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.
2019, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$55.00 - Out of stock
Since the 1960s, art and architecture have experienced a series of radical and reciprocal trades. While artists have simulated ‘architectural’ means like plans and models, built structures and pavilions outside art institutions, or intervened in urban and public spaces, architects have employed ‘artistic’ strategies inside art institutions, in exhibitions, biennales and art events. At the same time, art galleries and museums have combined both activities in an interdisciplinary, hybrid field, playing with the conditional differences between inside and outside the institution.
Trading between Architecture and Art zooms in on specific examples or ‘cases’ of these two-way transactions: artists adopting architectural means on the one hand, and architects adopting artistic strategies on the other. In particular, it presents in-depth studies of both historical and contemporary examples of the transposition of means and strategies from architecture to art, and vice versa, up to the point that established understandings of institutional categories, disciplinary concepts, and concrete practices become interestingly opaque, and meanings provocatively uncertain.
‘Studies in Architecture and Art’ explore the reciprocal trade between the disciplines of architecture and art.
Editors: Wouter Davidts, Susan Holden, Ashley Paine
Contributors: Angelique Campens, Guy Châtel, Wouter Davidts, Mark Dorrian, Susan Holden, John Körmeling, Maarten Liefooghe, Mark Linder, John Macarthur, Philip Metten, Sarah Oppenheimer, Ashley Paine, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Annalise Varghese, Stefaan Vervoort, Stephen Walker, Rosemary Willink
Design: Sam de Groot
Published by Valiz with The Australian Research Council, The University of Queensland, Ghent University, KASK School of Arts.
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$58.00 - Out of stock
Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective: Between Dematerialization and Documentation focuses on the curatorial practice of exhibiting conceptual art. The fact that conceptual works are not object-based, creates challenges in exhibiting or re-exhibiting them. This book offers various perspectives on how to handle conceptual art in the context of the museum, based on three detailed case studies and an extensive introduction in which the paradox of conceptual art is analyzed. It also elaborates on the history of exhibiting conceptual artworks, and on the influence of curators in their canonization.
The aim of the book is not to offer clear-cut practical solutions, but to raise awareness of the issue and the different ways of dealing with it within the traditional curatorial field. It is relevant for students of art and culture (particularly in museum and curatorial studies), art and museum professionals, and everyone interested in the art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Nathalie Zonnenberg is an art historian and curator. She holds a PhD in Art History from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (NL). Zonnenberg regularly writes on contemporary art, and she lectures at the post-graduate Curatorial Studies programme at KASK/the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (BE).
2002, English
Softcover, 430 pages, 15.2 x 23 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$45.00 - In stock -
Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)’s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)’s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.
Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her “one of the most subversive voices in American fiction.” Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.
Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja, California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007).
2013, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 19.6 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$46.00 - Out of stock
In a novel of extremes, whose disgust with “things as they are” includes the whole idea of “novels”, Michel Leiris pursues his heroine, Aurora, through a visionary landscape shot through with catastrophes — and his lucid yet baroque language, with its incredible descriptions and ever more extravagant metaphors, is only just able to keep pace. Leiris himself, looking back on this novel from his youth, exactly described its tone:
… despite the “black” or “frenetic” style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity — in fact, the way almost every page of it refuses to accept that human condition against which some will never cease to rebel, however reasonably society may be ordered.
Aurora is one of the high-points of literary Surrealism, and Leiris was an early member of the group. Close to Georges Bataille, Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre, he was a pivotal figure in post-war Paris. A director of the Musée de l’Homme, Leiris wrote important studies in the fields of ethnology and anthropology, as well as a sequence of autobiographical works regarded as classics of modern French literature.
Aurora translated and introduced by Anna Warby, Cardinal Point translated by Terry Hale.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$48.00 - In stock -
That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation! - from The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat
In The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called the "expressive power of fetishism": how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane.
Written in 1981, toward the end of Leiris's life, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat serves as a coda to his autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, taking the form of both shorter fragments (poems, memory scraps, notes) that are as formally disarming as the fetishistic experiences they describe, and longer essays, more exhaustive critical meditations on writing, apprehension, and the nature of the modern. Rooted in remembrance, devoted to the kaleidoscopic intricacies of wordplay, Leiris draws from his own aesthetic experiences as writer and spectator to explore the fetish that "exposes and disarms the sinister passage of time, "conferring" an undeniable realness upon the whole by essentially causing it to crystallize in a reality it would never have possessed if that sturdy fragment hadn't acted as bait."
Foreword by Marc Augé
Translated by Christine Pichini
"A necessary and enlightening sequel to Leiris's earlier extended explorations of his mind and heart, of writing, life, and art, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat allows us to continue in his stimulating company as he poses questions in all frankness and humility that are as fresh and personal, even politically timely, today as when he wrote them. This long overdue, fine translation by Christine Pichini recreates with grace and ease Leiris's often labyrinthine sentences--no less complex than the thoughts they express. A pleasure to read." - Lydia Davis, Author of Can't and Won't and translator of Michel Leiris's Rules of the Game, Volumes 1-3
Michel Leiris (1901–1990) was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer. Part of the Surrealist group in Paris, Leiris became a key member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and head of research in ethnography at the CNRS.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - Out of stock
The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years’ worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.
This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp’s film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell’s filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson’s pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field.
The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.
About the Author
Annette Michelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. A founding editor of the journal October, she has written on art and cinema for more than five decades.
“Annette Michelson is one of the most brilliant minds that has ever turned its focus on the art of cinema. It's a blessing to have her illuminating, inspiring, and informative pieces available in this volume.”
—Jonas Mekas, filmmaker and writer
“When many of these texts first appeared, they were undergroundbreaking. Now, as history, they continue to be impressive for their subtle insights and nuanced style. Annette Michelson’s writing is as avant-garde and of-the-moment as that of a critic/historian can be.”
—Michael Snow, filmmaker, musician, visual artist
“Written with enviable precision and grace, these essays remain the most compelling chronicle of the radical impact that film would have on the other arts in the twentieth century. Through her writings, Annette Michelson defined a field of critical inquiry where others saw only boundaries.”
—Bruce Jenkins, Chair, Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2017, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
Agnes Martin’s Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who was also a thinker, poet, and writer for whom self-presentation was a necessary part of making her works public. With Night Sea, Hudson argues, Martin (1912–2004) created a shimmering realization of control and loss that stands alone within her suite of classic grid paintings as an exemplary and exceptional achievement.
Hudson offers a close examination of Night Sea and its position within Martin’s long and prolific career, during which the artist destroyed many works as she sought forms of perfection within self-imposed restrictions of color and line. For Hudson, Night Sea stands as the last of Martin’s process-based works before she turned from oil to acrylic and sought to express emotions of lightness and purity unburdened by evidence of human struggle.
Drawing from a range of archival records, Hudson attempts to draw together the facts surrounding the work, which were at times obfuscated by the artist’s desire for privacy. Critical responses of the time give a sense of the impact of the work and that which followed it. Texts by peers including Lenore Tawney, Donald Judd, and Lucy Lippard are presented alongside interviews with a number of Martin’s friends and keepers of estates, such as the publisher Ronald Feldman and Kathleen Mangan of the Lenore Tawney archive, which holds correspondence between Martin and Tawney.
About the Author
Suzanne Hudson is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Art at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press) and Painting Now.
Endorsements
“In her wonderful contribution to the Afterall Books One Work series, Suzanne Hudson persuasively argues that Agnes Martin’s 1963 painting Night Sea is the summa of the early grid paintings. Because, as Hudson shows, Night Sea makes Martin’s process—and indeed Martin’s struggle—so visible, we comprehend much more clearly what follows: the achieved perfection of the graphite grid paintings. That an analysis of a single work could so fully illuminate the entirety of an artist’s oeuvre is a true accomplishment. Plus, the prose is a pleasure to read.”
—Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester
Out of print title.
2017, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Lars Müller / Zürich
$39.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multi-layered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design.
Colomina’s and Wigley’s field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges.
Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.
Beatriz Colomina is an architecture theorist, historian, curator, and professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture. One of her research focuses are sexual fantasies in association with architecture.
Mark Wigley is professor of architecture at Columbia University. The historian and theorist explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His books include: Derrida’s Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction; White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture; Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire; and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He is the co-author of Are We Human: Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Beatriz Colomina in association with their curation of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. He has also curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and The Drawing Center in New York; the Witte de With and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. His latest book is Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation (Lars Müller, 2018). He was born in New Zealand, trained there as an architect then as an architect then as a scholar, and is based in New York.
As New, corner bumped (hence price reduction)
2020, English
Hardcover, 328 pages, 21.3 x 28.2 cm
Published by
MASP / São Paulo
$100.00 - Out of stock
One of the most radical and joyful artists of the 20th century, Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) helped lead the charge in Brazilian art’s unique transition from abstract concrete art to performative objects and collective performance.
As MoMA’s 2019 exhibition Sur Moderno demonstrated, one of Oiticica’s most revolutionary projects was the Parangolé, wearable sculptures made from fabric, plastic or paper. The Parangolé is meant to be worn, inhabited and danced by a participant, lending a physical spontaneity to the piece that entirely blurs the boundaries between the art object and those who experience it.
Dance in My Experience traces the genealogy of this theme within the artist’s oeuvre, identifying rhythmic, choreographic and dance elements throughout his trajectory, from his first Metaesquemas through the Spatial Reliefs, Nuclei and Bólides, culminating in the Parangolés. Texts by Oiticica and numerous scholars.
Edited with text by Adriano Pedrosa, Tomás Toledo. Text by Adrian Anagnost, Cristina Ricupero, Evan Moffitt, Fernanda Lopes, Fernando Cocchiarale, Sergio Delgado Moya, Tania Rivera, Vivian A. Crockett, Hélio Oiticica.
2020, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 18.3 x 25.4 cm
Published by
MASP / São Paulo
$85.00 - Out of stock
A comprehensive tribute to one of the central figures of postmodern dance in America. Edited with text by André Mesquita. Texts by Adriana Banana, David M. Sperling, Susan Rosenberg, Babette Mangolte, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown.
A founding member of the legendary Judson Dance Theater, American choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown (1936-2017) helped build the tenets of postmodern dance and is now considered one of the most influential figures in American choreography. Trisha Brown: Choreographing Life presents a sizable archive of Brown’s career, with photographs, drawings and video stills that illustrate her lifelong contributions to the world of contemporary dance.
Brown established her own dance company in 1970 and continued to dance until 2008, during which time she created over 100 dances and six operas. One of her most famous pieces was the product of a creative partnership with artists Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg; after the 1983 premiere of Set and Reset at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Brown was launched into international acclaim. Brown’s choreography demonstrates an unparalleled cognizance of space and visuality, as indicated by the artistic process apparent in the drawings and diagrams included in this publication. Her work conveys the extent to which movement is an artistic language reflective of the complex relationship between body and mind.
2020, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Goldsmiths Press / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$36.00 - In stock -
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.
Precarity Lab brings together an intergenerational network of scholars and activists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to explore how digital cultures produce, reproduce, and intervene in precarity. Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Lisa Nakamura, Cindy Lin, with Meryem Kamil.
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.
2013, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 12 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Grazer Kunstverein / Graz
Mousse / Milan
$36.00 - Out of stock
This publication represents one of the many spaces Doug Ashford's work occupies. It is the fisrt collection of his writings and conversations and attempts to encompass the changing thoughts shared by the artist over the past twenty-five years. Doug Ashford is a teacher, artist, and writer. He has taught design, sculpture, and theory at The Cooper Union, New York, since 1989. His principal art practice from 1982 to 1996 was as a member of Group Material and since that time he has gone on to make paintings, write, and produce other cross-disciplinary projects.
Co-published with Grazer Kunstverein
edited by Krist Gruijthuijsen
Last copies, out-of-print.
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22.9 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, gathered here for the first time in this posthumous volume, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century—in which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work—to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, “intellectual cinema”—the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness.
The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of film scholars.
Like the filmmakers with which she is engaged, Annette Michelson's intellectual project is nothing short of passionate. The analytic rigor, the discerning historical and cultural perspectives and the political resonance of these essays are confluent with Michelson's keen perception and striking associations, while the elegance of the writing also registers her intensely poetic and imaginative engagement. — Noa Steimatsky, author of Italian Locations and The Face on Film
2020, English / French
Softcover, 168 pages, 17 x 23.9 cm
Published by
Dancing Fox Press
National Gallery of Canada / Ontario
$54.00 - Out of stock
Over the past 40 years, Canadian artist Moyra Davey (born 1958) has perfected a unique synthesis of photography, film and text to critically engage with the past, present and future of the world around her. Based on Davey’s eponymous 2019 film, I Confess unites three main sources in a chronicle of late 20th-century Quebec, shaped by themes of race, poverty, language and nationalism. Using American writer James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country as its point of departure, Davey’s film also focuses on the life and work of Québécois revolutionary Pierre Vallières and Ottawa-based political philosopher Dalie Giroux.
Published to accompany the exhibition Moyra Davey: The Faithful at the National Gallery of Canada, this deeply personal and highly political book seeks to examine an unresolved chapter of Québécois history from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective that draws attention to contemporary issues of separatism, while reflecting the artist's understanding of photography and text as unique corollaries. This publication features writings by the artist, Dalie Giroux and National Gallery of Canada’s Associate Curator Andrea Kunard, and a poster insert.
2014, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Schism Press / World
$30.00 - In stock -
Schism Press brings you Eugene Thacker's {anti} novel, An Ideal For Living.
As today's strategies of conceptual writing have become legitimized and cliched, Thacker's text reminds us of how radical and potent these gestures once were, treading a fine line between the mechanical and the authorial. This is an important book...these pages take cues from Burroughs and Gibson, while at the same time presciently pointing to the web-based path writing would take over the next decade. It's a joy to see this back in print. — Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Day and Soliloquy, founder of Ubuweb
Eugene Thacker's An Ideal for Living in the apoptosis of hyperreal language shed a data flesh as a discourse toward death continuously from cracks in DNA...It is present in an inexplicable state of literary language and data. — Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric and Mad In Japan
2020, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting edge of current critical thinking: media ecologies, post-colonial ethnographies, and the design of technology, and introduces us to the thinking of seventeen major writers who, combined, contribute to the common task of knowing the world. Each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to the work of the others.
The authors include: Sianne Ngai, Kodwo Eshun, Lisa Nakamura, Hito Steyerl, Yves Citton, Randy Martin, Jackie Wang, Wang Hui, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Achille Mbembe, Eyal Weizman, Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Bratton, Tiziana Terranova, Keller Easterling, Jussi Parikka, Deborah Danowich and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Wark argues that we are too often told that expertise is obtained by specialisation. Sensoria connects the themes and arguments across intellectual silos. The book is a vital and timely introduction to the future both as a warning but also as a roadmap for how we might find our way out of the current crisis.
Published by Verso, 2020
2020, English
Hardcover, 108 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
Gerhard Richter’s early period in Dresden ended in February 1961 with his escape from the DDR. The artist’s work in the West officially began at the end of 1962 with the painting listed number one in his works catalogue, “Tisch”.
The interval of one and a half years in between has remained largely ignored by art historians. It was during these months that Gerhard Richter, who still called himself “Gerd” at the time, tried to find his feet in his new surroundings in Düsseldorf.
The book presents numerous letters, photographs and documents, as well as pictures from this period and chronicles Richter’s experiences and search for a new artistic beginning.
2020, English
Hardcover, 330 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Barcelona
Walther König / Köln
$75.00 - Out of stock
An extensive survey of Antoni Tàpies’ work, focusing on the period the Catalan artist lived under Franco’s dictatorship, between 1946 and 1975.
In works that occupy a unique mid-ground between painting and sculpture, Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) fused the material vocabulary of Arte Povera and the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism with the mystical sensibility of Iberian Catholicism. Tàpies showed a preference for an austere palate and unconventional materials reflecting the limited resources of his political environment. He spent three decades of his long productive career in Barcelona, where he lived and died, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. In that time, Tàpies confronted many of the paradoxes a creative artist faces under an authoritarian and anti-intellectual regime. In painting, sculpture, writing and other mediums, his work existed in conversation with the currents of contemporary art in the West while within the strictures of an oppressive state.
Antoni Tàpies: Political Biography illuminates the artist’s responses to the conditions of his native Catalonia, reproducing documents such as letters, manifestoes and samples of the media reception Tàpies generated over the years alongside reproductions of works from across his career. Texts by artists, curators and critics discussing Tàpies and the context of his oeuvre, plus a comparative chronology, are also included.
Text by Xavier Antich, Glòria Domènech, Manel Guerrero, Núria Homs, María Dolores Jiménez Blanco, Xavier Montanyà, Javier Pérez Segura.
An incredible book!
2020, Enlgish
Softcover, 336 pages, 19.1 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Eurock Publications / Portland
$60.00 - In stock -
A collection of 'Artifacts' from the files of the legendary Eurock Magazine, "Archives" presents rare images, letters, and communiqués that help complete the intimate Eurock portrait of an era, the music and the friendships spanning 1970-2000. Haphazardly tracing Eurock founder Archie Patterson's life in music, "Archives" is at once both a visual scrapbook and idiosyncratic introduction to 1970s-80s experimental music networks around the world (Krautrock, Musique Française, Behind the Iron Curtain, Musica de Mexico, experimental music from Japan, Brazil, UK, Sweden, the labels, fanzines, distributions...), all heavily illustrated with ephemera, press images, hand-bills, letters, clippings, gig posters, zine covers, and much more.
Includes Cosmic Couriers, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Manuel Göttsching, Wallenstein, Witthüser & Westrupp, Floh de Cologne, Hoelderlin, Emtidi, Mythos, Amon Düül 2, Roedelius, Can, Konrad Schnitzler, Peter Baumann, Kraftwerk, Spacebox, Embryo, Lard Free, Guru Guru, Gilbert Artman, Urban Sax, Art Zoyd, Heldon, Etron Fou Leloublan, Patrick Gauthier, Ilitch, ZNR, Bernard Szajner, DDAA, Didier Bocquet, Wapassou, Univers Zero, Fondation, Shub Niggurath, Troll, Pascal Comelade, Eskaton, Christian Vander, Catherine Riberio + Alpes, Yochk'o Seffer, Luc Marianni, Pulsar, Pataphonie, Michail Chekalin, Patrick Vian, Plastic People of the Universe, Carlos Alvarado, Chac Mool, Decibel, Jorge Reyes, Far East Family Band, Stomu Yamash'ta, Magical Power Mako, Samla Mammas Manna, Aska Temple, Legendary Pink Dots, Michael Huygen, Vangelis, Neuronium, Klaus Schonning, Cybotron, Steve Maxwell Von Braund, Ian McFarlane, Rainbow Theatre, Kulu Hatha Mamma, Savage Rose, Metabolist, Henry Cow, Lemon Kittens, Half Japanese, Chrome, and many more...
Founded by Archie Patterson in Portland 1971 as an FM radio show in Central California, Eurock developed into the fanzine bible of European rock and electronic music, promoting space, cosmic music, krautrock, ambient, and experimental music through its pages and subsequent Intergalactic Trading Company and Paradox Music Mailorder services. Whilst releasing and distributing the "100 Points" recording by the imprisoned Czech underground band Plastic People of the Universe, consulting on film scores in LA (introducing director Michael Mann to Tangerine Dream), and teaching Rock music history classes in public high school, Archie published 45 issues of the invaluable, internationally distributed, vanguard Eurock magazine.
2007, English
Softcover, 718 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Eurock Publications / Portland
$80.00 - In stock -
"the Second Culture ... a culture that will not be dependent on the official channels of communication, social recognition, and the hierarchy of values laid down by the establishment." – Ivan Jirous, Plastic People of the Universe
"Eurock Magazine documents a particular time in the world when the limits of imagination and what was possible sonically were stretched beyond the norm. The futuristic alchemy of free-flowing ions, mind-expanding chemical substances and mega-watts of electricity resulted in an explosion of creativity unparalleled in the history of rock music." – from foreword
European Rock & the Second Culture, "The Book of Eurock", compiles all the feature articles, interviews, reviews and essays published in Eurock Magazine during its existence from 1973 - 1992. Founded by Archie Patterson in Portland 1971 as an FM radio show in Central California, Eurock developed into the fanzine bible of European rock and electronic music, promoting space, cosmic music, krautrock, ambient, and experimental music through its pages and subsequent Intergalactic Trading Company and Paradox Music Mailorder services. Whilst releasing and distributing the "100 Points" recording by the imprisoned Czech underground band Plastic People of the Universe, consulting on film scores in LA (introducing director Michael Mann to Tangerine Dream), and teaching Rock music history classes in public high school, Archie published 45 issues of the invaluable, internationally distributed vanguard Eurock magazine.
At over 700 pages, European Rock & the Second Culture contains an enormous wealth of information, illustrated and collated in chronological order, and rounded off with an extensive index of the musical artists and subjects covered over 30 years. Includes Amon Düül, Faust, Heldon, ZNR, Can, Magma, Plastic People of the Universe, Urban Sax, Henry Cow, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Art Zoyd, Univers Zero, Pascal Comelade, Floh de Cologne, Hoelderlin, Emtidi, Mythos, Amon Düül 2, Konrad Schnitzler, Peter Michel Hamel, Savage Rose, Urban Sax, Neu, Embryo, Yochk'o Seffer, Wigwam, Catherine Riberio + Alpes, Chrome, Area, Kluster, ZAO, Ange, Tolonen, Sensation's Fix, Osanna, DDAA, Le Orme, Kraan, SBB, Omega, Mark Shreeve, Cyrille Verdeaux, Holger Czukay, Pekka Pohjola, Richard Pinhas, Tasavallan Presidentti, and many many more, plus the labels, the fanzines, the politics, and above all else, the spirit of the music.
A Special Bonus is the previously unpublished tome on Krautrock from 1971 by Lester Bangs, late Editor of Creem Magazine and gonzo rock journalist extraordinaire, Amon Düül - A Science Fiction Rock Spectacle: "the combined accomplishments of American and Limey bands have been seeded in less-sung rock scenes around the world, and some of these seeds are coming to the weirdest blooms heard in the Western world with the mostest bloom in one of the seemingly unlikeliest places imaginable: Scandinavia and Germany." – Lester Bangs
A must!
2006, English
Hardcover, 220 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms—a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best—the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.
2019, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 12.7 x 18 cm
Published by
Harper Perennial / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
A new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.
In the first half of Kate Zambreno's astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno's thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them.
If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby--with Diane Arbus as nanny--it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans."--Amber Sparks
"In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with."--Brian Evenson
2020, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 15.2 x 23 cm
Published by
University of Iowa Press / Iowa
$59.00 - Out of stock
“The time has certainly come for a large-scale study of Dennis Cooper, and Wrong is a major achievement that satisfies in every respect. Cooper is a truly tireless figure who has somehow managed to thrive outside the university and nonprofit industrial complex. He’s published poetry, fiction, and hybrid genres that cross four decades of literary innovation and numerous subcultures: liberation-era militancy, anarcho-punk, AIDS writing, and digital poetics. Hester’s book makes the definitive case for Cooper as both modern day Rimbaud and Sade. Unlike Rimbaud, however, Cooper never abandoned the literary enterprise and instead, like his peer Eileen Myles, kept reinventing his project, rarely repeating the same formal decisions in any two works. Further, he has been a figurehead in Los Angeles, New York, and Amsterdam, not to mention his presence as a juggernaut of blogging. Readers will not soon forget the scenes that come hurtling at us sideways in these pages: the young Cooper bludgeoned in the head with an axe, the suburban youth baptized by punk music, the friendship with George Miles (the ‘flickering presence’ of Cooper’s cycle of novels), the literary disputes of later years, and many more. Hester’s ferocious sleuthing conveys us to whole new areas of understanding about Cooper.”—Kaplan Harris, coeditor, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley
“Diarmuid Hester unfurls a riveting chronicle of Dennis Cooper’s intertwined life and work, without circumscribing the possibilities that remain for readers to construct a Dennis of their own. Hester interprets Cooper’s creations within their historical, relational, and political contexts, and keeps alive the interpersonal spark that makes Cooper such an inspiration for rebels and artists everywhere.”—Wayne Koestenbaum, author, Camp Marmalade
Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.
In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American postwar avant-garde.
2020, English
Softcover, 276 pages, 16.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Occasional Papers / London
$52.00 $45.00 - Out of stock
This ambitious book brings together a wide international selection of new and recent writing by educators and practitioners who question the rules and hierarchies of graphic design education today. It holds a vivid mirror up to the ways in which graphic design is imagined, taught, received and reproduced.
Edited by two designer-educators, One and many mirrors provides an urgent overview of the field of contemporary graphic design education for all those concerned with its past, present and possible futures.
Featuring contributions by Paul Bailey, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Richard Buchanan, Vincent Chan, Tony Credland, Europa, Katie Evans, Matthew Galloway, Rob Giampietro, Corin Gisel, Ricardo Gonçalves, Lisa Grocott, Brad Haylock, Constanze Hein, Richard Hollis, Na Kim, James Langdon, Lu Liang, Ellen Lupton, Gabriela Matuszyk, Fraser Muggeridge, Paul Mylecharane, Nina Paim, Megan Patty, Radim Peško, Joe Potts, Bryony Quinn, Carlos Romo‑Melgar, Naomi Strinati, Jon Sueda, Lucille Tenazas, Teal Triggs, Michael Twyman, Jonty Valentine, Laurene Vaughan, Noel Waite, Luke Wood, Jia Xiao, Bonne Zabolotney and Roxy Zeiher.
Supported by The Physics Room, University of Canterbury College of Arts Contestable Research Fund and RMIT University School of Design
Edited by Luke Wood and Brad Haylock