emerges is a sense of a community of writers speaking to and about each other out of a common experience, and a compilation of extraordinary literature never before assembled in a single volume.
Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Lydia Davis, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Huston, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. LeGuin, Margaret Mead, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostriker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Mona Simpson, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy William and many more.
2014, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 13.8 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$44.00 - Out of stock
Presented here for the first time in English is a remarkable screenplay about the apostle Paul by Pier Paolo Pasolini, legendary filmmaker, novelist, poet, and radical intellectual activist. Written between the appearance of his renowned film Teorema and the shocking, controversial Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, St Paul was deemed too risky for investors. At once a political intervention and cinematic breakthrough, the script forces a revolutionary transformation on the contemporary legacy of Paul. In Pasolini's kaleidoscope, we encounter fascistic movements, resistance fighters, and faltering revolutions, each of which reflects on aspects of the Pauline teachings. From Jerusalem to Wall Street and Greenwich Village, from the rise of SS troops to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, here— as Alain Badiou writes in the foreword—"Paul's text crosses all these circumstances intact, as if it had foreseen them all."
This is a key addition to the growing debate around St Paul and to the proliferation of literature centred on the current turn to religion in philosophy and critical theory, which embraces contemporary figures such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben.
Translated by Elizabeth A. Castelli
Preface by Alain Badiou
Introduction by Ward Blanton
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 15.1 x 21.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$38.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art.
In an era of fitness programs, increasing antidepressant usage, nutrition counseling and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, dictating every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined western scientific paradigms; contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, critically tackling illness and impairment in their practice while challenging ableist institutional dynamics. In this volume, artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies.
At a moment at which epidemics and global warming menace all forms of life, we see clearly how health intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, class, and coloniality. By reclaiming other realities, beyond a state of health as a norm, this book questions the myths, stigmas, and cultural attitudes that shape normative perceptions, revealing the interdependence of our entangled existences. The book includes four newly commissioned texts: by artists Mahmoud Khaled and Patrick Staff, by curator Clare Barlow on disability in the museum, and by curator Portia Malatjie on the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape. It also features two texts on the current COVID-19 pandemic, by Anne Boyer and Filipa Ramos.
Artists surveyed include :
Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Lorenza Böttner, Canaries & Taraneh Fazeli, Grupo Chaclacayo, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Patricia Domínguez, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Luke Fowler, Alice Hattrick, Tamar Guimarães, Joseph Grigely, Gran Fury, Johanna Hedva, Mahmoud Khaled, Mujeres Creando, Carolyn Lazard, Simone Leigh, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques, Tabita Rezaire, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, David Wojnarowicz
Writers include :
Aimar Arriola & Nanci Garín, Clare Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Dodie Bellamy, Anne Boyer, Rizvana Bradley, Eli Clare, Taraneh Fazeli, Theodore (ted) Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, R.D. Laing, Miguel A. López, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Portia Malatjie, Margarida Mendes, Peter Pál Pelbart, Naomi Pearce, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Susan Sontag, Paul B. Preciado, Mary Walling Blackburn, Simon Watney & Sunil Gupta
Copublish by MIT Press with Whitechapel Gallery, London