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.
2017, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 20 x 25.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Cambridge
$45.00 - Out of stock
Edited by James Voorhies
Contributions by Martin Beck, Keller Easterling, James Goggin, Alex Kitnick, James Voorhies
Martin Beck’s exhibition “Program” at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts comprised a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and displays that drew on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building at Harvard University. The sequence of explorative strategies—each node of which Beck considered an “episode”—lent particular attention to the founding aspirations of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue. Beck performed and critically reflected on the kinds of activity an institution uses to build, organize, and engage with its audiences, and, in the case of the Carpenter Center, how it performed a kind of exhibition of education in both its pedagogical framework and its public outreach. From its physical infrastructure to its communication strategies, from its foundational curricular principles to visitor tallies, from building usage to welcome rituals, “Program,” which transpired over two years, examined institutional behaviors that collectively form institutional identity and integrate audiences into a cohesive program of public address.
This book, An Organized System of Instructions, is both a document of “Program” and an extension of the exhibition, which ran from October 24, 2014, to October 2016.
Copublished with Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Design by James Goggin, Practise
English, 2017
Hardcover, 194 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$59.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Naomi Beckwith, Clare Davies, Aïcha Diallo, Gabriele Genge, Thelma Golden, Gugulective, Elsa Guily, EJ Hill, Euridice Kala, Basia Lewandowska Cummings, Youssef Limoud, Misheck Masamvu, Walther Mignolo, Patrick Mudekereza, Senga Nengudi, Gabi Ngcobo, An Paenhuysen, Thiago de Paula Souza, Adriana Quiñones León, Luciane Ramos-Silva, Tabita Rezaire, Magnus Rosengarten, Sidney Santiago Kuanza, Helen Sebidi, Lucélia Sergio, Olufemi Terry, Wana Udobang
Over the past four years, the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) has called attention to exhibitions, artists, and curators from diverse African perspectives while boosting new areas of debate. I am built inside you, C&’s first book, is a compilation of eighteen pieces published since the magazine was launched in 2013. The point of departure is a conversation with the great South African artist Helen Sebidi that took place on the occasion of the 32rd São Paulo Biennial in 2016. The volume collects significant pieces from the C& archive that expand upon and contextualize Sebidi’s concepts of home, history, and spirituality. Included as well are interviews with emerging South African artist Tabita Rezaire; Senga Nengudi, artist and core member of the African-American avant-garde in 1970s and ’80s Los Angeles; Thelma Golden, legendary director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and pathbreaking academic Walter Mignolo.
Copublished with Contemporary And (C&), ifa Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen
Design by Studio Matthias Görlich
2017, English
Softcover, (w. dust jacket), 156 pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$25.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Omer Fast
In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-state’s exclusion of refugees as people out of place. Andrew Herscher’s Displacements: Architecture and Refugee, the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present. Posing the refugee as the preeminent collective political subject of our time, Displacements attempts to open up an architectural history of the refugee that could refract on the history of architecture and the history of the refugee alike.
Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Department of Art History. His publications include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012), and, coedited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Spatial Violence (Routledge, 2016).
Design by Zak Group
2016, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 528 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?
In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us.
In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
thestack.org
About the Author
Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, computer science, and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Endorsements
“In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton shows, with brilliant insight and imagination, what the world is coming to look like in an era of planetary-scale computing. He cuts through many received ideas about technology, globalization, and so forth and presents a fresh vision of the architecture of the world.”
—McKenzie Wark, author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene
“Endlessly thought-provoking, this amazing book is both cognitive mapping and a projective geometry of the new dimensions of technological reality we live in.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312
“The Stack is a major achievement. It is more than just philosophy of technology, software studies, or design criticism; it analyzes and guides our thinking in a baffling Anthropocenic era when computation works at the planetary scale and constitutes governance.”
—Natalie Jeremijenko, Associate Professor of Art, Computer Science, and Environmental Studies, New York University
“The Stack imagines a design brief for the whole world while floating or falling through all the ever-efflorescent plasmas and atmospheres of digital information.”
—Keller Easterling, Professor, Yale School of Architecture; author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
“This political geography of computation is a strange, marvelous text of great conceptual beauty. Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack breaks more new ground than a carpet bombing. The Stack itself may or may not exist, but it’s left everything that came before it in a state of rubble.”
—Bruce Sterling
2017, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Art Against Art / Berlin
$18.00 - In stock -
EDITORIAL
The art market is being kept alive with constant stimulus in the form of Venice-Basel-Kassel-Athens-Frieze-TEFAF. As the series of electric shocks continue, the art market is still in a period of reconfiguration trying to find longevity in the new. Whereas the art fair format inherently lacks culture – merely being a market place/forum for where exchange takes place – the biennial format has become too broad to create lasting cultural meaning; therefore the art market must look elsewhere for metrics of value. But if it only finds mirrors of its own logic (the free market itself), it will do nothing more than to accelerate the process upon which it has been organizing itself.
Definitions of culture have traditionally meant that the market can reflect on them too to prevent it from being flippant and volatile. The free market functions anchorless and incomprehensible without definitions – landmines of bubbles created without any meta signifier or even private collections and museums springing up that hang on the whim of the collector/personality/entrepreneur rather than frames of reference that create wider cultural value.
Contemporary art will only be able to reach the appreciation and longevity of modern art when...
CONTENTS
Editorial
Iain Robertson – What Drives the Value of Art?
Taslima Ahmed – Burning Man and the New Face of Art
Interview with Klaus Theweleit – No One Wins, It’s a War of Men - The Need for Cyborgs with Enhanced Human Potentials
Image Spread by Guan Xiao
Andrew Rankin – The Dangerous Art of Yukio Mishima
Antek Walczak – Boredom Year Point Oh
Image spread by Jeff Berwick
Samuel Veissière – Is the Self a Tulpa?
Artist edition by Marina Pinsky
1981, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 38 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Brickburner Press / Queensland
$20.00 - Out of stock
Three important essays from Anarchist-Feminists theorists/writers Peggy Kornegger, Zero Collective, and Kytha Kurin, dating 1975-1980, published in 1981 by Backburner Press in Australia.
Originally appearing in the Anarchist journals Second Wave, Zero and Open Road, this publication contains "Anarchism: The Feminist Connection" by Peggy Kornegger, "Anarchism/Feminism" by Zero Collective, and "Anarcha-Feminism: Why the Hyphen?" by Kytha Kurin.
1980, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 72 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Dark Star / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Feminist anthology 4 QUIET RUMOURS brings together for the first time some of the key writings by anarcha-feminists from the early ’70’s. Originally only available as individual pamphlets, so popular they were continually re-printed, demand now justifies the appearance of this anthology. The various writers illustrate the clear parallels existing between feminist practice ― non-hierarchical, anti- authoritarian and de-centralist ― and the theories of anarchism. These timeless concerns are posed against the rigid dogmas and patriarchal states of our modern world. The re-issue of these essays will undoubtably provoke thought and debate - as they have done ever since their first appearance.
Texts by Black Rose Anarcho-Feminists, Lynne Farrow, Peggy Kornegger, Marian Leighton, Voltairine de Cleyre, Carol Ehrlich.
1980, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 34 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Brickburner Press / Queensland
$20.00 - Out of stock
"This introduction to anarchism was first published in June 1969 as the hundredth issue of the monthly magazine Anarchy, and was immediately reprinted as a separate pamphlet. It was reprinted again in 1971, and it has also been translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian (twice), Japanese, Spanish (twice), and Yiddish (in Argentina). This new edition is unchanged except for the addition of this paragraph, of a new penultimate paragraph in the section on “The individual and society”, and of a new postscript at the end." - Brickburner Press, January 1977
1980 Australian reprint of Nicolas Walter's seminal essay "About Anarchism". Nicolas Hardy Walter was a British anarchist and atheist writer, speaker and activist. He was a member of the Committee of 100 and Spies for Peace, and wrote on topics of anarchism and humanism.
Contents: WHAT ANARCHISTS BELIEVE; HOW ANARCHISTS DIFFER; WHAT ANARCHISTS WANT; WHAT ANARCHISTS DO
1996, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 18 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Free Labour / Brunswick
$15.00 - Out of stock
"I am an Anarchist not because I believe Anarchism is the final goal, but because there is no such thing as a final goal." - Rudolf Rocker
"Rudolf Rocker (1873 - 1958) was a German anarchist who was forced into exile in 1892. He settled in Britain in 1895 and, though himself not Jewish, was active in the Jewish movement until he was interned and later deported during World War 1. He was active back in Germany until the rise of Hitler forced him into exile again, and he spent the rest of his life in the USA. Anarchism: Its Aims and Purposes is the first chapter of Rudolf Rocker's libertarian classic Anarchosyndicalism, originally published in 1938 by Martin Secker and Warbug. Anarchosyndicalism has been reprinted several times since and appears in a revised and abridged version as Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism. An attempt has been made within the text of this pamphlet to soften the gender-specific language, a product, apparently, of pre-feminist times. Where possible, the original text has been left unaltered. Where this has been impossible, substitute ”man," "his" or ”him" for the word appearing in the brackets to return to the original text."
Reprinted in 1996 by Brunswick's Free Labour Press, this
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Jura Books / NSW
$15.00 - Out of stock
An undated Australian reprint of this seminal essay by American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist, Noam Chomsky, first published in the 1973 collection For Reasons Of State. Published by Sydney's Jura Books.
2013, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 24 × 17 cm
Published by
Hyphen Press / London
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Anarchy was a journal of ideas published in London in the 1960s. Although its contributors were many and diverse, Anarchy was essentially the creation of one person, Colin Ward (1924–2010). With this journal, and throughout his work as a writer, editor, and activist, Ward proposed the idea that anarchist principles of mutual aid and autonomous organization outside a centralized state can be achieved here and now. This book gives attention for the first time to the covers of Anarchy, designed mostly by Rufus Segar. These little-known works provided the enticing entry to the plain text pages of the journal. The book reproduces all of the covers in a sequence that suggests, incidentally, something of the history of graphic design in Britain in those years. And it goes beyond the images, with an array of supporting texts that give a full picture of Anarchy and its context.
Contents
Daniel Poyner, Introduction
The covers of Anarchy
Raphael Samuel, ‘Utopian sociology’
Daniel Poyner, A conversation with Rufus Segar
Richard Hollis, ‘Anarchy and the 1960s’
Robin Kinross, An index to Anarchy
‘Autonomy’ doesn’t try to present Segar as some great innovator of graphic design. He wasn’t one and makes no claim to be. What the book sets out to do, and it succeeds magnificently without visual or verbal hyperbole, is to enrich and add nuance to our understanding of a 1960s graphic landscape we might think we know inside out by acquainting us with unfamiliar work that provided an important forward-thinking publication with its public face. Segar believed in the journal’s cause and 40 years later, he reports, he and his wife Sheila are still anarchists.
Rick Poynor, Creative Review, January 2013
2017, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$30.00 - Out of stock
The theme of this issue - The New New Left - is not entirely “new new,” as indeed it relates to the old anti-capitalist Left in its insistence on a theoretical analysis of capitalism and the price paid by many in such a system. But as the discourses and strategies long associated with the Left (workerism, identity politics, or the mode of the avant-gardist troll) have been adopted by anti-progressive outlets, it has become increasingly complex to locate a Left stance from which to effectively speak and act. This issue explores the affective mechanisms and media strategies – from the rise of viral content (memes) to the harvesting and right-wing politicization of emotions – that are producing our post-millennial, post-financial crisis, post-Brexit/Trump present.
Issue No. 106 / June 2017 "The New New Left“
Table Of Contents
Preface
Cultural Resources / Sabine Hark And Sighard Neckel In Conversation On Feelings Of Resentment And Revenge
Verena Dengler
Fake Left, Punch Right
Jaleh Mansoor
Unveiling And/Or Re-Masking / Notes On The Political Dialectics Of The Opacity Of The Sign
Seth Price
Wrong Seeing, Odd Thinking, Strange Action
Matt Goerzen
Notes Toward The Memes Of Production
Diedrich Diederichsen
The Tough Stuff / “Populism," "Political Correctness," And The Like
Simon Denny
Face The Market On Your Own
Klaus Walter
Liberté, Egalité, Beyoncé?
Dan Bodan
Europe, 2016-17 / Selected Status Updates Of Recent Months
Bildstrecke
Kayode Ojo
Become What You Fear
New Development
Ana Teixeira Pinto
Artwashing / Nrx And The Alt-Right
Rotation
Obsessive, Compulsive, Disorder / Johanna Burton On Douglas Crimp’s “Before Pictures”
Probing Attitudes / Philipp Ekardt On “Putting Rehearsals To The Test” (Buchmann, Lafer, Ruhm, Eds.)
In Experimenten Seine Vernunft Aufs Spiel Setzen / Stefan Römer Über Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, „Der Kupferstecher Und Der Philosoph. Albert Flocon Trifft Gaston Bachelard“
Reviews
Nachrichten Aus Der Ideologischen Antike / Georg Imdahl Über Wade Guyton Im Museum Brandhorst
Schwere Verspannungen Lösen / Eva Scharrer Über Nairy Baghramian Im S.M.A.K. In Gent
Deviant Art / Dena Yago On Danny Mcdonald At House Of Gaga, Los Angeles
Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is / Tina Schulz Über Nora Schultz Bei Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Reverse Cubism Als Betrachtungsirrtum / Gunter Reski Über Pieter Schoolwerth Bei Capitain Petzel, Berlin
Mad World / Steven Warwick On Liz Craft & Pentti Monkkonen At Liszt, Berlin
Public Viewing / Moritz Scheper Über Sadie Benning In Der Kunsthalle Basel
Eye In The Sky / Ilya Lipkin On Ned Vena At Societé, Berlin
Kritische Stoffe, Shoppinglust Und Andere Ambivalenzen / Ines Kleesattel Über Ines Doujak (Und John Barker) Im Württembergischen Kunstverein
In Einem Anderem Land / Christian Kravagna Über „The Color Line“ Im Musée Du Quai Branly, Paris
Mehr Epistemischer Ungehorsam! / Susanne Witzgall Über „Postwar: Kunst Zwischen Pazifik Und Atlantik 1945–1965“ Im Haus Der Kunst, München
With Or Without / Christian Philipp Müller On Yuji Agematsu At Miguel Abreu Gallery, Nyc
Kommunikation Ist Kein Objekt / Fiona Geuß Über Ian Wilson In Den Kw Institute For Contemporary Art, Berlin
Nachruf
Gustav Metzger (1926–2017): Ein Nachruf Von Sabine Breitwieser
Edition
Anne Imhof
Sean Landers
2016, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Dissect / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
The cultural framework and biopolitics of capitalist globalisation has resulted in an increased concentration on the body as a site of production—in contemporary art as in life. Just as the historical avant-gardes sought to overcome art’s autonomous and isolated relationship to society by way of inviting in the ‘praxis of life’; so do contemporary artists whose focus is bodies and subjectivities. In an ever-emergent bio-economy, it is not just the body, but subjects and their lives that are crucial to value creation.
Contributors
Philip Auslander, Dodie Bellamy, Eva Birch, Cristine Brache, Ramsay Burt, Travis Chamberlain, Amy Charlesworth, James Ferraro, Karen Finley, Andrea Fraser, Tim Gentles, Isabelle Graw, Amelia Groom, Aurelia Guo, K8 Hardy, Chris Kraus, Ruth O’Leary, Tanja Ostojic, Carol Que, Ander Rennick, Audrey Schmidt, Phebe Schmidt, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Katie West, Amelia Winata, Jarrod Zlatic
Designed by Clare Wohlnick
Edited by Audrey Schmidt, Chloe Sugden and Zoe Theodore
2007, English
Softcover, 21 x 28 cm, 320 pages
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$59.00 - In stock -
REAL LIFE Magazine: Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994 highlights a selection of writings and artists' projects from REAL LIFE magazine, which was originally edited by artist, writer, and curator, Thomas Lawson and writer, Susan Morgan. Published in twenty-three issues from 1979-1994 as an intermittent black and white magazine, REAL LIFE featured artists and art historians writing on art, media and popular culture interspersed with pictorial contributions. The development of the magazine through its 15 year history, traces the influences, development and transitions of artists through the 80s.
The anthology features writings by and about Dara Birnbaum, Eric Bogosian, Rhys Chatham, Mark Dion, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kim Gordon, Dan Graham, Thomas Lawson, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, John Miller, Dave Muller, Matt Mullican, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, David Robbins, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, John Stezaker, Bernard Tschumi, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, and James Welling among others.
Table of Contents:
Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan: Various Histories of REAL LIFE Magazine
Matthew Higgs: REAL LIFE
Susan Morgan: an interview with Robert Moskowitz, 1979
Valentin Tatransky: Collage And The Problem Of Representation: Sherrie Levine's new work, 1979
Grahame Shane: Crime as Function, 1979
Susan Morgan: an interview with Steve Gianakos, 1979
Barbara Kruger: Game Show, 1979
James Welling: Untitled, 1979
Thomas Lawson: Every Picture Tells A Story Don't It? 1979
Thomas Lawson: Fashion Moda, 1980
Richard Prince: Primary Transfers, 1980
Dan Graham: The Destroyed Room of Jeff Wall, 1980
Kim Gordon: Trash Drugs And Male Bonding, 1980
Thomas Lawson: Going Places, 1980
Susan Morgan: Michael Hurson, 1980
Barbara Kruger: Devils With Red Dresses On, 1980
Thomas Lawson: Long Distance Information, 1980
Joseph Bishop: Desperate Character, 1980
Richard Prince: Menthol Pictures, 1980
Laurie Simmons: Sam and Dottie Dance, 1980
Jim Bradley: Radical Genitalia, 1980
Allan McCollum: Matt Mullican's World, 1980
Michael Smith: Mike In... What Should I Do About The Car? 1980
Sherrie Levine: Two Photographs After Walker Evans, 1980
Kim Gordon: Honeymoon Habit, 1980
Post-Modernism: a symposium, 1981
Dan Graham: BOWWOWWOW (the Age of Piracy), 1981
Howard Singerman: The Artist as Adolescent, 1981
Elsa Bulgari: Your Everyday Critic, 1981
Thomas Lawson: Too Good to be True, 1981
Jenny Bolande: Elk Grazed as if Nothing Had Happened, 1981
David Robbins: Notes toward film, 1981
Eric Bogosian: Fascination, 1981
Fulton Ryder: Pissing on Ice, 1981
Joan Wallace and Geralyn Donohue: Edit deAk, 1982
Rex Reason: Democratism, 1982
The Holy Ghost Writers: Condensation and Dish-Placement, 1982-3
Howard Singerman: Paragraphs toward an essay entitled 'Restoration Comedies', 1982-3
John Roberts: Ruins in the Realm of Thought, 1983
Paul McMahon: From The Permanent Collection, 1983
Jo Baer and Bruce Robbins: Beyond the Pale, 1983
Kathi Norklun: Courage, 1983
Tim Rollins: Particles, 1980-1983, 1983-4
Doug Ashford: Kiss of Death, 1983-4
Thomas Lawson: Komar & Melamid, 1983-4
Robin Winters: The Secret Agent: an interview with Jacki Ochs , 1983-4
Robert C. Morgan: a conversation with Lawrence Weiner , 1983-4
Judith Kirshner: A Blinding Light , 1983-4
Rex Reason: Brie Popcorn: an interview with the directors of Nature Morte Gallery, 1983-4
John Miller: Morality and the Poetic, 1984
Susan Morgan: Portraits of the Artists/Composite Drawings, 1984
B.P. Gutfreund: Four Photographs, 1984
Susan Morgan: Each and Every One of You, 1985
Mark Dion: Tales From The Dark Side, 1985
Jeff Wall: Dan Graham's Kammerspiel Parts I and II, 1985
Jana Sterbak: Premeditated: an interview with Ed Ruscha, 1985
Walter Robinson: The Quest For Failure, 1985-6
Derek Boshier: John Dugger, 1985-6
John A.Walker: Unholy Alliance: Chairman Mao, Andy Warhol, and the Saatchis, 1985-6
Kellie Jones: David Hammons, 1986
John Miller: Swiss Family Robbins, 1986
Adrian Piper: An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit, 1987-8
Susan Morgan: when X does not equal Y , 1987-8
Thomas Lawson: Critical Art Ensemble, 1988-9
Christine N. Lea: Beyond Belief, 1988-9
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Untitled 1988: Detail of a Sculpture (Endless Copies), 1988-9
Thomas Lawson: No Bull, 1990
Allan McCollum: Photo from TV (with Paintings), 1990
Dara Birnbaum: The Wondering Of Context, 1990
James Welling: Corridors, 1989, 1990
Michael Smith and R. Sikoryak: Mike, 1990
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Untitled, 1990
Judith Barry: Drive-In or Walk-In Museum, 1990
Group Material: AIDS Timeline, 1990
David Robbins: Three Cancelled TV Families, 1990
Louise Lawler: Untitled 1988, 1990
Susan Morgan: Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, 1994
Josef Strau and Stephan Dillemuth: Friesenwall 120, 1994
David A. Muller: Three Day Weekend, 1994
Spencer Finch: Amnesia And Saying Nothing, 1994
2017, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
Uh Books / Amsterdam
$20.00 - Out of stock
F.R.DAVID is a typographical journal, edited by Will Holder, dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises. This 13th issue of F.R.DAVID is edited with Riet Wijnen, and has its origins in her Registry of Pseudonyms, an online database which accounts for who is who and why who is who. ‘Inverted Commas’ follows ‘pseudonym’ through names, naming, bodies, brains, self, author, other, reader, labour.
Includes: Michael Asher, Joan Didion, Harun Farocki, Sven Lütticken, Lucy Lippard, Barbara Guest, A.H. Nijhoff, Will Holder, Pauline Oliveros, and many more.
2017, English
Softcover (saddle-stitch w. acrylic book cover), 384 pages, 26 cm x 20 cm
Published by
MUMA / Victoria
$44.00 - Out of stock
Open Spatial Workshop: Converging in Time was published on the occasion of the first major museum exhibition by Open Spatial Workshop (comprising artists Terri Bird, Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell). The exhibition is part of MUMA's much anticipated annual survey exhibition series that presents the practices of Australia's most exciting and innovative mid-career artists. Converging in Time continues OSW's sculptural investigation into the forces of material formation. Drawing on earth sciences research and studies of the Anthropocene, this major book explores the relationship between the mineral make-up of a site and the societies they produce and sustain.
Designed by Paul Mylecharane and Ziga Testen
Artists: Open Spatial Workshop (comprising of Terri Bird, Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell)
Text: Open Spatial Workshop, Saskia Beudel, Kathryn Yusoff, Matt Poll
2017, English
Softcover, 226 pages, 16.5 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary / Vienna
$74.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Daniela Zyman, Cory Scozzari
Contributions by Armen Avanessian, Daniel Garza-Usabiaga, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Anke Hennig, Chus Martínez, Eva Wilson, Daniela Zyman
Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artist’s works in the TBA21 collection from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary societies. It examines the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between departure, displacement, and return.
This publication follows the eponymous exhibition at TBA21 – Augarten. While conceived in relation to the exhibition, this book is not a documentation, but rather the start of a journey that expands, explores, complicates, and undoes the thematic threads of spatial disjunction, recollection, asynchronicity, fictionality, and the politics of visibility.
Copublished with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna
Design by Studio Folder
2016, English / German
Softcover, 140 pages, 16.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$49.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Florian Malzacher, Ahmet Öğüt, Pelin Tan
With contributions by Florian Malzacher, María do Mar Castro Varela, Chantal Mouffe, Ahmet Öğüt, Rubia Salgado, Pelin Tan, and the Silent Universities in Amman, Athens, Hamburg, London, Mülheim/Ruhr, and Stockholm
The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants and researchers.
The Silent University proposes a new institution outside of the restrictions of existing universities, migration laws and the other bureaucratic or juridical obstacles many migrants face. At the same time it mimics the idea of exiting universities, using their representational logics by developing alternative structures of pedagogy beyond border politics, race/ethnicity and normative education.
This first comprehensive publication about the Silent University introduces the initiative and contextualizes it in the wider framework of both radical pedagogy and socially engaged art projects. In addition, all current branches of the Silent University—in Amman, Athens, Hamburg, London, Mülheim/Ruhr, and Stockholm—describe their very different achievements as well as their struggles and failures.
The book contextualizes this initiative within a broader picture of migration policies, critical pedagogy, artistic involvement and institutional engagement. It also hopes to be an introduction for all those who might want to get involved in the Silent University—as contributors, lecturers, students in the existing branches, or by initiating new SUs wherever they are needed: a need which is becoming urgent in more and more cities and countries all around the world.
This book is published as an edition of Impulse Theater Festival, which initiated the foundation of Silent University Ruhr in Mülheim in June 2015.
Design by Fons Hickmann m23
1996, English
Softcover, 290 pages, 15.4 x 23 cm
2nd ed.,
Published by
Free Association Books / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology.
Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field.
First published in 1991.
2005, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
2005 edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
$95.00 - Out of stock
The now scarce 2005 reprint edition of one of the greatest books on film. A classic returns! The original edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974, and has been out of print since 1987. According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored."
So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.
This 2005 edition, published by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, also quickly went out of print and it has not been available since.
Includes Luis Buñuel, Dusan Makavejev, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Roman Polanski, Vera Chytilova, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Watkins, Tony Conrad, Jonas Mekas, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Chris Marker, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kate Millett, John Cassavettes, Shuji Terayama, William Klein, Russ Meyers, Louis Malle, Woody Allen, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnes Varda, Walerian Borowczyk, Andy Warhol, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Lindsay Anderson, Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Morrissey, Joseph Losey, Otto Muehl, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Frans Zwartjes, Arrabal, Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Werner Herzog, Morgan Fisher, Jean Renior, Michael Snow, Robert Frank, Jan Svankmajer, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Sharits, Akira Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Frederick Wiseman, Ken Jacobs, Martin Scorcese, Jean Cocteau, Manuel Octavio Gomez, Stanley Kubrick, Norman McLaren, Albert Maysles and David Maysles, to name only a few of the hundreds of film-makers whose works are featured in this essential film book.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 368 pages, 192 x 233 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$76.00 - Out of stock
In recent years, the group Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Forensic Architecture has not only shed new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, but has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing.
In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Traversing multiple scales and durations, the case studies in this volume include the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.
Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. The practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.
About the Author
Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a Global Scholar at Princeton University. A founder of Forensic Architecture, he is also a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. His books include Mengele’s Skull, The Least of All Possible Evils, and Hollow Land.
Endorsements
“The investigative work of Eyal Weizman and his colleagues at Forensic Architecture is truly remarkable, breaking novel theoretical ground while actively supporting struggles for justice. Again and again, landscapes of power, violence, resistance and ecological stress are transformed in stunning new ways. Among the many revelations in these pages is a new mapping of the connections between climate-change, drought, drones and armed conflict. These are powerful analytic tools that will be indispensable to the construction of a new human rights framework.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
“In many respects Forensic Architecture is the current reincarnation of Soviet Russia’s Factography, a collective enterprise that, in the 1920’s and 30’s, was geared towards the construction of facts, as opposed to merely documenting them. The difference between both endeavors, each similarly brazen in taking advantage of unprecedented advances of media technology, is that the facts that Forensic Architecture wishes to (re)construct are for the most part acts of state violence that the perpetrating state deliberately conceals. Those facts are registered in buildings (or traces thereof), which Weizman and his team equate both to photographs (sensors) and to tools for decoding other sensors (such as the clouds of smoke hovering over a bombed city). Analyzing the vast bank of images provided by social media in conflict zones through a computation of differential parallaxes, Forensic Architecture is fast becoming the most efficient visual machine against the suppression of evidence by the authors of crimes against humanity. Recent history tells us that its work will be evermore needed.”
—Yve-Alain Bois
“In a world where environmental crimes are increasingly linked to human rights violations, Forensic Architecture has become an essential practice. Weizman and his team have understood how the tools of science and architecture can influence and transform the juridical system.”
—Baltasar Garzón, former Spanish investigating judge and president of the human rights foundation FIBGAR
2017, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Natasha Ginwala
The Contour Biennale 8, “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” curated by Natasha Ginwala, brings together twenty-five international and local artists and art collectives working in lens-based media, sound, performance, drawing, and installation, to address questions related to the nation-state system and the realm of justice today. Taking place in Mechelen, Belgium, “Polyphonic Worlds” embraces the communal spirit of the biennale by including the many-sided voices that assemble in collective formations as well as discrete, individual creative positions.
This reader proposes a series of beginnings—it is a polyphonic approach that borrows from juridical and musical spheres. Launched as the online journal of the biennial, Hearings pairs texts or image-based contributions, allowing for a sense of tension and affinity to develop in the feedback loop of the two voices. Relationships around the artwork as site of evidence and testimony are thus reoriented. The multidimensional readings are not restricted to the active apparatus of law and discipline, but instead seek to unravel the synchronies of our times—the mesh of injustice in our midst.
Featuring texts and illustrated contributions by Agency, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Eric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Hunter Braithwaite and Trevor Paglen, Filipa César, Cooking Sections, Council, T. J. Demos, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Rana Hamadeh, Louis Henderson, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ho Tzu Nyen, inhabitants, Arvo Leo, Sven Lütticken, Basir Mahmood, Samuel Mareel, Dirk de Meyer, Otobong Nkanga, Pallavi Paul and Anish Ahluwalia, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Judy Radul, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, Madonna Staunton, Ana Torfs, Trinh Thi Nguyen, Susanne M. Winterling and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Ghassan Zaqtan.
Copublished with Contour Biennale on the occasion of Contour Biennale 8: “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium” (March 11–May 21, 2017).
Design by Studio Remco van Bladel
2017, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 12 x 18.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$35.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Goldin+Senneby with Kim Einarsson
Contributions by Ronny Ambjörnsson, Mara Lee, Donald MacKenzie, Malin Nilsson, Mary Poovey, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Michael Taussig
“Off now, little paper, around the world, and destroy the tyranny of money, so that gold, silver and precious stones may one day cease to be the idols and tyrants of the world!”
—August Nordenskiöld, 1787
In the ancient art of alchemy, some elements can change to other states of matter while others cannot. At least not without magic. And a touch of trickery. For some time now, Goldin+Senneby have been interested in a utopian alchemist named August Nordenskiöld (1754–1792) who sought to create enough gold from inferior metals to permanently abolish its value, and the tyranny of money with it. But gold is not only money, just as money is not only gold. Gold is a substance, and money is a measure of value—for substances, feelings, ideas—that is open to magical projections, deceits and impurities, faulty counts, stealthy hacks, and hasty cover-ups. In The Exquisite Corpse of August Nordenskiöld, Goldin+Senneby initiate a parallel comedy of interpretation. As in the surrealist parlor game cadavre exquis, each of the book’s seven essays—by a historian of ideas, a sociologist of finance, a literary and cultural historian, a stage magician, an artist, an anthropologist, and a poet, in precisely that order—responds directly to the preceding essay only. What is magic, after all, if not a story line performed in near darkness—with little knowledge of what came before and even less of what will follow?
—Brian Kuan Wood
Design by Johan Hjerpe
2017, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages + DVD, 23 x 17 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$45.00 - Out of stock
This is a long-awaited account of the work of the great publisher and designer Hansjörg Mayer in the fields of concrete poetry, typography, artist’s publications and ethnographic books over six decades. It includes the first bibliography of his works.
Identified as a print prodigy by Max Bense in the late 1950s, Mayers unique expertise and virtuosity with print technologies of the time allowed for the casting of works in various experimental formats which stretched, fragmented and expanded the concept of the poem.
He combined an interest in chance and randomness with a mathematically precise attention to use of graphic space, which makes his works now seem anticipatory of networked systems whilst holding a more modernist purity of form. His works made seminal explorations into the possibilities of concrete and computational convergence.
Mayer had a retrospective exhibition at Haags Gemeentemuseum in 1968 at the young age of 25. After this he concentrated on making experimental publications with artists.
Through his edition hansjörg mayer he issued publications of Dieter Roth, Richard Hamilton, Tom Phillips, André Thomkins and Emmett Williams.
From the late 1970s he also began to research, collect and publish an extraordinary series of books about vanishing cultures.
English and German text.