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.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 16.7 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$60.00 - Out of stock
edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Contributions by David Edward Allen & Maria Buzhor, Rebecca Anderson, Bergit Arends & Sunoj D, Connie Butler & Hazel Dowling, Caroline Cornish & Mark Nesbitt, Alfred Döblin, Natasha Eaton, Germaine Greer, Kim Berit Heppelmann, Emma Waltraud Howes, Melanie Jackson, Alana Jelinek, Philip Kerrigan, Kay Evelina Lewis-Jones, Claire Loussouarn, Wietske Maas, Natasha Myers, Matteo Pasquinelli, Raqs Media Collective, herman de vries, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Botanical Drift explores the hermeneutics, historicization, semiotics, and symbiosis of plant diversification, species cultivation, and destruction—past and present, extant and extinct—around the globe. Plant histories are explored as commodities and colonial as well as decolonial devices by significant and diverse feminist, art-historical, and anthropological voices—from Germaine Greer to herman de vries—bringing new perspectives through photo-essays, fiction, performance, and interventions in ecological, film, and translation archives. Reflecting on experimental ecology—the undiscovered, underestimated, and undesired non-European flora and fauna—it challenges perception and inspires potentialities to bring new understandings of the undergrowth of the Kew Gardens botany collection.
Design by A Practice for Everyday Life
2019, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
In the current issue of Texts on Art, "Literature," we explore the emergence of the genre of "autofiction": a field in literature that has been taken up between the formally distinct categories of fiction and autobiography. Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, among others, whose works are exemplary in developing the form of writing in which the fictitious ego merges with the voices of others, where these voices are potentially in the social more generally.
ISSUE NO. 115 / SEPTEMBER 2019 "LITERATUR"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
BETWEEN YOU AND ME / A Correspondence on Autofiction in Contemporary Literature between Isabelle Graw and Brigitte Weingart
WOMAN AS SUBJECT OR EXEMPLARY OF HER KIND / A Conversation between Maija Timonen and Rachel Cusk
CLAUDE HAAS
ON - THE DEMISE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WHIRL OF AUTOFICTION. OR: REALITY TODAY
SURRENDER AS FREEDOM / Interview with Enis Maci by Aram Lintzel
PETER REHBERG
- QUEER AUTOFICTION AS BODY PROTOCOL
DIRK VON LOWTZOW
SOME QUESTIONS FOR LEÏLA SLIMANI
LEANDER SCHOLZ - LITERATURE OF WORKING-CLASS CHILDREN
JUTTA KOETHER -
WHEN YOU PAINT APPLES, DO YOU ALSO FEEL YOUR BREASTS AND KNEES BECOMING APPLES?
NEW DEVELOPMENT
EMPIRE OF ETHER / Colin Lang on the Advent of Drone Exhibitions
ROTATION
LIFE PRESERVER / Sven Lütticken on Alice Creischer’s “In the Stomach of the Predators: Writings and Collaborations”
KLANG KÖRPER
PROTO-WHATEVER-THIS-NEXT-PHASE-IS / Annika Haas über Holly Herndon in der Volksbühne Berlin und im Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel
REVIEWS
BLUE CUBES: VOLLGELAUFENE VOLUMEN / Diedrich Diederichsen über die 58. Biennale in Venedig
THE POWER OF NO / Eva Díaz on the Whitney Biennial 2019
GLOBAL SALE / Simon Baier über El Anatsui im Haus der Kunst, München
TO GIVE AND GIVE SUN / Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu on Cecilia Vicuña at Witte de With, Rotterdam
FREE WILLY / Mikael Brkic on Jana Euler at Galerie Neu, Berlin
UNDERSTANDING THAT EVERYONE IS NOT UNDERSTANDING EVERYTHING / Gunter Reski über Heike-Karin Föll in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
CONSIDER NOT THE BIRD’S, BUT THE WORM’S VIEW / Adam Kleinman on Cian Dayrit at Nome Gallery, Berlin
KÜNSTLERIN SEIN / Georg Imdahl über Anna Oppermann in der Kunsthalle Bielefeld
SETTING THE RECORD STRAY / Ana Teixeira Pinto on “Straying from the Line” at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
CHICAGO, NOW! / Hans-Jürgen Hafner über Gustave Caillebotte in der Alten Nationalgalerie, Berlin
HIDE AND SEEK / Magnus Schaefer on Lydia Ourahmane at Bodega, New York
WE NEVER KNOW HOW HIGH WE ARE / Thomas Groetz über Mayo Thompson in der Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
INVOLUNTARY TRACES / Daniel Ricardo Quiles on Jonathas de Andrade at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
POETISCHE SEZIERUNGEN / Isabel Mehl über Cana Bilir-Meier im Hamburger Kunstverein
CAVEMAN BLUES / Saim Demircan on Edith Karlson and Dan Mitchell at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn
DIE MEISTERIN / Stefan Neuner über Lotte Laserstein in der Berlinischen Galerie
STAGING FEMINISM / Luisa Lorenza Corna on “The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy” at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, and “Doing Deculturalization” at Museion, Bolzano
WAHRNEHMUNG IST VERSCHIEBBAR / Christina Irrgang über Bea Schlingelhoff in der Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf
GRIT AND VITALITY / Daniel Sturgis on Joan Snyder at Blain Southern, London
NACHRUFE
LINDA BILDA (1963−2019)
by Silvia Eiblmayr
AGNÈS VARDA (1928–2019)
by Jennifer Stob
MICHEL SERRES (1930−2019)
by Lorenz Engell
KLAUS BUSSMANN (1941–2019
by Ulrike Groos and Hans Haacke
EDITION
BIRGIT MEGERLE
STERLING RUBY
2019, English / German
Hardcover, 144 pages, 16.5 cm x 22 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Fridericianum / Kassel
$48.00 - Out of stock
The realm of the imaginary, which has always been regarded as the primal domain of art, has expanded progressively under the influence of new technologies in the early years of the twenty-first century. Through a process of mutual interaction, the imaginary permeates and shapes reality— and vice versa. The imaginary potential of the visual image has become increasingly significant. This ongoing process is designated by the concept of the image. The works presented in this exhibition explore the image at the moment of its fundamental reconfiguration. Changes affecting the origin, distribution, function, and mission of the image have made it both the point of departure and the principal object of artistic analysis.
Artworks by Pierre Huyghe, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Mark Leckey, Philippe Parreno, Michel Majerus, Trisha Donnelly, Cory Arcangel, Sturtevant, Isa Genzken
Texts by Alex Kitnick, Susanne Pfeffer, Seth Price, D.N. Rodowick
Published to accompany the exhibition ‘Images’, 31 Jan – 1 May 2016, Fridericianum, Kassel.
Co-published by Koenig Books and Fridericianum.
English and German text.
2017, English / German
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 560 pages, 23 x 18 cm
Published by
Kunsthaus Bregenz / Austria
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - In stock -
This comprehensive and chronologically structured catalogue raisonné orders the radical work of the artist Maria Eichhorn according to art history and is supplemented by extensive image and archive material on her works, projects and exhibitions since 1986.
With the addition of large-format illustrations of the exhibition in Bregenz, this is one of the most comprehensive publications on the work of the artist to date.
Published retrospectively after the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, 10 May – 6 July 2014.
English and German text.
Maria Eichhorn is a German artist based in Berlin. She is best known for site-specific works and installations that investigate political and economic systems, often revealing their intrinsic absurdity or the extent to which we normalize their complex codes and networks
2018, English
Softcover, 268 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
écal / Renens
$82.00 - Out of stock
Early Video Art and Experimental Films Networks traces the diffuse international networks through which video art and experimental films circulated during the late sixties and early seventies. It explores forgotten exhibitions both in Switzerland and France, the activities of public television channels and alternative art spaces in the US, a production art center dedicated to video in Italy and an Argentinian collective of conceptual artists, aiming to shed new light on the production and diffusion of moving images.
This volume is divided into two parts: the first part, which is longer and more extensively documented, explores the emergence and consolidation of video art networks at international level; the second focuses more specifically on two exhibitions of artists' films (New Forms in Film and Une histoire du cinéma) and one of the main instances of the museification of experimental cinema, Anthology Film Archives. Indeed, this particular story has wider currency insofar as several important works in recent years have focused on artists' films 23 and expanded cinema 24. We have adopted the principle, wherever possible, of providing rare and previously unpublished images and documents alongside the essays specifically commissioned for this volume, the choice of which has been left to the discretion of the author of each particular chapter.
Edited by François Bovier.
Texts by Kristen Alfaro, François Bovier, Enrico Camporesi, Katarzyna Cytlak, Larisa Dryansky, Tristan Lavoyer, Adeena Mey, Kris Paulsen, Cosetta G. Saba, Andrew V. Uroskie.
2019, English
Softcover, 560 pages, 17.3 x 27.5 cm
Published by
A.R.T. Press / New York
Koenig Books / London
$60.00 - Out of stock
Since the 1980s Andrea Fraser has achieved renown for performances that interrogate social structures with humor and pathos, aligning herself with feminism and institutional critique. While Fraser’s video and performance works are often associated with investigations of art institutions, her performances since the early 2000s evidence a turn toward analyzing the intersection between sociopolitical and psychological structures as they produce individual and group identity.
The extensive collection of conversations with fellow artists and curators provides access to Andrea Fraser's work and reception. The interview format gives a very personal insight into her artistic practice. Central ideas and topics of her work are explained from different perspectives. The chronological composition of the minimal editorial intervention covers three decades.
This volume was published on the occasion of Andrea Fraser's exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angelis in May- September 2019.
Contributors include: Judith Batalion, Helmut Draxler, Vincenzo de Bellis, Gregg Bordowitz, Sabine Breitwieser, Stuart Comer, Joshua Decter, Yilmaz Dziewior, Andrea Fraser, Jorg Heiser, Miwon Kwon, Bennett Simpson et al.
2019, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Uh Books / Amsterdam
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$23.00 - Out of stock
The eighteenth issue of ‘F.R. DAVID’ is edited by Will Holder and had its beginnings in prosody, the measure of language, geometry, and a notion of imagist transcription. A two-dimensional exercise, it turns out, on paper. Words were tuned out in favour of the volume of values our bodies exchanged. This issue’s diverse contents centre around the non-verbal, the insinuated, the reverse-side of the image, the backside, and perhaps even the next page. With contributions by Simone Weil, Marcel Proust, Will Holder, Anna Daučíková, Yvonne Rainer, Jesse Birch, Paola Grassi, David Lang, Péter Dobai, John Yau, Clare Noonan, and others.
2019, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Uh Books / Amsterdam
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$23.00 - Out of stock
‘Black Sun’ is edited in conversation with Krist Gruijthuijsen, currently the director of KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, to accompany the exhibitions ‘David Wojnarowicz Photography & Film 1978–1992’, ‘Reza Abdoh’, and ‘TIES, TALES AND TRACES: Dedicated to Frank Wagner, Independent Curator (1958–2016)’. The issue departs from Wojnarowicz’s grief at the loss of loved ones during the 1980s AIDS crisis and anger at the US government for its wilful neglect. It assembles a selection of various gendered and sexual positions, all seeking support, love, and intimacy in linguistic, architectural, and bodily structures while under threat of collapse.
Includes Cynthia Carr, Julia Kristeva, Ira & George Gershwin, James Agee, Michael Cisco, Noor Al Samarrai, Alvin Baltrop, Sarah Schulman, David Wojnarowicz, Renee Gladman, Lylah Clare, Shary Boyle & John Kurok, Herbert Read, Lee Lozano, Dennis Cooper, Talking Heads, Claire Fontaine, Marnie Slater, Audre Lorde, Falke Pisano, Alex Turgeon, Gregg Bordowitz, Wayne Kostenbaum, 3 Teens Kill 4, Pointer Sisters, Joseph Kusendila, RP Boo, Experimental Jetset, Rob Halpern, Mark Turner, Reza Abdoh, and more.
2019, English
Softcover, 238 pages, 11 x 17 cm
Published by
Book Works / London
$33.00 - Out of stock
Formed in 1995, Inventory was a loosely associated group of writers, artists and theorists, currently guided by the efforts of two artists/heretics, Adam Scrivener and Paul Claydon, who advance a practical and theoretical notion of what they call ‘fierce sociology’. Capitalism continues to disempower us, with its corrosive mantra that it provides the best of all possible worlds and that we must stay silent and accept its violent side-effects as unfortunate necessity: we are told to tolerate its hereditary and dynastic aspects. We are told that technological change alone will bring the deleterious effects of profit and loss to heel. And so it appears, that unless we are driven to the brink of extinction, there will be no collective counter-attack of lasting value. This is the counsel of spent, asking how far we must be pushed as a species, as a planet, and how much more must be tolerated in the interests of ‘survival’ before we awake and understand that there is no natural evolution under capitalism?
2019, English
Softcover, 488 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Städelschule / Frankfurt
$42.00 - Out of stock
‘Since the year 1999, around 800 lectures have taken place at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. The texts are transcripts of thirteen lectures, selected to represent the most recent history, cataloguing ideas that might otherwise be buried and forgotten. This volume is the first of a series and focuses on the diversity of artistic perspectives. It provides an insight into the Städelschule’s educational program and documents a variety of artistic and theoretical approaches that the school seeks to support in art and society at large. The ongoing series will continuously reflect the school’s anatomy and core protagonists—the professors, the curatorial program at Portikus, and the students.’ — Philippe Pirotte (Städelschule Rector)
Städelschule Lectures 1 presents lectures, conversations, and interviews by: Monika Baer, Petra Van Brabandt, Douglas Gordon, Mark Leckey, Joshua Oppenheimer, Philippe Parreno, Philippe Pirotte, Lucy Raven, Willem de Rooij, Martha Rosler, Adi Rukun, Georgia Sagri, Mark von Schlegell, Amy Sillman and Josef Strau. The public lecture program is an integral part of the education at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. This publication is the first of a series cataloguing selected presentations from the past 20 years. Co-published with Städelschule.
2017, English
Hardcover, 384 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$84.00 - Out of stock
In 1960, the renowned architect Philip Johnson championed Frederick Kiesler, calling him “the greatest non-building architect of our time.” Kiesler's ideas were difficult to construct, but as Johnson believed, “enormous” and “profound.” Kiesler (1890–1965) went against the grain of the accepted modern style, rejecting rectilinear glass and steel in favor of more organic forms and flexible structures that could respond to the ever-changing needs of the body in motion.
In Elastic Architecture, Stephen Phillips offers the first in-depth exploration of Kiesler's innovative and multidisciplinary research and design practice. Phillips argues that Kiesler established a new career trajectory for architects not as master builders, but as research practitioners whose innovative means and methods could advance alternative and speculative architecture. Indeed, Kiesler's own career was the ultimate uncompromising model of a research-based practice.
Exploring Kiesler's formative relationships with the European avant-garde, Phillips shows how Kiesler found inspiration in the plastic arts, experimental theater, early animation, and automatons to develop and refine his spatial concept of the Endless. Moving from Europe to New York in the 1920s, Kiesler applied these radical Dadaist, constructivist, and surrealist practices to his urban display projects, which included shop windows for Saks Fifth Avenue. After launching his innovative Design Correlation Laboratory at Columbia and Yale, Kiesler went on to invent new houses, theaters, and galleries that were meant to move, shift, and adapt to evolutionary changes occurring within the natural and built environment.
As Phillips demonstrates vividly, although many of Kiesler's designs remained unbuilt, his ideas proved influential to later generations of architects and speculative artists internationally, including Archigram, Greg Lynn, UNStudio, and Olafur Eliasson.
Stephen J. Phillips is Professor of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University, Founding Director of the Cal Poly Los Angeles Metropolitan Program in Architecture and Urban Design, and Principal Architect at the firm Stephen Phillips Architects (SPARCHS).
1970, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 $8.00 - Out of stock
English 1970 Penguin edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's "Iron in the Soul", translated by Gerard Hopkins.
June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men who fought and tragic men like Mathieu, who had dedicated his life to finding personal freedom, now overwhelmed by remorse and bitterness, who must learn to kill. Iron in the Soul, the third volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom Trilogy, is a harrowing depiction of war and what it means to lose.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".
Good copy.
1987, English
Softcover, 146 pages, 11.4 cm x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 English edition.
In 1976, Jean Baudrillard sent this essay to the French magazine Critique, where Michel Foucault was an editor. Foucault was asked to reply, but remained silent. Forget Foucault (1977) made Baudrillard instantly infamous in France. Characterizing it as a "mythic discourse," Jean Baudrillard proceeds, in this brilliant essay, to dismantle the powerful, seductive figure of Michel Foucault. In a torrent of haikus, which can now be seen as classically Baudrillardian, he swirls Foucault's concepts of repression, sexuality, production, consumption, and history around in an intense, and often comical, reversal of forces. Exceeding the boundaries of literary or philosophical critique, Baudrillard writes from beyond the horizon of political thought and in a space of phantasmic speculation, finally "using" Foucault's terminologies and public significance to launch his own form of occult, philosophical clarity. In the second half of the book, Baurillard meets his match in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer, who teases Baudrillard with his own ideas, in turn making commentaries on subjects as diverse as panic, ecstasy, and May '68.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations (1983) instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art.
2018, English / Italian
Softcover, 236 pages, 16 x 22.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Galleria Giovanni Bonelli / Milan
$44.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Marco Scotini in collaboration with Gabriele Sassone
Contributions by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Adam Budak, Luca Cerizza, Émile Ouroumov, Marco Scotini, Elisabetta Trincherini
This publication surveys the work of Italian critic, architect, and visual artist Gianni Pettena. Focusing on a rich ten-year period of production that began in the mid-sixties, it brings new attention to the artistic and intellectual practice of a figure known primarily as one of the main exponents of the Radical Architecture movement. International curators and writers consider a span of projects about landscape and the built form as well as objects and works documenting Pettena’s interests in labor, temporality, action, and the event. Published on the occasion of the exhibition “About Non-Conscious Architecture” at Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan, 2017, the book also contains a republished conversation between Pettena and artist Robert Smithson and an illustrated index detailing the trajectory of Pettena’s body of work and research.
Copublished with Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
Design by Dallas
2018, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 14 x 22.5 cm
$57.00 - Out of stock
Throughout the twentieth century, art history has been too narrowly focused on formalism. As a result, analyses regularly reduced works of art to their materials, texture, and composition. By contrast, art historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Gilles Deleuze's readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as the basis for a new resistance to the overly reductive account of art history. After laying out his argument for a new aesthetics of production in introductory chapters that discuss the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as Heidegger and Kant, Egenhofer applies this theoretical framework to case studies on Michael Asher, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Piet Mondrian. An aesthetics of production does not, he argues, imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for a work of art's singularity, but a way to bring together elements of critical materialism with a thorough reevaluation of the modern art and abstraction.
2019, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$77.00 - Out of stock
An examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era.
In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation-from home video to social media-suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms.
Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us-those that we take and share, those that we see and assimilate through mass media and social media, those that we encounter in museums and galleries. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices-and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.
2013, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 178 x 218.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$77.00 - Out of stock
If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading. -- from Feelings Are Facts In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$49.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
"It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist's dream."
So begins Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations are covering over onetime cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The list of entwined horrors--climatic, biological, social--is long. But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: "habitat loss," "human rights abuses," "climate change." The shock of these words has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig's keen attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues from precursors' ruminations: Roland Barthes' suggestion that trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest; William Burroughs' retort to critics that for him words are like animals--cut them and the words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with experimental verve, this book is Taussig's Tristes Tropiques for the twenty-first century.
Michael Taussig is professor of anthropology at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Walter Benjamin's Grave and My Cocaine Museum, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
2009, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$57.00 - Out of stock
Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path.
Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum, this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich.
Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.
Michael Taussig is professor of anthropology at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Walter Benjamin's Grave and My Cocaine Museum, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
2014, English
Softcover, 190 pages, 11.5 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Sequence Press / New York
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$45.00 - Out of stock
English Translation by Robin Mackay
Foreword by Alain Badiou
Gilles Châtelet’s scathing polemical tract opens at the end of the 70s, when the liberatory dreams of ‘68 are beginning to putrefy, giving rise to conditions more favourable to a new breed of self-deluding ‘nomads’ and voguish ‘gardeners of the creative’. Gulled by a ‘realism’ that reassures them that political struggle is for anachronistic losers, their allegiances began to slide inexorably toward the ‘revolutionary’ forces of the market’s invisible hand, and they join the celebrants of a new order governed by boredom, impotence and envy….
As might be expected of Châtelet—mathematician, philosopher, militant gay activist, political polemicist, praised by contemporaries such as Deleuze and Badiou for his singularly penetrating philosophical mind—this is no mere lament for a bygone age. To Live and Think Like Pigs is the story of how the perverted legacy of liberalism, allied with statistical control and media communication, sought to knead Marx’s ‘free peasant’ into a statistical ‘average man’—pliant raw material for the cybernetic sausage-machine of postmodernity.
Combining the incandescent wrath of the betrayed comrade with the acute discrimination of the mathematician-physicist, Châtelet proceeds to scrutinize the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize ‘market democracy’. As he acerbically recounts, ‘chaos’, ‘emergence’, and the discourses of cybernetics and networks merely impart a futuristic sheen to Hobbesian ‘political arithmetic’ and nineteenth-century ‘social physics’—a tradition that places the individual at the center of its apolitical fairy-tales while stringently ignoring the inherently political process of individuation.
When first published in 1998, Châtelet’s book was a fierce revolt against the ‘winter years’ and a mordant theory-science-fiction of the future portended by the reign of Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand. Today its diagnoses seem extraordinarily prescient: the ‘triple alliance’ between politics, economics and cybernetics; the contrast between the self-satisfied ‘nomadism’ of a global overclass and the cultivated herds of ‘neurolivestock’ whose brains labour dumbly in cybernetic pastures; the arrogance of the ‘knights of finance’; and the limitless complacency and petty envy of middle-class dupes haplessly in thrall to household gods and openly hostile to the pursuit of a freedom that might require patience or labour.
Mercantile empiricists and acrobat-intellectuals, fluid nomads and viscous losers, Robinsons on wheels, Turbo-Bécassines and Cyber-Gideons…Châtelet deploys a cast of grotesque ‘philosophical personae’ across a series of expertly-staged set-pieces: from Hobbes’s Leviathan to Wiener’s cybernetics; from the ecstasies of Parisian nightlife to the equilibrial dystopia of Singapore’s ‘yoghurt-maker’; from the mercantile empiricist for whom the state is a glorified watermelon-seller to the coy urbanite with a broken hairdryer; from the ‘petronomadic’ stasis of the traffic jam to the financier chasing the horizon of absolute volatility; from the demonization of cannabis to the fatuous celebration of ‘difference’.
To Live and Think Like Pigs is both an uproarious portrait of the evils of the new world order, and a technical manual for its innermost ideological workings. Châtelet’s diagnosis of the ‘neoliberal counter-reformation’ is a significant moment in French political philosophy worthy to stand alongside Deleuze’s ‘Control Society’ and Foucault’s ‘liberal governmentality’. His book is crucial reading for any future politics that wants to replace individualism with an understanding of individuation, libertarianism with liberation, liquidity with plasticity, and the statistical average with the singular exception. Its appearance in translation is an important new contribution to contemporary debate on neoliberalism, economics and capitalist subjectivation.
Gilles Châtelet (1944-1999) began his studies at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud. During the late 1960s he was a member of an anti-Stalinist student faction of the French Communist Party. After 1968, a stay at UC Berkeley brought him into contact with key protagonists of the Beat Generation. He returned to France and joined the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), and befriended Roland Barthes, Daniel Guérin and Guy Hocquenghem. Meeting Michel Foucault was an important marker in the development of his political thinking; as was his friendship with Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, who played a decisive role in renewing his passion for philosophy. He obtained his PhD in Pure Mathematics from the University of Paris XI in 1975, writing his thesis on differential topology. In 1979 he became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Paris VIII. Around this time he established a dialogue with René Thom that continued until his death. He was programme director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1989 to 1995, during which period he published the important work Les Enjeux du Mobile: Mathématique, Physique, Philosophie. In 1994 he joined the Laboratoire Disciplinaire Pensée des Sciences, founded by Charles Alunni at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There, he had an active and influential role in the seminar, ‘Actuality, Potentiality and Virtuality’.
2017, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$32.00 - In stock -
The word “corruption” is insufficient for the magnitude of this evil.
—from The Iguala 43
On the night of September 26th, 2014, policemen attacked a group of student protestors in the Mexican town of Iguala. Forty-three of these students were then kidnapped and turned over to criminals who allegedly tortured and murdered them, and then burned their corpses. The families of the victims refused to accept the official story, which placed all blame on local actors and absolved the federal government of any culpability. The anger provoked by this atrocity, one of the most barbaric acts in recent times, divided Mexican society in two: on one side were those who unwaveringly supported the cause of the students and on the other those who accepted the government’s “historic truth.”
Written in memory of the forty-three students, this well-researched and powerfully argued book uncovers the agents, causes, and factors responsible for this unspeakable crime. It offers an interpretation of these events that goes beyond the artificial opposition between good and evil, between rulers and insurgents, and tries instead to understand the cruelty that normalizes atrocity.
González Rodríguez warns us that “this story has been repeated around the world, but we refuse to see it. If anyone doubts or denies this, then I challenge them to finish this book. When faced with the acceptance of horror, we must recover our lucidity and exercise our freedom to transform this tragic reality.”
Translated by Joshua Neuhouser
About the Author
Sergio González Rodríguez is a writer, journalist and critic for the Mexico City newspaper Reforma. His works include Bones in the Desert, The Flight, and The Femicide Machine (Semiotext(e)).
2018, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
An analysis of contemporary violence as the new commodity of today's hyper-consumerist stage of capitalism.
“Death has become the most profitable business in existence.”—from Gore Capitalism
Written by the Tijuana activist intellectual Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism is a crucial essay that posits a decolonial, feminist philosophical approach to the outbreak of violence in Mexico and, more broadly, across the global regions of the Third World. Valencia argues that violence itself has become a product within hyper-consumerist neoliberal capitalism, and that tortured and mutilated bodies have become commodities to be traded and utilized for profit in an age of impunity and governmental austerity.
In a lucid and transgressive voice, Valencia unravels the workings of the politics of death in the context of contemporary networks of hyper-consumption, the ups and downs of capital markets, drug trafficking, narcopower, and the impunity of the neoliberal state. She looks at the global rise of authoritarian governments, the erosion of civil society, the increasing violence against women, the deterioration of human rights, and the transformation of certain cities and regions into depopulated, ghostly settings for war. She offers a trenchant critique of masculinity and gender constructions in Mexico, linking their misogynist force to the booming trade in violence.
This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to analyze the new landscapes of war. It provides novel categories that allow us to deconstruct what is happening, while proposing vital epistemological tools developed in the convulsive Third World border space of Tijuana.
2017, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$36.00 - Out of stock
Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee's previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” Now emerges at a time when the Invisible Committee’s contestation has found echoes throughout the West, with a collapse of trust in the police, an inept weariness on the part of the political system, a growing urgency for opposition, a return of the theme of the Commune, a vanishing distinction between radicals and citizens, and a widespread refusal on the part of the citizen to be governed. As farcical political elections continue to unfold worldwide like a line of tumbling dominoes, and governments increasingly struggle to reclaim a legitimacy that has already slipped out of their grasp, Now clarifies the Invisible Committee’s attitude toward all such elections and their outcome: one of utter indifference. Now proposes a “destituent process” that charts out a different path to be taken, a path of outright refusal that simply ignores elections altogether. It is a path that calls for taking over the world and not taking power, for exploring new forms of life and not a new constitution, and for desertion and silence as alternatives to proclamations and crashes. It is also a call for an unprecedented communism—a communism stronger than nation and country.
Translated by Robert Hurley
About the Author
The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous pen name.
2015, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$32.00 - In stock -
Translated by Robert Hurley
The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection was a phenomenon, celebrated in some quarters and inveighed against in others, publicized in media that ranged from campus bulletin boards to Fox News. Seven years later, The Invisible Committee follows up their premonitory manifesto with a new book, To Our Friends.
From The Invisible Committee:
In 2007 we published The Coming Insurrection in France. It must be acknowledged that a number of assertions by the Invisible Committee have since been confirmed, starting with the first and most essential: the sensational return of the insurrectionary phenomenon. Who would have bet a kopeck, seven years ago, on the overthrow of Ben Ali or Mubarak through street action, on the revolt of young people in Quebec, on the political awakening of Brazil, on the fires set French-style in the English or Swedish banlieues, on the creation of an insurrectionary commune in the very heart of Istanbul, on a movement of plaza occupations in the United States, or on the rebellion that spread throughout Greece in December of 2008?
During the seven years that separate The Coming Insurrection from To Our Friends, the agents of the Invisible Committee have continued to fight, to organize, to transport themselves to the four corners of the world, to wherever the fires were lit, and to debate with comrades of every tendency and every country. Thus To Our Friends is written at the experiential level, in connection with that general movement. Its words issue from the turmoil and are addressed to those who still believe sufficiently in life to fight as a consequence.
To Our Friends is a report on the state of the world and of the movement, a piece of writing that’s essentially strategic and openly partisan. Its political ambition is immodest: to produce a shared understanding of the epoch, in spite of the extreme confusion of the present.
About the Author
The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous pen name.
Reviews
“From crisis capitalism to cybernetics, and from infrastructure to political destitution and the commune, To Our Friends engages in lively and innovative ways with the contemporary situation.”—Antipode