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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Australian Art
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
2016, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 272 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$50.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Iain Ball, Erick Beltrán, Jane Bennett, Benjamin H. Bratton, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Erik Davis, John Durham Peters & Paul Feigelfeld, Mircea Eliade, Boris Groys, Marguerite Humeau, Timothy Morton & Emilija Skarnulyte, Boris Ondreička, The Otolith Group, Jussi Parikka, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nadim Samman, Charles Stankievech
Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.
Rare earth elements are the game-changing foundation of our most powerful innovations, are fundamental to contemporary accoutrements such as mobile phones, iPods and iPads, liquid crystal displays, LEDs, light bulbs, CDs and DVDs. Often described as conflict materials due to the limited number of easily accessible mines, they are also integral to weapon systems used for cyber-warfare, medical technologies (including MRI scanning equipment), hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, and other green energy applications. Consequently, rare earth elements play an increasing role in global affairs and power inventions that facilitate our changing self-image—giving birth to today’s emergent myths and identities.
Rare Earth grounds our strange, seemingly weightless cultural moment. While we may design our technologies, these tools and weapons shape us in turn. It may seem that we dream the contemporary into existence, but perhaps rare earth elements are dreaming through us. After the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, this is the age of Rare Earth.
Copublished with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna on the occasion of the exhibition “Rare Earth,” February 19–May 31, 2015, with works by Iain Ball, Erick Beltrán, Julian Charriere, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Camille Henrot, Roger Hiorns, Marguerite Humeau, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Oliver Laric, Ursula Mayer, The Otolith Group, Katie Paterson, Charles Stankievech, Suzanne Treister, Ai Weiwei, Guan Xiao, Arseniy Zhilyaev
Design by David Rudnick and Raf Rennie
2016, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analog video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological approach, Blom’s new book—her second from Sternberg Press—is a brilliant look at the relationship between video memory and social ontology.
Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, as well as visiting professor at the Department of Art History, University of Chicago.
This is a phosphorescently brilliant exploration of the birth and life of video. In the times when electronic media meant the flow of televisual signals, video became a uniquely glimmering force of idiosyncratic memory and the ordination of time. Blom’s focused beam of histories and ideas superlatively traces the crackling and flickering scanlines of this new reality as it came into being in art.
—Matthew Fuller, author and professor at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London
With this extraordinary study, early video has finally found its chronicler. Invaluable not only for its perspicacious genealogy of media-art practice, but for its inspired historiographic gambit, wherein both art and history are reimagined in light of contemporary media archaeology.
—Andrew V. Uroskie, author of Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art
Design by Surface
2016, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 12.7 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Fitzcarraldo Editions / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
What is pretentiousness? Why do we despise it? And more controversially: why is it vital to a thriving culture? In this brilliant, passionate essay, Dan Fox argues that it has always been an essential mechanism of the arts, from the most wildly successful pop music and fashion through to the most recondite avenues of literature and the visual arts. Pretentiousness: Why it Matters unpacks the uses and abuses of the term, tracing its connections to theatre, politics and class. From method acting to vogueing balls in Harlem, from Brian Eno to normcore, Fox draws on a wide range of references in advocating critical imagination and open-mindedness over knee-jerk accusations of elitism or simple fear of the new and the different. Drawing on his own experiences growing up and working at the more radical edges of the arts, this book is a timely defence of pretentiousness as a necessity for innovation and diversity in our culture.
'Pretentiousness: Why it Matters is more than a smartly counterintuitive encomium: it's a lucid and impassioned defence of thinking, creating and, ultimately, living in a world increasingly dominated by the massed forces of social and intellectual conservatism.' - Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island
Dan Fox is a writer, musician, and co-editor of frieze magazine, Europe's foremost magazine of art and culture. He is based in New York.
2011, English
Softcover, 113 pages, 140 x 215 mm
Edition of 100, hand-numbered.,
Published by
Pep Talk / Los Angeles
$32.00 - Out of stock
Bruce Hainley PEP TALK is the first collection of the author's writing, bringing together an amazing selection of republished and unpublished interviews, critical essays, and poems. Every single text in this collection is guaranteed to light your fire, if you have any wick at all. As writer, critic, poet, teacher, mentor and more, Hainley is incomparable and irreplaceable to us in Los Angeles and those engaged with contemporary art anywhere. This monographic issue also includes contributions from artists Richard Hawkins and Dianna Molzan. - PEP TALK
Very highly recommended.
2014, English
Hardcover, 304 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$76.00 - In stock -
Asked to sum up her artistic pursuit, the American artist Elaine Sturtevant once replied: 'I create vertigo.' Since the mid-1960s, Sturtevant has been using repetition to change the way art is understood. In 1965, what seemed to be a group show by then 'hot' artists (Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and James Rosenquist, among others) was in fact Sturtevant's first solo exhibit, every work in it created by herself. Sturtevant would continue to make her work the work of others, focusing her career on the artistic copy. The subject of major museum exhibitions throughout Europe and awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale, she will have a majorsurvey at the MoMA, New York, in 2014. In Under the Sign of, Bruce Hainley unpacks the work of Sturtevant, providing the first book-length monographic study of the artist in English. Hainley draws on elusive archival materials to tackle not only Sturtevant's work but also the essential problem that it poses. Hainley examines all of Sturtevant's projects in a single year (1967); uses her Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1995 as a conceptual wedge to consider contemporary art's place in the world; and, finally, digs into the most occluded part of her career, from 1971 to 1973, when she created works by Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, and had her first solo American museum exhibit.
Under the Sign of is ostensibly a study of the haunting American artist Elaine Sturtevant, but what Bruce Hainley has written, really, is a poem about postwar American art and the woman who remade it in her own image by 'appropriating,'which is to say, reconfiguring, the distinctly male and sometimes male queer vision that informed the work of artists such as Warhol, Oldenburg, Johns, and the rest. As the first book-length monograph in English of a baffling, moving, and mysterious artist -- 'I create vertigo,' Sturtevant said about herself -- Hainley has written a splendid study not only of the artist's work but also of the atmosphere of change it helped foster. - The New Yorker
Bruce Hainley lives and works in Los Angeles. A contributing editor atArtforum, he is the author of two books of poetry, one of which, Foul Mouth, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series. With John Waters, he wrote Art -- A Sex Book. He teaches in the MFA programs of Art Center College of Design and the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California.
2016, English / German
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
Art and fashion have always been interrelated. And it’s due to fashion’s ability to quickly capture social shifts that the art world has repeatedly turned to it. But as Texte zur Kunst No. 102 proposes, it is fashion’s protagonists, recently, that have been markedly drawing on art conceptual practices (e.g., parasitism, collective authorship, détournement, and forms of institutional critique) as they push back against the pressures of a hyper-accelerated fashion market. In this issue, TzK examines, also, how the industry’s current volume is a product of its late-'00s promise of online democratization; the changing function of such long-held value designations as “luxury,” “discount,” and “underground,” and the role of “real”-er bodies in a climate wherein models are preferably “nodels” or “othered” bodies, hyper-individualised to stand out in the stream.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
ROBERT KULISEK & DAVID LIESKE
FASHION PROFILES OF:
69 WORLDWIDE / NASIR MAZHAR / KYLE LUU / BERNADETTE VAN-HUY / LIAM HODGES / TELFAR / NIK KOSMAS & JEANNE-SALOMÉ ROCHAT / MARTINE ROSE / JULIANA HUXTABLE / ECKHAUS LATTA / DIS / NHU DUONG /
with texts by Harry Burke, Tess Edmonson, Jack Gross, and Bianca Heuser
INGEBORG HARMS "CRYSTAL MESH / Existential imagery in current fashion"
COLLECTIVE SOUL / Jessica Gysel in conversation with Lotta Volkova Adam and Atelier E.B. (Beca Lipscombe & Lucy McKenzie)
CAROLINE BUSTA "NEO-BODIES"
NATASHA STAGG "ACCESS CODING"
PHILIPP EKARDT "DRESSING AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE / The emancipation of Jonathan Anderson"
CALLA HENKEL & MAX PITEGOFF "LAST NIGHT"
ROTATION
IN DER FRÜHE / Peter Geimer über Friedrich Kittlers „Baggersee“
RETURNS OF THE STONE AGE / Sven Lütticken on the exhibition publications for “Kunst der Vorzeit” and “Allegory of the Cave Painting”
ZUR KULTURPOLITISCHEN BEKÄMPFUNG DER MODERNEN KUNST / Otto Karl Werckmeister über die neue Ausgabe von Hitlers „Mein Kampf“
LIEBE ARBEIT KINO
DURATIONAL FASHION / Sara Marcus on K8 Hardy’s “Outfitumentary”
KLANG KÖRPER
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO ELECTRIC LADYLAND / Barbara Vinken über Michaela Melián im Lenbachhaus, München
EINE KULTURGESCHICHTE DER ENTGRENZUNGEN / Daniel Martin Feige über „I Got Rhythm. Kunst und Jazz seit 1920“ im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
SHORT WAVES
Jens Hoffmann on “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” at the Met Breuer, New York / Magdalena Nieslony über Agnes Martin im K20, Düsseldorf / Dena Yago on Ei Arakawa, Gela Patashuri, and Sergei Tcherepnin at Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis / Eva Wilson on Das Institut at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London / Julia Moritz on Tobias Madison at Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover
REVIEWS
MARIUS UND DIE INFORMATION / Hans-Christian Dany über „Nervöse Systeme. Quantifiziertes Leben und die soziale Frage“ im Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
DIE KUNST VERACHTEN, DEN REST DER WELT ANKLAGEN /Susanne von Falkenhausen über Boris Lurie im Jüdischen Museum Berlin
DEUTSCHES VITRINENGLAS / Steffen Zillig über Dierk Schmidt bei KOW, Berlin
NOTHING BUT KINDNESS / Verena Dengler über Lili Reynaud-Dewar in der Galerie Emanuel Layr, Wien
EARLY SYSTEMS ESTHETICS / Craig Buckley on Les Levine at Buell Hall, GSAPP, Columbia University, New York
WHAT A BODY CAN’T DO / Sophie Goltz über Regina José Galindo im Frankfurter Kunstverein und Maria José Arjona in der Kunsthalle Osnabrück
NACHRUFE / OBITUARIES
PIERRE BOULEZ (1925–2016)
by Björn Gottstein
ZAHA HADID (1950–2016)
by Than Hussein Clark
EDITION
JOHN MILLER
TORBJØRN RØDLAND
2016, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 16 x 21 cm
Published by
Open Editions / London
$59.00 - In stock -
It is widely assumed that everyone is ‘interdisciplinary’ nowadays, that we all work in the intersections of specialised disciplines. But if being flexible, multi-skilled and polymathic are the prerequisites to survival in today’s world, why do educators and art marketeers still find it imperative to maintain conditions of production that advocate specialist forms? The aim of this new anthology in the Occasional Table series is to critically reflect upon the role of specialism in art and society and to understand better how the claim of those who seek to transcend the parameters of specialisation contrasts to others who maintain that deep levels of achievement can only be attained within highly focused methods and forms.
Edited by David Blamey, Specialism includes texts by Matthew Cornford, Neil Cummings, Dan Fox, Anouchka Grose, Mingyuan Hu, Stephen Knott, Frances Loeffler, Nina Power, Rick Poynor, Alistair Rider, Andrew Robinson, Irit Rogoff and Ruth Sonderegger, Chris Watson, Jon Wozencroft and Ian Whittlesea.
2013, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 13.4 x 20 cm
Edition of 1000,
Published by
Monash University Museum of Art / Melbourne
Surpllus / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981–1984 brings together a diverse body of texts focused on Paul Taylor, the Australian editor, writer, curator and impresario, and in particular his important and influential early years in Melbourne between 1981 and 1984. The dates of the texts included span some thirty years and take a variety of different forms — critical essays, reviews, short reflective texts, interviews, transcriptions of lectures — the combination of which seeks to analyse Taylor’s impact on Australian art history in the early 1980s, when he founded Art & Text and curated the landmark exhibition ‘POPISM’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, and the subsequent ripples that continue to encircle us in his wake, thirty years on.
Edited and introduced by Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon, and featuring contributions by Ashley Crawford, Adrian Martin, Charles Green & Heather Barker, Chris McAuliffe, David Chesworth & Jon Dale, David Pestorius, Graham Willett, Ian McLean, Judy Annear, Janine Burke, Juan Davila, Jonathan Holmes, John Nixon & David Homewood, Jenny Watson & Kelly Fliedner, Lyndal Jones, Merryn Gates, Maria Kozic, Philip Brophy, Paul Foss, Patrick McCaughey, Peter Tyndall, Rex Butler & Susan Rothnie, Ralph Traviati, Imants Tillers, Edward Colless, Russell Walsh, Sue Cramer, Denise Robinson and Vivienne Shark LeWitt.
Editors: Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon
Design: Brad Haylock
2015, English / German
Softcover, 300 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Christoph Merian / Basel
$36.00 - Out of stock
Seventy years after the death of the originator, his or her works become public intellectual property; they are in the public domain and so belong to the public. This effects not just medieval texts, but also 20th century books and works. Thanks to digitization the treatment of these works has taken on a whole new dynamism. For museums, libraries, archives and galleries, the public domain is a challenge, but also an opportunity for the whole cultural sector.
This book explains the copyright fundamentals of the public domain and discusses the difficulties involved in implementing it in the everyday functioning of cultural institutions. Particular attention is given to the theme remix, which is presented from a theoretical and a practical viewpoint. The publication has an extensive glossary.
With essays by Leonhard Dobusch, Merete Sanderhoff, Martin Steiger, Wolfgang Ullrich, and others.
2016, English / Portuguese
Softcover, 168 pages, 15,5 x 22 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$45.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
João Laia, ed.
Texts by Stephanie Bailey, Paulo Cunha E Silva, Attilia Fattori Franchini, João Laia, João Ribas, Alex Ross, David Santos, Andrey Shental, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Rósza Zita Farkas
This publication has been produced in the framework of “Hybridize or Disappear”, a group exhibition with works by Cécile B. Evans, Neïl Beloufa, Antoine Catala, Diogo Evangelista, Oliver Laric, Shana Moulton, Katja Novitskova, Laure Prouvost and Magali Reus at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, and at the Paços do Concelho, Câmara Municipal do Porto. Edited by João Laia, this book aims to expand on the universe of the show, posing a wide set of questions that shape contemporary visual culture, rather than serving as a document or an archive. Through the lens of the “hybrid”, the commissioned texts look at different dimensions of our current condition, addressing ideas related to the circulation of identity and meaning in our mediated environments.
2015, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 16 x 21 cm
Published by
Open Editions / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Universities and art schools alike have been subjected to the pressure of recent austerity politics and the ongoing attempt to transform higher education on the basis of neoliberal principles. In this context, there is an urgent need to conceive of alternative frameworks and methodologies of study – whether this is within, outside or at the margins of academic institutions. This book examines what is currently at stake in education through a series of conversations with artists, theorists, activists and educators who are all actively involved in developing new models of study. Ranging from self-organised learning to critical teaching methodologies, the conversations gathered here offer a resource for those interested in the renewed politicisation of education and alternative modes of pedagogy and inquiry.
With contributions by Andrea Fraser, Brian Holmes, Gal Kirn, Gerald Raunig, Judy Chicago, Melissa Gordon & Marina Vishmidt, Ruth Sonderegger, Suhail Malik, Timothy Ivison and The New Centre for Research & Practice.
2016, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$42.00 - Out of stock
During a career that spanned more than forty years, from the late 1960s until his death in 2012, Michael Asher created site-specific installations and institutional interventions that examined the conditions of art's production, display, and reception. At the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, he famously relocated a bronze replica of an eighteenth-century sculpture of George Washington from the museum's entrance to an interior gallery, thereby highlighting the disjunction between the statue's symbolic function as a public monument and its aesthetic origins as an artwork. Today, Asher is celebrated as one of the forerunners of institutional critique. Yet because of Asher's situation-based method of working, and his resistance to making objects that could circulate in the art market, few of his works survive in physical form. What does survive is writing by scholars and critics about his diverse practice. The essays in this volume document projects that range from Asher's environmental works and museum displacements to his research-based presentations and reflections on urban space.
Contributors: Michael Asher, Sandy Ballatore, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jennifer King, Miwon Kwon, Barbara Munger, Stephan Pascher, Birgit Pelzer, Anne Rorimer, Allan Sekula
2015, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 15.2 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$42.00 - Out of stock
For five decades, the artist Hans Haacke (b. 1936) has created works that explore the social, political, and economic underpinnings of the production of art. His works make plain the hidden and not-so-hidden agendas of those -- from Cartier to David Koch -- who support art in the service of industry; they expose such inconvenient social and economic truths as the real estate holdings of Manhattan slumlords, and the attempts to whitewash support for the Nazi regime, apartheid, or the war on terror through museum donations. This book gathers interviews, difficult-to-find essays, cornerstones of institutional critique, and new critical approaches by writers that include Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jack Burnham, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Leo Steinberg. Haacke's 1971 Guggenheim exhibition was famously canceled when the artist refused to withdraw several proposed works, including one exposing the business dealings of a Manhattan real estate company. This volume includes Edward Fry's catalog text for that show, as well as Walter Grasskamp's "An Unpublished Text for an Unpainted Picture," redacted from an exhibition catalog in 1984 because of statements about the German collector Peter Ludwig. Other essays consider such topics as Haacke's controversial commission for the Reichstag; the activation of the spectator, from Condensation Cube to the Polls; the conceptual continuity of his practice with regard to General Systems Theory; and his delayed and problematic reception in both the United States and Europe. With contemporary essays and scholarly reassessments, this collection serves as an essential guide to critical thinking on Haacke's artistic practice, from the works of the 1960s that engage with physical and biological systems to his later interrogations of the social and economic underpinnings of art.
Contributors: Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jack Burnham, Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Sam Durant, Edward F. Fry, Walter Grasskamp, Rosalind Krauss, Jack McGrath, Luke Skrebowski, Leo Steinberg
2013, English
Softcover, 212 pages, 15.2 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$42.00 - Out of stock
This October Files volume gathers essays, an interview, and a roundtable discussion on the work of Robert Morris, one of the most influential American artists of the postwar period. It includes a little-known text on dance by Morris himself and a never-before-anthologized but influential catalog essay by Annette Michelson. Often associated with minimalism, Morris (b. 1931) also created important works that involved dance, process art, and conceptualism. The texts in this volume focus on Morris's early work and include an examination of a 1971 Tate retrospective by Jon Bird, an interview with the artist by Benjamin Buchloh, a conversation from a 1994 issue of October about resistance to 1960s art, and an essay by this volume's editor, Julia Bryan-Wilson, on the labor involved in installing the massive works in Morris's 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney. Spanning 1965 to 2009, these writings map the evolution of critical thought on Morris over more than four decades.
2016, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Art Against Art / Berlin
$18.00 - In stock -
EDITORIAL
When considering the art field as being a raft in speculative time, the tendency is to seek comfort in numbers, regressive ideas such as another return to painting[1] or hedging bets on all sides whilst pursuing an unreasonable personal growth fetish.
These are classic reactions to a perceived risk that arises as a result of readjusting to new data. Uncertainty, if left unmediated, will pose a risk not just to market stability but to conceptual stability as it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between artists and ads; artworks and hype-objects; or content and sponsored content – keeping us in a state of high drama too complex to decode. For example artists who consciously use marketing strategies as art are contextually mixed up with masses of artists who simply run a marketing strategy. Or, equally, galleries with a reputation for long-term quality regularly use their weight to inflate very short-lived speculative art. It is in these differences that art barters itself off very quickly to sometimes uninteresting effects holding us in a certain inappropriate narrative if we are not careful.
Up until a hundred years ago, it was normal to assume that all art aimed at “beauty” or varying degrees of “representation” and that anything but, would not be considered art. Later, after The Fountain, this evolved into the politics of mass production leading to whatever fallacy that we have today – perhaps a speculative bias targeted at an erroneously projected future consensus. It may be worth considering ditching all retroactive rhetoric about “safe places” in favor of heightening one’s own form of perception (perhaps even through enhancement), to adapt to the new environment and to filter through informational debris.
Inside the art world [...]
The Editors
CONTENTS
Editorial
Kenny Schachter – Art After the Apocalypse
Linda Yablonsky – Plus Ça Change
A Conversation with Michael Gross – Quid pro Quo – How the sausage gets made at the Met
Joseph Walsh – An Image that is Nothing to be Desired
Image spread by Natasha Vita-More
Paul Mason – Eleven Theses on Postcapitalist Art
Christian J. Haye – More Art
Casey Jane Ellison – 2 Ones Chat and Then End
Armen Avanessian – Present Tension: Notes on Preemption, Hyperstition,
Contemporary Art and the Post-Contemporary Condition
Artist edition by Phillip Zach
2015, English
Softcover, 86 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Art Against Art / Berlin
$18.00 - In stock -
London, Paris, New York, Milan, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Palo Alto – art is moving faster than capital like a god wind that no-one can stop let alone control. Meanwhile a lot of art writing and ‘critical theory’ is stuck in the comfort zone of the 70-90s when there actually was an avant garde or subculture.
For art writing to get back on track it needs to shake out of this nostalgia and start engaging with the nuances of what is going on by covering the new breeds of involvement that have emerged since 2009 – the new sincerities and ironies, the more subtle art practices and social variations of market participation that have developed to deal with the institutional grip. For some time an aesthetic suspension of disbelief helped to provide an alibi that allowed us to participate as if we did believe the market was the key to “validation”, but then quickly vanished into feelings of depression after any agency seemed like an impossibility. As the contradictions got wider, different problems have emerged such as whether art is concurrent with the transitional moments of our present culture or technology, or whether art altogether has reached its informational limit.
The art world has slowly transitioned from modernist pretensions that seem like delusional excuses to the public, to developing a new sensibility – one of silent, shared communion, retributions and confessions. It has taken the step into a reality that is more in keeping with the real world of business, design and branding than creating stark ‘alternatives’. Beyond short-term pragmatism and adaptability, how can artists aesthetically work alongside their authentic desire to participate in a logic of the market that by necessity must scale? How can we realistically judge the work of art institutions if they are frozen into following instrumental logics rather than relevance? With the availability of information online, there is no way these logics are not transparent to a committed internet user.
Narratives like these happened in Pop Music years ago. Just as the Music Industry had to face up to its own protocols, the Art Industry needs to be judged on its changing developments; the ways art is being used as a financial instrument, art’s new marketing techniques, art as representation of different sociological interests, art as access to power, status, fame, participation and the rest of it. Until art writing gets really into these driving forces, it won’t be able to say anything interesting about art. It also won’t be able to grow or be writing that anyone really wants to read.
Art Against Art marks a turning point – the one that says by breaking from the overbearing logic of what seems like an inevitability, we can get closer to the conceptualizations we would like society to experience but don’t.
The Editors
CONTENTS
Editorial
Marion Maneker - Art is Not an Asset, It’s a Reserve Currency
Ben Vickers - Strange Objects and Their Discontents
Martin G Fuller - A Sociology of Art for Artists
Steven Shaviro - Feed
Taslima Ahmed - Left to the Mercy of Roussel
Image spread by Michael Farin
Roberto Ohrt - Needle and Balloon
Manuel Gnam - Centralization and Globalization of Art leading to One Global Hierarchy That Creates Less Options and Forms a Function of Limited Growth
Carles - Creativity vs. Scalability
Artist edition by Megan Marrin
2016, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
Materiality has reappeared as a highly contested topic in recent art. Modernist criticism tended to privilege form over matter—considering material as the essentialized basis of medium specificity—and technically based approaches in art history reinforced connoisseurship through the science of artistic materials. But in order to engage critically with the meaning, for example, of hair in David Hammons’s installations, milk in the work of Dieter Roth, or latex in the sculptures of Eva Hesse, we need a very different set of methodological tools.
This anthology focuses on the moments when materials become willful actors and agents within artistic processes, entangling their audience in a web of connections. It investigates the role of materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process, or participation. And it looks at the ways in which materials obstruct, disrupt, or interfere with social norms, emerging as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It reexamines the notion of “dematerialization”; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys relationships between matter and bodies, from the hierarchies of gender to the abject and phobic; explores the vitality of substances; and addresses the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality emerging in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation.
Artists surveyed include
Georges Adéagbo, Carl Andre, Janine Antoni, Amy Balkin, Artur Barrio, Helen Chadwick, Mel Chin, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, Tessa Farmer, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Romuald Hazoumè, Pierre Huyghe, Ilya Kabakov, Mike Kelley, Anthony McCall, Teresa Margolles, Robert Morris, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Tino Sehgal, Shozo Shimamoto, Santiago Sierra, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, Paul Thek, Paul Vanouse, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Kara Walker
Writers include
Joseph D. Amato, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Georges Didi-Huberman, Natasha Eaton, Jens Hauser, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Tim Ingold, Wolfgang Kemp, Julia Kristeva, Esther Leslie, Jean-François Lyotard, Dietmar Rübel, Monika Wagner, Gillian Whiteley
About the Editor
Petra Lange-Berndt is Chair of Modern and Contemporary art in the Art History Department at the University of Hamburg and a leading researcher in the field of material studies in art history. She is coeditor, with Dietmar Rübel, of Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries and Comrades, the 1970s.
2016, English
Softcover, 192 pages + 92 page booklet, 23 × 30 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Nicholas Croggon, David Homewood, & Helen Hughes; with a guest edited section by Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center; and designed by Robert Milne.
Contents
Cover : Gordon Bennett
Editorial by Nicholas Croggon, David Homewood & Helen Hughes
Elizabeth Newman: Abstraction, Simulation, Obscuration by Francis Plagne
Critical Ambiguity: A Kantian Reading of Recent Work by Juan Davila by Helen Johnson
Trans-Pacific: Abstract Painting in Australia, New Zealand and America 1930–1960 by Rex Butler & A.D.S. Donaldson
Object Documentation by David Homewood & Bronté Lambert
The Dispute at the 19th Biennale of Sydney by Michael Ascroft
Illusion in Wendy Paramor’s Triad by Amelia Sully
Ambient Perspective and Endless Art by Nikos Papastergiadis & Amelia Barikin
Figures of the Machine: Richard Tuohy’s Halftone Films by Giles Fielke
Non-Resolution IRL by Danni Zuvela
Interview with Hito Steyerl by Amelia Groom
The Three Bodies of Angus Cerini by Jon Roffe
Encountering a Collection: Fiona Connor’s Wallworks by Kate Warren
What it’s Like to Dance Naked in the Museum and Other Thoughts: Stuart Ringholt’s Kraft (2014) by Liang Luscombe & Patrice Sharkey
Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity: Reflections on Method, Review of Reviews (Part 2) by Terry Smith
The Eternal Return of Irony: Gordon Bennett (1955–2014) by Ian McLean
Clothes by Centre for Style
Back Cover : John Citizen
Guess edited section by Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (loose booklet in Bahasa and English)
Holopis Kuntul Baris: Karya Seni di Era Kolaborasi yang Tampak Mekanis / Holopis Kuntul Baris: The Work of Art in the Age of Manifestly Mechanical Collaboration
Pengantar/Introduction by Ferdiansyah Thajib
Kerangka Kolektivitas/Terms of Collectivity by Simon Soon
Wok the Rock & Co.: Memahami Persahabatan dalam Dunia Seni Yogyakarta/Wok the Rock & Co.: Making Sense of Friendship in Yogyakarta’s Art Scene by Nuraini Juliastuti
Punkasila, Kerjasama dan Persahabatan/Punkasila, Cooperation and Friendship by Syafiatudina
Hestu A. Nugroho (Setu Legi)
(artist pages)
1972, Japanese
Softcover (w. dustjacket), 340 pages, 15.5 x 22 cm
1st Japanese edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
? / Japan
$45.00 - In stock -
Japanese edition of this classic collection of writings from the great Jonas Mekas.
Please note, texts in this scarce edition are entirely in Japanese.
In his Village Voice Movie Journal columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking s next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash.
2016, English
Hardcover (padded), 312 pages, 18.4 x 30 cm
Published by
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
Walther König / Köln
$45.00 - Out of stock
Anyone undertaking a study of the concept of "life" in our culture will observe that it never gets defined as such, writes Giorgio Agamben. Instead, he claims, this indeterminate thing - life itself - gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of oppositions that give it a function in the sciences without ever being defined as such. These theoretical and literary articulations are what this book is about, and what the 173 texts by authors, scientists and philosophers from all times and all disciplines will try to answer.
Ernst Haeckel, speculative biologist and naturalist, coined key concepts as phylum and ecology. In the years 1899-1904 he published Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature), one hundred prints depicting organisms many of which were first described by Haeckel himself, who with this project took an unusual step from science to art. His sketches thus create a bridge between this book and the exhibition at Moderna Museet, appearing in the margins of both. Otherwise there is no art in this publication and the division of labor strict: the exhibition is art?s chance to answer the topic spelled out in the subtitle to Life Itself: "On the question of what it essentially is; its materialities, its characteristics, considering that attempts to answer this question by occidental sciences and philosophies have proven unsatisfactory."
Exhibition featured the work of Giovanni Anselmo, Olga Balema, Hicham Berrada, Joseph Beuys, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Victor Brauner, Nina Canell, Lygia Clark, Trisha Donnelly, Monica Englund, Valia Fetisov, Dirk Fleischmann, Katharina Fritsch, Ernst Haeckel, Barbara Hauser, Tamara Henderson, Eva Hesse, Damien Hirst, Tehching Hsieh, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller/Rosemarie Trockel, On Kawara, Josh Kline, Hilma af Klint, Edward Krasinski, Mark Leckey, Helen Marten, Henri Michaux, Barnett Newman, Otobong Nkanga, Katja Novitskova, Philippe Parreno, Giuseppe Penone, Leo Reis, Ulf Rollof, Rachel Rose, Anri Sala, Sebastian Stöhrer, Sturtevant, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Rosemarie Trockel/Günter Weseler, Christine Ödlund.
2016, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$49.00 - Out of stock
Franco "Bifo" Berardi's newest book analyzes the contemporary changes taking place in our aesthetic and emotional sensibility -- changes the author claims are the result of semio-capitalism's capturing of the inner resources of the subjective process: our experience of time, our sensibility, the way we relate to each other, and our ability to imagine a future. Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration. Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family. It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people, yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of the old.
2016, English
Softcover (w. banderole), 512 pages, 16 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$45.00 - In stock -
This volume is a collection of dynamic and engaged writings by art historian John C. Welchman on a range of contemporary European artists: Vasco Araújo, Cosima von Bonin, Jan De Cock, Orshi Drozdik, Susan Hiller, Andy Hope 1930, Michael Kunze, Nathaniel Mellors, Miguel Palma, José Álvaro Perdices, Sascha Pohle, Thomas Raat, Nicola Stäglich, and Xavier Veilhan. Anchored in concerns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, Welchman poses thoughtful and provocative questions about how these artists receive and negotiate the social and aesthetic histories through which they live and work.
Past Realization inaugurates XX–XXI, John C. Welchman’s two-part series on European art from this and the last century, which will be followed by a series on West Coast artists and one on the work of Mike Kelley.
Design by Metahaven
2016, English
Softcover, 138 pages, 11.4 × 17.7 Cm
Published by
Aboriginal Humanities Project / Melbourne
Discipline / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
Published by Aboriginal Humanities Project, Melbourne, in association with Discipline. Edited by Marion Campbell & Philip Morrissey, with contributions by Philip Morrissey, Marion Campbell, ‘Affected Staff’, Ruth Campbell, Leo Seward, Giles Fielke, Raewyn Connell, Hans A. Baer, Adam Bartlett, Justin Clemens, Lauren Bliss, Kevin Murray, Gill H. Boehringer, Aunty Janet Turpie-Johnstone, Ted Clark, and designed by Nicholas Tammens.
On 11 April 2015 in the Brunswick Uniting Church in Melbourne, a People’s Tribunal was held to investigate the ‘Business Improvement Program’ at the University of Melbourne.
The Tribunal itself–composed of scholars, students and senior members of the Aboriginal community, and assisted as Counsel by a group of final-year students from the Melbourne Law School–heard evidence from a range of expert witnesses about the development, implementation and consequences of the Business Improvement Program. This volume collects material generated from those proceedings in order to keep alive an under-standing of what happened at the University of Melbourne during 2013 and 2014, and to stimulate further analysis of what this process signifies for the future of work and of education.
2016, English / German
Softcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$29.00 - Out of stock
ISSUE NO. 101 / MARCH 2016 “POLARITIES”
Issue No. 101 of Texte zur Kunst takes “Polarities” as its theme – a term we associate with what’s unfolding around us right now: ideological polarization, from Pegida to Donald Trump. How do we understand the growing gap between the ideals of tech/smooth space (where the art world tends to reside, swiftly neutralizing any resistance as “content”) and the striated regions of material unrest? How do we understand “polarization” despite our dominant, and inherently continuous, neoliberal system? Given these macro conditions in which art critical and art historical discourses are currently being formed, and within which they will need to position themselves, could the image of polarization be something not to avoid but to engage; perhaps even a potentially generative model for times that are anything but ideology-free?
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
ET SOUS LA PLAGE … ? / Philipp Felsch interviews Timothy Brennan on the state of left theory
HELMUT DRAXLER
ALWAYS POLARIZE? / Conditions and limitations of a model of argumentation
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, SECURITY / Four questions for Carolin Emcke
ENTER THE VOID / Roy Scranton and @LILINTERNET on hyperreality and reflexive narrative
DANIEL COLUCCIELLO BARBER AND DAVIS RHODES
THE TERROR WITHIN
ANTEK WALCZAK
GLOBALLY POSITIONED
GABRIELE WERNER
HEIMAT / Notes on the enduring renaissance of an idea
BILDSTRECKE
GERHARD RICHTER
"12 PHOTOGRAPHS OF ULRIKE MEINHOF" / Taken in October 1966 for "Konkret" by Inge-Maria Peters
NEW DEVELOPMENT
NATIONAL CUSTOMS / Sven Lütticken on Germany's Kulturgutschutzgesetz
ROTATION
IST DER MENSCH DOCH NOCH ZU RETTEN? / Svenja Bromberg über Nina Powers Aufsatzsammlung „Das kollektive politische Subjekt“
HEY MOTHERFUCKERS, HERE IS YOUR GENERATIONAL NOVEL / Tobias Madison über Seth Prices Roman „Fuck Seth Price“
SHORT WAVES
Hans-Jürgen Hafner über Daniel Richter in der Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/M. / Astrid Mania über Verena Pfisterer bei Exile, Berlin / Ana Teixeira Pinto on Július Koller at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw / Beate Söntgen über Joan Mitchell im Museum Ludwig, Köln / Daniel Keller on Peter Fend at Barbara Weiss and Oracle, Berlin / Manfred Hermes über Anne Speier bei Silberkuppe, Berlin
REVIEWS
SPERRIGE NAHEVERHÄLTNISSE / Eva Kernbauer über „to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer. Künstlerische Praktiken um 1990“ im Mumok, Wien
DER GESCHMACK DES PRIVATEN / Barbara Buchmaier und Christine Woditschka über die Sammlung Würth im Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
BENEFITS / Sarah Lookofsky on “Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
NOBODY EVER DID WHAT WE DID / David Rimanelli on Dash Snow at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut
MALEREI MALGRÉ TOUT / Maria Muhle über „Painting 2.0“ im Museum Brandhorst, München
PUNK’S NOT DEAD, JUST DIFFERENT / Gili Tal on “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” at Eden Eden, Berlin
WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU / Jenny Nachtigall on Carolee Schneemann at Museum der Moderne, Salzburg
FREMDE ZUNGEN / Yilmaz Dziewior über „Slip of the Tongue“ in der Punta della Dogana, Venedig
LOCAL UNION / Rhea Anastas on Union Gaucha Productions at Artists Space, New York
EDITION
THEA DJORDJADZE
DANA SCHUTZ