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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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
Paperback, 120 pages, 13 x 20 cm
Published by
Badlands Unlimited / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Preface by Kate Horsfield. Introduction by Lynne Tillman. Interview by Lyn Blumenthal.
In 1984, the art critic, theorist and gay activist Craig Owens (1950–90) gave a wide-ranging interview with Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield for their extraordinary video series On Art and Artists. At once personal, political and forward-thinking, Owens recounts his experiences with Rosalind Krauss and the founding of the journal October, the "Pictures Generation" artists and critics, and his evolving understanding of the art market, and how it impacts the thinking around art itself.
Along the way, he talks about his journey from a small town in Western Pennsylvania to the Off-Broadway theater world of New York in the '70s, and offers insights into his struggles grappling with the aesthetic and political contradictions haunting contemporary art then—as much as now. The interview, newly edited and updated, is published here for the first time and tells the intimate story of one of the most compelling minds in art theory and criticism. Novelist Lynne Tillman provides an introduction.
2017, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 22.9 x 22 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman’s groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern “Madame Realism.”
Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer’s observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman’s stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, “Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner.”
This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman’s other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the “Translation Artist” and Cindy Sherman.
About the Author
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novel No Lease on Life and her second essay collection What Would Lynne Tillman Do? were nominated, respectively, for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction (1998) and in Criticism (2014). She is Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as an Arts Writers grant from the Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital (2015).
1985, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
$100.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce catalogue and unique valuable resource published to accompany the exhibition "Working Art: A Survey of Art in The Australian Labour Movement in The 1980's", curated by Australian conceptual artist, curator and writer Ian Burn for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1985. Designed by Michael Davies of the Art Workers Union (AWU), this heavily illustrated (in colour and black and white) catalogue surveys the Banners, Posters, Graphics, Photographs, and Media of the Australian Labour movement during the 1980's, as well as a detailed "Historical Sketch" written and compiled by Ian Burn and Sandy Kirby that illustrates the rich history of the Arts in Australian unionism and communities. Alongside the many exhibited prints and textiles, there is photo documentation throughout of marches, performances, artist's at work, historical exhibitions, plus reproductions of newsletters, newspapers, cartoons, announcements, along with further accompanying introductory texts and a bibliography.
Includes inserted Trade Union Information Kit "Art and Working Life : The Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Workshop" booklet that takes an illustrated look at the activities of the VTHC Workshop in the 1980s. A perfect accompaniment to this catalogue. Also, errata slip enclosed from the NSW catalogue.
Ian Burn (1939-1993) was an Australian conceptual artist, curator and writer who spent the first part of his career working in London and New York. It was here that he began working with Art & Language, a collaborative group who produced the publication Art-Language and whose members included artists Roger Cutforth, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Ramsden. Returning to Australia in 1977 Burn became involved in the Art Workers Union (AWU), a political and social platform that championed artists’ rights and helped change the landscape and expectations under which artists worked in Australia. From 1980 onwards, together with artist and social activist Ian Millis, he worked on a number of initiatives to further the cause of the labour movement, including Union Media Services and the Art and Working Life program. Burn died by accidental drowning in 1993.
A great copy of an important resource on Australia's cultural, industrial and political history, and also an important publication by Ian Burn.
Light general reading/handling creasing to oblong pages, otherwise tight and clean throughout. Previous owner's name penned to title page.
2017, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 21 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
LOOP / Barcelona
$58.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Eugeni Bonet
With texts by Stephen Beck, AA Bronson, Peter Campus, Peter d’Agostino, Douglas Davis, Jon Dovey, Juan Downey, Jean-Paul Fargier, Hermine Freed, Frank Gillette, David Hall, Takahiko Iimura, Les Levine, Mary Lucier, Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler, Paul Ryan, Francesc Torres, Woody Vasulka & Scott Nygren, Bill Viola, and Peter Weibel
Writings by artists have always played a crucial role in art theory. For the practitioners, they are a way to illustrate and explain their own ideas around their trajectory and working methods, identify trends they feel close to, articulate a broader reflection on a given medium, and perhaps challenge preconceived ideas. Just as film theory has incorporated essays, manifestos, and other written thoughts by filmmakers into a body of work that also includes the voices of critics studying the “new cinematic object,” this publication gathers together a number of artists’ writings—which were previously scattered in different publications—in order to revisit and reevaluate the early days of video art (up to 1990, a not entirely arbitrary time span). It adds a critical layer to LOOP Barcelona’s 15th edition, Winding the Clock Back: A Contemporary Archaeology of Video.
This title is now out of print.
2017, English / German
Softcover, 232 pages, 22 x 14 cm
Published by
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
Koenig Books / London
$32.00 - In stock -
I think it can only be because of memory-of-knowing-how that we made it through the grey days in cities in general–and through the greyness of Berlin in particular–that we made it through again and again. Because the streets switched directions too, rushing towards us a whole lot faster. Bicycles became utterly useless. Just looking at them knocked the air out of their tyres. What's more, ticket prices increased and coins no longer fit in the slots of vending machines. [Judith Hopf, Stepping Stairs]
With texts by Kathy Acker, Madeleine Bernstorff, Sabeth Buchmann, Maurin Dietrich, Anna Gritz, John Hejduk, Judith Hopf, Monika Rinck, Avital Ronell, Annette Wehrmann
2007, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$36.00 - Out of stock
By Derek Schilling
Few filmmakers have taken the principle of the 'talking picture' so far as Eric Rohmer, the internationally reknowned director of the Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles. Occasionally dismissed as precious or overly literary, Rohmer's features may leave the impression that there is more to listen to than to look at. Yet as the secretive director (b. Maurice Schérer in 1920) points out, dialogue is no less engaging than the best gunfights, and if his characters prefer discussing love to making it, they are no less the 'heroes' of the stories they tell.
Charges of political conservatism aside, the author of My Night at Maud's, Summer and such period films as Perceval and the all-digital The Lady and the Duke emerges - like Hitchcock before him - as a singular inventor of cinematic forms. This critical overview, which contains an extensive bibliography and a filmography, will appeal to students of Film Studies, French Studies, and enthusiasts.
From Manchester University Press' French Film Directors series, edited by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram.
2009, English
Hardcover, 512 pages (60 b&w ills), 178 x 229 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$105.00 $80.00 - Out of stock
"Institutional critique" is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own housing in galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when--driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art--institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present by gathering writings and representative art projects of artists from across Europe and throughout the Americas who developed and extended the genre. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique. Like Alberro and Stimson's Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance.Artists represented include Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers' Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d'Etudes, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann.
2018, English
Softcover, 308 pages, 16.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
The Academy of Fine Arts / Vienna
$40.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Ilya Budraitskis, Maira Enesi Caixeta, C.A.S.I.T.A., Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Miguel González Cabezas, Marina Gržinić, Juan Guardiola, Çetin Gürer, Neda Hosseinyar, Njideka Stephanie Iroh, Adla Isanović, Fieke Jansen, Tjaša Kancler, Zoltán Kékesi, Betül Seyma Küpeli, Gergana Mineva, Musawenkosi Ndlovu, Stanimir Panayotov, Suvendrini Perera, Jelena Petrović, Khaled Ramadan, Rubia Salgado, Marika Schmiedt, Joshua Simon, Aneta Stojnić, Shirley Anne Tate, Göksun Yazıcı, Hiroshi Yoshioka
Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence.
In this volume, these notions and conditions are connected with the concept of borders, which seems to have disappeared as a function of the global neoliberal economy but is palpably reappearing again and again through deportations, segregations, and war. How can we think about these relations in an open way, beyond borders? Is it possible to develop border thinking for a radical transformation, as a means to revolutionize the state of things? To do this, we must reconsider what is possible for the social and the political as well as for art and culture.
Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 21
Design by Surface
2017, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 248 pages, 18.5 x 26.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
LUMA Foundation / Zürich
Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College / New York
$74.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Amanda Beech, Rony Brauman, David Campbell, Olivia Custer, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Keenan, Eric Kluitenberg, David Levine, Suhail Malik, Sohrab Mohebbi, Sharon Sliwinski, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Tirdad Zolghadr
It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through which channels does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these ideas themselves? Which narratives and imageries have proven easier to export and import, and whose interests are at stake in the configurations in question?
The Flood of Rights draws on a conference of the same name, organized by the LUMA Foundation and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, which took place in Arles, France, in 2013.
Copublished with the LUMA Foundation and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York
Design by Zak Group
2017, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 14.11 x 21.1 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing, Jussi Parikka, Elvia Wilk
Contributions by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, Jamie Allen and David Gauthier, Clemens Apprich and Ned Rossiter, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Benjamin Bratton, Florian Cramer, Dieter Daniels, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Daphne Dragona, Keller Easterling, Olga Goriunova, Louis Henderson, Geraldine Juarez, Olia Lialina, Alessandro Ludovico, Rosa Menkman, Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, Erica Scourti, Cornelia Sollfrank, Telekommunisten (Baruch Gottlieb and Dmytri Kleiner), Tiziana Terranova, YoHa (Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji)
This collection of art and theory analyzes today’s post-digital conditions for critical media practices—across and beyond the analog and the digital, the human and the nonhuman. The contributions also look across and beyond the field of media art, staking out new paths for understanding and working in the transversal territories between theory, technology, and art. The concept of the post-digital is a way to critically take account of, contextualize, and shift the coordinates of new technologies as part of contemporary culture. The post-digital condition is not merely a theoretical issue but also a situation that affects conceptual and practice-based work.
The program of the transmediale festival in Berlin, celebrating its thirtieth year in 2017, has reflected these changes, and this book gathers new contributions from leading international theorists and artists of media and art who have taken part in the festival program over its past five editions. Divided into the thematic sections “Imaginaries,” “Interventions,” and “Ecologies,” this book is not a document of the festival itself, it is rather a stand-alone exploration of the ongoing themes of transmediale in a book format.
The reader is developed as a collaboration between transmediale and Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
Copublished with transmediale e.V.
Design by the Laboratory of Manuel Bürger (Stefanie Ackermann, Manuel Bürger)
2016, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 19.5 x 26 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$54.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Zdenka Badovinac, Jože Barši, Boris Beja, Goran Bertok, Irena Borić, Blaž Božič, BridA (Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango, Jurij Pavlica), Chang Tsong-Zung and Gao Shiming, Keti Chukhrov, Jasmina Cibic, Femkanje (Bojana S. Knežević, Katarina Petrović), Vadim Fishkin, Boris Groys, Ida Hiršenfelder, Maja Hodošček, IRWIN, Sergej Kapus, Staš Kleindienst, Nina Koželj, Tanja Lažetić, Gregor Mobius, Lívia Páldi, Marko & Marika Pogačnik, Uroš Potočnik, Marjetica Potrč, Tatjana Pregl Kobe, Lina Rica & Boštjan Čadež, Sašo Sedlaček, Miha Turšič, Ali Van, Anton Vidokle, Arseny Zhilyaev, Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič
In our cultural imagination, the cosmos is a harmonious, utopian universe, but it is also uncontrollable, even unknown, and the source of a specifically modern fear or uneasiness—one that could be described as “cosmic anxiety.” It’s no accident that mass culture today is obsessed with visions of asteroids coming out of space, causing the destruction of the earth. At the same time, space is the last frontier—the final chance for a genuine human endeavor. This catalogue presents many possibilities for the artistic exploration of the topic at hand: the connection between artistic and scientific imagination, the cosmos as analysis of sci-fi culture, perspectives of corporeal immortality, and the critique of contemporary technology.
Copublished with Moderna galerija, Ljubljana
Design by Novi kolektivizem
2013, English/German
Softcover, 320 pages (81 b/w ills.), 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$79.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Petra Reichensperger; essays by Anke te Heesen, Kirsten Maar, Markus Miessen, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, Jan Verwoert, Choy Lee Weng; interviews by Dóra Maurer/ Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch, Channa Horwitz/Petra Reichensperger, Yael Davids/Adam Szymczyk, Brian O'Doherty/Dominikus Müller, Carl Michael von Hausswolff/Thibaut de Ruyter, Karl Holmqvist/Dominikus Müller, Daniel Knorr/Katharina Groth, Jaroslaw Kozlowski/Petra Stegmann, Hans Schabus/Kathrin Rhomberg, Steven Claydon/Lea Schleiffenbaum, Karin Sander/Anne Schreiber, Martin Germann/Petra Reichensperger/Renate Wagner
This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture.
Almost fifty terms relevant to the making and discussion of exhibitions today have been compiled in Terms of Exhibiting (from A to Z), contributed by Liam Gillick, Manfred Hermes, Wojciech Kosma, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Vogt, Jochen Volz, and June Yap, among others. Six essays investigate key terms raised by the three-part exhibition series “Terms of Exhibiting, Producing, and Performing” at Kunsthaus Dresden in 2012. Jan Verwoert reflects on the division of labor in artistic production, while Anke te Heesen presents a survey of the museum, collection, and exhibition. Markus Miessen discusses the advantages of curating institutions and inventing structures rather than merely implementing or appropriating them. The book also includes essays by Kirsten Maar, Ursula Panhans-Bühler, and Lee Weng-Choy. Each of the twelve conversations with various artists places one term under scrutiny within the context of their own artistic interests and practices—with reference to the term presence, Daniel Knorr explains the significance of materialization for his own creative process, while Brian O’Doherty discusses invention in relation to his practice. Each term generates further insight and reflection into each individual art practice.
Including glossaries written by Friedrich von Borries, Hans-Christian Dany, Stefanie Diekmann, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Liam Gillick, Manfred Hermes, Ulrike Jordan, Vera Knolle, Wojciech Kosma, Verena Kuni, Pablo Larios, Oona Lochner, Fiona McGovern, Andrea Meyer, Ana Ofak, Christian Rattemeyer, Petra Reichensperger, Dietmar Rübel, Thibaut de Ruyter, Jörn Schafaff, Lea Schleiffenbaum, Anne Schreiber, Nora Sdun, Vera Tollmann, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Vogt, Jochen Volz, Renate Wagner, Friederike Wappler, June Yap
2018, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Aspen Art Museum / Aspen
$55.00 - Out of stock
A perceptive, sensitive interviewer, Zuckerman offers the reader refreshing insights and access to some of the most engaging artists making work this decade. The range of artists appearing in Conversations with Artists testifies to Zuckerman’s wide-ranging interests: artists featured include Lutz Bacher, Darren Bader, Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Alice Channer, Cheryl Donegan, Tony Feher, Sergej Jensen, Liz Larner, Adam McEwen, William J. O’Brien, Rob Pruitt and Pedro Reyes.
2018, English
Hardcover, 294 pages, 29.5 x 23.5cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
MUMA / Victoria
$50.00 - Out of stock
Mutlu Çerkez: 1988–2065 is the first major monograph published on the art and life of Mutlu Çerkez, the Turkish Cypriot Australian artist who lived and worked in Melbourne until his untimely death in 2005. This limited edition, deeply researched volume forms a catalogue raisonné of Çerkez's work and was published by MUMA to accompany their phenomenal 2018 survey exhibition of the artist.
Çerkez was an influential artist who, during his lifetime, had a significant impact on the Australian and international art worlds. His work incorporated traditions of conceptual art, minimalism and monochrome painting but made its own internal logic its primary reference point while strenuously resisting a reduction to any single style. Mutlu Çerkez: 1988–2065 brings together the artist’s key remaining works loaned from public and private collections across Australia as well as from the artist’s family.
This accompanying monograph reproduces all the works exhibited alongside newly commissioned essays by Francis Plagne, Max Delany and the exhibition’s curators, Charlotte Day, Helen Hughes and Hannah Mathews, archival texts and essays, an illustrated catalogue raisonné, chronology, biography, bibliography, exhibition history.
Designed by Yanni Florence and published in an edition of only 500 copies.
1987, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 206 pages, 7 x 10.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hanuman Books / New York-Madras
$100.00 - Out of stock
Great copy of the scarce "Bread and Water" by Eileen Myles, published in 1987 by Hanuman Books, their third book. This 200 plus page collection contains the stories: "Light Warrior", "21, 22, 23...", "Merry Christmas Dr. Title", "Bath, Maine", "Bread and Water", & "Everybody Would Go Play Cards At Eddie & Nonie's".
Hanuman Books was a series of books published between 1986 and 1993 out of the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Featuring some of the biggest names in avant-garde culture of the time - including figures from Beat poetry, gay and trans culture, Warhol’s Factory, San Francisco’s North Beach and New York’s Lower East Side art scenes, the Naropa Institute, contemporary music and film - the series has since acquired a cult following.
Founded by American art critic and editor Raymond Foye and Italian painter Francesco Clemente in 1986. The name - as well as the striking format - were influenced by Indian prayer books collected on a trip to India in 1985. "The books, small in size and bright in color, were always dedicated to the writings of a particular guru or saint, and were intended to be carried around with ease in a shirt pocket for potential contemplation throughout daily life." The editors elected to publish a series of similarly designed books to showcase contemporary writing, hard-to-find translations, and "exquisite expressions" of poets and artists. Volumes included René Daumal, Henri Michaux, Francis Picabia, Cookie Mueller, Bob Flanagan, Eileen Myles, John Ashbery, Candy Darling, William Burroughs, Willem de Kooning, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Gary Indiana, Jean Genet, Jack Smith, Richard Hell, Dodie Bellamy, and more.
Hanuman books were printed on a letter press in Madras, India, the pages were sewn together by local fishermen and others. The books were distributed informally from the Chelsea Hotel.
Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine “the rock star of modern poetry,” is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene.
2012, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 114 x 178 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - Out of stock
The Uprising is an Autonomist manifesto for today’s precarious times, and a rallying cry in the face of the catastrophic and irreversible crisis that neoliberalism and the financial sphere have established over the globe. In his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues that the notion of economic recovery is complete mythology. The coming years will inevitably see new surges of protest and violence, but the old models of resistance no longer apply. Society can either stick with the prescriptions and “rescues” that the economic and financial sectors have demanded at the expense of social happiness, culture, and the public good; or it can formulate an alternative. For Berardi, this alternative lies in understanding the current crisis as something more fundamental than an economic crisis: it is a crisis of the social imagination, and demands a new language by which to address it.
This is a manifesto against the idea of growth, and against the concept of debt, the financial sector’s two primary linguistic means of manipulating society. It is a call for exhaustion, and for resistance to the cult of energy on which today’s economic free-floating market depends. To this end, Berardi introduces an unexpected linguistic political weapon--poetry: poetry as the insolvency of language, as the sensuous birth of meaning and desire, as that which cannot be reduced to information and exchanged like currency. If the protests now stirring about the world are to take shape and direction, then the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent--it will be linguistic, or will not be at all.
About the Author:
Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.
2012, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 114 x 178 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$28.00 - Out of stock
The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all “debtors,” guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor.
--from The Making of the Indebted Man
Debt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx’s lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.
Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.
How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.
Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
By Maurizio Lazzarato
Translated by Joshua David Jordan
2011, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 114 x 178 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$32.00 - In stock -
Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—;the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us. . . ''—from This Is Not a Program
Traditional lines of revolutionary struggle no longer hold. Rather, it is ubiquitous cybernetics, surveillance, and terror that create the illusion of difference within hegemony. Configurations of dissent and the rhetoric of revolution are merely the other face of capital, conforming identities to empty predicates, ensuring that even ''thieves,'' ''saboteurs,'' and ''terrorists'' no longer exceed the totalizing space of Empire. This Is Not a Program offers two texts, both originally published in French by Tiqqun with Introduction to Civil War in 2001. In ''This Is Not a Program,'' Tiqqun outlines a new path for resistance and struggle in the age of Empire, one that eschews the worn-out example of France’s May ‘68 in favor of what they consider to be the still fruitful and contemporary insurrectionary movements in Italy of the 1970s. ''As a Science of Apparatuses'' examines the way Empire has enforced on the subject a veritable metaphysics of isolation and pacification, ''apparatuses'' that include chairs, desks, computers; surveillance (security guards, cameras); disease (depression); crutch (cell phone, lover, sedative); and authority.
Tiqqun’s critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire is all the more urgent as we become inured to the permanent state of exception that is the War on Terror and to other, no less intimate forms of pacification. But all is not lost. In its unrelenting production of the Same, Empire itself creates the conditions necessary for the insurrection to come.
Tiqqun is a French collective of authors and activists formed in 1999. The group published two journal volumes in 1999 and 2001 (in which the collective author ''The Invisible Committee'' first appeared), as well as the books Théorie du Bloom and Théorie de la jeune fille.
2012, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$28.00 - Out of stock
In Ciudad Juarez, a territorial power normalized barbarism. This anomalous ecology mutated into a femicide machine: an apparatus that didn’t just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institutions that guarantee impunity for those crimes and even legalize them. A lawless city sponsored by a State in crisis. The facts speak for themselves.
—from The Femicide Machine
Best known to American readers for his cameo appearances as The Journalist in Roberto Bolano’s 2666and as a literary detective in Javier Marías’s novel Dark Back of Time, Sergio González Rodríguez is one of Mexico’s most important contemporary writers. He is the author of Bones in the Desert, the most definitive work on the murders of women and girls in Juárez, Mexico, as well as The Headless Man, a sharp meditation on the recurrent uses of symbolic violence; Infectious, a novel; and Original Evil, a long essay. The Femicide Machine is the first book by González Rodríguez to appear in English translation.
Written especially for Semiotext(e) Intervention series, The Femicide Machine synthesizes González Rodríguez’s documentation of the Juárez crimes, his analysis of the unique urban conditions in which they take place, and a discussion of the terror techniques of narco-warfare that have spread to both sides of the border. The result is a gripping polemic. The Femicide Machine probes the anarchic confluence of global capital with corrupt national politics and displaced, transient labor, and introduces the work of one of Mexico’s most eminent writers to American readers.
2012, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 18.4 x 23.4 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$85.00 $45.00 - Out of stock
Over the past two decades, French artist Pierre Huyghe has produced an extraordinary body of work in constant dialogue with temporality. Investigating the possibility of a hypothetical mode of timekeeping -- "parallel presents" -- Huyghe has researched the architecture of the incomplete, directed a puppet opera, founded a temporary school, established a pirate television station, staged celebrations, scripted scenarios, and journeyed to Antarctica in search of a mythological penguin. In this first book-length art historical examination of Huyghe and his work, Amelia Barikin traces the artist's continual negotiation with the time codes of contemporary society. Barikin finds in Huyghe's projects an alternate way of thinking about history -- a "topological historicity" that deprograms (or reprograms) temporal formats. Barikin offers pioneering analyses of Huyghe's lesser-known early works as well as sustained readings of later, critically acclaimed projects, including No Ghost Just a Shell (2000), L'Expedition scintillante (2002), and A Journey That Wasn't (2005). She emphasizes Huyghe's concepts of "freed time" and "the open present," in which anything might happen. Bringing together an eclectic array of subjects and characters -- from moon walking to situationist practices, from Snow White to Gilles Deleuze -- Parallel Presents offers a highly original account of the driving forces behind Huyghe's work.
1980, English
Softcover (w. insert), 142 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
LIP / Melbourne
$50.00 - Out of stock
The incredible book-sized 1980 edition of Melbourne's great LIP journal. Published out of Carlton between 1976-1984, LIP encapsulated Australian feminist artistic practice of the period, publishing articles and interviews by women on women in film, sound, theatre, painting, photography, poetry, criticism, activism, journalism, publishing, sculpture, design, education, and much more.
In this issue:
Editorial; MEDIA : Heralding Women : A Visual Essay by Lesley Dumbrell, Freda Freiberg and Elizabeth Gower; The Women At Work Kit - a discussion with Judy Munro, Sylvie Shaw and Ponch Hawkes, by Jeannette Fenelon; Shoulder to Shoulder and Up Hill; The Way by Julie Copeland; The Coming Out Show : Five Years On by Julie Rigg; Nancy Dexter : In Her Own Accent by Elizabeth Owen; Fiona McDougall press photographer; Child's Image, Women's Hands by Barbara Hall; ART : Memories of Grace Crowley by Janine Burke, Ian North, Frank and Margel Hinder; "Mothers' Memories, Others' Memories" by Vivienne Binns; The Dinner Party - Introduction by Isabel Davies; Judy Chicago And The Dinner Party by Ailsa O'Connor; 'The Coming Out Show' discusses 'The Dinner Party'. Transcribed and edited by Isabel Davies; The Adelaide Women's Art Movement by Jane Kent and Anne Marsh; Adelaide Women's Performance Month, November 1979; River Murray Project by Bonita Ely; Joy Hester by Janine Burke; Janet Dawson - Painter, interviewed by Lesley Dumbrell; Monday To Monday by Maxienne Foote; Ethel Carrick (Mrs. E. Phillips Fox) by Margaret Rich; The Male Nude, Margaret Walters interviewed by Julie Copeland; Stella Sallman photographs; Don't Believe I'm An Amazon - Ulrike Rosenbach talking with Elizabeth Gower, Margaret Rose and Janine Burke, transcribed by Margaret Rose; Tertiary Visual Arts Education Study and Report by Alison Fraser; Holos - Whole, Graphos - Picture, The Work Of Margaret Benyon by Catherine Peake; Ceramic Sculpture - Maggie May; Artist-Decorated Trams - Statements by Erica McGilchrist and Mirka Mora on the tram design project, Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board; THEATRE/PERFORMANCE : At Home - A series of Five Solo Performances by Lyndal Jones (1977-80) documentation by Lyndal Jones and Suzanne Spunner; Beyond Glitter - The Role Of The Female Performer as seen by Robyn Archer in "A Star is Tom" by Suzanne Spunner; Wimmin's Circus by Katie Noad; Jeannie Lewis interviewed by Christine Johnston; Failing In Love by Ruth Maddison; By A Bamboo Blind : Jenny Kemp, writer and director of Sheila Alone interviewed by Suzanne Spunner; Brisbane Womens Theatre Group by Barbara Allen; FILM : The Women's Film In The Post-Haskell Era by Freda Freiberg; Making A Career Of Feminism by Suzanne Spurner; How Will We Learn To Remember Tomorrow? 'A Catalogue of Independent Women's Films' reviewed by Barbara Hall; The Problems Of Pluralism : Women's Films And Feminist Films by Kate Legge; Interview With Norma Disher; Margot Nash & Margot Oliver; Roma 'Just An Ordinary Life' by Jan Macdonald
Insert : Crosswords by Elizabeth Gower
Front Cover : Erica Mc Gilchrist
Back Cover : Mirka Mora
Co-ordinator : Elizabeth Gower
LIP Collective members: Annette Blonski, Janine Burke, Isabel Davies, Suzanne Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Jeannette Fenelon, Freda Freiberg, Elizabeth Gower, Barbara Hall, Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Owen, Cathy Peake, Suzanne Spunner.
2013, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 153 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$45.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Helen Molesworth
With Taylor Walsh
Louise Lawler has devoted her art practice to investigating the life cycle of art objects. Her photographs depict art in the collector’s home, the museum, the auction house, and the commercial gallery, on loading docks, and in storage closets. Her work offers a sustained meditation on the strategies of display that shape art’s reception and distribution. The cumulative effect of Lawler’s photographs is a silent insistence that context is the primary shaper of art’s meaning. Informed by feminism and institutional critique, Lawler’s witty, poignant, and trenchant photos frequently pay attention to a host of overlooked details—almost Freudian slips—that ineffably and tacitly shore up what we conventionally think of as art’s “power.”
This book includes the earliest published text on Lawler’s work; an examination of her ephemera (Lawler produced, among other things, matchbooks and paperweights); a rare interview with the artist, conducted by Douglas Crimp; a conversation between George Baker and Andrea Fraser on Lawler’s work; and essays by writers including Rosalind Krauss, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Helen Molesworth, the volume’s editor. The book traces the changing reception of Lawler’s work from early preoccupations with appropriation to later discussions of affect.
About the Editor
Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. She edited Louise Lawler’s Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back), published by the Wexner Center for the Arts and distributed by the MIT Press.
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 312 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Jeremy Gilbert
Translated by Arianna Bove, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew Goffey, Mark Hayward, Jason Read and Alberto Toscano
In Experimental Politics, Maurizio Lazzarato examines the conditions of work, employment, and unemployment in neoliberalism’s flexible and precarious labor market. This is the first book of Lazzarato’s in English that fully exemplifies the unique synthesis of sociology, activist research, and theoretical innovation that has generated his best-known concepts, such as “immaterial labor.” The book (published in France in 2009) is also groundbreaking in the way it brings Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari to bear on the analysis of concrete political situations and real social struggles, while making a significant theoretical contribution in its own right.
Lazzarato draws on the experiences of casual workers in the French entertainment industry during a dispute over the reorganization (“reform”) of their unemployment insurance in 2004 and 2005. He sees this conflict as the first testing ground of a political program of social reconstruction. The payment of unemployment insurance would become the principal instrument for control over the mobility and behavior of the workers. The flexible and precarious workforce of the entertainment industry prefigured what the entire workforce in contemporary societies is in the process of becoming: in Foucault’s words, a “floating population” in “security societies.” Lazzarato argues further that parallel to economic impoverishment, neoliberalism has produced an impoverishment of subjectivity—a reduction in existential intensity. A substantial introduction by Jeremy Gilbert situates Lazzarato’s analysis in a broader context.
About the Author
Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher in Paris. He is the author of Governing by Debt and Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, both published by Semiotext(e).
2011, English
Softcover, 11.2 x 17.8 cm, 128 pages (26 b/w ill.)
$46.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Tal Adler/Osama Zatar, Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, Maayan Amir/Ruti Sela, Ariella Azoulay, Yael Bartana/Sebastian Cichocki, Raji Bathish, Itzhak Benyamini, Sari Hanafi, Sandi Hilal/Alessandro Petti/Eyal Weizman, Yazan Khalili, Ohad Meromi/Joshua Simon, Norma Musih, Ingo Niermann, Noam Yuran
Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.
“Solution” is a tricky term especially in relation to the ongoing newspeak of the last two decades in Palestine-Israel. In their contributions for this book, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman suggest revisiting the term “decolonization,” “in order to maintain a distance from the current political terms of a ‘solution’ to the Palestinian conflict and its respective borders. The one-, two- and now three-state solutions seem equally entrapped in a ‘topdown’ perspective, each with its own self-referential logic.”
Unlike previous books in the Solution series, this book invited several writers from the region to suggest specific and doable solutions for today. This is mainly since it seems absurd to present a one-man master plan for Palestine-Israel. In many senses, such master plans (whether they take a colonial, Zionist or other meta-narrative lead) have been the mold of the problem in the region for at least the last 150 years.
The idea is therefore to rethink the different antagonisms that structure our ways of resistance and compliance: to rethink Semitism and 1948, rethink identity and territory, rethink resistance and memory, rethink democracy and state, rethink Zionism and decolonization, rethink refugee and property, rethink religion and solution.
Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann
Design by Z.A.K.