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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1990, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 512 pages, 29.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Biennale of Sydney / Sydney
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible (huge) catalogue published to accompany the 8th Biennale of Sydney 1990 "The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art", held 11 April-3 June 1990 in Sydney across various venues. The eighth Biennale began from ‘a trio of Dada originators’: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. A large number of artists across generations joined these key figures in Artistic Director René Block’s exploration of the ‘readymade’ in twentieth-century art, which aimed to highlight ‘its invention and pure use by Duchamp, to its resurgence in Nouveau Realism, Pop Art, and Fluxus of the 60s, all the way to new versions by young contemporary artists’. Pop, fluxus and conceptual artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Alison Knowles, César, George Brecht, Nam Jun Paik and Piero Manzoni were shown alongside Rosemarie Trockel, John Nixon, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Janet Burchill, Peter Tyndall, Robert Rooney, Rosalie Gascoigne, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, Hans Haacke, Rebecca Horn, Sophie Calle, Jeff Koons, Allan Kaprow, Jenny Holzer, Robert Gober, Jill Scott, Bill Culbert, Stanley Brouwn, Peter Cripps, Terry Fox, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fischli & Weiss, KP Brehmer, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Rot, Hanne Darboven, Robert MacPherson, Jackie Redgate, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Bloom, Oyvind Fahlstrom, amongst so many others. The industrial Bond Store at Millers Point featured site-specific works by artists such as Olaf Metzel and Simone Mangos, and several works were created on-site in Sydney, amplifying Block’s notion of the Biennale as a ‘workshop’. A comprehensive satellite program of music, performance, lectures, symposia, workshops and exhibitions at various Sydney venues complemented the exhibition, with Carles Santos’ piano recital on a barge in Sydney Harbour a highlight. Five satellite exhibitions included On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Alain Fleischer, Fluxus and Broken Record, which featured artist’s experimentations with audio recordings, vinyl and album artwork – from John Cage’s 33 1/3 composition for 12 record players to Milan Knížák’s record-collages.
An incredible Sydney biennale, captured here across over 500 pages conceived and realised by René Block and Jennifer Cook - profusely illustrated with examples of all artists works and accompanying texts throughout by Lynne Cooke, Bernice Murphy, Anne Marie Freybourg, Dick Higgins, René Block and Jennifer Cook. Very Good copy with only general wear/ageing. Bright and clean, includes tanned original dust jacket now preserved under plastic wrap.
Having represented Beuys, Richter and Polke, German gallery owner, art publisher, art collector and curator René Block (born 1942) ranks among the central figures of the 1960s avant-garde.
Very Good copy with original dust jacket. Common tanning to dust jacket spine, now preserved under mylar wrap.
2008, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Ed of 1000,
Published by
Museo Tamayo Arte contemporáneo / Mexico City
Dundee Contemporary Arts / Dundee
Lunds Konsthall / Sweden
$39.00 - Out of stock
Ellipsis features photography, film and video from the 1970s and the early 1980s by Chantal Akerman (b. 1950), Lili Dujourie (b. 1941) and Francesca Woodman (1958–81). This is the first joint exhibition of their work, curated by Lynne Cooke, Chief Curator at Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Gorgeous catalogue published to accompany the exhibition held at Lunds Konsthall, 9 February – 13 April 2008 and Dundee Contemporary Arts, 23 April – 22 June 2008, co-published with Museo Tamayo Arte Contempor´neo, Mexico. Illustrated throughout with works by all artists alongside texts by Jan Avgikos, Lynne Cooke, Ramiro Martinez, Åso Nacking and Judith Winter.
Lynne Cooke writes: Although born ten years apart and in very different circumstances, the three artists featured in this exhibition each profited from the turn to still photography, and other lens-based technologies – film, slide projection and the newer medium of video – that dominated vanguard art practice in the late 1960s. Taking themselves – their bodies and their immediate circumstances – as their point of departure, during the 1970s all three made performative work for the camera. Tellingly, the sites they favored were mostly their own studios or domestic interiors. Beyond this quite evident concurrence of interest in the self as both artist and model, as subject and object of the gaze, there runs a deeper if more elusive thread that links their art from this period. Less a mood than a state of being, or frame of mind, its content could be described in existential terms as the estranged relation of the female subject to her world; in the terminology of current critical discourse, their abiding preoccupations centered on the construction and representation of identity.
The words Hommage à followed by an ellipsis (…) form the title of the first five of the seventeen videos Lili Dujourie produced between 1972 and 1981. Numerous names come to mind to complete this phrase, among them the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Of particular interest to this exhibition is the proposal of a relation between the artworks of Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman and the films of Antonioni. The fragility and precariousness of his principal characters is evidenced in the ways in which their identities seem to split, double or dissipate so that each becomes unable to find coherence in a shifting amorphous world, and so verges on alienation. Through a signature language centered in an innovative treatment of space and time, Antonioni forged new formal and conceptual means to explore the identities of his subjects, means which resonate tellingly in the works of these three artists.
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).
2012, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 29 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Monacelli Press / New York
Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia / Madrid
$180.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce English-language edition of this stunning and long out-of-print hardcover Rosemarie Trockel catalogue, published in 2012 by The Monacelli Press on the occasion of the touring exhibition "A Cosmos" curated by Lynne Cooke, former Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in collaboration with Rosemarie Trockel.
The German artist Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952) has gained international renown for a multifaceted practice encompassing painting, sculpture, video, and drawing. Issues including a concern with natural history, the creative expression of diverse species, and the representation and role of women in contemporary culture fuel her work. A Cosmosa world shaped by Trockels ideas and affinitiesis presented in this volume, companion to a major exhibition, which places her in the company of others whom she regards as kindred spirits. Juxtaposing her work with objects that range across eras and cultures, borrowed from the fields of art history, botany, craft, and outsider art, this exceptional ensemble illuminates Trockel's highly influential practice of the past thirty years.
Profusely illustrated throughout with all works and installations, includes the work of artists James Castle, Morton Bartlett, Judith Scott, Manuel Montalvo, Günter Weseler, Ruth Francken, and more. Includes essays by Lynne Cooke, Dore Ashton, Suzanne Hudson, and Anne M. Wagner.
Very Good copy. Highly recommended.
2012, English
Hardcover, 268 pages, 196 x 260 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
Dia Foundation / New York
$86.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeously quiet in color and composition, Agnes Martin's paintings have a distinctive grace that sets them apart from those of the Abstract Expressionists of her day and the Minimalist artists she inspired. Martin attributed her grid-based works to metaphysical motivations, lending a serene complexity to her oeuvre that has defied any easy categorization. Perhaps for this reason, critical and scholarly analysis of her paintings has been scarce-until now. This important new anthology brings together the most current scholarship on Martin's paintings by twelve multidisciplinary essayists who consider various aspects of the artist's four-decade career. Organized by Dia Art Foundation, whose extensive holdings of Martin's paintings and ambitions to support in-depth research on the works are unparalleled, the publication brings renewed focus and energy to Martin's career and her contributions to the art historical narrative.
Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly
Texts by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, Rhea Anastas, Douglas Crimp, Jonathan D. Katz, Michael Newman
2010, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
The chance situation or random event—whether as a strategy or as a subject of investigation—has been central to many artists' practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But why—a century after Dada and Surrealism's first systematic enquiries—does chance remain a key strategy in artists' investigations into the contemporary world?The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young
Writers include: Paul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Sarat Maharaj, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Sarah Valdez, Katharina VossenkuhlDocuments of Contemporary Art series
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London
2010, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 192 pages, 23.5 x 28.6 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$79.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder. Texts by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Lynne Cooke, Suzanne Hudson, Susanne Küper, and James Lawrence
The first retrospective in the U.S. to feature German artist Blinky Palermo (1943–1977) includes more than 60 works, most of which have never before been shown in North America. This beautifully illustrated volume spans the breadth of Palermo’s brief but significant career and explores each phase, beginning with objects and paintings created shortly after he graduated from Joseph Beuys’s class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the early 1960s and culminating with paintings he produced during his last years in both Germany and New York City.
Palermo’s oeuvre is customarily divided into four principal groupings: the Objects; the Cloth Pictures (Stoffbilder), the in situ Wall Paintings and Drawings, and the late Metal Pictures, including the epic To the People of New York City (1976), now in the collection of Dia Art Foundation. Blinky Palermo also addresses the artist’s works on paper, including watercolors, sketches, preparatory studies, and prints that he made throughout his career.
Essays by distinguished authors position the artist’s work in relation to postwar American art and culture, which he greatly revered. Topics include the influence of the American milieu on the Metal Pictures; space and time in the Wall Drawings and Paintings; and the insights into Palermo’s concerns and process afforded by his works on paper. The most comprehensive volume on Palermo’s career to date, this important book offers a rare opportunity to explore in-depth the work of a remarkably innovative artist, pointing to Palermo’s relevance and influence on a new generation of artists.
Palermo
(Blinky) Palermo (1943–1977) was born Peter Schwarze in Leipzig. In 1962, he entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied with Bruno Goller and then with Joseph Beuys and, in 1964, appropriated the name Blinky Palermo from the American boxing promoter-cum-mafioso Frank “Blinky” Palermo, famous for managing heavyweight champion Sonny Liston. Over the course of his short life, Palermo participated in more than seventy exhibitions worldwide, including Documenta in 1972 and the Venice Biennale in 1975. He has had posthumous retrospectives at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (1984); Kunstmuseum Bonn (1993); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2002); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2007); and Dia:Beacon and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (CCS Bard) (2011).
2014, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
$43.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Antony Hudek
Artists increasingly refer to “post-object-based" work while theorists engage with material artifacts in culture. A focus on “object-based" learning treats objects as vectors for dialogue across disciplines. Virtual imaging enables the object to be abstracted or circumvented, while immaterial forms of labor challenge materialist theories. This anthology surveys such reappraisals of what constitutes the “objectness" of production, with art as its focus.
Among the topics it examines are the relation of the object to subjectivity; distinctions between objects and things; the significance of the object’s transition from inert mass to tool or artifact; and the meanings of the everyday in the found object, repetition in the replicated or multiple object, loss in the absent object, and abjection in the formless or degraded object. It also explores artistic positions that are anti-object; theories of the experimental, liminal or mental object; and the role of objects in performance. The object becomes a prism through which to reread contemporary art and better understand its recent past.
Artists surveyed include
Georges Adéagbo, Art in Ruins, Iain Baxter, Louise Bourgeois, Pavel Büchler, Lygia Clark, Claude Closky, Brian Collier, Jimmie Durham, Fischli & Weiss, Luca Frei, Meschac Gaba, Isa Genzken, Gruppe Geflecht, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, John Latham, Antje Majewski, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Gabriel Orozco, Adrian Piper, Falke Pisano, Eva Rothschild, Aura Satz, Kenneth Snelson, Hito Steyerl, Josef Strau, Alina Szapocznikow, Joelle Tuerlinckx, Erwin Wurm
Writers include
Homi K. Bhabha, Jack Burnham, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Lynne Cooke, Gillo Dorfles, Jean Fisher, Ferreira Gullar, Charles Harrison, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, Lev Manovich, Ursula Meyer, Bruno Munari, Georges Perec, Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Dieter Roelstraete, Howard Singerman, Nancy Spector, Marcus Steinweg, Anne Wagner, Gérard Wajcman, Slavoj Zizek
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 170 pages (50 colour ill.), 17 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Christine Burgin / New York
Donald Young Gallery / New York
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Contemporary artists respond to the work of Robert Walser.
A Little Ramble: In the Spirit of Robert Walser was initiated by the gallerist Donald Young, who saw in Robert Walser an exemplary figure through whom connections between art and literature could be discussed anew. He invited a group of artists to create and exhibit work in response to the writings of Robert Walser. This book is a result of that collaboration.
A Little Ramble is a Walser reader of material chosen by the artists. There are Walser love stories discovered by Thomas Schütte in the 70s appearing here for the first time in English, translated by Susan Bernofsky; the poem Snow which inspired Rosemarie Trockel also newly translated for this edition by Christopher Middleton; the little known Walser story A Painter's Life illustrated by Josiah McElheny; Pantoums by Rodney Graham based on the first line of Walser's Berlin stories and excerpts from Wandering with Walser, conversations with Walser recorded by his guardian, Carl Seelig, chosen by Moyra Davey to name only a few. Also included in the book is an afterword by Lynne Cooke and an introduction by Donald Young.
Robert Walser (1878–1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium—where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad."
Distinguished poet and translator Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas. His awards include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize.
Prize-winning translator Susan Bernofsky has translated numerous works by Robert Walser including The Microscripts, The Tanners, and The Assistant. She is currently at work on a biography of Robert Walser
2012, English
Softcover, 322 pages ( 138 b/w and 15 color ill.), 18.8 x 25.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$42.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Anni Albers, Doug Ashford, Gaston Bachelard, Angelo Bellfatto, Nova Benway, Gregg Bordowitz, Johanna Burton, Theresa Choi, Beatriz Colomina, Lynne Cooke, Moyra Davey, Tom Eccles, Diana Fuss, Jennifer Gross, Elizabeth Grosz, Roni Horn, Jenny Jaskey, Susanne Küper, Elisabeth Lebovici, Nathan Lee, Zoe Leonard, Dorit Margreiter, Josiah McElheny, Helen Molesworth, Georges Perec, Juliane Rebentisch, David Reed, Lisa Robertson, Joel Sanders, Virginia Woolf, Amy Zion
Encounters with art engage various conditions of interiority—whether through psychic spaces or specific physical environments, such as museums and private residences. The exhibition “If you lived here, you’d be home by now,” presented at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, in 2011, was the catalyst for the current volume, providing a paradigmatic case study for probing issues of the personal and subjective within realms of the sociological and the cultural. Through diverse discursive modes—commissioned essays, conversations and talks, historical writings, and artistic projects—this anthology, the first CCS Readers volume, examines the poetics and politics of interior experience within the frame of contemporary art.