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
Theory / Essay
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
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Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
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Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
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.
2012, English
Softcover, 631 pages, 10.8 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume VII: Culinary Materialism
(Reissued Edition)
Reza Negarestani & Robin Mackay (Eds.)
Philosophical Research and Development.
Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a culinary materialism wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation?
Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking, excavating the cultural, industrial, physiological, chemical and even cosmic grounds of cookery, and proposing new models of culinary thought for the future.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY & REZA NEGARESTANI - Editorial Introduction
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT - The Chemical Paradigm (Interview)
JOHN GERRARD & MICHAEL A. MORRIS - Corn Bomb: An Extended History of Nitrogen
FIELDCLUB - Whey To Go: On the Hominid Appropriation of the Pig-Function
RICK DOLPHIJN - The New Alimentary Continuum
MANABRATA GUHA - Vague Weaponizations, or The Chemistry of Para-Tactical Engagements
CAROL GOODDEN - FOOD and the City (Interview)
AO& - Where's the Edge of the Pot? (Interview)
JOHN COCHRAN - Object-Oriented Cookery
RICHARD WRANGHAM - Reason in the Roasting of Eggs
VANINA LESCHZINER AND ANDREW DAKIN - Theorizing Cuisine from Medieval to Modern Times: Cognitive Structures, the Biology of Taste, and Culinary Conventions
SEAN DAY - The Human Sensoria and a Synaesthetic Approach to Cooking
JEREMY MILLAR - Black Cake (A Recipe for Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson)
DAN AND NANDITA MELLAMPHY - Ec[h]ologies of the Désêtre
EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO - The Metaphysics of Predation
EUGENE THACKER - Spiritual Meat: Resurrection and Religious Horror in Bataille
DOROTHÉE LEGRAND - Ex-Nihilo: Forming a Body Out of Nothing
FERNANDO ZALAMEA - Analytical Jelly and Transmodern Tatin
GABRIEL CATREN - On Philosophical Alchimery, Or Why All Chimeric Compositions are Philosophical Stones
APPENDIX OF RECIPES - Compiled by the editors
2012, English
Softcover, 540 pages, 10.8 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume VI: Geo/Philosophy (Reissued Edition)
Robin Mackay (Ed.)
Philosophical Research and Development.
Following Collapse V's inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus' deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy poses the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy's task to escape the planetary horizon?
Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought.
Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as an (or the) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract 'world' that is the condition for a 'whole' of thought?
Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions presents us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth - these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?
Collapse VI brings together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of 'planetary thought'.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Editorial Introduction
NICOLA MASCIANDARO - Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT - Introduction to Schelling's On the World Soul
F. W. J. SCHELLING - On the World Soul (Extract)
GREG MCINERNY, DREW PURVES, RICH WILLIAMS, STEPHEN EMMOTT - New Ecologies (Interview)
TIMOTHY MORTON - Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, the Strange Stranger and the Beautiful Soul
F I E L D C L U B - How Many Slugs Maketh the Man?
OWEN HATHERLEY - Fossils of Time Future: Bunkers and Buildings from the Atlantic Wall to the South Bank
EYAL WEIZMAN - Political Plastic (Interview)
ANGELA DETANICO AND RAFAEL LAIN - A Given Time / A Given Place
MANABRATA GUHA - Introduction to SIMADology: Polemos in the 21st Century
REZA NEGARESTANI - Undercover Softness: An Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay
ROBIN MACKAY - Philosophers' Islands
CHARLES AVERY - The Islanders: Epilogue
GILLES GRELET - Theory is Waiting
RENEÉ GREEN - Endless Dreams and Water Between
2012, English
Softcover, 587 pages, 10.8 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume V: The Copernican Imperative (Reissued Edition)
Damian Veal (Ed.)
Associate Editors: Robin Mackay, Ray Brassier
Philosophical Research and Development.
Ever since Nicolaus Copernicus unmoored the Earth from its anchorage at the centre of the Universe and set it hurtling around the Sun, science has progressively uncovered the lineaments of an objective reality to which human experience stands as only the most superficial and attenuated of abstractions.
Collapse V brings together some of the most intellectually-challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of this ever-widening gulf between the real and the intuitable from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.
With articles by groundbreaking philosophers and scientists, in-depth interviews with prominent thinkers, and new work from contemporary artists, Collapse V addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, and the enduring chasm between the spontaneous image of reality bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the sciences in the wake of Copernicus.
Contents
DAMIAN VEAL - Editorial Introduction
CARLO ROVELLI - Anaximander's Legacy
JULIAN BARBOUR - The View from Nowhen (Interview)
CONRAD SHAWCROSS AND ROBIN MACKAY - Shadows of Copernicanism
JAMES LADYMAN - Who's Afraid of Scientism? (Interview)
THOMAS METZINGER - Enlightenment 2.0 (Interview)
NIGEL COOKE - Thinker Dejecta
JACK COHEN AND IAN STEWART - Alien Science (Interview)
MILAN CIRKOVIC - Sailing the Archipelago
NICK BOSTROM - Where are They?
KEITH TYSON - Random Sampler from a Blocktime Animation
MARTIN SCHÖNFELD - The Phoenix of Nature
IMMANUEL KANT - On Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Space and Time
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT - Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism
GABRIEL CATREN - A Throw of the Quantum Dice
ALBERTO GUALANDI - Errancies of the Human
PAUL HUMPHREYS - Thinking Outside the Brain
2012, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 10.7 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume IV: Concept Horror (Reissued Edition)
Robin Mackay (Ed.)
Associate Editor: Damian Veal
Philosophical Research and Development.
Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse's pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Editorial Introduction
GEORGE SIEG - Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror: The Gnosis of the Victim
EUGENE THACKER - Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror
RAFANI - Czech Forest
CHINA MIÉVILLE - M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?
REZA NEGARESTANI - The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo
JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN - I Can See
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ - Poems
JAMES TRAFFORD - The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood
THOMAS LIGOTTI / OLEG KULIK - Thinking Horror / 'Memento Mori'
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX - Spectral Dilemma
BENJAMIN NOYS - Horror Temporis
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT / TODOSCH - Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy' / Drawings
STEVEN SHEARER - Poems
GRAHAM HARMAN / KEITH TILFORD - On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl / Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo
KRISTEN ALVANSON - Arbor Deformia
Notes on Contributors
2012, English
Softcover, 458 pages, 10.7 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$52.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume III: Unknown Deleuze (Reissued Edition)
Robin Mackay (Ed.)
Associate Editors: Dustin McWherter
Philosophical Research and Development.
Collapse III contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London in 2007.
The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' - what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Editorial Introduction
THOMAS DUZER - In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE - Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI - "I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician": The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX - Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER - Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE - Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
INCOGNITUM - Malfatti's Decade
JOHN SELLARS - Chronos and Aion: Deleuze and the Stoic Theory of Time
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JEAN-CLAUDE BONNE - Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN - Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER - Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX - Speculative Realism
2012, English
Softcover, 330 pages, 10.7 x 17.5 cm
2nd Edition,
$40.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume II: Speculative Realism (Reissued Edition)
Robin Mackay (Ed.)
Associate Editor: Damian Veal
Philosophical Research and Development.
Comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, and involving them in unforeseen and productive syntheses, Collapse II features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and cinéastes, and searching interviews with leading scientists.
Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical philosophical problematics - the status of the scientific object, metaphysics and its "end", the prospects for a revival of speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency - both through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Editorial Introduction
RAY BRASSIER - The Enigma of Realism
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX - Potentiality and Virtuality
ROBERTO TROTTA - Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil (Interview)
GRAHAM HARMAN - On Vicarious Causation
PAUL CHURCHLAND - Demons Get Out! (Interview)
CLÉMENTINE DUZER & LAURA GOZLAN - Nevertheless Empire
REZA NEGARESTANI - Islamic Exotericism: Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility
KRISTEN ALVANSON - Elysian Space in the Middle East
2012, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 10.7 x 17. 5 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$40.00 - Out of stock
Collapse Volume I: Numerical Materialism (Reissued Edition)
Robin Mackay (Ed.)
Associate Editors: Ray Brassier, Michael Carr
Philosophical Research and Development.
Collapse I is an unprecedented collection of work by leading practitioners in diverse fields of enquiry. Conceived as a meticulously compiled and compendious miscellany, a grimoire or instruction manual without referent, as a delirious carnival of sobriety, Collapse operates its war against good sense not through romantic flight but through the formal insanity secreted in the depths of the rational ("the rational is not reasonable").
Collapse aims to force unforeseen conjunctions, singular correspondences, and unnatural cross-fertilisations; to diagram abstract regions as yet unnamed.
The first volume of Collapse investigates the nature and philosophical uses of number through interviews with philosophers scientists and mathematicians, essays on the mathematics of intensity, terrorism, the occult and information theory, and graphical works of multiplicity.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Editorial Introduction
ALAIN BADIOU - Philosophy, Sciences, Mathematics (Interview)
GREGORY CHAITIN - Epistemology as Information Theory
REZA NEGARESTANI - The Militarization of Peace
MATTHEW WATKINS - Prime Evolution (Interview)
"INCOGNITUM" - Introduction to ABJAD
NICK BOSTROM - Existential Risk (Interview)
THOMAS DUZER - On the Mathematics of Intensity
KEITH TILFORD - Crowds
NICK LAND - Qabbala 101
Notes on Contributors
2015, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Witte de With / Rotterdam
$43.00 - Out of stock
Douglas Coupland’s new book 'Bit Rot', published on the occasion of his exhibition at Witte de With, combines fictional short stories with columns, and creates a parallel narrative to the exhibition itself. 'Bit Rot' addresses subjects such as the death of the middle class, the rise of the internet and its impact on our lives, and in short, evinces a shedding of twentieth-century notions of what the future is and could be. The book is named after a phenomenon in digital archiving that describes the way digital files of any sort spontaneously decompose.
2014, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 15.2 x 22 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$34.00 - Out of stock
The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano’s Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave.
And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano’s most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist’s entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano’s act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist’s practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.
About the Author
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer and curator based in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Otis College of Art and Design, publishes Pep Talk, and runs the experimental art venue The Finley Gallery. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Artforum, ArtReview, Art in America, Artonpaper, ArtSlant, Mousse, and exhibition catalogs.
2015, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 12.8 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Black transparency is an involuntary disclosure of secrets against a backdrop of systematic online surveillance, as large parts of contemporary life move into the digital realm. Black transparency, as a radical form of information democracy, has brought forward a new sense of unpredictability to international relations, and raises questions about the conscience of the whistleblower, whose personal politics are now instantly geopolitical. Empowered by networks of planetary-scale computation, disclosures today take on an unprecedented scale and immediacy. Difficult to contain and even harder to prevent, black transparency does not merely create openness, order, and clarity; rather, it triggers chaos, stirring the currents of a darker and more mercurial world.
Metahaven was founded in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. In Black Transparency— part essay, part fanzine—Metahaven embark on a journey of subversion, while examining transparency’s intersections with design, architecture, and pop culture, as well as its ability to unravel the circuitry of modern power.
Design by Metahaven
2015, English
Softcover (w. fold-out dust jacket), 172 pages, 11 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (CAC) / Lithuania
$30.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Kari Cwynar
Foreword by Raimundas Malašauskas
When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. Unfolding in the Reflection Room in Kassel’s Karlsaue Park, it was the most involved installment of the Hypnotic Show to date—“an exhibition that exists only in the mind of the audience,” according to Lutyens’s collaborator Raimundas Malašauskas.
Lutyens also didn’t know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document. Here, the artist chronicles the Hypnotic Show and puts together all kinds of improbable experiences for his readers: research of cognition and neurological activity, deep exploration of varying states of consciousness, and, at the center, the possibility for contingency and embodied dematerialization within the current thinking of art.
Copublished with Kunstverein Toronto and CAC Vilnius / XII Baltic Triennial
Design by Goda Budvytytė and Line Gry Hørup
2014, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$31.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Anna Molska, Łukasz Ronduda, Felicity Scott, Axel Wieder, Michał Woliński, Florian Zeyfang; interviews with Wiktor Gutt, Grzegorz Kowalski, Paweł Kwiek, Anna Niesterowicz, Artur Żmijewski
Oskar Hansen’s (1922–2005) theoretical concept of “open form” was developed in the context of international debates around late-modern architecture in the 1950s. Open form assumed that no artistic expression is complete until it has been appropriated by its users or beholders. In the following decades, the concept became a key principle of performance and film art, and led to the development of process-oriented and interdisciplinary artistic techniques. Hansen’s concept revolutionized the traditional means of artistic communication.
This publication examines the impact of Hansen’s ideas within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. The book includes in-depth interviews with some of the most important protagonists of experimental art in Poland, who investigate the historical impact of the open form. Other contributions comment on the theory’s influence on a younger generation of artists. Visual material by Hansen and the artists complete this extensive volume.
Design by HIT
2015, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Harvard University Graduate School of Design / Cambridge
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$20.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin
“Nothing in the architecture of Lacaton and Vassal is what it looks like at first glance.”
— Iñaki Ábalos, introducing Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, March 24, 2015
Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal are known for an architecture that privileges inhabitants’ freedom and pleasure through generous, open designs. The Paris-based architects opened their 2015 lecture at Harvard University with a manifesto: study and create an inventory of the existing situation; densify without compressing individual space; promote user mobility, access, choice; and most importantly, never demolish. Freedom of Use reflects on these core values to present a fluid narrative of Lacaton and Vassal’s oeuvre, articulated through processes of accumulation, addition, and extension. The architects describe built and unbuilt work, from a house in Niger made of little more than branches; to the expansive Nantes School of Architecture; to a public square in Bordeaux where, after months of study, their design solution was: do nothing.
Lacaton and Vassal’s principle of doubling space is echoed in the book’s treatment of photography: black-and-white exterior shots that run alongside the text form a dialogue with corresponding full-color photographs of each interior, gathered at the end of the book.
The Incidents series is copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Book series designed by Åbäke
2015, English
Softcover, 230 pages, 20.5 x 27 cm
Published by
Cura. / Rome
$20.00 - Out of stock
cura. is a quarterly magazine, a publishing house, an exhibition space and a platform for editorial and curatorial activities, based in Rome, Italy.
CURA. No.20
FALL 2015
Cover by Allison Katz
INSIDE THE COVER
Allison Katz. Pungent Painting
text by Ruba Katrib
PORTRAITS IN THE EXHIBITION SPACE
Wim Beeren and Tomorrow’s Museum
by Lorenzo Benedetti
TALKING ABOUT
Why Poetry?
by Jean-Max Colard
POP-UP SECTION: DISPLAY
ISSUE 01
You Display, I Display, We Display
by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade
ABOUT
Josh Kline
by Ciara Moloney
PROJECT
A Wonderful World Under Construction
by GCC
SPOTLIGHT
Ryan Gander
in conversation with Adam Carr
ABOUT
Michael E. Smith
by Jenny Jaskey
A VISIT TO
Pedro Barateiro: The Current Situation /
Palmeiras Bravas, Museu Colecão Berardo, Lisbon
with João Mourão & Luís Silva
ABOUT
Marguerite Humeau
by Hans Ulrich Obrist
HOT!
Olga Balema
by Chris Sharp
Darja Bajagić
by Franklin Melendez
Sascha Braunig
by Rose Bouthillier
Rachel Rose
by Frances Loeffler
PROJECT
Villa Design Group
and Nicoletta Lambertucci
PROJECT
Lena Henke and Anna Gritz
2015, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 13.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$28.00 - Out of stock
The Well-Dressed Wound is Derek McCormack’s play script “séance”: a fashion show by the dead for the living. In the depths of the Civil War, in a theater in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln participate in a staged spiritualistic rite. But the medium conducting them has invited along another being: the Devil, disguised as twentieth-century French fashionista Martin Margiela (aka “King Faggot”). What follows is the most fiendish runway show ever mounted, complete with war dead, deconstructed couture, and gay ghosts infected with all manner of infectious agents, including oozy AIDS.
While his previous fictions have explored the darker corners of country music, high fashion, and camp, The Well-Dressed Wound is McCormack’s most radical work yet, occultishly evoking the evil-twin muses of transgressive literature, Kathy Acker and Pierre Guyotat. The creation thus conjured is a gleeful grotesquerie, a savage satire not so much of fashion as of death, a work that, as Bruce Hainley observes in Artforum, puts “the ‘pus’ back in opus.” Here death and life spin on a viral double helix of contamination and couture, blistering and bandages, history and hysteria, semen and seams. “Being dead is so very now,” Hainley opines. “This tiny tome (a time bomb, a tomb) is to die for and radically alive.”
About the Author
Derek McCormack is a writer who lives in Toronto. His previous books include The Show that Smells (2009), Grab Bag (2004), and The Haunted Hillbilly (2004).
2015, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 13.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$30.00 - Out of stock
As any good magician or psychoanalyst knows, it’s the deliberate chalking of a particular square that allows for the discovery of personal order and private mythology.
—from The Irresponsible Magician
Sharp, acerbic, and often humorous, Rebekah Rutkoff's writings about contemporary culture reflect the present in ways reminiscent of Renata Adler’s and Joan Didion's writings about urban life in the late twentieth century. Moving freely between fact and fiction, utilizing imaginary interviews, accidental stories, and critical essays, The Irresponsible Magician approaches psychoanalysis and celebrity on a first-name basis. Writing about cultural figures as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Michel Auder, the Kennedy women, William Eggleston, Gregory Markopulos, and Hilda Doolittle, Rutkoff interprets protagonists as if they were figures in a dream. Navigating a world of painting, cable television, video art, avant-garde film, memories, or Rutkoff's own photographs, these texts read images like tea leaves, opening up a space in which shadows speak more eloquently than symbols or signs.
About the Author
Rebekah Rutkoff is a New York-based writer, artist, and teacher. She is currently completing books on the American filmmakers Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos and is the editor of a forthcoming volume of writings by and about Beavers. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Animal Shelter, and World Picture. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a new project on the artist Lillian Schwartz.
Endorsements
“Rebekah Rutkoff’s fertile mind disrupts the conventional, leaping over the usual ways of seeing and thinking. She embraces the imagination, refuses oppositions, say, between rational and irrational, and, like H.D., welcomes dreams as the mind’s unconscious, helpful messenger. Her lovely, rhythmic sentences are delightful, as is her special comprehension of the visual and written.”
—Lynne Tillman
2015, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$43.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia
Originally published in Italian in 2002, When the Word Becomes Flesh provides a compelling contribution to the understanding of language and its relation to human nature and social relationships. Adopting Aristotle’s definition of the human being as a linguistic and political animal, Paolo Virno frames the act of speech as a foundational philosophical issue—an act that in its purely performative essence ultimately determines our ability to pass from the state of possibility to one of actuality: that is, from the power to act to action itself. As the ultimate public act, speech reveals itself to be an intrinsically political practice mediating between biological invariants and changing historical determinations. In his most complete reflection on the topic to date, Virno shows how language directly expresses the conditions of possibility for our experience, from both a transcendental and a biological point of view.
Drawing on the work of such twentieth-century giants as Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege, Virno constructs a powerful linguistic meditation on the political challenges faced by the human species in the twenty-first century. It is in language that human nature and our historical potentialities are fully revealed, and it is language that can guide us toward a more aware and purposeful realization of them.
About the Author
Paolo Virno is an Italian philosopher, semiologist, and a prominent figure among the Italian Postfordist thinkers. He currently teaches at the University of Rome and is the author of A Grammar of the Multitude and Multitude Between Innovation and Negation, both published in English by Semiotext(e).
2015, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$29.00 - Out of stock
Decades following the rise of computer aided design and the aesthetic-theoretical debates that coincided, it might seem late, at this point, to place a spotlight on photography. After all, hardly anyone defends photography’s loyalty to the analog index anymore, or mourns the medium specificities of centuries past. And yet, who can dispute that the photograph has become the primary base for establishing identity now, for cohering a social body; one that, as the substrate across which today’s human subject is drawn, stands as, in a sense,our material support? As the image’s gaze has become omnipresent, it is perhaps prime time to ask how do we now understand photo-media to operate? What information do we expect it to carry? What facts do we trust it to convey?
ISSUE NO. 99 / SEPTEMBER 2015 “PHOTOGRAPHY”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
LOST TRACES OF LIFE / A conversation about indexicality in analog and digital photography between Isabelle Graw and Benjamin Buchloh
LORETTA FAHRENHOLZ
SCANNERS
ROBIN KELSEY
PHOTOGRAPHY, LACAN, AND THE GENIUS OF JEFF KOONS
PETER OSBORNE
THE DISTRIBUTED IMAGE
ANNA GASKELL
LIFE IN THE SYSTEM
TIMUR SI-QIN
TRUE LIES
MICHAEL HAGNER
THE PHOTOBOOK, POST-DIGITAL
CLEMENS JAHN
PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER PHOTOGRAPHY
SETH PRICE
LECTURE ON THE EXTRA PART
BILDSTRECKE
BENJAMIN ASAM KELLOGG
OCULUS DEMOS MAXIMUS
SHORT CUTS
FUTURE NOT PRESENT / Helmut Draxler, Susanne von Falkenhausen, Amy Sillman, and Hong Zeiss on the 56th Venice Biennale
NEW DEVELOPMENT
DREAMING IN TRENDS / Michael Wang on the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris
NO EXPO / Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho on the Fondazione Prada, Milan
OPEN SEASON / Nikoloz Japaridze with Natasha Randall on the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow
ROTATION
HART SPRECHEN FÜR EINE GEMEINSAME WELT / Christian Kravagna über "Kritik der schwarzen Vernunft" von Achille Mbembe
GARY COOPER'S LIPSTICK / Thomas Beard on Boyd McDonald's "Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to 'Oldies' on TV"
LIEBE ARBEIT KINO
WETRANSFER: MEDIATING THE MEDIATED SELF / Carson Chan on Britta Thie's "Translantics"
KLANG KÖRPER
WIR SIND GAR NICHT HIER / Joy Kristin Kalu über Richard Maxwells "The Evening", The Kitchen, New York
SHORT WAVES
Megan Francis Sullivan on Birgit Megerle at Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna / Nuit Banai on Josef Strau at Secession, Vienna / Nina Franz über Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff in der Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
REVIEWS
BLAUE FLECKEN / Alexander García Düttmann über De La Fuente Oscar De Franco im Helmhaus, Zürich
HEARTS OF CONTROL / Dan Mitchell on Gili Tal at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn
JEDERMANNS AUTOBIOGRAFIE / Kerstin Stakemeier über Mark Leckey im Haus der Kunst, München
MIT INDIEGOGO NACH PIONEERTOWN / Michael Kral über Pierre Bismuth in der Galerie Jan Mot, Brüssel
ALTE GEISTER / Philip Ursprung über Albert Oehlen in der Kunsthalle Zürich
OBITUARY
LAWRENCE WEINER
DOROTHEE FISCHER (1937-2015)
2015, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 16.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Dexter Sinister / New York
Sternberg Press / Berlin
The Serving Library / New York
$25.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Issue number nine tackles all manner of sports and games, providing commentary on their language, politics, and philosophies. It kicks off with Rob Giampietro on New England Patriots controversial quarterback Tom Brady in view of ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with David Peace narrating seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 radio interview with UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Uncovering a fascination for what is still considered the most difficult game of cards, Vincenzo Latronico takes us through the complexities of bridge. Kathy Acker identifies the bodybuilder’s language as the simplest of language games, reduced to a minimal set of nouns and numerical repetition. Joe Scanlan presents “three object lessons” on advanced imaging technologies related to movement, while James Langdon follows the debates on the innovations to rock climbing. The issue slaloms through further contributions from Christoph Keller, Sarah Demeuse, Linus Elmes, Chris Evans, Junior Aspirin Records, Philip Ording, Leila Peacock, Justin Warsh & Miguel Abreu, and Carlin Wing.
2014, English
Softcover (zip-open cardboard jacket), 112 pages, 12.7 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Swiss Institute / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Melanie Gilligan, Jenny Jaskey, Fionn Meade, Kari Rittenbach, Piper Marshall
Descartes’ Daughter, edited by Piper Marshall, former curator of the Swiss Institute in New York, documents the critically lauded 2013 exhibition of the same name as well as continuing its ideas. Taking the historical account of philosopher René Descartes’ creation of an animatronic effigy of his deceased young daughter as its foundation, the exhibition explored the traditional divide between conceptual and expressive works, those dealing with either the mind or the body.
The reader includes five essays that explore the room in between this divide, both within the works exhibited and beyond. Fionn Meade, curator at the Walker Art Center, submits a poetic elegy to René Descartes, placing his ideas and the discussion around them at the center of this book. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of the Artists’s Institute, writes on scale and the subjective, metabolic qualities of “human.” Piper Marshall asks how one can curate a feminist art exhibition, firmly merging the discussion.
Copublished with Swiss Institute following the exhibition“Descartes’ Daughter” (September 20–November 3, 2014), with works by Malin Arnell, Miriam Cahn, John Chamberlain, Hanne Darboven, Melanie Gilligan, Rochelle Goldberg, Nicolás Guagnini/Jeff Preiss, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Lucas Knipscher, Jason Loebs, Ulrike Müller, Pamela Rosenkranz, Karin Schneider, and Sergei Tcherepnin.
Design by Li Inc., New York
2015, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 120 pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$25.00 - Out of stock
Eyal Weizman - The Roundabout Revolutions (Critical Spatial Practice 6)
With Blake Fisher and Samaneh Moafi
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring photography by Kyungsub Shin
One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.
Rereading the history of the roundabout through the vortices of history that traverse it, the book follows the development of the roundabout in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, to its subsequent export to the colonial world in the context of attempts to discipline and police the “chaotic” non-Western city. How did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power became the locus of its undoing?
Today, as the tide of revolt that characterized the Arab Spring seems to ebb, when nations and societies disintegrate by brutal civil wars and military oppression, the series of revolutions might seem like Dante’s circles of hell. To counter this counter-revolution, Weizman proposes that the immanent power of the people at the roundabouts will need to find its corollary in sustained work at round tables—the ongoing formation of political movements able to enact political change.
The sixth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series stems from Eyal Weizman’s contribution to the Gwangju Folly II in 2013, an exhibition curated by Nikolaus Hirsch with Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun for the Gwangju Biennale. Weizman and the architect Samaneh Moafi constructed a folly composed of seven roundabouts and a round table in front of the Gwangju train station, one of the central points in the events of May 1980.
Design by Zak Group
2015, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Harvard University Graduate School of Design / Cambridge
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$20.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin
With contributions by Savinien Caracostea, Pierre Hermé, Sanford Kwinter
On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University from Paris. He brought five chefs, two assistants, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 32 pounds of cream, 25 pounds of milk chocolate couverture, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate “lecture de pâtisserie.” Together with Savinien Caracostea and Sanford Kwinter, he methodically deconstructed four conceptual desserts for 400 spectator-diners.The Architecture of Taste recaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé’s pastry visions.
The Incidents is a series of publications based on events that occured at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow.
Copublished with the Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Book series designed by Åbäke
2015, English / Arabic
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.5 x 21 cm
$16.00 - Out of stock
Mai Abu ElDahab (Ed.)
Texts by Federica Bueti, Malak Helmy, Francis McKee, Haytham El Wardany, Brian Kuan Wood
Five essays that take an intimate look at what language’s role is in moments of dramatic change, and how to find meaning for artistic practices in these transformative conditions. Taking its cue from the aftermath of the events of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, Final Vocabulary doesn’t provide answers as much as it captures the spirit of the moment of searching in which the writers find themselves. The book was developed out of a live conversation at an event called “The Informal Meeting” that took place in Leuven in January 2015, where participants were asked: Our histories and references are often in a different language (abstract or actual) than we use ourselves, what tools do you think are or might be useful to help you trust your own memories and narratives? What, if anything, do you think we might borrow from art to experiment with language in different situations? In English and Arabic.
Copublished with Mophradat
Design by Kaisa Lassinaro
2010, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 232 pages, 215 x 115 mm
Published by
De Appel / Amsterdam
Open Editions / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
This sleek and serious anthology of new curatorial writing documents the inter-dependent relationships between the curatorial past, present and speculative futures and, instead of following the convention of curators writing about themselves, invites the authors to provide a text about the curatorial work of others. The result is an eclectic volume of accessible responses that provides a dynamic curatorial discourse where critical essays, theoretical explorations, propositions, historical overviews, interviews, exhibition critiques and fictional accounts sit side by side. Essential reading for students and professionals alike.
This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about exhibition making. Moving away from autobiographical first-person narratives, Curating Subjects instead invites its broad range of contributors to comment upon the curatorial endevours of others. Conflating and colliding the past and present with possible futures, this book unfolds as an idiosyncratic conversation that is at once informative, entertaining and often revealing.
Matthew Higgs
Introduction by Paul O'Neill & Annie Fletcher; Design by Jonathan Hares.
Published with de Appel Arts Centre