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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2006, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 14 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. This collection of essays by art historians and artists from Europe and the Americas (including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Helen Molesworth, Isabelle Graw, Thomas Crow, Helmut Draxler, Alexander Alberro, Sabeth Buchmann, Henrik Oelsen, Edit András) introduces and develops the idea that conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art practice. Some of these contested commonplace assumptions of what art is; others served to buttress those assumptions. The bulk of the volume features newly written and highly innovative essays challenging standard interpretations of the legacy of conceptualism and discussing the influence of conceptualism's varied practices on art since the 1970s. The essays explore topics as diverse as the interrelationships between conceptualism and institutional critique, neoexpressionist painting and conceptualist paradigms, conceptual art's often-ignored complicity with design and commodity culture, the specific forms of identity politics taken up by the reception of conceptual art, and conceptualism's North/South and East/West dynamics. A few texts that continue to be crucial for critical debates within the fields of conceptual and postconceptual art practice, history, and theory have been reprinted in order to convey the vibrant and ongoing discussion on the status of art after conceptual art. Taken together, the essays will inspire an exploration of the relationship between postconceptualist practices and the beginnings of contemporary art.
2019, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 19.2 x 24.6 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$100.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) - stage and film actor, director, writer, and visual artist - was a man of rage and genius. Expelled from the Surrealist movement for his refusal to renounce the theatre, he founded the Theater of Cruelty and wrote The Theater and Its Double, one of the key twentieth-century texts on the topic. Artaud spent nine years at the end of his life in asylums, undergoing electroshock treatments. Released to the care of his friends in 1946, he began to draw again. This book presents drawings and portraits from this late resurgence, in colour reproductions. Accompanying the images are texts by by Artaud's longtime friend and editor Paule Thévenin and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
“We won't be describing any paintings,” Derrida warns the reader. Derrida struggles with Artaud's peculiar language, punctuating his text with agitated footnotes and asides (asking at one point, “How will they translate this?”). Thévenin offers a more straightforward biographical and historical account. (It was on the walls of her apartment that Derrida first saw Artaud's paintings and drawings.) These two texts were previously published by the MIT Press in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud without the artwork that is their subject. This book brings together art and text for the first time in English.
Paule Thévenin (1918–1993) knew Antonin Artaud well and edited many his complete writings for the French publisher Éditions Gallimard.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), an enormously influential philosopher, theoretician, critic, and deconstructionist, is the author of Of Grammatology, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Aporias, and many other books.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 388 pages, 25 x 2.5 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of the best, largest volume on visionary architect Bruce Goff, published by MIT in 1988! Distilled from years of research and friendship, this is the first comprehensive study to capture the essential Goff — the idiosyncratic and profoundly original designs, the erratic yet exuberant career that produced some of the most challenging and inventive architecture of this century. Bruce Goff spent most of his life (1904-1982) in the American heartland. In the seven decades of his practice he designed nearly 500 projects, of which some 140 were built. Although he loved to flaunt the novel use of found materials (steel pipe, coal, rope, plexiglas aircraft domes, cake pans) and flashy decorative surfaces including white goose feathers and egg crates Goff's central and abiding concern was with the mastery of space.
As David De Long shows in this engaging book, Goff's spatial creativity was unbounded, his diversity seemingly unlimited. De Long discusses the architect's development and early work in Tulsa, the formative influences that shaped his career, his first independent work in Chicago, the periods of working on speculation in Bartlesville and Kansas City, his withdrawal from active practice following charges of homosexuality, and Goffs triumphant resurgence with his design for the Japanese Wing of the Los Angeles County Museum. De Long devotes an entire chapter to Goff's major projects - the Ledbetter, Ford, Bavinger, and Wilson houses, the Hopewell Baptist Church, and Crystal Cathedral, whose complex geometries, spatial richness, and modified prefabricated elements set them radically apart from the conformity of small town America. The story is a fascinating one, incorporating significant design details with local reactions and sometimes devastating professional criticism.
Bruce Goff: Toward Absolute Architecture, contains a complete catalogue raisonné of buildings and projects; it is included in The Architectural History Foundation's American Monograph Series.
2018, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$44.00 - Out of stock
Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
Edited by Lisa Darms and David O'Neill
Introduction by David Velasco
In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.—from The Weight of the Earth
Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.
2012, English
Hardcover, 304 pages, 216 x 254 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
Lucy R. Lippard's famous book, itself resembling an exhibition, is now brought full circle in an exhibition (and catalog) resembling her book.
“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’” — Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years
In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging, it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art. Nearly forty years later, the Brooklyn Museum takes Lippard’s celebrated experiment in curated concatenation as a template, turning a book that resembled an exhibition into an exhibition materializing the ideas in her book.
The artworks and essays featured in this publication recall the thrill that was tangible in Lippard's original documentation, reminding us that during the late sixties and early seventies all possible social and material parameters of art (making) were played with, worked over, inverted, reduced, expanded, and rejected. By tracing Lippard’s own activities in those years, the book also documents the early blurring of boundaries among critical, curatorial, and artistic practices.
With more than 200 images of work by dozens of artists (printed in color throughout), this book brings Lippard’s curatorial experiment full circle.
Edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin
Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Six Years' Project: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, September 14, 2012-February 3, 2013, organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum, and the independent scholar Vincent Bonin.
1981, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$64.00 - Out of stock
Rosalind E. Krauss, editor and cofounder of October magazine, is University Professor at Columbia University. She is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, and Perpetual Inventory, all published by the MIT Press.
"...Krauss's book is undoubtedly the best treatment of its subject yet written. As a textbook, it ought to raise the level of discourse in art history classes, for it is the meaning, not the chronology, of sculpture since Rodin that is the book's central concern. Krauss avoids the conventional plodding survey and divides the book into a sequence of 'case studies' that permit sustained attention to specific works and artists. In so doing, she attempts to trace a 'tradition' to stand behind that portion of American sculpture of the past 15 years which she espouses critically."
—Art in America
"Distinguished art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss analyzes with exceptional clarity and insight the major works that have led 20th century sculpture from the traditional and figurative to the revolutionary conceptual art of the 1970s—an art which has developed a new 'syntax' that discards 'narrative' for instantaneous impact and boldly breaks new ground. Beginning with a penetrating study of Rodin's modernity in rejecting 'narrative' in his 'The Gates of Hell,' she moves successively through detailed examinations of futurism, constructivism, Duchamps' 'readymades,' Brancusi, David Smith's 'Tanktotem,' sculptural realism, and the introduction of light, motion, and theatrical elements into sculpture by Picabia, Calder, Oldenburg, and others right up to younger sculptors like Carl Andre, Blochner, and others [including Robert Morris, Don Judd, Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer]. As critic and theorist, Krauss makes demands that will challenge even the most sophisticated."
—Publishers Weekly
"The book is well illustrated in black and white and is, for an art book, of a convenient and manageable size. The text is rigorously formalistic and analytical and organized around specific sculptural considerations such as the treatment of narrative time, the handling of space, and the game strategies of surrealist sculpture. It is an approach that pays off particularly well in the author's discussions of Rodin and David Smith."
—Saturday Review
2014, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 17.5 x 22.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomaki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Asher's projects, and the artist's own archives, Peltomaki offers a comprehensive account of Asher's work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of this work, as well as the artist's refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomaki discusses are described here for the first time. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomaki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Writings by the conceptual artist Michael Asher—including notes, proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most published here for the first time.
The California conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) was known for rigorous site specificity and pioneering institutional critique. His decades of teaching at CalArts influenced generations of artists. Much of Asher's artistic practice was devoted to creating works that had no lasting material presence and often responded to the material, social, or ideological context of a situation. Because most of Asher's artworks have ceased to exist, his writings about them have special significance. Public Knowledge collects writings by Asher about his work—including preliminary notes and ideas, project proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most of which have never been previously published.
Asher gave few interviews, didn't write art criticism, and rarely published extensive accounts of his own work. Yet writing was central to his artistic practice, serving as a tool for working out ideas, negotiating institutional parameters, and describing thought processes. In these texts, he considers writing and documentation, discusses artistic practice, offers notes for gallery and museum talks, presents artist statements for exhibition-goers, describes individual works and their situational context, and reflects on teaching and art education. Among other things, Asher provides his definition of site specificity, addresses the function of art in public space, and analyzes the intersection of teaching art and institutional models of education. Readers will see an artist at work, formulating ethical and political strategies for making art in a situational world.
2021, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 15.2 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$36.00 - Out of stock
Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan's environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination.
Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan's vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural memory. Existing in dialogue with land art and postminimalist sculpture, the Marsh Ruins are nevertheless unique refusals of art world classifications and systems of value. Making abstract use of concrete forms, Buchanan's works embody their own stakes, from colonialism's legacies of fracture and dislocation, to the workings of weather and time. In the words of her own mother, Buchanan had always "seen things" in rocks that others didn't see.
Amelia Groom
Amelia Groom is an art historian and a postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her writing on art has been published e-flux journal, Frieze, Art Agenda, and other publications. She edited Time, a volume in the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press).
2021, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
Donald Judd (1928–1994) was one of the most influential American artists of the postwar era. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed new ideas about art—in both his works and writings—that challenged many of modernism's core tenets by resisting the categories of painting and sculpture. Judd described this work as “specific objects.” Critics labeled it minimalism. Perhaps because Judd's own writings provide a discursive framework for his project, some of the monographic essays on his art are not widely known. This volume collects critical and scholarly writings on Judd, examining his work as both artist and critic.
Spanning all periods of Judd's career, the essays gathered in this volume explore questions of abstraction, phenomenology, political engagement, labor, urban planning, and conservation. Written by a range of artists, architects, art historians, critics, and curators, these texts make clear Judd's relevance for a wide array of fields and disciplines, and situate him as a pivotal figure in contemporary art. They include an early consideration of Judd's work by Robert Smithson, a text on Judd's later works by curator Lynne Cooke, two essays by the art historian Rosalind Krauss, and an appraisal of Judd's writings by the artist Mel Bochner.
Contributors
Elizabeth C. Baker, Karl Beveridge, Mel Bochner, Yve-Alain Bois, Ian Burn, Lynne Cooke, Rosalind E. Krauss, Michael Meredith, Joshua Shannon, Robert Slifkin, Robert Smithson, Ann Temkin, Brian Wallis
Annie Ochmanek is a PhD candidate at Columbia University. Alex Kitnick is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College and the editor of a previous October Files volume, Dan Graham (MIT Press).
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 15.1 x 21.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$38.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The ethical, aesthetic and political significance of practices, positions and theories connected to health in contemporary art.
In an era of fitness programs, increasing antidepressant usage, nutrition counseling and health-management apps, wellness is one of the defining issues of contemporary life, dictating every intimate aspect of our lives. Historically, art has been entwined with the values of medicine, beauty, and the productive body that have defined western scientific paradigms; contemporary artists are increasingly confronting and reshaping these ideologies, critically tackling illness and impairment in their practice while challenging ableist institutional dynamics. In this volume, artists, curators, writers, and thinkers engage with the ways the vulnerability of our bodies reveals structural aspects of our societies.
At a moment at which epidemics and global warming menace all forms of life, we see clearly how health intersects with sexuality, ethnicity, gender, class, and coloniality. By reclaiming other realities, beyond a state of health as a norm, this book questions the myths, stigmas, and cultural attitudes that shape normative perceptions, revealing the interdependence of our entangled existences. The book includes four newly commissioned texts: by artists Mahmoud Khaled and Patrick Staff, by curator Clare Barlow on disability in the museum, and by curator Portia Malatjie on the work of Dineo Seshee Bopape. It also features two texts on the current COVID-19 pandemic, by Anne Boyer and Filipa Ramos.
Artists surveyed include :
Oreet Ashery, Lucy Beech, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Lorenza Böttner, Canaries & Taraneh Fazeli, Grupo Chaclacayo, Anne Charlotte Robertson, Patricia Domínguez, Dora García, Felix González-Torres, Luke Fowler, Alice Hattrick, Tamar Guimarães, Joseph Grigely, Gran Fury, Johanna Hedva, Mahmoud Khaled, Mujeres Creando, Carolyn Lazard, Simone Leigh, Park McArthur, Pedro Neves Marques, Tabita Rezaire, Jo Spence, Patrick Staff, Christine Sun Kim, Pedro Reyes, David Wojnarowicz
Writers include :
Aimar Arriola & Nanci Garín, Clare Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Dodie Bellamy, Anne Boyer, Rizvana Bradley, Eli Clare, Taraneh Fazeli, Theodore (ted) Kerr & Alexandra Juhasz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, R.D. Laing, Miguel A. López, Catalina Lozano, Audre Lorde, Portia Malatjie, Margarida Mendes, Peter Pál Pelbart, Naomi Pearce, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Susan Sontag, Paul B. Preciado, Mary Walling Blackburn, Simon Watney & Sunil Gupta
Copublish by MIT Press with Whitechapel Gallery, London
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 14.9 x 21 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$38.00 - In stock -
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The first major anthology to focus on relationships between science fiction and contemporary art, with topics ranging from accelerating technological change to global urbanization.
Over the past two decades, artists and writers have increasingly used science fiction as a lens through which to search for fragments of truth emerging from the past or the future. The proliferation of science fiction in contemporary art practice and discourse reflects an increased understanding of how this narrative field continues to grow in relevance. This book is the first major anthology to focus on relationships between science fiction and contemporary art, and offers an essential read for all those exploring this vital genre.
Organizing its contributions according to four distinct approaches—"estrangement,” “futures,” “posthumanism,” and “ecologies”—this unique collection gathers key examples of the influence of science fiction in recent cultural development. It considers topics that include the integration and acceleration of technological change, global urbanization and concepts of futurity, the boundaries of social structures and nonhuman life, and the threatening evidence of climate change.
Artists surveyed include :
Laylah Ali, Pawel Althamer, Ama Josephine Budge, Lee Bul, Ellen Gallagher, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eduardo Kac, Patrick Keiller, Josh Kline, Lawrence Lek, Anne Lislegaard, Mariko Mori, Wangechi Mutu, The Otolith Group, Suzanne Treister
Writers include :
Peio Aguirre, Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Rosi Braidotti, Rachel Carson, Dawn Chan, T.J. Demos, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Wanuri Kahiu, Tom McCarthy, David Musgrave, Alondra Nelson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Darko Suvin
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - Out of stock
The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years’ worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.
This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp’s film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell’s filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson’s pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field.
The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.
About the Author
Annette Michelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. A founding editor of the journal October, she has written on art and cinema for more than five decades.
“Annette Michelson is one of the most brilliant minds that has ever turned its focus on the art of cinema. It's a blessing to have her illuminating, inspiring, and informative pieces available in this volume.”
—Jonas Mekas, filmmaker and writer
“When many of these texts first appeared, they were undergroundbreaking. Now, as history, they continue to be impressive for their subtle insights and nuanced style. Annette Michelson’s writing is as avant-garde and of-the-moment as that of a critic/historian can be.”
—Michael Snow, filmmaker, musician, visual artist
“Written with enviable precision and grace, these essays remain the most compelling chronicle of the radical impact that film would have on the other arts in the twentieth century. Through her writings, Annette Michelson defined a field of critical inquiry where others saw only boundaries.”
—Bruce Jenkins, Chair, Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2017, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$39.00 - Out of stock
Agnes Martin’s Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who was also a thinker, poet, and writer for whom self-presentation was a necessary part of making her works public. With Night Sea, Hudson argues, Martin (1912–2004) created a shimmering realization of control and loss that stands alone within her suite of classic grid paintings as an exemplary and exceptional achievement.
Hudson offers a close examination of Night Sea and its position within Martin’s long and prolific career, during which the artist destroyed many works as she sought forms of perfection within self-imposed restrictions of color and line. For Hudson, Night Sea stands as the last of Martin’s process-based works before she turned from oil to acrylic and sought to express emotions of lightness and purity unburdened by evidence of human struggle.
Drawing from a range of archival records, Hudson attempts to draw together the facts surrounding the work, which were at times obfuscated by the artist’s desire for privacy. Critical responses of the time give a sense of the impact of the work and that which followed it. Texts by peers including Lenore Tawney, Donald Judd, and Lucy Lippard are presented alongside interviews with a number of Martin’s friends and keepers of estates, such as the publisher Ronald Feldman and Kathleen Mangan of the Lenore Tawney archive, which holds correspondence between Martin and Tawney.
About the Author
Suzanne Hudson is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Art at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press) and Painting Now.
Endorsements
“In her wonderful contribution to the Afterall Books One Work series, Suzanne Hudson persuasively argues that Agnes Martin’s 1963 painting Night Sea is the summa of the early grid paintings. Because, as Hudson shows, Night Sea makes Martin’s process—and indeed Martin’s struggle—so visible, we comprehend much more clearly what follows: the achieved perfection of the graphite grid paintings. That an analysis of a single work could so fully illuminate the entirety of an artist’s oeuvre is a true accomplishment. Plus, the prose is a pleasure to read.”
—Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester
Out of print title.
2020, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Goldsmiths Press / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$36.00 - In stock -
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.
Precarity Lab brings together an intergenerational network of scholars and activists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to explore how digital cultures produce, reproduce, and intervene in precarity. Anna Watkins Fisher, Silvia Lindtner, Ivan Chaar-Lopez, Cengiz Salman, McKenzie Wark, Kalindi Vora, Jackie Wang, Cass Adair, Lisa Nakamura, Cindy Lin, with Meryem Kamil.
An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 22.9 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Annette Michelson's erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, gathered here for the first time in this posthumous volume, giving readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretive paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century—in which she emphasized phenomenological readings of their work—to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. Over four decades, Michelson returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, “intellectual cinema”—the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness.
The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make movies of both Marx's Capital and Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her authoritative discussion of Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. This collection makes these canonical texts available for a new generation of film scholars.
Like the filmmakers with which she is engaged, Annette Michelson's intellectual project is nothing short of passionate. The analytic rigor, the discerning historical and cultural perspectives and the political resonance of these essays are confluent with Michelson's keen perception and striking associations, while the elegance of the writing also registers her intensely poetic and imaginative engagement. — Noa Steimatsky, author of Italian Locations and The Face on Film
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$44.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
In Liquidation World, Alexi Kukuljevic examines a distinctive form of subjectivity animating the avant-garde: that of the darkly humorous and utterly disoriented subject of modernity, a dissolute figure that makes an art of its own vacancy, an object of its absence. Shorn of the truly rotten illusion that the world is a fulfilling and meaningful place, these subjects identify themselves by a paradoxical disidentification—through the objects that take their places. They have mastered the art of living absently, of making something with nothing. Traversing their own morbid obsessions, they substitute the nonsensical for sense, the ridiculous for the meaningful.
Kukuljevic analyzes a series of artistic practices that illuminate this subjectivity, ranging from Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages to Charles Baudelaire’s melancholia. He considers the paradox of Duchamp’s apparatus in the Stoppages and the strange comedy of Marcel Broodthaers’s relation to the readymade; the comic subject in Jacques Vaché and the ridiculous subject in Alfred Jarry; the nihilist in Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste; Oswald Wiener’s interpretation of the dandy; and Charles Baudelaire as a happy melancholic. Along the way, he also touches on the work of Thomas Bernhard, Andy Kaufman, Buster Keaton, and others. Finally, he offers an extended analysis of Danny’s escape from his demented father in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Each of these subjects is, in Freud’s terms, sick—sick in the specific sense that they assume the absence of meaning and the liquidation of value in the world. They concern themselves with art, without assuming its value or meaning. Utterly debased, fundamentally disoriented, they take the void as their medium.
Alexi Kukuljevic is an artist and Lecturer in Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
“With exuberantly mordant humor, Alexi Kukuljevic leads us to that place—Liquidation World—where we already are. This world turns out to be an atopia in which dissolute impersonators, caught between the first and third person, never find themselves a second, and where the epitome of happiness is to make oneself an object of absence from melancholic despair. It’s not so much that everything must go—just that everything does go. And, when it does, so do we. But we don’t go well. Thankfully, Kukuljevic is here to show us the pistols and the ropes.”
—Justin Clemens, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne; author of Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
“Liquidation World is a shockingly clever but very kind book, treating its readers as well as its clumsy, incomplete, damaged, but well-meaning subjects as partners in a series of arty, thoughtful adventures in humor and absence. Embracing innumerable paradoxes, Kukuljevic nevertheless steers a steely course through ridiculousnesses of all kinds. It is the rigor of the madhouse, and what absurd fun.”
—Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton; author of One Dimensional Woman
2013, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
In Sanja Iveković’s Triangle (Trokut, 1979), four black-and-white photographs and written text capture an eighteen-minute performance from May 10, 1979. On that date, a motorcade carrying Josip Broz Tito, then president of Yugoslavia, drove through the streets of downtown Zagreb. As the President’s limousine passed beneath her apartment, Ivokevic began simulating masturbation on her balcony. Although she could not be seen from the street, she knew that the surveillance teams on the roofs of neighboring buildings would detect her presence. Within minutes, a policeman appeared at her door ordered her inside. Not only did Ivekovic's action expose government repression and call attention to the rights of women, it also called attention to the relationship of gender to power, and to the particular experience of political dissidence under communist rule in Eastern Europe. Triangle is considered one of Iveković’s key works and yet, despite Iveković’s stature as one of the leading artists of the former Yugoslavia, it has received little direct attention. With this book, Ruth Noack offers the first sustained examination of Iveković’s widely exhibited, now canonical artwork.
After a detailed analysis of the work's formal qualities, Noack considers its position in the context of artistic production and political history in socialist Yugoslavia. She looks closely at the genesis of the performance and its documentation as a work of art, and relates the making of the work and the politics of canon-making to issues pertaining to the former East-West divide. She discusses the artistic language and meaning-making in relation to conceptualism and performance and to the position of women in Tito’s Yugoslavia and in society at large, and investigates the notion that Iveković’s work of this period is participating in citizenship, shifting the focus from the artist’s subversive act to her capacity to shape the terms through which we order our world.
About the Author
Ruth Noack, an art historian, critic, and curator, has taught at art schools and universities in Vienna, Lüneburg, and Kassel. She co-curated Documenta 12 (2007).
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 14 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$32.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Matias Viegener
Afterword by John Kinsella
“Why am I telling you all this? Partly ‘cause the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything, absolutely everything. Slipping between straight/gay is child’s play compared to slipping between writer/teacher/influence-peddler whatever. I forget who I am. You reminded me of who I prefer to be.” [M.W.]
“It’s two in the morning. . . I know what you mean about slipping roles: I love it, going high low, power helpless even captive, male female, all over the place, space totally together and brain-sharp, if it wasn’t for play I’d be bored stiff and I think boredom is the emotion I find most unbearable. . . ” [KA]
— from I’m Very into You
After Kathy Acker met McKenzie Wark on a trip to Australia in 1995, they had a brief fling and immediately began a heated two-week email correspondence. Their emails shimmer with insight, gossip, sex, and cultural commentary. They write in a frenzy, several times a day; their emails cross somewhere over the International Date Line, and themselves become a site of analysis. What results is an index of how two brilliant and idiosyncratic writers might go about a courtship across 7,500 miles of airspace—by pulling in Alfred Hitchcock, stuffed animals, Georges Bataille, Elvis Presley, phenomenology, Marxism, The X-files, psychoanalysis, and the I Ching.
Their corresepondence is a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks. I’m Very Into You is a text of incipience, a text of beginnings, and a set of notes on the short, shared passage of two iconic individuals of our time.
About the Authors
Kathy Acker was a novelist, essayist and performance artist whose books include Blood and Guts in High School, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Empire of the Senseless, In Memoriam to Identity, Don Quixote, My Mother: Demonology, and her last novel, Pussy King of the Pirates. Born and raised on New York’s Upper East Side, she died of breast cancer in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1997.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer whose books include Virtual Geography, A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, The Beach Beneath the Street,Telesthesia and The Spectacle of Disintegration. He teaches at The New School in New York City.
Reviews
“...this collected correspondence offers a fascinating glimpse of two artists at a time when they were as passionate about each another as their work.”—Publishers Weekly
“Described as ‘a Plato’s Symposium for the twenty-first century, but written for queers, transsexuals, nerds, and book geeks’, this voyeuristic, epistolary saga gives us a unique insight into the lives of two artists at a time when they were as passionate about each other as they were their work. I’m Very Into You presents us with the guilty pleasure of gossip at its very smartest.”—Dazed Digital
1990, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$27.00 - Out of stock
Cookie trips through her forty-year odyssey on this planet — from LSD to shopping at the A&P, from birthing Max to shooting Pink Flamingos. The echoes of her passionate commitments will ring in your ears. It is a tragedy to have lost her. Fortunately, along with the memories, she left us this marvellous testament to her intrepid zest for living.
"Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus - spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud" - John Waters
2019, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$34.00 - In stock -
In times of war the law is silent.
-from Field of Battle
Field of Battle presents the world today as nothing less than a war in progress, with Mexico an illustrative microcosm of the developing geopolitical scenario: a battlefield in which violence, drug trafficking, and organized crime-as well as the alegal state that works alongside all of this in the guise of fighting against it-hold sway. The rule of law has been replaced by the dominance of alegality and the rise of the "a-state."
This war scenario is establishing a form of global governance that utilizes methods of surveillance and control developed by the United States government and enforced through its global network of military bases and the multinational corporations that work in synergy with its espionage agencies. Geopolitics take advantage of social instability, drug cartels, state repression, and paramilitarism to establish the foundations of a world order.
Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez argues that this surveillance and control model has been imposed on the international community through extreme neoliberal ideology, free markets, the globalized economy, and the rise of the information society. The threats are clear. Nation-states are increasingly unable to respond to societal needs, and the individual has been displaced by money and technique-the axis of the transhumanist future foretold by today's electronic devices. The human being as the prosthesis of an artificial world and as an object of networks and systems: citizens are the victims of a perverse vision of reality, caught between the defense of their rights and their will to insurrection.
Translated by Joshua Neuhouser, Introduction by David Lida
2018, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
An examination of the reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift in global politics to the right, implemented both by the right and the establishment left.
Systemic, euphemized, insidious and structural violence has increased. It is now objectively measurable by the gulf in revenues, by subjective malaise, or by the menace of ecological apocalypse, and also by their constant exacerbation.—from How the World Swung to the Right
Despite a few zones of active resistance—the alter-globalization movement, the Chiapas uprisings, the Arab springs, and the recent resistance to racialized police brutality and environmental and genocidal warfare in the United States—the last half-century has been witness to an undeniable global shift to the right. How the World Swung to the Right provides a comprehensive overview of this reactionary, individualist, cynical, and belligerent shift, which often has been cloaked in the guise of entertainment and good intentions. The counterrevolutions began with a first phase of deregulation and ideological counter-attacks, and the fall of the so-called “real” communisms. The 1990s inaugurated a global biopolitical turn and the financialization of the economy; the 2000s hammered in neoliberal gains through the alliance of ultraliberalism with neoconservatism. These policies were implemented, surprisingly, not only by the right but often by the establishment left. Cusset argues that in the face of this betrayal, conflict is the one thing we can still salvage from the notion of the “left.” What we need today, he contends, are new sites of conflict that multiply the causes of struggle and the sites of mobilization, linking socioeconomic struggle with questions of identity and the urgency of ecology.
Translated by Noura Wedell
2017, English
Hardcover, 216 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$38.00 - Out of stock
A fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother.
Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood. —from Book of Mutter
Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures—at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space.
Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$85.00 $70.00 - Out of stock
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.