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
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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.
1982, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / Japan
$45.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, rare Japanese souvenir photo booklet for Tobe Hooper's masterpiece Poltergeist, a 1982 American supernatural horror film directed by Tobe Hooper from a story by Steven Spielberg. Starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson and Beatrice Straight, the film focuses on a suburban family whose home is invaded by malevolent ghosts that abduct their youngest daughter. Spielberg conceived Poltergeist as a horror sequel to his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind titled Night Skies; however, Hooper was less interested in the sci-fi elements and suggested they collaborate on a ghost story. The film received critical acclaim and commerical success and is considered a horror classic. Heavily illustrated throughout with glossy colour and b/w stills from the film, alongside texts in Japanese about the film, cast, and production information.
Very Good copy with some light spine wear.
1978, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
? / Japan
$30.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, scarce Japanese souvenir photo booklet for Brian De Palma's The Fury, a 1978 American supernatural horror thriller film starring Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Amy Irving, Carrie Snodgress, Charles Durning, and Andrew Stevens. The screenplay by John Farris was based on his 1976 novel of the same name. Heavily illustrated throughout with glossy colour and b/w stills from the film, alongside texts in Japanese about the film, cast, and production information.
Fine copy.
1976, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Toho / Tokyo
toho
$50.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, rare Japanese souvenir photo booklet for the acclaimed 1976 South Australian drama film Storm Boy, directed by Henri Safran and based on the 1964 book of the same name by Colin Thiele, about a lonely boy (Greg Rowe) and his pet pelicans living in a coastal wilderness with his reclusive father, 'Hide Away' Tom (Peter Cummins). In search of friendship, Mike encounters another recluse in the wilderness, Fingerbone Bill (David Gulpilil), an Aboriginal man estranged from his tribal people. Fingerbone names Mike "Storm Boy" and enlists the child's help caring for three orphaned pelican chicks. It was the third feature film made by the South Australian Film Corporation, and is a highlight of the New Wave of Australian Cinema from the 1970s. Heavily illustrated throughout with glossy colour and b/w stills from the film, alongside texts in Japanese about the film, cast, and production information.
Good—Very Good copy. Some pinching to spine otherwise VG.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 210 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunken Shiryo Kankokai / Tokyo
$55.00 $35.00 - In stock -
April 1974 issue of Fuzoku Kitan, an important Japanese SM magazine was published between 1960—1974, and edited by Hajime Takakura. Filled with SM stories and illustrations, along with colour and b/w gravure photographic kitan and fetish photoshoots and art galleries, the magazine published a wild array of subjects on sexual customs, especially a significant amount of queer and transgender sexuality, lots of cross-dressing, masochism, torture, sodomy, sadophelia and fem-dom material. Includes artwork by Tatsuji Okawa, Men's Naked Festival, artwork by Gene Bilbrew, Flowers In Full Bloom (Western SM photography and play), kinbaku photo gallery, fem-fem Western spanking photography, lots of stories from Japanese cross-dressers, readers confessions, a treasure-trove of illustrated transgressive fiction, almost all articles under nom de plumes! Also, excellent ads.
VG—Good copy, with light wear, tanning.
1962, Japanese
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunken Shiryo Kankokai / Tokyo
$100.00 $80.00 - In stock -
Very rare early special "Masochist Ecstasy" issue of Fuzoku Kitan, an important Japanese SM magazine was published between 1960-1974, and edited by Hajime Takakura. Filled with SM stories and illustrations, along with colour and b/w gravure photographic kitan and fetish photoshoots and art galleries, the magazine published a wild array of subjects on sexual customs, especially a significant amount of western SM artists and material introduced to Japanese audiences and a great deal of queer sexuality. This issue from 1962 is probably one of the finest examples of this, featuring photographic spreads of Japanese and western male physique models, Japanese cross-dressers, Japanese and western female kinbaku/bondage photography, the "man, man, man, man's world!" feature of queer western romanesque illustration from George Quaintance, Tom of Finland, and others, illustrated cover article on Masochism, stories from Japanese cross-dressers, illustrated fiction of gay and lesbian SM stories, as well as lots of fem-dom, sodomy and sadophelia. Almost all articles under nom de plumes! Cover art by Tom of Finland.
Good copy, with edge wear and tanning from age. Binding great.
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunken Shiryo Kankokai / Tokyo
$45.00 $25.00 - In stock -
March 1972 issue of Fuzoku Kitan, an important Japanese SM magazine was published between 1960—1974, and edited by Hajime Takakura. Filled with SM stories and illustrations, along with colour and b/w gravure photographic kitan and fetish photoshoots and art galleries, the magazine published a wild array of subjects on sexual customs, especially a significant amount of queer and transgender sexuality, lots of cross-dressing, masochism, torture, sodomy, sadophelia and fem-dom material. Art gallery by master of kinbaku illustration Yoko Ozuma, equestrianism photography, lots of stories from Japanese cross-dressers, readers confessions, a treasure-trove of illustrated transgressive fiction, almost all articles under nom de plumes! Also, excellent ads.
VG—Good copy, with light cover/spine wear, tanning.
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Bunken Shiryo Kankokai / Tokyo
$45.00 $25.00 - In stock -
December 1972 issue of Fuzoku Kitan, an important Japanese SM magazine was published between 1960—1974, and edited by Hajime Takakura. Filled with SM stories and illustrations, along with colour and b/w gravure photographic kitan and fetish photoshoots and art galleries, the magazine published a wild array of subjects on sexual customs, especially a significant amount of queer and transgender sexuality, lots of cross-dressing, masochism, torture, sodomy, sadophelia and fem-dom material. Photo features of Rope and Ecstasy and Sadist Breeding Male Slaves, studies on corporal punishment, stories from Japanese cross-dressers, readers confessions, a treasure-trove of illustrated transgressive fiction, almost all articles under nom de plumes! Also, excellent ads.
VG—Good copy, with light cover/spine wear, tanning.
2007, English
Hardcover (w. audio cd), 48 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Thrill Jockey Record / Chicago
$10.00 - In stock -
First, out-of-print edition. Baltimore's Higgs is best known for his work as the lyricist and frontman of Lungfish, whose work on Dischord spans three decades. This release is a limited edition CD + full colour 48-page hardcover book of Daniels's paintings and writings and the second release in the Thrill Jockey book series (the first being "Hokane" by Aki Tsuyuko). The CD of guitar and piano drones, jew's harp, and banjo recorded by Daniel is inserted in the front cover of the book.
As New.
2022, French
Flexcover (clothbound), 248 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
$69.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Marc Camille Chaimowicz – Zig Zag and Many Ribbons… at MAMC Saint-Etienne in 2022—2023, this reference monograph revisits the conceptual and sensorial developments pursued by the artist since the 1970s.
Includes a ribbon drawn by the artist as an inserted bookmark. Edited by Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Anna Clifford. Text by Marie Canet. Designed by Zak Kyes.
Born in the aftermath of World War II (in 1947 in Paris) of a Polish father and a French mother, Marc Camille Chaimowicz moved as a child to the United Kingdom. He studied at Ealing, Camberwell, and the Slate School of Art in London. In new artistic times, careful to bring art and life closer, often using performance, the life of Marc Camille Chaimowicz has become a great workshop. Living in the exhibition spaces, he sets up hotels entrances, decorates them with his own artefacts, and serves there some tea to visitors with musical background. When it became an official art practice which was no longer subversive, Chaimowicz abandoned performance art. From 1975 to 1979, he designed the interior of his Approach Road flat. Wallpapers, curtains, videos he made while performing in his own decor: everything had been tailored-imagined, drawn, and conceived to turn his interior into a room conducive to reverie. From the 1980s onwards, decors and furniture set like in a theatre scenography took their place in museums. Since then, hundreds of exhibitions have featured the interiors series of this international artist.
Marie Canet is a French art critic, independent curator and professor of aesthetics at the Villa Arson (Nice).
2010, English
Softcover, 207 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Western Sydney University / WA
$70.00 $40.00 - In stock -
Conceptual Beauty is a collection of essays that are in some way representative of a particular moment in contemporary Australian art: a moment marked by the enduring belief in the social power of art but also by cognizance of the largely illusory nature of individual agency; a moment energised by the lively debates of post-structuralist theory and the politics of representation (in particular feminist perspectives), but one also marked by a sense of loss, namely the loss of the aesthetic dimension of art in the wake of conceptualism. Many of the essays are about works that seek to connect art with wider social and political questions in full awareness of its limitations; works that grapple with the apparent dichotomy between critical idea and beautiful object; works that are drawn equally to conceptual approaches that engage in meta-analysis of language and institutions - including the figure of the artist him/herself - and to the well-crafted piece, the affectively joyful. Conceptual Beauty includes essays on the work of Robyn Backen, Barbara Campbell, Maria Cruz, Anne Ferran, Adam Geczy, Bronia Iwanczak, Vanila Netto, David Noonan, Mike Parr, Sue Pedley, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty, Julie Rrap, Robyn Stacey, Monika Tichacek and Ruth Watson amongst others.
As New copy with some light tanning.
2009, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$70.00 $30.00 - In stock -
Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public?
Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today's multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? Smith argues that the most recognisable kind is characterised by a return to mainstream modernism in the work of such artists as Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, as well as the retro-sensationalism of figures like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. At the same time, Smith reveals, postcolonial artists are engaged in a different kind of practice: one that builds on local concerns and tackles questions of identity, history, and globalisation. A younger generation embodies yet a third approach to contemporaneity by investigating time, place, mediation, and ethics through small-scale, closely connective art making.
Inviting readers into these diverse yet overlapping art worlds, Smith offers a behind-the-scenes introduction to the institutions, the personalities, the biennials, and of course the works that together are defining the contemporary. The resulting map of where art is now illuminates not only where it has been but also where it is going.
1992, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$18.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Employing an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the complexities of contemporary urban culture, this work examines a diverse range of cultural expressions that may be considered typical of the 1980s, from retro fashion, to Latinization, to the recycling of religious imagery as kitsch. The topics Olalquiaga explores are shown to be exemplary condensations of different cultural currents, and she establishes reception as a vantage point from which to think about city life. "Megalopolis" sees in 1950s and 1960s retro fashion a re-enactment of space-age fears of technological dehumanization, in the resurfacing of kitsch an attempt at recovering emotional intensity, in an aesthetics of death and ruins a lament for the loss of a concrete and organic reality. Consumption is the basis of an unavoidable postmodernity in which the traditional ways of looking at the world have become so many icons; technology is the new language through - or against - which experience is articulated.
Very Good copy with some cover marks, otherwise as new.
2022, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This volume gathers a collection of diary-like texts, posted in 2015 by Evelyn Taocheng Wang on her Facebook page, recording the experiences she had as an undercover transgender masseuse in a massage parlour in Amsterdam. The vignette-like chapters retrace the daily routine at the parlour, incidents with clients and conversations with fellow workers. A series of watercolours by the artist accompanies and illustrates the texts, interpreting her anecdotes in colourful visions. Also includes personal reflections that deftly mix bursts of humour with moments of tension, poetical notes and an acute sense of observation.Through transcriptions of discussions between Chinese immigrant women working together, the author proposes an unconventional portrait of the Chinese diaspora. Inaccuracies of language are an integral part of the narrative.
1997, English
Softcover, 86 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art / Connecticut
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of Bruce Nauman 1985—1996 Drawings, Prints, and Relate Works, published on the occasion of an exhibition held May 4 to Aug. 31, 1997 at Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art February 27-April 19, 1998. Illustrated throughout in colour an b/w with many of Nauman's works accompanied by a prologue by Jill Snyder and with a sixteen-page essay by Ingrid Shaffner, "Circling Oblivion/Bruce Naumann through Samuel Beckett", plus a checklist of all works.
Good—Very Good copy.
2017, English
Softcover, 44 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$18.00 $10.00 - In stock -
What is the new normal? Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications, such gaps can be perilous. In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in all the bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be.
Part manifesto and part syllabus, this essay by design theorist, Benjamin H. Bratton describes his vision for how design should approach and intervene in the new normal and what kinds of cities we should be planning for now.
Bratton is Programme Director of The Strelka Institute of Architecture, Media and Design in Moscow, a resilient beacon of generous futurism in a time and place at the centre of contemporary twists and turns. The essay outlines The New Normal post-graduate think-tank at Strelka, which brings together architects, programmers, interaction designers, game designers, artists, philosophers, filmmakers, novelists, economists, and 'free-range’ computer scientists. They study with Keller Easterling, Lev Manovich, Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel Van Der Velden), Casey Reas, Liam Young, and many others.
2019, English
Softcover, 138 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$35.00 $15.00 - In stock -
The Terraforming is the comprehensive project to fundamentally transform Earth cities, technologies, and ecosystems to ensure that the planet will bе сараblе of supporting Earth-like life. Artificiality, astronomy, and automation form the basis of that alternative planetarity.
Benjamin H. Bratton’s work spans philosophy, art, design, and computer science. He is the Program Director at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, and a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is also a Professor at The European Graduate School, and a Visiting Professor at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) and NYU Shanghai.
English
Softcover, 36 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$18.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Privileging declarations, right answers, proofs, and universals, culture is often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address contemporary chemistries of power. On the flip side, medium design offers no dramatic manifestos where things are new or right. Instead it only rehearses a habit of mind that has been eclipsed. Even at a moment of digital ubiquity, medium design treats space as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, and technical networks. And just as it inverts the typical focus on the object over the field, it may also invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics, and politics.
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. A previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.
2018, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$28.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Digital Tarkovsky is an extended poetic exploration of how our experiences of visual entertainment and time itself are changing in the era of the smartphone and near-constant connection. The essay applies the ‘slow’ cinematic art of Andrei Tarkovsky to our interaction with the digital, visual reality of screens and interfaces. Digital Tarkovsky is a way of tracing what cinema, storytelling and time mean in our platform-based world.
In the US, an adult on average spends two hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone every day. That is eight minutes longer than Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.
We’re not interested in telling you to put your phone down and start paying attention to the real world. Instead, we want to investigate the kind of experience we have whilst staring at these tiny screens and the digital platforms that inhabit them. We are interested in calling this something other than smartphone addiction. We are interested in calling it cinema.
The work of Metahaven consists of filmmaking, writing, design, and installations, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling, digital superstructures, and propaganda. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) (2015), Information Skies (2016), Possessed (2018, with Rob Schröder), Hometown (2018) and Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) (2018). Publications include PSYOP (2018), Black Transparency (2015) and Uncorporate Identity (2010). Their work is screened, published, and exhibited worldwide.
2019, English
Softcover, 134 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$24.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Introduction to Comparative Planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different "figures" of the planet – the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth – in order to assess their geopolitical implications. These implications are then mapped on respective prospects of these figures in developing an infrastructural space for planetary coordination of our design interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction.
2014, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Strelka / Moscow
$28.00 $10.00 - In stock -
We live in an age of sticky problems, whether it's climate change or the decline of the welfare state. With conventional solutions failing, a new culture of decision-making is called for. Strategic design is about applying the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges such as healthcare, education and the environment. It redefines how problems are approached and aims to deliver more resilient solutions. In this short book, Dan Hill outlines a new vocabulary of design, one that needs to be smuggled into the upper echelons of power. He asserts that, increasingly, effective design means engaging with the messy politics - the "dark matter"- taking place above the designer's head. And that may mean redesigning the organization that hires you.
2012, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 172 pages, 25 x 20 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Standard Books / Oslo
$70.00 $50.00 - Out of stock
Profusely illustrated cloth-bound first edition of first major monograph on artist Fredrik Værslev, published by Standard (Oslo), with contributions by Nicolas Ceccaldi and Gertrud Sandqvist. One of the most original and recognised voices in contemporary painting, Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev navigates between different pictorial traditions. In his practice, he focuses on the process of painting, demonstrating the possibilities and relevance of the medium today. Texts in English.
2017, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 20 x 28 cm
Published by
Capricious / New York
$75.00 $50.00 - Out of stock
A dual catalogue and archival exposé that explores the pivotal exhibition, Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women, originally curated by the late artist, Ellen Cantor, in 1993, along with its re-staging in 2016 by curator Pati Hertling and artist, Julie Tolentino.
The book also chronicles the unprecedented partnership amongst five New York City institutions. Exhibitions and programming of Cantor’s work were offered by 80WSWE, Maccarone, Foxy Productions, Participant Inc., Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Skowhegan School of Painting, and MOMA—highlighting the lush, visionary, and audacious aspects of Cantor’s drawings, paintings, curatorial projects, sculpture, assemblage, video, film, and evocative writing. Another section features a reprint of an interview between Cantor and Cerith Wyn Evans, a conversation between Lia Gangitano/Jonathan Berger and Julie Tolentino/Pati Hertling, as well as archival material from Cantor’s diary entries and never-seen sketches from Cantor’s personal papers.
LIST OF ARTISTS:
PAINTING/SCULPTURE/PHOTOGRAPHS: Lynda Benglis, Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Ellen Cantor, Patricia Cronin, Mary Beth Edelson, Nicole Eisenman, Nancy Fried, Nan Goldin, Nancy Grossman, Pnina Jalon, G.B. Jones, Doris Kloster, Joyce Kozloff, Zoe Leonard, Monica Majoli, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Semmel, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Spero, and Hannah Wilke
VIDEO/FILM: Peggy Ahwesh, Maria Beatty, Lynda Benglis, Abigail Child, Cicciolina, Kate Dymond, Azian Nurudin, Barbara Hammer, Holly Hughes, Julia Kunin, Blush Productions, Annie Sprinkle, and Ona Zee
PERFORMANCES: FlucT, luciana achugar, Kia Labeija, Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom, Zackary Drucker & Orlando Tirado, Jim Fletcher, Narcissister, niv Acosta, and Jen Rosenblit and their collaborators
2015, English
Loose-leaf A4 material in stamped C4 envelope w. stickers, postcard, 7" vinyl record, 22.9 × 32.4 cm
Ed. of 100 copies,
Published by
Bunyip Trax / Melbourne
Endless Lonely Planet / Melbourne
$10.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Endless Lonely Planet is a yearly periodical, interested in the format of a year in time. With ongoing and new contributors having the loose deadline of a year to work within, mostly… Each issue explores a different binding, and accompany formatted recording.
Issue 4 includes a 7" record (BTX051) featuring tracks from Tim Coster, Alwayse, Mshing, Lucid Castration, Noematic Oblivion, Mouving, Porpoise Torture, Roman Nails, Papaphilia, and Psychward.
The printed components in this issue include contributions from Joshua Petherick, Virginia Overell, Y3K, Counterfeitness first, F K-X D, S.T. Lore, Aurelia Guo, some random pages, and stickers. These occupy a A4 postage envelope.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 10.8 x 11.8 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$56.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Contributions by Bart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther Zonsheim
According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge.
Fedorov’s call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov’s ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program.
This book of interviews and conversations with today’s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today’s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries.
Published in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Kaye Cain-Nielsen, Stephen Squibb, Anton Vidokle
Design by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick