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.
2018, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25x 31 cm
Published by
Getty Publications / Los Angeles
$126.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Glenn Phillips, Doris Chon, Pietro Rigolo, Philipp Kaiser
Harald Szeemann is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate of avant-garde movements like conceptualism and post minimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture.
Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a "Museum of Obsessions." This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through the materials he collected and produced while researching and organising his exhibitions, including letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists' books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes.
This book documents all phases of Szeemann's career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apartment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realised projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005.
The book contains essays exploring Szeemann's curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and exhibition documents as well as many other materials from the curator's archive.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
"Tanya Harrod is our leading scholarly voice on craft. [This] invaluable anthology...is an ideal introduction to the intellectual landscape of craft, and an essential tool for those already invested in the topic." - Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art
Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through ‘craft’, materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on ‘craft’ as process, product and ideology.
Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Aaron Angell, Ruth Asawa, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Edmund de Waal, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Sheila Hicks, Ana Lupas, Lu Shengzhong, Enzo Mari, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Bridget Riley, Ettore Sottsass, Studio Formafantasma, Peter Voulkos.
Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin.
Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian who lives in London and who writes widely on craft, art and design. She is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and is author of The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999), The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew (2012) which won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World (2015).
2018, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick.
A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.—from Social Practices
Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.
2018, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 19.8 x 13 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
Contributions: Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, Chantal Mouffe, G. M. Tamás
Edited by Susanne Pfeffer
The contributions in this book are based on, A New Fascism – a symposium held at Fridericianum, Kassel (2016), in conjunction with the exhibition, Two A.M. by Loretta Fahrenholz. The texts follow the questions: Is there a new fascism emerging? And how can we form a counter-acting power?
In her novel entitled Nach Mitternacht (After Midnight, 1937), Irmgard Keun describes everyday life in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s under the dominant influences of fear, government control and despotism. In her exhibition at the Fridericianum, artist Loretta Fahrenholz called attention to similar contemporary phenomena. Based loosely on Keun’s exile novel, her Two A.M. was a socio-fiction film in which she presents frightening analogies to present-day surveillance, capitalism and re-emerging fascism.
One of the essential characteristics of representatives of the new Right, from the Hungarian Prime Minister to Marine Le Pen, is that they all regard themselves as democrats. And when we listen to them, they seem to become more democratic every day. Without blushing, the AfD compares itself to the Third Reich resistance group known as the Weiße Rose. And the French Front National proudly points out that it was the only party in France whose members voted in a democratic referendum on the European constitution.
Thus the obscurity of European institutions can surely be cited as one of the reasons for the emergence of new right-wing movements in all European countries. And the increasing popularity of the new right-wing and nationalist parties can also be attributed at least in part to the movements of migrants and refugees, which are certain to continue unabated in the foreseeable future.
Fascism has reinvented itself, as Alain Badiou pointed out 10 years ago. It has assumed new forms which must be analyzed. And the old theories regarding fascism are no longer adequate for that purpose.
2018, English / German
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
The September issue of Texte zur Kunst focuses on Amerika (U.S. America principally): the land, the idea, and all that seems to come with it. What is Amerika today other than a contradiction between brute political reality and a largely fictional self-image, where fiction says as much about fact as “alternative facts” say about the truth? Within this contradiction, this issue tries to imagine modes of engaging with the current political machinery without opting for the one-dimensional dive into micropolitics that has plagued much recent activist discourse. The Trump regime has introduced a new form of politics whose tactics are closer to artistic practice—inventing parallel truths and questioning facts—than anything like traditional governance. As such, those familiar with art are in a unique position to offer an analysis of the specific forms that define contemporary politics in Amerika. We have thus commissioned artists and critics to come up with new strategies for analyzing the rampant barbarism, resisting the urge to sink into paralysis and defeat in the face of the endless onslaught.
Issue No. 111 / September 2018 "America"
Table Of Contents :
Foreword
Prefaces
Colin Lang
- The Horror, Vacui
Ken Okiishi -
Liberty and Justice For All, Not Us
Aria Dean -
Trauma And Virtuality
Letter To A Friend In New York / By Isabelle Graw
The Golden Hoard / Conversation With Andrea Fraser
Sina Najaf - i
The American Dream State
Robert F. Reid-Pharr -
What We Dare Not Remember
New Development
Is Space The Place? / Eva Díaz On Feminist Futures In The Anthropocene
Love Work Cinema
Between Bildersturm And Artistic Research / Rainer Bellenbaum About Films From The Years Around 1968 In The Historical Program Of The Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
Reviews
Decolonialized Narrative In The National Art Temple / Susanne Von Falkenhausen On "Hello World" At Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
That Fluctuating Moment / Jesi Khadivi At The 10Th Berlin Biennale
The Silent Ship / Övül Ö. Durmusoglu On Manifesta 12 In Palermo
Love And Salt / Adrienne Rooney On Adrian Piper At The Museum Of Modern Art, New York
Tracks Of Disappearance / Tobi Maier About Bruce Nauman In The Schaulager, Basel
Man In The Mirror / Dan Kidner On "Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy" At Tate Modern, London
In The Bure Of The Circle / Marietta Kesting About Raster-Noton In The Kunstbau Lenbachhaus, Munich
Looking But Not Seeing? / Darla Migan On Faith Ring Gold At Weiss Berlin
Mad / Ame / Jenny Nachtigall About Jutta Koether At The Museum Brandhorst, Munich
If You Are Once Big / Nadja Abt About Philip Wiegard At Between Bridges, Berlin
Marked By Trade / Sven Lütticken On "Trade Markings" At The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Amazone Retired / Tina Schulz On Astrid Klein In The Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg
Born To Die / Colin Lang On Jeanette Mundt At Société, Berlin
Limitations Of Utopia / Christina Irrgang On Cyril Lachauer In The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
Hereditary Peers / Saim Demircan On Luke Willis Thompson At Kunsthalle Basel
Zoology Of The Falls / Niklas Lichti On Peter Wächtler With Lars Friedrich, Berlin
Below The Surf / Steven Warwick On Georgie Nettell At The Kunstbunker Forum For Contemporary Art, Nuremberg
The Hour Of The Historics / Ariane Müller About Valie Export At The Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Foreign Powers / Johanna Burton On Zoe Leonard At The Whitney Museum Of American Art
Committee Criteria / Kerstin Stakemeier On Henrike Naumann At The Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Related Practices / Sandra Neugärtner On Anni Albers In The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Term (s) Of Endearment / Kathi Hofer On "Milieu" At After The Butcher, Berlin
Obituary
Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018)
Edition
Cecily Brown
Mark Leckey
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 23.7 x 29 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$280.00 - Out of stock
The now very scarce and collectable MIT Press monograph on David Hammons, published in 1991. First and only edition in original dust jacket.
Essays by Steve Cannon, Tom Finkelpearl, and Kellie Jones
Photographs by Dawoud Bey and Bruce Talamon
Rousing the Rubble celebrates two decades of work by artist David Hammons, who has risen to prominence while at the same time consciously ducking the attention of critics, galleries, and museums, preferring to "do things in the street." A recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a Prix de Rome, Hammons places himself as an artist between Arte Povera and Marcel Duchamp. He makes his art from refuse and the detritus of African-American life: chicken wings, Thunderbird and Night Train bottles, clippings from dreadlocks, basketball hoops. Hammons's deeply felt political views on race and cultural stereotypes give his witty and elegant sculptures, installations, and body prints an integrity that promises to keep the focus on his art rather than on his career.
Illustrated with nearly 100 photographs (both black and white and color), Rousing the Rubble covers the full range of Hammons's art and his methods of creating it. Steve Cannon's rap poem takes the reader on a freewheeling bicycle ride from Harlem to the Lower East Side in New York and is joyously infused with the same energies and inspirations as Hammons' work. Tom Finkelpearl discusses the power of the dirty, used objects Hammons prefers and how they relate to the clean" art exhibited in conventional gallery settings. And Kellie Jones examines how Hammons's art evolved from Los Angeles in the 1960s to New York and Rome in the present day.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket (some small repaired tears, now preserved under plastic sleeve)
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 12.7 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Laurenz Foundation / Schaulager
$54.00 - Out of stock
Bruce Nauman: A Contemporary presents the artist as contemporary in a double sense. First, the works of Nauman's 50-plus-year career are placed in the context of contemporary positions and discourses. Second, the publication analyses the extent to which Nauman's themes, media and forms have forged connections to the present, remaining of enduring importance for artists of subsequent generations. This publication seeks to counter the tendency to cast Bruce Nauman as an outstanding, solitary figure of postmodernism by putting the artist's work back in context. Nauman's early works were originally discussed in the context of contemporary practices and discourses, such as minimal music, postmodern dance, conceptual art, Gestalt therapy or the philosophy of language. But soon Nauman's reputation came to precede him, and his more recent work has largely been appraised independently of any artistic, social, historical or theoretical context. Critical consideration of Nauman's work has narrowed to a relatively small selection of the artist's works and ideas. Bruce Nauman: A Contemporary redresses this imbalance by focusing on thematic concerns shared by Nauman and his contemporaries. Scholarly essays explore how Nauman and his works enter contemporary conversations on the relationship of art and work, art and globalisation, and corporeality in the digital age.
2016, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 17.7 x 23.8 cm
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
Concerted Efforts explores the nature and purpose of collaborative relationships in contemporary art. Edited by Samantha McCulloch and Christopher Williams-Wynn. Featuring contributions from A Constructed World, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, bomb collective, Catherine or Kate, Charles Green, Courtney Coombs, Critical Art Ensemble, Institute for New Feeling, neverhitsend, and Rachael Haynes.
Published by Melbourne publisher Surpllus.
2017, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 15.2 x 21.3 cm
Published by
Capricious / New York
$39.00 - Out of stock
A 180+ page collection of poems and writings by artist and performer Juliana Huxtable.
Juliana Huxtable is a New York City-based writer, performer, and artist. Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Artforum, Candy, Tropical Cream, and Mousse. She was included in the 2015 New Museum Triennial, curated by Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell.
1947, French
Softcover, 142 pages, 24 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Maeght Editeur / Paris
$480.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce copy of the legendary "Le Surréalisme en 1947 : Exposition Internationale de Surréalisme présentée par André Breton et Marcel Duchamp", published by Maeght Editeur, Paris, in conjunction with an important exhibition of Surrealist artists in 1947. Features the cover design by Marcel Duchamp - a photographic reproduction by Rémy Duval of "Prière de toucher (Please touch)", the famous Duchamp rubber breast edition, created with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati, that adorned the first 999 copies of the catalogue. This gorgeous catalogue features the work of artists from 24 countries including Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Jacqueline Lamba, Jacques Hérold, Wilfredo Lam, Joan Miró, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Jean, Maria Martins, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Hans Arp, Hector Hyppolite, Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Elizabeth van Damme, Jacques Halpern, Julio de Diego, Enrico Donati, Francis Bouvet , David Hare, Iaroslav Serpan, Jacqueline Lamba, Taro Okamoto, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Toyen, Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, Leonard Baskin, Jindrich Heisler, Jeanne Reynal, Roger Brielle, Jindrich Styrsky, Bruno Capacci, Jean Guerin, Isamu Noguchi, Gerome Kamrowski, Eugenio Granell, Francis Picabia, Remedios Varo, Hans Richter, Arshile Gorky, and many more,, along with the folding sheet catalogue loosely inserted.
Good copy considering age. Very tanned edges and wear to corners, edges and spine.
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 456 pages, 152 x 229 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - In stock -
A critique of capital through the lens of war, and a critique of war through the lens of the revolution of 1968.
“We are at war,” declared the President of the French Republic on the evening of November 13, 2015. But what is this war, exactly?
In Wars and Capital, Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato propose a counter-history of capitalism to recover the reality of the wars that are inflicted on us and denied to us. We experience not the ideal war of philosophers, but wars of class, race, sex, and gender; wars of civilization and the environment; wars of subjectivity that are raging within populations and that constitute the secret motor of liberal governmentality. By naming the enemy (refugees, migrants, Muslims), the new fascisms establish their hegemony on the processes of political subjectivation by reducing them to racist, sexist, and xenophobic slogans, fanning the flames of war among the poor and maintaining the total war philosophy of neoliberalism.
Because war and fascism are the repressed elements of post-'68 thought, Alliez and Lazzarato not only read the history of capital through war but also read war itself through the strange revolution of '68, which made possible the passage from war in the singular to a plurality of wars—and from wars to the construction of new war machines against contemporary financialization. It is a question of pushing “'68 thought” beyond its own limits and redirecting it towards a new pragmatics of struggle linked to the continuous war of capital. It is especially important for us to prepare ourselves for the battles we will have to fight if we do not want to be always defeated.
Translated by Ames Hodges
2017, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 13.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Harvard University Graduate School of Design / Cambridge
$22.00 - Out of stock
In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design. In this new account of “design thinking” based on that memorable talk, Rowe charges that ideas about the “precision” and “incompleteness” of information have become exaggerated and made more manifest. He dives into the crucial role of schema theory and the heuristics that flow from it, but concedes that the “ineffable characteristics of design problems and of design thinking also appear to have remained.”
The Incidents is a book series based on uncommon events at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1936 to tomorrow.
Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Book series designed by Åbäke
2012, English
Softcover, 70 pages (7 b/w ill.), 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$24.00 - Out of stock
Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation. With contributions by Peter Geimer, Isabelle Graw, and André Rottmann, Thinking through Painting investigates painting’s traits and reception in cultural and socioeconomic discourse.
2017, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Afterall / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
The artist Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) worked across a broad range of media—including photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and film—and in styles that varied from abstract expressionism to Pop. This volume in Afterall’s One Work series offers an illustrated exploration of Freundinnen (Girlfriends 1965/66), one of Polke’s important early paintings. Taken from a found image of two young women, and using the raster dots also found in mass media reproductions, Girlfriends offers a statement about the use and social function of images.
Stefan Gronert approaches Girlfriends through its deliberate and elusive ambiguity, providing technical detail and historical background that allow some of the work’s motivation and depth to become clearer. Gronert analyzes Polke’s relationship to his tutors and peers, especially Gerhard Richter; describes the art historical context in which Polke worked; and discusses some of the social and political issues to which Girlfriends refers. Considering such topics as the distinction between Polke and Alain Jacquet in their use of photographed material, between Polke’s use of the raster technique and that of Roy Lichtenstein, and the feminist discourse of the time, Gronert draws on a variety of critical interpretations of Polke’s work, including some material that has not yet been translated into English.
About the Author
Stefan Gronert is Curator of Photography and New Media at Sprengel Museum Hannover. A lecturer in art history at the Braunschweig University of Art, he is the author of Jeff Wall: Specific Pictures and coeditor of Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965-2013.
2016, English
Paperback, 240 pages, 21.6 x 27.9 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
Judd Foundation / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
This is the complete, authorized collection of Donald Judd's early art criticism and polemical writings; it includes his landmark essay "Specific Objects" plus more than 500 contemporary art reviews he wrote on key artists and exhibitions of the 1960s.
Complete Writings 1959–1975 was first published in 1975 by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and since then it has been the primary source for Donald Judd’s early writing. Working as an art critic for the magazines Arts, Arts Magazine and, later, Art International, Judd regularly contributed reviews of contemporary art exhibitions between 1959 and 1965, but continued to write throughout his life on a broad range of subjects. In his reviews and essays, Judd discussed in detail the work of more than 500 artists showing in New York in the early and mid-1960s, and provided a critical account of this significant era of art in America. While addressing the social and political ramifications of art production, the writings frequently addressed the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Lee Bontecou, Yayoi Kusama, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Kenneth Noland and Claes Oldenburg. Judd’s essay "Specific Objects," first published in 1965, remains central to the analysis of the new art developed in the early 1960s. Other essays included in this publication are "Complaints I" (1969), "Complaints II" (1973) and his previously unpublished essay "Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism" (1975), all of which establish the polemical importance of Judd’s writing.
Donald Judd (1928–94) was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and after having served in the United States Army, attended the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, and Columbia University, New York, where he received a BS in Philosophy, cum laude, in 1953. Studying at the Art Students League, Judd began his artistic career as a painter and transitioned to three-dimensional work in the early 1960s. Throughout his lifetime, in his writings and his work, he advocated for the importance of art and the artist’s role in society.
"Perhaps more than any other artist of his generation, Judd shaped the cultural discourse of his time- not only through his radical sculptures, but with his prolific writing on his peers." - Zoë Lescaze, Artnews
2017, English
Softcover, 80 pages (plus insert), 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Ani Schulze and Inga Danysz / Frankfurt am Main
$19.00 - Out of stock
How to find answers for the questions about possibilities for living together in the present and future? The current social and political crisis is stirring up the liberal society, as do the global developments that affect our daily lives, demanding new categories of critical thinking and action. These changes also call for new ideas of co- habitation that are slowly replacing traditional notions of social constellations and ways of living. Furthermore new forms of social interactions are evolving, and new models of partnership are being established. That give the necessary call for new and more contemporary relationship concepts. The changing conditions of the private and political, the society and the individual demonstrate how social structures manifest themselves in our everyday lives and social situations. It also exposes a certain dependency that has taken place. How can opportunities for self-determination be provided? The fragile conditions of living together in terms of individual and social dimensions begin to crumble. The idea of the 'house' as a private sphere, separated from the world of production needs an experimental approach and a radical re- organisation towards new concepts for living, and towards more generic spaces. How to deal with the tension-ridden relationships between housing, architecture and social reality? Is it about time to minimise individual space and maximise collective space? Personal happiness and well-being can originate and find their expression in spaces that are not isolated from the 'outside' anymore, which in return require a collective structured decision making process. - Melissa Canbaz, 2017
Published by Ani Schulze and Inga Danysz, with contributions by Olga Pedan, Melissa Canbaz, Carla Donauer, Sebastian Muehl, Inga Danysz & Ani Schulze
Graphic Design by Philipp Moeller & Benjamin Franzki, Frankfurt am Main
CONTRIBUTORS
Melissa Canbaz (1986, Hannover, Germany) is a writer and curator based in Berlin. She graduated from the Masters of Research programme at the Glasgow School of Art (2013). Canbaz is a regular contributor to various publications, as well as artist’s books and catalogues. She is also editor of the interview magazine mono.kultur.
Inga Danysz (1990, Warsaw, Poland) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Frankfurt am Main. She studied at Cooper Union, New York and graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (2015). She is currently an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2015-17) and was awarded the Columbus Advancement Prize for Contemporary Art (2016).
Carla Donauer (1981, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is an independent curator, writer and art historian based in Cologne, where she is currently hosting the exhibition project HOSPITALITY. She was interim director of the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein (2013) and curator at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2014-15).
Sebastian Mühl (1981, Zwickau, Germany) studied philosophy and Media and Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig (2005-12). He is currently finishing his PhD on notions of utopia in contemporary art practices at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. Mühl is research assistant at HfG Offenbach where he works for the German Society for Aesthetics.
Olga Pedan (1988, Kharkov, Ukraine) is a Swedish artist based in Germany. She graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main (2014). Her work spans various media, ranging from painting and costume making to installation, video and photography.
Ani Schulze (1982, Frankenberg, Germany) studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, the Glasgow School of Art, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Kunstakademie Karlsruhe. She was selected for the Schloss Ringenberg Stipendium (2017) and completed residencies at AIR Antwerpen (2016), CEAAC, Strasbourg (2015) and at Fondazione Bevilaqua La Masa, Venice (2013).
2017, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 25 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
Now out of print and very collectable, this unique volume contains the last abstract images series made by Hilma af Klint in the 1920ʼs which are previously unpublished in their entirety. These images are followed by ground breaking essays which shed new light on the pioneering abstract artist af Klint and her importance for artists today. These images are complemented by essays based on lectures delivered during the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2016. Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes.
Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. A considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women who shared her belief in the importance of trying to make contact with the so-called "High Masters" – often by way of séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.
2004, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 15 x 22.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$39.00 - Out of stock
A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
"One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside -- but, he cautions, as a philosopher.
Translated by Mike Taormina
Edited by David Lapoujade
2015, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$48.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Gilles Deleuze
Translated by Ames Hodges
Originally published in French in 1972, Psychoanalysis and Transversality gathers all the articles that Félix Guattari wrote between 1955 and 1971. It provides a fascinating account of his intellectual and political itinerary before Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), the ground-breaking book he wrote with Gilles Deleuze, propelled him to the forefront of contemporary French philosophy.
Guattari’s background was unlike that of any of his peers. In 1953, with psychoanalyst Jean Oury, he founded the La Borde psychiatric clinic, which was based on the principle that one cannot treat psychotics without modifying the entire institutional context. For Guattari, the purpose of “institutional psychotherapy” was not just to cure psychotic patients, but also to learn with them a different relation to the world. A dissident in the French Communist Party and active in far-left politics (he participated in the May 1968 student rebellion), Guattari realized early on that it was possible to introduce analysis into political groups. Considered as open machines (subject-groups) rather than self-contained structures (subjugated groups), these subject-groups shunned hierarchy and vertical structures, developing transversally, rhizomatizing through other groups.
Psychoanalysis and Transversality collects twenty-four essays by Guattari, including his foundational 1964 article on transversality, and a superb introduction by Gilles Deleuze, “Three Group-Related Problems.”
About the Author
Félix Guattari (1930–1992), post-‘68 French psychoanalyst and philosopher, is the author of Anti-Oedipus (with Gilles Deleuze), and a number of books published by Semiotext(e), including The Anti-Oedipus Papers, Chaosophy, and Soft Subversions.
1971, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$48.00 - Out of stock
"In 1961 a fashionable commercial artist named Andy Warhol created an artistic furor in New York with his deadpan versions of the Campbell’s Soup can. Since then he has become the most talked about but least understood artist of the late 20th century. Warhol made acceptable the use of industrial techniques in the creation of paintings obsessed with modern clichés—car crashes, Coke bottles, sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. At the same time, his films—Blowjob, Sleep, Chelsea Girls, Lonesome Cowboys—forced us to look at the object/subject, transformed the bizarre into the banal, and remade the form and content of cinematic experiment and production."
First edition, published in 1971 by the mighty Studio Vista (and out of print since 1980), Peter Gidal’s Andy Warhol was the first book written on Warhol’s films and paintings, a concise and astute analysis of an artistic revolution. "Idol of the jet set," "trend-maker," superstar, Warhol was taken at more than face value in Gidal’s unconventional and insightful exploration. Decades later, Andy Warhol remains a seminal text, essential for a serious understanding of the artist and the work. Still the best thing written on Andy Warhol, according to art historian Benjamin Buchloh. Illustrated with over 100 b/w photographs, many of which caused great censorship problems at the time of distribution.
1978, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$55.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida’s essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book’s first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida’s method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.
The second half of the book contains some of Derrida’s most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida’s notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.
1969, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pantheon / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
In this prescient and beautifully written book, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscurity to realize his monumental and very public vision of art. But Berger’s impassioned account goes well beyond the specific dilemma of the pre-glasnot Russian artist to illuminate the very meaning of revolutionary art. In his struggle against official orthodoxy–which involved a face-to-face confrontation with Khruschev himself–Neizvestny was fighting not for a merely personal or aesthetic vision, but for a recognition of the true social role of art. His sculptures earn a place in the world by reflecting the courage of a whole people, by commemorating, in an age of mass suffering, the resistance and endurance of millions.
“Berger is probably our most perceptive commentator on art…. A civilized and stimulating companion no matter what subject happens to cross his mind.”–Philadelphia Inquirer
John Peter Berger (1926 – 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and moved to a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
2018, English
Softcover, 350 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Trapart / Stockholm
$63.00 - Out of stock
Texts and Interviews by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, with Peter Christopherson. Edited with notes by Andrew M. McKenzie. Introductions by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Carl Abrahamsson.
Brion Gysin (1916–86) has been an incredibly influential artist and iconoclast: his development of the “cut-up” technique with William S. Burroughs has inspired generations of writers, artists and musicians. Gysin was also a skilled networker and revered expat: together with his friend Paul Bowles, he more or less constructed the post-beatnik romanticism for life and magic in Morocco, and was also a protagonist in an international gay culture with inspirational reaches in both America and Europe. Not surprisingly, Gysin has become something of a cult figure.
One of the artists he inspired is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who collaborated with both Gysin and Burroughs in the 1970s, during his work with Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions. The interviews made by P-Orridge have since become part of a New Wave/Industrial mythos. This volume presents them in their entirety alongside three texts on Gysin by P-Orridge, plus an introduction. This book is an exclusive insight into the mind of a man P-Orridge describes as “a kind of Leonardo da Vinci of the last century,” and a fantastic complement to existing biographies and monographs.
2015, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
Minerva / Sydney
$28.00 - Out of stock
Within this book, Helen Johnson considers the operations of painting today, proposing means by which painting, as an aesthetic practice, might continue to make a critical address. She describes the book thus, “Being a painter in a post-medium specific context does not mean approaching painting as some sort of anachronistic refuge, or thinking that the modernist project of the specific medium can be rehabilitated, or even continue to be flogged. As a site for the production of meaning, painting is a rich field of loadings, neuroses and suggestiveness that can mesh with aesthetic qualities to make a charged conceptual space. Focusing on works by Juan Davila and Martin Kippenberger, this book proposes an extended understanding of how painting can operate aesthetically, grounded in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of aesthetic experience as implicitly connected to critical reflection. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement constitutes the basis of a mobilisation of aesthetics for the reading of painting beyond formalism, embracing aesthetic criticality as an open position of refusal, rather than the dogmatic pursuit of a rational conclusion.”