World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2014, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Fillip / Vancouver
$20.00 $5.00 - In stock -
In this Issue:
Byron Peters and Jacob Wick, Christopher Regimbal, Bettina Funcke with Andrew Stefan Weiner, Nicholas Gottlund, Zarouhie Abdalian with Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im, Lene Berg with Jacob Wren, Sumi Ink Club, Matteo Pasquinelli and more...
2014, English
Softcover, 84 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 18.7 X 26 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$19.00 - Out of stock
Overture
Jens Hoffmann and Lumi Tan
Curator’s Favorites
Monika Szewczyk – Idolizing Twilight
Chen Tamir – Liminal Spaces
Hendrik Folkerts – WACK the Canon!
Back in the Day
Inés Katzenstein – Experiencias 68: A Threshold
Missing in Action
Lucy Lippard – After a Fashion: The Group Show
introduced by Chelsea Haines
Attitude
Massimiliano Gioni – What I Did Last Summer
Assessments: Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins Saturday
Christopher Y. Lew – Workers’ Compensation
Ase Lovgren – More Verbs, Please
Laurel Ptak – Art in the Age of the Norwegian Semi-Social-Democratic-Post-Welfare-State
Johanne Nordby Werno – Love for Labour
Rigorous Research
Germano Celant – The Territories of Exhibition
Six x Six
Ngahiraka Mason, Fionn Meade, Pable Léon de la Barra, Fillipa Ramos, Maria Inés Rodriguez, Syrago Tsiara
Rear Mirror
Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielsky – Considering the 2013 Carnegie International
Jennifer Gross – The Société Anonyme’s Dada Destiny
Edited by Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers-Szupinska, Lumi Tan
2014, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$44.00 - Out of stock
This anthology provides a multivocal critique of the exhibition of contemporary art, bringing together the writings of artists, curators, and theorists. Collectively these diverse perspectives are united by the notion that although the focus for modernist discussion was individual works of art, it is the exhibition that is the prime cultural carrier of contemporaneity. The texts encompass exhibition design and form; exhibitions that are object-based, live, or discursive; projects that no longer rely on a physical space to be visited in person; artists’ responses to being curated and their reflections on the potential of acting curatorially. Set against the rise of the curator as an influential force in the contemporary art world, this volume underlines the crucial role of artists in questioning and shaping the phenomenon of the exhibition.
Artists surveyed include:
Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, AA Bronson, Daniel Buren, Graciela Carnevale, Andrea Fraser, Piero Gilardi, Group Material, Richard Hamilton, Huang Rui, Laboratoire Agit-Art, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Konrad Lueg, Matsuzawa Yutaka, Palle Nielsen, OHO (Marko Pogagnik), Hélio Oiticica, Philippe Parreno, Victor Pasmore, Raqs Media Collective, Gerhard Richter, Ruangrupa, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi
Writers include:
Judith Barry, Martin Beck, Charles Esche, Patricia Falguières, Elena Filipovic, Patrick Flores, Liam Gillick, Thelma Golden, Hou Hanru, Geeta Kapur, Pablo Lafuente, Lisette Lagnado, Lucy R. Lippard, Miguel A. López, Stuart Morgan, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Yvonne Rainer, Moira Roth, Seth Siegelaub, Wan-kyung Sung, El Hadji Sy, David Teh, Margarita Tupitsyn, Marion von Osten, Anton Vidokle, Peter Wollen
About the Editor:
Lucy Steeds is Pathway Leader in Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.
2014, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
The dawn of the electronic media age in the 1960s began a cultural shift from the modernist grid and its determination of projection and representation to the fluid structures and circuits of the network, presenting art with new challenges and possibilities. This anthology considers art at the center of network theory, from the 1960s to the present.
Artists have used the “space of flows" as a basis for creating utopian scenarios, absurd yet functional propositions or holistic planetary visions. Others have explored the economies of reciprocity and the ethics of generosity, in works that address changed conditions of codependence and new sites of social negotiation. The “infra-power" of the network has been a departure point for self-organized counterculture and the creation of new types of agency. And a “poetics of connectivity" runs through a diverse range of work that addresses the social and material complexity of networks through physical structures and ambient installation, the mapping of the Internet, or the development of robots and software that take on the functions of artist or curator.
Artists surveyed include
Joseph Beuys, Ursula Biemann, Heath Bunting, Critical Art Ensemble, Fernand Deligny, Peter Fend, Gego, Jobim Jochimsen, Koncern, Christine Kozlov, Pia Lindman, Mark Lombardi, Diana McCarty, Marta Minujín, Aleksandra Mir, Tanja Ostojic, Ola Pehrson, Walid Raad, Artüras Raila, Hito Steyerl, Tomaso Tozzi, Suzanne Treister, Ultra Red, Wolf Vostell, Stephen Willats
Writers include
Jane Bennett, Hakim Bey, Luc Boltanski, Manuel Castells, ève Chiapello, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, Okwui Enwezor, Michael Hardt, Bruno Latour, Marshall McLuhan, Marcel Mauss, Reza Negarestani, Antonio Negri, Sadie Plant, Lane Relyea, Craig Saper, Saskia Sassen, Pit Schultz, Steven Shaviro, Tiziana Terranova, Paolo Virno
2010, English
Softcover, 416 pages (150 b/w ill.), 140 x 215 mm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$34.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Brian Kuan Wood
Selections and responses by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, and Tirdad Zolghadr
Working in a number of contexts and capacities has shown Maria Lind to be a curator who, over time, has engaged in a rethinking of the art institution and the formats and methodologies connected with it, taking art itself as a starting point. Following on the various endgames outlined by institutional critique, Lind has forged paths out of hegemonic institutional regimes precisely by identifying other ways of working through them, from both inside and outside.
For Lind, writing is integral to her curatorial work. It is where she accounts for her decisions, explains her intention, justifies her interest, toys with new possibilities and develops new ideas, and recognizes historical precedents. It is where the craft of curating, already pointed out towards a public, finds another channel of articulation.
Selected Maria Lind Writing brings together twenty-two essays selected by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, and Tirdad Zolghadr.
The collection of essays spanning from 1997 to 2010 forms a tapestry of Lind's own interweaving interests, but also of those of a panel of readers invited by Lind to project their own concerns onto her corpus of writing. Essays on individual artists, monographic and group exhibitions, funding structures, new contexts and spatial paradigms, together comprise a rare opportunity to swivel a spotlight on its axis back towards a figure who always tries to aim it at what really matters.
Maria Lind is a curator and writer based in Stockholm. She was the director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2008 to 2010. She was director of Iaspis in Stockholm 2005 to 2007 and from 2002 to 2004 was the director of Kunstverein München. From 1997 to 2001, Lind was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where she was responsible for Moderna Museet Projekt. She was co-curator of Manifesta 2 in 1998. Lind has contributed widely to magazines and other publications, as well as to numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
Design by Liam Gillick
2014, English
Softcover, 352 pages (60 b/w ill.), 11.5 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Petra Bauer & Sofia Wiberg, Barnabás Bencsik, Boris Buden, Maria Lind and Tensta konsthall, Jelena Vesić, What, How & for Whom/WHW
From 2012 to 2014 a series of contemporary art exhibitions, events, and participatory forums organized by Galerija Nova, Tensta konsthall, and Grazer Kunstverein comprised the project “Beginning as Well as We Can (How Do We Talk about Fascism?).” Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—the project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.
Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, edited by curator Maria Lind and the collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, continues the debate with contributions by cultural critics, curators, and artists, which articulate resistant and constructive possibilities of social and artistic production—investigating the language of politics and philosophy and also popular vocabularies, social contexts, media, science, and aesthetics. The exhibitions featured here, which form an essential part of the overall project, test the potential of aesthetic experience to question reality and upset the ideological complacency and political resignation that lead to a loss of control over the direction of social transformation.
Copublished with Tensta konsthall and What, How & for Whom/WHW
Design by Metahaven
2014, English
Softcover, 260 pages, (27 b/w and 47 color ill.), 16.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$33.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Endora Comer-Arldt, Ilka Becker, Tanja Bradaric, Martina Fineder, Eva Flicker, Elke Gaugele, Birgit Haehnel, Alicia Kühl, Michael R. Müller, Sabina Muriale, Taro Ohmae, Barbara Schrödl, Ruby Sircar, Birke Sturm, Monica Titton
Aesthetic Politics in Fashion outlines critical studies in the present cross-sections of fashion, art, politics, and global capitalism. Critically examining contemporary collaborations of artists, media, and fashion labels, this groundbreaking anthology locates fashion within ecological and ethical discourses, postcolonial styles, and critical reflections on whiteness. Contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars debate fashion as a cultural phenomenon at the intersection of artistic, creative, economic, and everyday practices.
Aesthetic economies, the production of space, and alternative aesthetic politics are explored from interdisciplinary angles: art history, cultural science, sociology, design, and fashion studies. Aesthetic Politics in Fashion advances theorizing of fashion as an aesthetic metapolitics.
Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 14
Design by Surface
2014, English
softcover, 280 pages (b/w ill.), 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Ina Blom, Franziska Bork Petersen, Andrea Božić, Gabriele Brandstetter, Ramsay Burt, Maren Butte, Fiona McGovern, Adrian Heathfield, Liz Kotz, Kirsten Maar, Marie-France Rafael, Jörn Schafaff, Nina Schallenberg, Minnie Scott, Gregor Stemmrich, Christian Tecker
Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance aims to map the exchanges and transgressions between art and dance that characterize the manifold variety of relations between art and dance that can be observed today: dance performances taking place in art galleries or public spaces, for example, or visual artists developing specific presentational formats or exhibition displays that generate dimensions of dramaturgy and choreography for their visitors. Terms like mise-en-scène, situation, setting, choreography, and installation are being almost coevally used not only by theoreticians but also by contributors from both art and dance in order to define modes of presentation or to specify visitors’ aesthetic experience. Taking into account historical and current examples, and involving perspectives from art history, dance studies, and architecture, the book explores similarities and differences in the respective practices, as well as in the theoretical concepts they correspond with.
Design by Marit Münzberg
2013, English / French
Softcover (w. dustjacket), 424 pages, 16.8 x 23.8 cm
Published by
Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen / Switzerland
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
$63.00 - Out of stock
An overview of the relation between choreography and exhibition, through the contributions of over thirty international visual artists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, theorists, and curators.
In 2008, the Contemporary art centre La Ferme du Buisson, invited the curator Mathieu Copeland to present his work, Choregraphed Exhibition, composed of movements executed by three dancers over two months. This exhibition nourished a multitude of questions that gave birth to a book, Choreograping Exhibitions, overview of the relation between choreography and exhibition. It brings together over thirty international visual artists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, theorists, and curators.
Contributions by Kenneth Anger, Fia Backström, Jérôme Bel, Julien Bismuth, Giovanni Carmine, Boris Charmatz,Mathieu Copeland, Tim Etchells, Barbara Formis, Maite Garbayo Maeztu, Kenneth Goldsmith, Amy Greenfield, Abbie Hoffman, Karl Holmqvist, Pierre Huyghe, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jennifer Lacey, LeClubdes5, Franck Leibovici, Pablo León de la Barra, André Lepecki, Alan Licht, Raimundas Malašauskas, Loreto Martínez Troncoso,Malcolm McLaren, Gustav Metzger, Lilo Nein, Phill Niblock, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Michael Parsons, Julie Pellegrin, Mickaël Phelippeau, Michael Portnoy, Claude Rutault, Irena Tomažin, Catherine Wood.
Edited by Mathieu Copeland and Julie Pellegrin.
Graphic design: Nicolas Eigenheer and Jeremy Schorderet.
Published with Mathieu Copeland editions, la Ferme du Buisson and Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.
2014, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 18 x 25 cm
Published by
The Burger Collection / Germany
$41.00 - Out of stock
Published by the Burger Collection, ‘Torrent’ provides information and source material related to the work of artists it represents by focusing on in-depth conversations with diverse authors, practitioners and producers.
This issue includes a thought-provoking conversation with curator and writer Robert Storr on ethics in the art world. Artist contributions explore the awe-inspiring relationship between the sky and city space in Hong Kong (Muhanned Cader), materials about hyper-specialists on eBay, radioactive glows, and clouds of bats (Florian Germann) and text experiments and visuals related to pseudo writings and Chinese calligraphy (Enoch Cheung). Also included a visual essay about photographic materiality (Roland Lüthi) and a take on the transcultural dynamics in contemporary art through the example of kung-fu director Robert Tai’s Shaolin Dolemite (Manual Cirauqui).
2014, English
Softcover, 396 pages, (65 b/w ill.), 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Bassam El Baroni, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Sabine Breitwieser, Barbara Clausen, Maeve Connolly, Rike Frank, Adrian Heathfield, Inka Meißner, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Maria Muhle, Philippe Parreno, Jörn Schafaff, Bennett Simpson, Kerstin Stakemeier, Thomas Weski, et al.
Processuality and performativity, and more recently dramaturgy and choreography, are terms often used in analyses of exhibitions and other curatorial formats. These attributions reflect the changes curatorial practice has undergone over the past twenty years in the wider context of cultural and economic globalization and the related notions of acceleration, action orientation, and mobility. In this light, the exhibition manifests itself as a transdisciplinary and transcultural set of spatiotemporal relations, which is time-based by its very nature. Focusing on time instead of the typically predominant category of space, this publication—the second volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial series—takes up the key aesthetic, social, political, and economic issues of the early twenty-first century running through the field and framed by the axes of exhibiting and the temporal.
Copublished with Kulturen des Kuratorischen, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig
Design by Surface
2014, English
Softcover, 294 pages (81 b/w and 52 color ill.), 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$40.00 - Out of stock
Tone Hansen, Lars Bang Larsen (Eds.)
Contributions by Emanuel Almborg, Nils Christie, Carl Hegemann, Ane Hjort Guttu, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Carsten Rene Jørgensen, Lars Bang Larsen, Sharon Lockhart, Magnus Marsdal, Marit Paasche, Allan Sekula
One of the few things we have in common in contemporary society is the future of our children. But it seems that even the “we” of childhood, of learning and free play, has turned into a common ground for instrumentalization and competition. Today, the pedagogical paradox—Kant’s meditation on the paradox that the subject’s predisposition for freedom must be learned—is increasingly lost in governmental obsession about the efficiency of education and schooling. From another perspective, artists are addressing questions of childhood, play, and pedagogy.
What ideological and moral transformations is the school system currently undergoing? What do the psychiatric diagnoses and treatments mean that are increasingly applied to children and youth? What happened to the reform pedagogy of the twentieth century? What is the status of childhood in the era of the consuming child and the playing adult? These are some of the questions addressed by The Phantom of Liberty, which sets out to reestablish a social and aesthetic dialogue between visual art and psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, and critical journalism.
The Phantom of Liberty: Contemporary Art and the Pedagogical Paradox is published following the exhibition “Learning for Life” curated by Tone Hansen and Ane Hjort Guttu, November 11, 2012–February 24, 2013, at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK).
Copublished with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter
Design by Eriksen/Brown
2014, English/Spanish
Softcover, 352 pages (122 b/w and 29 colour ills.), 22 x 26 cm
Published by
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo / Madrid
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 - Out of stock
Chantal Pontbriand (Ed.) Per/Form
How to Do Things with[out] Words
Contributions by Jean-Pierre Cometti, Amelia Jones, Antonio Negri, Chantal Pontbriand, José Antonio Sanchez; visual essays by Mathieu Abonnenc, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, Geneviève Cadieux, Adrian Dan, Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Carole Douillard, Cevdet Erek, Köken Ergun, Esther Ferrer, Chiara Fumai, Simon Fujiwara, Ryan Gander, Dora García, Camille Henrot, Sandra Johnston, Latifa Laâbisi, La Ribot, Ines Lechleitner, Franck Leibovici, Cristina Lucas, Haroon Mirza, Roman Ondak, Falke Pisano, Chloé Quenum, Pedro Reyes, Julião Sarmento, Ulla von Brandenburg, Carey Young, Héctor Zamora
Performativity explores the in-between space when bodies or objects are left to perform. The fact that we are living more and more in an “immaterial” world, dominated by mediatization (which some call spectacle), the impact of globalization, the increasing tendency to think of politics as biopolitics—these different factors enhance performance over materiality, or object making. Per/Form investigates the process of this enhancement—how to work through form, and how to let form speak for itself.
The meaning of performance and performativity today are examined here through different modes of “display”: a book, an exhibition, and its three “Intensity Days” of performative situations. This book compliments these events and the sixteen installations of the exhibition curated by Chantal Pontbriand, “PER/FORM_How to Do Things with[out] Words” (CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, March 22–September 21, 2014), with theoretical texts and visual essays by thirty participating artists, including musical scores, drawings, documents, and photographs, which all work together to generate various perspectives on the subject through different theoretical premises (politics, experience, immateriality, action, realization, manifestation) and also through the artists’ many diverging perspectives.
Copublished with CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid
Design by Agnès Dahan Studio Paris
2008, English
Hardcover, 330 pages, 17.8 cm x 25.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$47.00 - Out of stock
Post-Political Politics
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi
with a new introduction by Sylvère Lotringer, "In the Shadow of the Red Brigades"
Most of the writers who contributed to the issue were locked up at the time in Italian jails.... I was trying to draw the attention of the American Left, which still believed in Eurocommunism, to the fate of Autonomia. The survival of the last politically creative movement in the West was at stake, but no one in the United States seemed to realize that, or be willing to listen. Put together as events in Italy were unfolding, the Autonomia issue—which has no equivalent in Italy, or anywhere for that matter—arrived too late, but it remains an energizing account of a movement that disappeared without bearing a trace, but with a big future still ahead of it.
—Sylvère Lotringer
Semiotext(e) is reissuing in book form its legendary magazine issue Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, originally published in New York in 1980. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi with the direct participation of the main leaders and theorists of the Autonomist movement (including Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, Paolo Virno, Sergio Bologna, and Franco Berardi), this volume is the only first-hand document and contemporaneous analysis that exists of the most innovative post-'68 radical movement in the West. The movement itself was broken when Autonomia members were falsely accused of (and prosecuted for) being the intellectual masterminds of the Red Brigades; but even after the end of Autonomia, this book remains a crucial testimony of the way this creative, futuristic, neo-anarchistic, postideological, and nonrepresentative political movement of young workers and intellectuals anticipated issues that are now confronting us in the wake of Empire. In the next two years, Semiotext(e) will publish eight books by such Italian "Post-Fordist" intellectuals as Antonio Negri, Christian Marazzi, Paolo Virno, and Bifo, as they update the theories of Autonomia for the new century.
Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja, California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007).Christian Marazzi was born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951. He obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York, and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.
"[The] recent reissue of Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Semiotext(e)'s 1980 special issue on autonomia... provides a much needed historical framework for understanding the disciplined dispersion of this movement and the contemporary work of writers, such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, who were formed by it."—Artforum
2008, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$32.00 - Out of stock
The Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi is one of the core theorists of the Italian postfordist movement, along with Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Bifo (Franco Berardi). But although his work is often cited by scholars (particularly by those in the field of "Cognitive Capitalism"), his writing has never appeared in English. This translation of his most recent work, Capital and Language (published in Italian in 2002), finally makes Marazzi's work available to an English-speaking audience.
Capital and Language takes as its starting point the fact that the extreme volatility of financial markets is generally attributed to the discrepancy between the "real economy" (that of material goods produced and sold) and the more speculative monetary-financial economy. But this distinction has long ceased to apply in the postfordist New Economy, in which both spheres are structurally affected by language and communication. In Capital and Language Marazzi argues that the changes in financial markets and the transformation of labor into immaterial labor (that is, its reliance on abstract knowledge, general intellect, and social cooperation) are just two sides of the same coin.
Capital and Language focuses on the causes behind the international economic and financial depression of 2001, and on the primary instrument that the U.S. government has since been using to face them: war. Marazzi points to capitalism’s fourth stage (after mercantilism, industrialism, and the postfordist culmination of the New Economy): the "War Economy" that is already upon us.
Marazzi offers a radical new understanding of the current international economic stage and crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form. Capital and Language also provides a warning call to a Left still nostalgic for a Fordist construct—a time before factory turned into office (and office into home), and before labor became linguistic.
Christian Marazzi was born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951. He obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master’s degree at the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York, and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.
2014, English
Softcover with dust jacket, 744 pages (colour and b/w ill.), 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$42.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Forensic ArchitectureWith contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nabil Ahmed, Maayan Amir, Hisham Ashkar & Emily Dische-Becker, Ryan Bishop, Jacob Burns, Howard Caygill, Gabriel Cuéllar, Eitan Diamond, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Anselm Franke, Grupa Spomenik, Ayesha Hameed, Charles Heller, Helene Kazan, Thomas Keenan, Steffen Krämer, Adrian Lahoud, Armin Linke, Jonathan Littell, Modelling Kivalina, Model Court, Working Group Four Faces of Omarska, Gerald Nestler, Godofredo Pereira, Nicola Perugini, Alessandro Petti, Lorenzo Pezzani, Cesare P. Romano, Susan Schuppli, Francesco Sebregondi, Michael Sfard, Shela Sheikh, SITU Research, Caroline Sturdy Colls, John Palmesino & Ann Sofi Ronnskog / Territorial Agency, Paulo Tavares, Füsun Türetken, Robert Jan van Pelt, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss / NAO, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, Chris WoodsForensics originated from the term "forensis" which is Latin for “pertaining to the forum.” The Roman forum was a multidimensional space of negotiation and truth-finding in which humans as well as objects participated in politics, law, and the economy. With the advent of modernity, forensics shifted to refer exclusively to the courts of law and to the use of medicine, and today as a science in service to the law. The present use of forensics, along with its popular representations have become increasingly central to the modes by which states police and govern their subjects.By returning to forensis this book seeks to unlock forensics’ original potential as a political practice and reorient it. Inverting the direction of the forensic gaze it designates a field of action in which individuals and organizations detect and confront state violations.The condition of forensis is one in which new technologies for mediating the “testimony” of material objects—bones, ruins, toxic substances, landscapes, and the contemporary medias in which they are captured and represented—are mobilized in order to engage with struggles for justice, systemic violence, and environmental transformations across the frontiers of contemporary conflict.This book presents the work of the architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theorists who participated directly in the “Forensic Architecture” project in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, as well as the work of associates and guests. It includes forensic investigations undertaken by the project and its collaborators aimed at producing new kinds of evidence for use by international prosecutorial teams, political organizations, NGOs, and the UN. It also brings together research and essays that situate contemporary forensic practices within broader political, historical, and aesthetic discourse.Copublished with Forensic ArchitectureDesign by Zak Group
Due to the weight of this volume, your order will likely incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
2014, English
Hardcover (cloth binding), 336 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 16 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
Coedited by Anne Faucheret, Veronica Kaup-Hasler, Kira Kirsch, Andreas R. Peternell, Johanna Rainer Essays by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, Alanna Lockward, Florian Malzacher, Chantal Mouffe, Gerald Raunig, Jonas Staal; a conversation with etcetera, Nato Thompson, WHW; and drawings by Dan PerjovschiHow does art play a role in social and political struggles all over the world? Can art be a tool with which to shape the world, rather than just reflect it? Truth is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics takes the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and looks for direct action and concrete knowledge: for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that not only acts for the sake of acting but searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment. This book is the second manifestation under this title; the first materialized as a twenty-four-hour, seven-day marathon camp that took place in the frame of the steirischer herbst festival in Graz, Austria, in September 2012.This handbook is a stand-alone publication, emphasizing the “usefulness” of the different artistic approaches collected. It is a toolbox and a manual with contributions by key protagonists in this field. One hundred texts describe very different strategies and tactics, written by their inventors and/or practitioners from all over the world, mapping the broad field of engaged art and artistic activism today. Additional essays focus on the philosophy, structures, and modalities behind the many battles to make this world a better place.With further contributions by Jonathan Allen, Udi Aloni, Corina L. Apostol / Artleaks, Hector Aristizábal, Saki Bailey / Teatro Valle, Artúr van Balen / Tools for Action, Katherine Ball, Andy Bichlbaum / The Yes Men, Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping, Leah Borromeo, Andrew Boyd, Tania Bruguera, Santiago Cirugeda / Recetas Urbanas, Collective Authorship, Corrupt Tour, Gabriella Csoszó / FreeDoc, Minerva Cuevas, Neil Cummings, Diedrich Diederichsen, Charles Esche, Noah Fischer, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius / raumlaborberlin, Sérgio Miguel Franco / Pixadores, Andrea Fraser, Isabelle Fremeaux, Christine Gaigg, Ganzeer, Federico Geller, Guillermo Gómez-Peña / La Pocha Nostra, Marina Gržinić, Núria Güell, Erdem Gündüz, Hans Haacke, The Haircut Before The Party, Stefano Harney, Carl Hegemann, Justin Hoffmann, Khaled Hourani, Iconoclasistas, The Institute for Human Activities, International Institute of Political Murder, Janez Janša, Khaled Jarrar, Jeudi Noir, Anna Jermolaeva, John Jordan, Janice Kerbel, Jisun Kim, Omer Krieger, the laboratory of insurrectionary imagination, Kalle Lasn / Adbusters, André Lepecki, Lexxus Légal, Lawrence Liang, Liberate Tate, Geert Lovink, Matteo Lucchetti, Lucifer / Church of Kopimism, Oliver Marchart, Leónidas Martín, Joana Mazza / Observatório de Favelas, Tomislav Medak, Thomas Meinecke, Jasmina Metwaly / Mosireen Collective, Antanas Mockus, Jean-Luc Moulène, Rabih Mroué, Michal Murin, Marina Naprushkina / Office for Anti-Propaganda, Neue Slowenische Kunst, Occuprint, Robyn Orlin, Ahmet Öğüt / The Silent University, Sibylle Peters, The Pinky Show, Srđa Popović / CANVAS, Public Movement, Raivo Puusemp, Richard Reynolds, Irit Rogoff, Ned Rossiter, Philipp Ruch / Center for Political Beauty, Yekaterina Samutsevich / Pussy Riot, Florian Schneider, Frank Apunkt Schneider / monochrom, Susan Schuppli / Forensic Architecture, Shared Inc., Inna Shevchenko / Femen, Gregory Sholette, Stevphen Shukaitis, Toma Sik, Kostis Stafylakis / Kavecs, Mladen Stilinović, Kuba Szreder, Claire Tancons, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ultra-red, the vacuum cleaner, Dmitry Vilensky / Chto Delat?, Marina Vishmidt, Joanna Warsza, WochenKlausur, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jacob Wren, Stephen Wright, Kàddu Yaraax, Wu Yuren, Salam Yousry, and Slavoj ŽižekDesign by Atelier Neubacher
2014, English
Softcover, 480 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 15 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Edited and with contributions by Carola Dertnig, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Holert, Johannes Porsch, Johanna Schaffer, Stefanie Seibold, and Axel Stockburger
In 2010/11, a group of Vienna-based art practitioners (artists, art historians, and cultural theorists) embarked on a journey of experimental research, exploring the genealogical and political implications of the ways in which research rhetorics and policies are currently incorporated into the fields of contemporary art and art education.
Troubling Research: Performing Knowledge in the Arts, a collection of “books” of essays and conversations, is the quirky and exhilarating outcome of this collaborative endeavor to render a “problematization” by interrogating the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation. Michel Foucault once introduced problematization as a “specific work of thought” that transforms “a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response.” For this project, the obstacles and difficulties in question were the terms “art” and “research” and their peculiar conjunction as “artistic” or “arts-based research.” As a result of this process, the understanding of individual artistic/theoretical practices was tested. Working both independently and as a collaborative entity, the group found itself negotiating and contesting each participant’s claim to knowledge in the context of art. The eventual responses to the problem of research proved to be both performative and troubling.
Design by Johannes Porsch
2014, English
Softcover, 224 pages (b/w ill.), 16.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Philip Auslander, Sabeth Buchmann, Margarit von Büren, Barbara Clausen, Carola Dertnig, Andrea Fraser, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Simone Forti, Sabina Holzer, Amelia Jones, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Marie-Luise Lange, Suzana Milevska, Lilo Nein, Susanne Neuburger, Yvonne Rainer, Constanze Ruhm, Dietmar Schwärzler, Stefanie Seibold, Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Mechtild Widrich, Martha Wilson Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools. This anthology is a collection of twenty-one essays and conversations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine arts. They bring to light the conventions involved in the production, presentation, reception, and historicization of performance art, as well as the specific cultural and political implications. The various contributions also show how these conventions are produced through or within each artwork, independent from their specific contexts, offering ways of thinking beyond their usual frames of reference. At the same time they recognize the substantial work carried out by artists, critics, and theorists who have built on the meanings, references, and implications of performative thinking since the beginning of the “performative turn.” Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 13 Design by Surface
2013, English
Softcover, 237 pages, 15.2 cm x 21.2 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
What does 'contemporary' actually mean? This is among the fundamental questions about the nature and politics of time that philosophers, artists and more recently curators have investigated over the past two decades. If clock time -- a linear measurement that can be unified, followed and owned -- is largely the invention of capitalist modernity and binds us to its strictures, how can we extricate ourselves and discover alternative possibilities of experiencing time? Recent art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as wasting and waiting, regression and repetition, deja vu and seriality, unrealized possibility and idleness, non-consummation and counter-productivity, the belated and the premature, the disjointed and the out-of-sync -- all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience. While such theorists as Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman have proposed "anachronistic" or "heterochronic" readings of history, artists have opened up the field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question.
This collection surveys contemporary art and theory that proposes a wealth of alternatives to outdated linear models of time.
Artists surveyed include Marina Abramovi, Francis Alys, Matthew Buckingham, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Bea Fremderman, Toril Johannessen, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Christian Marclay, nova Milne, Trevor Paglen, Katie Patterson, Raqs Media Collective, Dexter Sinister, Simon Starling, Hito Steyerl, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tehching Hsieh, Time/Bank.
Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Walter Benjamin, Franco Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Huberman, D gen Zenji, Peter Galison, Boris Groys, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Joshua Foer, Elizabeth Grosz, Adrian Heathfield, Rachel Kent, Bruno Latour, George Kubler, Doreen Massey, Alexander Nagel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Daniel Rosenberg, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Nancy Spector, Nato Thompson, Christopher Wood, George Woodcock, Mark von Schlegell.
Edited by Amelia Groom.
2004, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$33.00 - Out of stock
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.
The author of four novels, the most recent of which is Summer of Hate, and two books of criticism, Chris Kraus was recently described by the New York Observer as "the art world's favorite fiction writer." She teaches at European Graduate School and lives in Los Angeles.
"Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard." Publishers Weekly (online) "Kraus predictably... plunges into [Los Angeles's] 'not-thereness' headfirst and takes the reader with her down every rabbit hole." Masha Gutkin San Francisco Bay Guardian "Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city's emptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city." Tamar Brott Los Angeles Magazine
2014, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$40.00 - Out of stock
“Capital is a semiotic operator'': this assertion by Félix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of subjectivity.
Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows how signs act as “sign-operators" that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic “motors" that make capitalism’s social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements.
Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari’s complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever.
Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher living and working in Paris, where he studies immaterial labor, the breakdown of the wage system, and “post-socialist” movements. He is the author of The Making of the Indebted Man, published by Semiotext(e).
2011, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$28.00 - In stock -
"History that repeats itself turns to farce. But a farce that repeats itself ends up making a history."
— from The Agony of Power
In these previously unpublished manuscripts written just before his death in 2007, Jean Baudrillard takes a last crack at the bewildering situation currently facing us as we exit the system of ''domination'' (based on alienation, revolt, revolution) and enter a world of generalized ''hegemony'' in which everyone becomes both hostage and accomplice of the global market. But in the free-form market of political and sexual liberation, as the possibility of revolution (and our understanding of it) dissipates, Baudrillard sees the hegemonic process as only beginning. Once expelled, negativity returns from within ourselves as an antagonistic force—most vividly in the phenomenon of terrorism, but also as irony, mockery, and the symbolic liquidation of all human values. This is the dimension of hegemony marked by an unbridled circulation—of capital, goods, information, or manufactured history—that is bringing the very concept of exchange to an end and pushing capital beyond its limits: to the point at which it destroys the conditions of its own existence. In the system of hegemony, the alienated, the oppressed, and the colonized find themselves on the side of the system that holds them hostage. In this paradoxical moment in which history has turned to farce, domination itself may appear to have been a lesser evil.
Translation byAmes Hodges, Introduction by Sylvere Lotringer
This book gathers together two essays—''The Agony of Power'' and ''From Domination to Hegemony''—and a related interview with Baudrillard from 2005, ''The Roots of Evil.'' Semiotext(e) launched Baudrillard into English back in the early 1980s; now, as our media and information infested ''ultra-reality'' finally catches up with his theory, Semiotext(e) offers The Agony of Power, Baudrillard's unsettling coda.
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur.
2014, English / French
Softcover, 232 pages (b&w ill.), 240 x 175 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$25.00 - In stock -
MAY #12 features:
The Spoiled Children of Art
— Georges Rey
Afterword
— Florence Bonnefous
Black Box
— Éric Troncy
“Project Unité” in Firminy.
Interview with Yves Aupetitallot
— May
Editorial (catalog of “L’Hiver de l’amour”)
— Elein Fleiss, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Bernard Joisten, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Olivier Zahm
Traffic: Space-times of the Exchange
— Nicolas Bourriaud
The Stranger and the Margin. Interview with Roy Genty
— May
Reviews
On Loretta Fahrenholz, “Ditch Plains” at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York
— Annie Godfrey Larmon
On “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade 1500-1800” at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and “Decorum: Carpets and Tapestries by Artists” at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris
— Nick Mauss
Trois petits chats. On “Pierre Huyghe” at Centre Pompidou, Paris
— Neil Beloufa
Mobile Brand Development. On Carissa Rodriguez, “La Collectionneuse” at Front Desk Apparatus, New York
— Jacob King
To the Planetarium. On “The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside”, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
— Vincent Normand
Painting Inside Yourself. On Antek Walczak, “New Transbohemian States” at Real Fine Arts, New York
— Damon Sfetsios, Elise Duryee-Browner
About MAY Revue:
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quaterly, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisement typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.