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
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2015, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 592 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - In stock -
Essays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art.
These influential essays by the noted critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history. Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred.
Buchloh's subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l'ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s. He discusses conflicts resulting from historical repetitions (such as the monochrome and collage/montage aesthetics in the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s), the emergence of crucial neo-avantgarde typologies, and the resuscitation of obsolete genres (including the portrait and landscape, revived by 1980s photography). Although these essays are less monographic than those in Buchloh's earlier collection, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, two essays in this volume are devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, whose work remains central to Buchloh's theoretical concerns. Engaging with both formal and historical paradigms, Buchloh situates himself productively between the force fields of formal theory and historical narrative, embracing the discrepancies and contradictions between them and within individual artistic trajectories.
Contents
Formalism and Historicity (1977) • Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde (1980) • Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting (1981) • Allegorical Procedures: Appropriations and Montage in Contemporary Art (1982) • The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers (1983) • From Faktura to Factography (1984) • Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue (1985) • The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avantgarde (1986) • Cold War Constructivism (1986) • Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions (1989) • Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture (1994) • Sculpture: Publicity and the Poverty of Experience (1996)
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 424 pages, 23.5 x 16.3 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$58.00 - In stock -
J. G. Ballard's collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation.
J. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels—from the notorious Crash (1973) to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing journalism, memoir, and cultural criticism in a variety of forms. This volume collects the most significant short nonfiction of Ballard's fifty-year career, extending the range of the only previous collection of his nonfiction, A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996), which selected essays and reviews published between 1962 and 1995.
A decade on from Ballard's death in 2009, a new generation of readers needs a new collection. In the period following A User's Guide, Ballard's writing addressed 9/11, British politics from New Labour onward, and what he termed “the rise of soft fascism”—a diagnosis that maintains its relevance amid a shift toward right populism in European and US politics. Beautifully edited by Ballard scholar and novelist Mark Blacklock, this volume includes Ballard's editorials and manifestos; commentaries on his own work; commentaries on the work of others; reviews; and more. Above all, it makes the case for the currency of Ballard's work at a contemporary juncture at which so many of his diagnoses concerning the media and politics have become apparent.
2009, English
Hardcover, 550 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$400.00 - In stock -
First edition of the scarce, highly sought after, and most comprehensive book ever published on American artist Paul Thek, published in 2009 by MIT Press. Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, this enormous 550 page monograph contains more than 300 works by this groundbreaking artist, documenting his journey from legendary outsider to central figure in many contemporary art movements.
Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek's death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn. This book brings together more than 300 of Thek's works—many of which are published here for the first time—to offer the most comprehensive display of his work yet seen. The book, which accompanies an exhibition at ZKM ? Museum of Contemporary Art presenting Thek's work in dialogue with contemporary art by young artists, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation work, as well as photographs documenting the room-size environments into which Thek incorporated elements from art, literature, theater, and religion. These works chart Thek's journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek's works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek's treatment of the body in such works as “Technological Reliquaries,” with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in colour) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek's work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.
Essays by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Margrit Brehm, Bazon Brock, Suzanne Delehanty, Harald Falckenberg, Marietta Franke, Stefan Germer, Kim Gordon, Roland Groenenboom, Axel Heil, Gregor Jansen, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Susanne Neubauer, Kenny Schachter, Harald Szeemann, Annette Tietenberg, Peter Weibel, Ann Wilson.
Good copy with heavy tanning to spine and covers (esp. fluro spot colour), some bumping to cover corners, light page edge tanning. Internally Very Good, clean throughout.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$34.00 - Out of stock
Why am I writing this book? Because I share Gramsci’s anxiety: “The old are dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The fascist monster, born in the entrails of Western modernity. Of course, the West is not what it used to be. Hence my question: what can we offer white people in exchange for their decline and for the wars that will ensue? There is only one answer: peace. There is only one way: revolutionary love.
—from Whites, Jews, and Us
With Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon’s political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love.
Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe—that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab–Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn’t in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a problem; that humanism can be against racism when its very function is to support the political-ideological apparatus that Bouteldja names the “white immune system.”
At this transitional moment in the history of the West—which is to say, at the moment of its decline—Bouteldja offers a call for political unity that demands the recognition that whiteness is not a genetic question: it is a matter of power, and it is high time to dismantle it.
Foreword by Cornel West
Translated by Rachel Valinsky
Houria Bouteldja is a French-Algerian political activist and writer focusing on anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and Islamophobia. She serves as spokesperson for the Parti des Indigènes de la République (Party of the Indigenous of the Republic).
2020, English
Hardcover, 440 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$89.00 - In stock -
How cubism and Dada radically reimagined the social nature of language, following the utopian poetic vision of Stéphane Mallarmé.
At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn,” centered on the radical doubt about the social function of language that defined the avant-garde movements. Major cubists and Dadaists—including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara—appropriated bureaucratic paperwork, newspapers, popular songs, and advertisements, only to render them dysfunctional and incommunicative. In doing so, Stark argues, these figures contended with the utopian vision of the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who promised a “total expansion of the letter.”
In his poems, Mallarmé claimed, “the act of writing was scrutinized down to its origins.” This scrutiny, however, delivered his work into an indeterminate zone between mediums, social practices, and temporalities—a paradox that reverberates through Stark's wide-ranging case studies in the history of the avant-garde. Stark examines Picasso's nearly abstract works of 1910, which promised to unite painting and writing at the brink of illegibility; the cubists' “hope of an anonymous art,” expressed in newspaper collages and industrial colors; the collaborative, cacophonous invention of “simultaneous poems” by the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I; and Duchamp's artistic exploration of chance in gambling and finance. Each of these cases reflected the avant-garde's transformative encounter with the premise of Mallarmé's poetics: that language—the very medium of human communication and community—is perpetually in flux and haunted by emptiness.
As certain artists experimenting in the postwar orbit of John Cage well knew, it was not he who introduced the conceptual scope of chance and musical metric into the language of art. In his brilliant book on Mallarmé's legacy—sure to correct the record—Trevor Stark positions the Coup de Dés as the first score of the twentieth century. Inhabiting industrialism's destruction of the subject, and an infinite abstraction—as chance gave way to indeterminism—Mallarmé encoded his best-known poem with score-like traits (time/realization) and ambiguity (language's readymade indeterminacy); thus he cast the death of the author like a bottle thrown at sea. Such stakes are clear because Stark makes them so. With not a word or a sentence wasted, he adroitly guides us through the Mallarméan dimensions of three pivotal experiments: Braque and Picasso's introduction of text into pictorial space (1910/1912); the temporal-auditory collage of Tzara's simultaneous poems honed in the collectivism of Zurich Dada; and Duchamp's ultimate transvaluation of art/work in Monte Carlo. The often-startling fruits of Stark's meticulous research are presented with a light touch, a space for realization; yet we sense the intellectual and “intermedial” virtuosity the author brings to the task—handling, deciphering, hearing, seeing, translating, across disciplines, languages, and time(s)—to convey his cases and insights to 21st-century readers with the force of contemporaneity. — Julia E. Robinson, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University; curator of the exhibition John Cage & Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence
1970, English
Softcover, 374 pages, 21 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - In stock -
Scarce first 1970 edition of Kropotkin's Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, published by the MIT Press, edited with an introduction by Martin A. Miller.
The selection of this anthology is designed to reveal such fundamental conceptions as Kropotkin's interpretation of the role of anarchism in modern history, his criticism of capitalism, his theory of revolution, and his views of the ideals to be realized in the postrevolutionary society of the future.
The editor of this anthology writes that anarchism in the late nineteenth century combined within itself the extremes of intellectuals such as Kropotkin and Tolstoy surrounded by an aura of unimpeachable moral conduct, together with assassins and bandit-outlaws such as Ravachol and Sazonov. What these widely disparate individuals shared was a common attitude toward society and the state. It was an attitude of profound alienation cutting across all social class lines from urban aristocrat to rural peasant.
This anthology contains selected essays and correspondence of Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin, who was, after Bakunin's death in 1876, unquestionably the most widely read and respected theorist of anarchism. The selection is designed to reveal such fundamental conceptions as Kropotkin's interpretation of the role of anarchism in modern history, his criticism of capitalism, his theory of revolution, and his views of the ideals to be realized in the postrevolutionary society of the future. The theoretical writings are supplemented by more concrete articles dealing specifically with conditions in nineteenth-century Russia--a society confronted by an authentic revolutionary opposition. Kropotkin's analysis of the revolution itself is implicit in the report of his meeting with Lenin and in his letters to the Bolshevik leader. The letters to Nettlau, Steffen, and Brandes present additional concerns which are closely related to the large themes of anarchism and revolution described in the essays.
Martin Miller's introduction surveys and analyzes the most significant aspects of Kropotkin's life and thought: Kropotkin's formative years in Russia, 1842-1876, and the origins of his anarchist thinking (military service in eastern Siberia, the influence of the works of Proudhon and Bakunin, his role in the Chaikovskii Circle); his years as an emigre in western Europe, 1976-1917, and the ripening of his political thought (editor of Le Révolté, his views on propaganda by the deed and on Marxist socialism); and his last years in the Soviet Union, 1917-1921 (the revolution and civil war, his meeting and correspondence with Lenin).
Good copy with general age wear. Previous owners name.
1983, English
Softcover, 27 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$48.00 - In stock -
Prisms, essays in cultural criticism and society, is the work of a critic and scholar who has had a marked influence on contemporary American and German thought. It displays the unusual combination of intellectual depth, scope, and philosophical rigor that Adorno was able to bring to his subjects, whether he was writing about astrology columns in Los Angeles newspapers, the special problems of German academics immigrating to the United States during the Nazi years, or Hegel's influence on Marx.
In these essays, Adorno explores a variety of topics, ranging from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Kafka's The Castle to Jazz, Bach, Schoenberg, Proust, Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption, museums, Spengler, and more. His writing throughout is knowledgeable, witty, and at times archly opinionated, but revealing a sensitivity to the political, cultural, economic, and aesthetic connections that lie beneath the surfaces of everyday life.
Prisms is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a student of philosophy, musicology, psychology, and sociology at Frankfurt where he later became Professor of Philosophy and Sociology and Co-Director of the Frankfurt School. During the war years he lived in Oxford, in New York, and in Los Angeles, continuing to produce numerous books on music, literature, and culture.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen teaches environmental philosophy and psychology in Antioch University Seattle's M.A. Program on Environment and Community and is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Seattle. She has translated several works by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 25.4 x 20.3 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - Out of stock
An illuminating study of the work of artist Martin Kippenberger, whose art expressed the enthusiasms and frustrations of the West German middle class.
Martin Kippenberger: Everything Is Everywhere is the first scholarly monograph in English on West German artist Martin Kippenberger (1953–1997), one of the most prominent German artists of the 1980s. In this book, Chris Reitz shows that the condition of Kippenberger’s art was an endless, enthusiastic searching, constrained by the impossibility of fulfillment. A child during West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, and a young adult during the economic recession and political tumult of the 1970s, Kippenberger belonged to the first truly postwar generation. But, largely uninterested in the legacy of National Socialism that had occupied his predecessors, Kippenberger instead pursued a hyperproductive artistic practice that reflected the dreams and fears of the ascendent 1980s West German middle class.
Kippenberger’s ambitions took him everywhere: he founded a museum in Greece, invested in a fashion business and a restaurant, and even bought a gas station in Brazil. He made art in a dizzying range of genres, from paintings to poetry, from posters to stickers. He made art out of his appetites, too, producing art on the theme of his own alcoholism. Intensely entrepreneurial, Kippenberger carried out an artistic practice in which his diverse endeavors, and the people who joined him in them, were all connected in a sprawling network. Reitz deftly presents Kippenberger’s career as an allegory of the neoliberal networks of capital, technology, and culture that spanned Europe and America in the 1980s.
2023, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25 x 16.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$89.00 - In stock -
How artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.
In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time.
As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.
Frederic J. Schwartz is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at University College London. His books include The Werkbund- Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War and Blind Spots- Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.
1995, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1995 edition of this long out-of-print study by Hal Foster, published The MIT Press and October Books. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death.
Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, André Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. To this end Foster first restages the difficult encounter of surrealism with Freudian psychoanalysis, then redefines the crucial categories of surrealism—the marvelous, convulsive beauty, objective chance—in terms of the Freudian uncanny, or the return of familar things made strange by repression. Next, with the art of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti in mind, Foster develops a theory of the surrealist image as a working over of a primal fantasy. This leads him finally to propose as a summa of surrealism a body of work often shunted to its margins: the dolls of Hans Bellmer, so many traumatic tableaux that point to difficult connections not only between sadism and masochism but also between surrealism and fascism. At this point Compulsive Beauty turns to the social dimension of the surrealist uncanny. First Foster reads the surrealist repertoire of automatons and mannequins as a reflection on the uncanny processes of mechanization and commodification. Then he considers the surrealist use of outmoded images as an attempt to work through the historical repression effected by these same processes. In a brief conclusion he discusses the fate of surrealism today in a world become surrealistic. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a deconstructive reading of surrealism, long neglected by Anglo-American art history, but also participates in a postmodern reconsideration of modernism, the dominant accounts of which have obscured its involvements in desire and trauma, capitalist shock and technological development.
Very Good copy.
1971, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1971 edition of History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács, published by The MIT Press the year following the philosopher's death. Lukac's long suppressed, but most famous work of Marxist theory. "It is one of the indispensable works of the twentieth century"—Raymond Williams. Influential on the '68 uprisings.
This is the first time one of the most important of Lukács' early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923, has been made available in English. The book consists of a series of essays treating, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of Historic Marxism, class consciousness, and the substantiation and consciousness of the Proletariat.
Writing in 1968, on the occasion of the appearance of his collected works, Lukács evaluated the influence of this book as follows:
"For the historical effect of History and Class Consciousness and also for the actuality of the present time one problem is of decisive importance: alienation, which is here treated for the first time since Marx as the central question of a revolutionary critique of capitalism, and whose historical as well as methodological origins are deeply rooted in Hegelian dialectic. It goes without saying that the problem was omnipresent. A few years after History and Class Consciousness was published, it was moved into the focus of philosophical discussion by Heidegger in his Being and Time, a place which it maintains to this day largely as a result of the position occupied by Sartre and his followers. The philologic question raised by L. Goldmann, who considered Heidegger's work partly as a polemic reply to my (admittedly unnamed) work, need not be discussed here. It suffices today to say that the problem was in the air, particularly if we analyze its background in detail in order to clarify its effect, the mixture of Marxist and Existentialist thought processes, which prevailed especially in France immediately after the Second World War. In this connection priorities, influences, and so on are not particularly significant. What is important is that the alienation of man was recognized and appreciated as the central problem of the time in which we live, by bourgeois as well as proletarian, by politically rightist and leftist thinkers. Thus, History and Class Consciousness exerted a profound effect in the circles of the youthful intelligentsia."
Georg Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian, and critic.
Rodney Livingstone, Reader in German at the University of Southampton, has edited and translated numerous works by Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and others.
Very Good copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 504 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world.
The Principle of Hope is published in three volumes: Volume 1 lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious--the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains a remarkable account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian wishful images in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theater, dance, and the cinema. Volume 2 presents the outlines of a better world. It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is nothing less than an encyclopedic account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume 3 offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper homeland, where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.
Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight
Ernst Simon Bloch (1885—1977) was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.
Fine copy of first 1995 edition. Long out-of-print.
2003, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 20.3 x 22.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - Out of stock
Critical writings and commentary by the Los Angeles based artist Mike Kelley.
The work of artist Mike Kelley (b. 1954) embraces performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His recent work offers dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley has written are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending.
This book offers a diverse collection of Kelley's writings from the last twenty-five years. It contains major critical texts on art, film, and the wider culture, including his piece on the aesthetic he calls "urban Gothic." It also contains essays, mostly commissioned for exhibition catalogs and journals, on the artists and groups David Askevold, OEyvind Fahlstroem, Douglas Huebler, John Miller, Survival Research Laboratories, and Paul Thek, among others. Kelley's voices are passionate, analytic, and ironic, and his critical intelligence is leavened with touches of whimsy.
“This collection proves that [Kelley] has not only helped write history but has had an effect on it.” — Diedrich Diederichsen, Artforum
2023, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$48.00 - In stock -
Contemporary art exhibitions appeal to cognition as well as the senses, modeling a new and expansive understanding of global aesthetics.
In this original work of aesthetic theory, James Voorhies argues that we live in the shadow of old ways of thinking about art that emphasize the immediate visual experience of an autonomous art object. But theory must change as artistic and curatorial production has changed. It should encompass the full range of activities through which we encounter art and exhibitions, in which reading and thinking are central to the aesthetic experience. Voorhies advances the theoretical framework of a "postsensual aesthetics," which does not mean we are beyond a sensual engagement with objects, but rather embraces the cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. Cognitive engagements with art often begin with publications conceived as integral to exhibitions, conveying the knowledge and research artists and curators produce, and continuing in time and space beyond traditional curatorial frames. The idea, and not just visual immediacy, is now art's defining moment.
Voorhies reframes aesthetic criteria to account for the liminal, cognitive spaces inside and outside of the exhibition. Surveying a wide range of artists, curators, exhibitions, and related publications, he repositions the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and draws inspiration from Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson, to describe a contemporary "logic of the curatorial." He demonstrates how, even as we increasingly expect to learn from contemporary art, we must avoid an instrumentalist and reductive view of art as a mere source of information. As Voorhies shows through an analysis of two major global exhibitions, dOCUMENTA (13) (artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) and Documenta11 (artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and of Ute Meta Bauer's curatorial work at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, it is imperative for artistic research to retain its unique role in the production of knowledge.
1991, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$35.00 - Out of stock
You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'...
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer—which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be "not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults," and subsequently banned.
Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended—but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...
2023, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$34.00 - In stock -
On the internet's transformation from communication tool to computational infrastructure.
The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today's Corporate Platform Complex (CPC)--a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation.
In the essays collected in this book, written mostly between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. Mobilizing theories of cognitive capitalism, neo-monadology, and sympathetic cooperation, considering ideas such as the attention economy and its psychopathologies, and evoking the relation between algorithmic automation and the Common, she provides real-time takes on the mutations that have changed the technological, cultural, and economic ethos of the Internet. Mostly conceived, elaborated, and discussed in collective activist spaces, After the Internet is neither apocalyptic lamentation nor melancholic "rise and fall" story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 152 pages, 30.5 x 24.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
MOCA / Los Angeles
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of long out-of-print important catalogue published to accompany Afterimage : Draw Through Process, a major survey of conceptual / post-minimalist drawing at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before travelling to Texas and Washington. Co-published by the MIT Press and MOCA.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and post minimalist art of the 1970s.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time" drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works, such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late 1960s.
The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten.
Very Good copy. Only very light wear to soft dust jacket, light tanning to edges.
2009, English
Hardcover, 550 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$420.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce, highly sought after, and most comprehensive book ever published on American artist Paul Thek, published in 2009 by MIT Press. Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, this enormous 550 page monograph contains more than 300 works by this groundbreaking artist, documenting his journey from legendary outsider to central figure in many contemporary art movements.
Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek's death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn. This book brings together more than 300 of Thek's works—many of which are published here for the first time—to offer the most comprehensive display of his work yet seen. The book, which accompanies an exhibition at ZKM ? Museum of Contemporary Art presenting Thek's work in dialogue with contemporary art by young artists, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation work, as well as photographs documenting the room-size environments into which Thek incorporated elements from art, literature, theater, and religion. These works chart Thek's journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek's works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek's treatment of the body in such works as “Technological Reliquaries,” with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in colour) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek's work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.
Essays by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Margrit Brehm, Bazon Brock, Suzanne Delehanty, Harald Falckenberg, Marietta Franke, Stefan Germer, Kim Gordon, Roland Groenenboom, Axel Heil, Gregor Jansen, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Susanne Neubauer, Kenny Schachter, Harald Szeemann, Annette Tietenberg, Peter Weibel, Ann Wilson.
Good copy with tanning to spine, some bumping and waving from storage. Clean throughout.
2020, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.
Susan Buck-Morss is Distinguished Professor of Political Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center and Jan Rock Zubrow Professor Emerita of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press) and other books.
"Buck-Morss has written a wonderful book. Although rigorously analytic, the book doesn't sacrifice those qualities in Benjamin's writing that are not reducible to method. His lyrical, hallucinatory evocation of the city as a place of dreams, myths, expectations."—Herbert Muschamp, Artforum
"Wonderfully imaginative...Like Benjamin, Buck-Morss is a surrealist explorer, her mysteries unraveled by intuition, revealed by illusion."—Eugen Weber, The New Republic
2019, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$28.00 - Out of stock
A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.
Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the "is" of natural orders with the "ought" of moral orders.
In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition-specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws-and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder.
Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
1974, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 17.8 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$280.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 US edition of this historical publication by Cornelius Cardew, a key collection/collaborative manifesto of texts and scores by a group of British avant-garde musicians compiled and edited by the legendary experimental composer.
"Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre."
This is Morton Feldman's assessment of Cardew's importance, an assessment that took on prophetic status when Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. This orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own music in the 1960s when, working in almost total isolation from the musical establishment, he patiently drew together a large group of composers and performers into experimental music through his own compositional activities and through teaching. This group became the nucleus of the orchestra.
The draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra opens as follows: "Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).
"Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.
"The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of—for lack of a better word—concerts."
This lively book on the repertory the orchestra created is as much graphic and visual as it is verbal and about aural events and happenings. After all, scratch music itself is meant to be perceived by the eye and all the senses—not just by ear—so the notation used in preparing the scores for performance might be graphic, collage, verbal, or musical. The scores in Scratch Music are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and other devices. Contemporary musicians, artists, and critics have long recognized both Cardew's music and this text as hugely influential and significant. Scratch Music demonstrates the extraordinary richness of this particular compositional matrix, giving the reader some idea of what it is like to put on a scratch music event.
Contents: Introduction; Scratch Music—Early Outlines and Later Notes; Scratch Music; Key to Scratch Music; Scratch Music Catalogue; 1001 Activities; Appendix: Four Compositions (David Ahern, Greg Bright, Michael Chant, Roger Frampton).
Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981) was an English experimental music composer. A student at the recently established the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. Cardew was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American experimental composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards. In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group AMM as cellist and pianist, alongside Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores. Cardew's most important scores from his experimental period are Treatise (1963–67), a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books in London. While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra, a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. He later rejected experimental music, his creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment as a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1970s, and in 1979 as co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Very Good copy with some tanning and general wear.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 616 pages, 23.6 x 16.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$62.00 - In stock -
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film.
"Serge Daney was the end of criticism as I understood it."—Jean-Luc Godard
One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture.
Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
"Serge Daney was the key French film critic of his era. His untimely death in 1992 at 48, from AIDS, robbed international cinema of its most important critical voice. Despite his achievements as a writer and editor, little of Daney's work has been published in English. The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962–1981 covers Daney's years as a contributor and editor at the magazine that launched the French New Wave. It is about time English-language readers had access to the full range of Daney's thought and his unparalleled work on cinema. His prose, with its keen insights into individual films and the cinema as concept and practice, is original and transformative, a must-read for serious cinephiles and anyone else who believes in the ongoing tale of cinema."—A. S. Hamrah
"Thirty years after his death, Daney's revenant presence offers a most welcome disquietude."—Nick Pinkerton
Serge Daney became the editor of Cahiers du Cinema in 1974. In 1981, he left Cahiers and wrote about visual culture for Libération, turning his attention to television and coverage of the Gulf War. He collaborated with Claire Denis on a documentary film, Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990). He died of AIDS-related causes in 1992.
A. S. Hamrah is a writer living in Brooklyn. He contributed a column on film to n+1 from 2008 to 2019, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Harper's, Bookforum, Cineaste, and other publications. Heis the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018.
2006, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 448 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - In stock -
First 2006 hardcover edition.
In Zizek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the parallax gap in the ontological, the scientific, and the political--and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.
The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the parallax gap separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an impossible short circuit of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which nobody is home in the skull, just stacks of brain meat--a condition Zizek calls the unbearable lightness of being no one); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics--including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.
The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.
Very Good copy, VG dust jacket.
2022, English
Softcover, 528 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$89.00 - Out of stock
The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh maps the unfolding of Richter's ever more complex and contradictory lifework. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945, a European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b. 1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own development and evolution.
What emerges from Buchloh's detailed analysis of Richter's key works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the modernist and even the postmodernist painterly aesthetic. In a series of essays that proceeds chronologically, Buchloh begins with Elbe (1957), viewing it as a foundational moment in Richter's confrontation with Socialist Realism, and goes on to consider such works as October 18, 1977 (1988), the series of representational photo-based paintings of Baader-Meinhof members; Richter's glass works; and the late group of Birkenau Paintings (2014). Richly illustrated in color, dense with insights that represent half a lifetime of engagement with Richter's work, this book will stand as the definitive examination of a major contemporary artist.