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:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
SAT 12—4 PM
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.
1977, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 47 pages, 27.7 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Art Metropole / Toronto
$180.00 - In stock -
Exceptionally rare, excellent reference work on artists' publications issued in 1977 by Art Metropole in Toronto, the first large-scale distributor of artists' books and publications in North America. This valuable catalogue, featuring "European titles, publications, periodicals, records, special editions, videos and films", offers works by European and American artists such as Beuys, Rainer, Polke, Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Terry Riley, Lamonte Young, Marian Zazeela, Douglas Huebler, Broodthaers, Kaprow, Piper, Buren, Reich, Cage, Snow, Darboven, Matta-Clark, Dibbets, Brion Gysin, Simone Forti, General Idea, Claes Oldenburg, Jimmy De Sana, Vito Acconci, Gilbert & George, Robert Filliou, Sol Lewitt, Ehrenberg, Filliou, Fulton, Graham, Rebecca Horn, Mel Bochner, William Burroughs, Ugo La Pietra, Urs Luthi, Hansjörg Mayer, Merz, Robert Cumming, Willats, Al Hansen, Richard Long, Philip Glass, George Brecht, Image Bank, Robert Barry, Nannucci, Donald Judd, Maria Reiche, Dennis Oppenheim, Dieter Rot, Kurt Schwitters, Giorgio Ciam, Daniel Spoerri, Ed Ruscha, Ray Johnson, Philip Corner, Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Weiner, Klaus Rinke, Les Levine, Lea Vergine, Baldessari, Ant Farm, Emmett Williams, Robert Wilson, UFO Group, Vostell, etc. with each item concisely described, and for the books, essential bibliographical information is provided. Publications from Art Metropole, periodicals, records, and videos are also listed for sale, with prices. Cover artwork features Viennese actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler's Portfolio of the 3rd Action, which is among the selections of European artists' books. Selected b/w illustrations throughout of items listed, and full-page ads for Art Metropole's "FETISH" t-shirt and General Idea's FILE magazine.
Issued privately as a mail-out catalogue, this copy includes the AM ink stamp and Canadian postage stamp on the verso, posted in 1977 to American conceptualist photographer Les Krim, in Buffalo, New York.
Average—Good copy, some chipping to extremities, small closed tear to top-left corner of cover, generally tanned/aged newsprint.
2006, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 26 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Center for Curatorial Studies Bard College / New York
$290.00 - In stock -
First edition of this very special, now very rare catalogue published in 2006 on the occasion of the major survey exhibition Witness To Her Art, featuring the work of Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and the seminal magazine Eau de Cologne, published by gallerist Monika Sprüth between 1985 and 1989. Profusely illustrated throughout with artworks by all artists, reproductions of important artist publications, installation views, and many works by other related artists, alongside texts by Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Monika Sprüth, Rhea Anastas, Michael Brenson, Norton Batkin, Johanna Burton, Aruna D’Souza, Pamela Franks, Janet Kraynak, David Levi Strauss, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ann Reynolds, Hamza Walker, and many more.
Publisher's blurb:
"This radical new study aims to change the way that some of the most influential artists of the past 40 years are seen—all of them women. Emphasizing questions of autonomy, critical intelligence and artistic intention, "Witness to Her Art" presents works by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and "Eau de Cologne," a magazine published by gallerist Monika Sprüth. The artworks are accompanied by original writings by the artists, contemporaneous criticism and newly commissioned essays by Pamela Franks, Aruna D'Souza, Johanna Burton, David Levi Strauss, Hamza Walker and Cuauhtémoc Medina. The ambitious works presented and interpreted herein invite us to consider the impact of the feminist revolution across generations while rendering obsolete any stigma associated with shows or catalogues limited to women artists. Taking its lead from Conceptualism, feminism, and from its included artists, "Witness to Her Art" reaches for art history's capacity as a medium of world-making."
Highly recommended. Very Good copy with light edge wear/rounding to stiff overlay boards.
2024, English
Softcover, 776 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$65.00 - Out of stock
“A sense of art history is part of the critical basis on which artists construct ‘a future’ of art. But the question is, which sense of art history will be shaping that future? Art history has always been far too important to be left up to art historians.”—Ian Burn, 1982
Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an exConceptual artist’.
Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting. Alongside a vast collection of his artworks, the catalogue brings together previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Ian Burn called ‘peripheral vision’. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.
Born in Geelong in 1939, Ian Burn was a conceptual artist. Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53.
Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—or, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-conceptual artist’.
Born in Geelong in 1939, Burn studied painting in Melbourne and went on to live and work in London and New York. Burn moved back to Australia in 1977 and passed away in 1993 at the age of 53.
Burn sought to grapple with how art history intersects and engages with contemporary art and political debate, arguing for a decentred view of the world. His legacy is international and can be seen in retrospective exhibitions as recent as 2022, and his work remains a key touchstone in art history.
Edited by Burn’s friend, frequent collaborator and eminent art historian, Dr Ann Stephen, this volume brings together 49 pieces of Burn’s own agile and expansive writings alongside a vast collection of his artworks. The collection concludes with reflections on Burn’s life and work from prominent figures and past collaborators in the form of memorial lectures.
Design and typesetting by Robert Milne.
Co-published by Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
1970, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
$600.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1970 edition of MoMA's landmark book on conceptual art, published to accompany this groundbreaking avant-garde show.
In the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the now legendary exhibition Information, one of the first surveys of conceptual art. Conceived by MoMA’s celebrated curator Kynaston McShine as an “international report” on contemporary trends, the show and attendant catalog together assembled the work of more than 150 artists from 15 countries to explore the parameters and possibilities of the emerging art practices of the era. Noting the participating artists’ attunement to the “mobility and change that pervades their time,” McShine underscored their interest in “ways of rapidly exchanging ideas, rather than embalming the idea in an ‘object.’” Indeed, much of the work in the exhibition engaged mass-communications systems, such as broadcast television and the postal service, and addressed viewers directly, often encouraging their participation in return.
The catalog, rather than merely document the show, functioned autonomously: it included a list of recommended reading, a chance-based index by critic Lucy Lippard, and individual artist contributions in the form of photographic documentation, textual description, drawings and diagrams—some relating to work in the exhibition and others to artworks as yet unrealized.
Artists include Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Keith Arnatt, Art & Language Press, Art & Project, Richard Artschwager, David Askevold, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Barrio, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, Bernhard & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, George Brecht, Stig Broegger, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, James Lee Byars, Jorge Luis Carballa, Christopher Cook, Roger Cutforth, Carlos D'Alessio, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Group Frontera, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Giorno Poetry Systems, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ira Joel Haber, Randy Hardy, Michael Heizer, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Peter Hutchinson, Richards Jarden, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Cildo Campos Meirelles, Marta Minujin, Robert Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, New York Graphic Workshop, Newspaper, Group Oho, Helio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, Paul Pechter, Giuseppe Penone, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Alejandro Puente, Markus Raetz, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Edward Ruscha, J.M. Sanejouand, Richard Sladden, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Erik Thygesen, John Van Saun, Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz, Bernar Venet, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson.
Kynaston McShine was formerly Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Very Good copy. Light cover wear, single spine crack, all crisp, clean interior and tightly bound copy of a book that usually sees serious page detachments. Best copy we have seen.
1999, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fine Arts Gallery - University of Maryland / Baltimore
$150.00 - In stock -
Scarce first extensive monographic catalogue published in conjunction with Adrian Piper's major survey exhibition held at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore, October 14, 1999 - January 15, 2000. Traveled to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, October 4, 2001 - January 13, 2002. Profusely illustrated in black-and-white and colour, alongside accompanying texts by Piper, Maurice Berger, Jean Fisher, Kobena Mercer, Laura Cottingham, and Dara Meyers-Kingsley. With illustrated checklist and bibliography. Cover features her "Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features" (1981) work.
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (b. 1948) is an American conceptual artist and philosopher. Her work addresses ostracism, otherness, racial passing and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media. The only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s, she has profoundly influenced the language and form of Conceptual art in America and is widely recognised today through her equally important writings.
Very Good-Fine first edition. Light tanning to edges and light bump to top-right corner.
1973 / 1997, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 173 x 213 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$70.00 - Out of stock
“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or 'dematerialized.'”—Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years
In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging, it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period. Lippard provides a new preface to this 1997 reprint edition.
Includes: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Dennis Adrian, Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Keith Arnatt, Art-Language, Richard Artschwager, Michael Asher, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, N.E. Thing Co., Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Hans Haacke, Charles Harrison, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Peter Hutchinson, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Bruce McLean, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramsden, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Willoughby Sharp, Seth Siegelaub, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Athena Tacha Spear, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wiley, Ian Wilson, La Monte Young
"Essential source book of documentation of the Conceptual Art, Land Art, Earth Art, Arte Povera, Minimal Art, Performance Art, Video Art movements. Documents the activities, day by day, month by month, year by year of artists including Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Dennis Adrian, Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Keith Arnatt, Art-Language, Richard Artschwager, Michael Asher, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, N.E. Thing Co., Josef Beuys, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Hans Haacke, Charles Harrison, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Peter Hutchinson, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Bruce McLean, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramsden, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Willoughby Sharp, Seth Siegelaub, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Athena Tacha Spear, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wiley, Ian Wilson, La Monte Young and others. "The unusual form of this provocative book intentionally reflects the chaotic network of ideas connected with so-called conceptual art or information art or idea art, in America and abroad, from 1966 to 1972. Arranged as a continuous bibliographical chronology, into which is woven a rich collection of original documents - including texts by, and taped discussions with and among, the artists involved - and annotations by Lucy R. Lippard, the book has the informal quality of a lively contemporary forum. Only a minimum of order is imposed; for the most part the reader is left to confront the curious compendium of information on his or her own, to follow changing ideas and artistic developments over the six-year period, to witness the gradual (and controversial) "dematerialization" of the art object." -- publisher's statement."
Good—Very Good copy with general light shelf wear and tanning to spine.
1997, English / Dutch
Softcover, 500 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
SUN / Nijmegen
$45.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics / Voorbij ethiek en esthetiek, a 500 page book based on the experiences during the formation, realization and evaluation of the exhibition: I + the Other. Art and the Human Condition, in the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam 1994. Edited by Ine Gevers and Jeanne Van Heeswijk.
"Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics has been compiled in the knowledge that it is impossible to avoid a history in which the meaning of ethics and aesthetics has already been fixed. Rooted in tradition, these notions determine the space and scope of contemporary practices such as fine art, exhibition-making and theory. Whenever an attempt is made to cross the dividing lines, for instance in trying to connect art with life, it becomes immediately apparent how unproductive it is to continue to com-ply with structures that are no longer functional in a technology- and information-based, postmodern society. This is particularly true when it becomes clear that notions such as ethics and aesthetics, which are basically idealistic, often have a controlling and, in this sense, limiting function. With this book we want to draw attention to the sometimes subtle, though often radical attempts to escape from the way modernity has divided the world into manageable and relatively safe specializations. The continuing institutionalization, 'museification' and 'mediaization' of our society provides an example. They seem to pull the above-mentioned obstructions even sharper into focus." — from book introduction
With contributions by Oscar van Alphen, Ute Meta Bauer, Yvonne P. Doderer, Marianne Brouwer, Martin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Simon Critchley, Helmut Draxler, Jean Fisher, Avital Geva, Ine Gevers, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Tijs Goldschmidt, Roy Villevoye, Multiple Autorenschaft, Jouke Kleerebezem, Viktor Misiano, Everlyn Nicodemus, Sadie Plant, Martha Rosler, Rob Schroder, Jorinde Seijdel, Barbara Steiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ross Sinclair, and more.
Good copy with some cover wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 456 pages, 16.8 x 23.1 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$52.00 - Out of stock
Conversations with leading women artists, composers and writers from Judy Chicago, Anohni and Lynne Tillman to Ellie Ga, Tauba Auerbach and Renee Green.
This massive volume comprises over 80 interviews published across a 13-year span of Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s career as a writer, educator, editor and cofounder of November magazine. The majority of the interviews first appeared on Artforum.com’s interviews column, which O’Neill-Butler edited for 11 years. The book is divided into two sections, “Q&A” and “As Told To”—the first comprising interviews in a traditional format and the second recast by O’Neill-Butler in the interviewee’s voice.
Interviewees include: Judy Chicago, Shannon Ebner, Carolee Schneemann, Lucy R. Lippard, Joan Semmel, Liz Deschenes, Eleanor Antin, Andrea Fraser, Anohni, Claudia Rankine, Lorrie Moore, Adrian Piper, fierce pussy, Nan Goldin, Nell Painter, Frances Stark, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Alex Bag, Agnès Varda, Lisi Raskin, Mary Mattingly, Carol Bove, Jennifer West, Aki Sasamoto, Mary Ellen Carroll, Rebecca Solnit, Rita McBride and Kim Schoenstadt, Karla Black, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Sturtevant, Rachel Foullon, Ellie Ga, Lisa Tan, Mira Schor, Jo Baer, Ruby Sky Stiler, Suzanne Lacy, Rebecca Warren, Katy Siegel, Marlene McCarty, Rachel Mason, Mary Kelly, Dianna Molzan, Lynne Tillman, Polly Apfelbaum, Jesse Jones, Dorothea Rockburne, Sarah Crowner, Lucy Skaer, Sophie Calle, Mary Beth Edelson, W.A.G.E., Mary Heilmann, Pauline Oliveros, Kathryn Andrews, Jessamyn Fiore, Aura Rosenberg, Lucy McKenzie, Rhonda Lieberman, Lucy Dodd, Hong-Kai Wang, Sakiko Sugawa, Beverly Semmes, Virginia Dwan, Jeanine Oleson, Tauba Auerbach, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, Donna J. Haraway and more.
1976, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
E P Dutton / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 printing of this fantastic and now rarely seen classic book collection of essays by internationally acclaimed writer, art critic, activist and curator, Lucy R. Lippard.
"FROM THE CENTER : Feminist Essays on Women's Art" is broken into three sections: GENERAL ESSAYS, MONOGRAPHS, and FICTION. GENERAL ESSAYS include 12 major essays such as "Sexual Politics : Art Style", "Household Images in Art", "Fragments", "What is Female Imagery", "Making Up: Role-Playing and Transformation in Women's Art", "The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art", "The Womens' Art Movement - What Next?" and more. MONOGRAPHS is made up of writings dedicated to single artists, including essays on the work of Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, Jo Baer, Joan Mitchell, Hanne Darboven, Ree Morton, Irene Siegel, Rosemarie Castoro, Louise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold, Yvonne Rainer, Judy Chicago, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and many more. A suburb collection, illustrated throughout with examples of the artists written about, including a colour plate section.
Very Good copy with cover/spine tanning, light wear.
2019, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
The 50th anniversary edition of MoMA's landmark book on conceptual art.
In the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the now legendary exhibition Information, one of the first surveys of conceptual art. Conceived by MoMA’s celebrated curator Kynaston McShine as an “international report” on contemporary trends, the show and attendant catalog together assembled the work of more than 150 artists from 15 countries to explore the parameters and possibilities of the emerging art practices of the era. Noting the participating artists’ attunement to the “mobility and change that pervades their time,” McShine underscored their interest in “ways of rapidly exchanging ideas, rather than embalming the idea in an ‘object.’” Indeed, much of the work in the exhibition engaged mass-communications systems, such as broadcast television and the postal service, and addressed viewers directly, often encouraging their participation in return.
The catalog, rather than merely document the show, functioned autonomously: it included a list of recommended reading, a chance-based index by critic Lucy Lippard, and individual artist contributions in the form of photographic documentation, textual description, drawings and diagrams—some relating to work in the exhibition and others to artworks as yet unrealized. This facsimile edition of the original Information catalog, which has long been out of print, invites reengagement with MoMA’s landmark exhibition while illuminating the early history of conceptual art.
Kynaston McShine was formerly Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Artists include Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Keith Arnatt, Art & Language Press, Art & Project, Richard Artschwager, David Askevold, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Barrio, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, Bernhard & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, George Brecht, Stig Broegger, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, James Lee Byars, Jorge Luis Carballa, Christopher Cook, Roger Cutforth, Carlos D'Alessio, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Group Frontera, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Giorno Poetry Systems, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ira Joel Haber, Randy Hardy, Michael Heizer, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Peter Hutchinson, Richards Jarden, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Cildo Campos Meirelles, Marta Minujin, Robert Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, New York Graphic Workshop, Newspaper, Group Oho, Helio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, Paul Pechter, Giuseppe Penone, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Alejandro Puente, Markus Raetz, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Edward Ruscha, J.M. Sanejouand, Richard Sladden, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Erik Thygesen, John Van Saun, Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz, Bernar Venet, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson.
2006, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 14 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. This collection of essays by art historians and artists from Europe and the Americas (including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Helen Molesworth, Isabelle Graw, Thomas Crow, Helmut Draxler, Alexander Alberro, Sabeth Buchmann, Henrik Oelsen, Edit András) introduces and develops the idea that conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art practice. Some of these contested commonplace assumptions of what art is; others served to buttress those assumptions. The bulk of the volume features newly written and highly innovative essays challenging standard interpretations of the legacy of conceptualism and discussing the influence of conceptualism's varied practices on art since the 1970s. The essays explore topics as diverse as the interrelationships between conceptualism and institutional critique, neoexpressionist painting and conceptualist paradigms, conceptual art's often-ignored complicity with design and commodity culture, the specific forms of identity politics taken up by the reception of conceptual art, and conceptualism's North/South and East/West dynamics. A few texts that continue to be crucial for critical debates within the fields of conceptual and postconceptual art practice, history, and theory have been reprinted in order to convey the vibrant and ongoing discussion on the status of art after conceptual art. Taken together, the essays will inspire an exploration of the relationship between postconceptualist practices and the beginnings of contemporary art.
2021, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$40.00 - Out of stock
An examination of the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections, with works that uses the powerlessness of art.
Cybernetics of the Poor examines the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections in the past and present. From the late 1940s on, the term cybernetics began to be used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in order to intervene in changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, under digital capitalism cybernetics has since become an economic factor (particularly in the realm of big data). In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to a new situation: a cybernetics of the poor.
Cybernetics of the Poor presents work that uses the powerlessness of art—its poverty—vis-à-vis the cybernetic machine to propose countermodels: work that is both recent and historical by artists who believed in cybernetics as a participatory, playful practice or were pioneers in delineating a counter-cybernetics. How much of what Thomas Pynchon termed “counterforce” exists within art when it is conceived as a cybernetics of the poor?
Texts by Sabeth Buchmann, Mercedes Bunz, Diedrich Diederichsen, Oier Etxeberria, Harun Farocki
With artistic contributions by Agency, Ana De Almeida, Alicja Rogalska & Vanja Smiljanić, Eleanor Antin, Cory Arcangel, Elena Asins, Paolo Cirio, Coleman Collins, Hanne Darboven, Jon Mikel Euba, Michael Hakimi, Douglas Huebler, Gema Intxausti, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mike Kelley, Ferdinand Kriwet, Agnieszka Kurant, Mario Navarro, Adrian Piper, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Heinrich Riebesehl, Pedro G. Romero, Constanze Ruhm, Jörg Schlick, Camila Sposati, Kathrin Stumreich, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Tanja Widmann, Robert Adrian X
Diedrich Diederichsen
Diedrich Diederichsen is a German author, music journalist, and cultural critic. He is one of Germany's most renowned intellectual writers at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture.
Oier Etxeberria
Oier Etxeberria is a Basque visual artist and musician. He is head of the Visual Arts at CICC Tabakalera.
2012, English
Hardcover, 304 pages, 216 x 254 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
Lucy R. Lippard's famous book, itself resembling an exhibition, is now brought full circle in an exhibition (and catalog) resembling her book.
“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’” — Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years
In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging, it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art. Nearly forty years later, the Brooklyn Museum takes Lippard’s celebrated experiment in curated concatenation as a template, turning a book that resembled an exhibition into an exhibition materializing the ideas in her book.
The artworks and essays featured in this publication recall the thrill that was tangible in Lippard's original documentation, reminding us that during the late sixties and early seventies all possible social and material parameters of art (making) were played with, worked over, inverted, reduced, expanded, and rejected. By tracing Lippard’s own activities in those years, the book also documents the early blurring of boundaries among critical, curatorial, and artistic practices.
With more than 200 images of work by dozens of artists (printed in color throughout), this book brings Lippard’s curatorial experiment full circle.
Edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin
Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Six Years' Project: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, September 14, 2012-February 3, 2013, organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum, and the independent scholar Vincent Bonin.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Siglio Press / Los Angeles
$88.00 - Out of stock
It Is Almost That collects is a phenomenal collection of twenty-six visionary image+text works by women artists and writers. Supremely imaginative in their use of word and image, these hybrid works are steeped in narrative play and subversion, inviting readers to engage in multiple modes of reading. It Is Almost That features substantial excerpts or the works in their entirety—many previously unpublished, difficult to find, or long out-of-print—by renown, little known, forgotten, and emerging artists.
The works include a painted autobiographical novel by a young artist who died in the Holocaust (Charlotte Salomon); the transformation of the front pages of newspapers into alchemical drawings (Suzanne Treister); a computer-generated chance operation that “imagines” houses and their inhabitants (Alison Knowles); the pseudo-scientific examination of mother-daughter conversations (Eleanor Antin); and drawings called “body maps,” inscribed with stories of HIV-positive South African women (Bambanani Women’s Group), among almost two dozen others.
Arranged as a constellation with various kinds of connective tissue, It Is Almost That eschews traditional categories in order to reorient the reader to see the works outside or beyond their recognizable affiliations. Both literary and art audiences will discover new works, new artists and writers, as well as new ways of reading.
"Because the frame is image+text, we’re reminded that all of us generally do more. Female artists don’t just stay in their disciplines; we experience, we forage, we play. Intuitively and practically speaking, It Is Almost That is, in effect, a handbook. It, by presenting female art history, shows us how to be an artist."—EILEEN MYLES, The Poetry Foundation
CONTRIBUTORS: Eleanor Antin, Bambanani Women’s Group, Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cozette de Charmoy, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Susan Hiller, Dorothy Iannone, Bhanu Kapil & Rohini Kapil, Helen Kim, Alison Knowles, Ketty La Rocca, Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, Charlotte Salomon, Geneviéve Seillè, Molly Springfield, Cole Swensen & Shari DeGraw, Suzanne Treister, Erica Van Horn & Laurie Clark, Carrie Mae Weems, Hannah Weiner, Sue Williams, and Unica Zürn.
2016, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Center for Book Arts / New York
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Regine Ehleiter, Michalis Pichler, Seth Siegelaub
Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub spans an arc of tension between the works of Seth Siegelaub and contemporary cultural production. It features an interview with Seth Siegelaub, two essays by Regine Ehleiter and Michalis Pichler, and an extensively illustrated catalogue with bibliographic details.
In preparation for the project, Siegelaub and Pichler met twice in Amsterdam, where they had a long recorded conversation about books, living with books, being intimately connected with books, and producing books, and about the recent emergence of contemporary publications that show clear reference to books Siegelaub had produced, both piracies and homages, and not always to his delight.
Books by Siegelaub that are often paraphrased include the Xerox Book (1968), which was printed in offset and has since been xeroxed by various artists and publishers in many different ways, the catalogue exhibitions from 1969, as well as Lawrence Weiner’s Statements (1968). These publications are often taken as starting points for new projects, which are derivative and yet substantial artworks in their own right. Also, Siegelaub’s engagement with the Art Workers’ Coalition and subsequent draft of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement has had wide reception and reaction in contemporary art and activism.
“The works presented in Michalis Pichler’s catalogue Books and Ideas after Seth Siegelaub reinvent Siegelaub’s renowned distinction between primary and secondary information.”
—Annette Gilbert, editor of Reprint: Appropriation (&) Literature and Publishing as Artistic Practice
“This anthology provides a welcome overview of the highly innovative exhibition and distribution practices developed by Seth Siegelaub in the late 1960s and the 1970s.”
—Alexander Alberro, author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity
“Seth Siegelaub was largely responsible for publicizing and promoting Conceptual art in the 1960s, but as Books and Ideas documents, he has continued to be a provocation and inspiration almost half a century after his abrupt exit from the art world he helped to create. Moreover, this book provides a context for Pichler’s own brand of conceptual practices. If part of Siegelaub’s genius was to reconceive exhibition as publication, Pichler gives us a catalogue of catalogues exhibiting the proliferation of mirrors which line the hall of Conceptual art’s legacy. In the pages of Books and Ideas, secondary information, accordingly, becomes primary.”
—Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium and Reading the Illegible
Copublished with the Center for Book Arts, New York
Design by Burak Yilmaz Kececiler
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$58.00 - Out of stock
Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective: Between Dematerialization and Documentation focuses on the curatorial practice of exhibiting conceptual art. The fact that conceptual works are not object-based, creates challenges in exhibiting or re-exhibiting them. This book offers various perspectives on how to handle conceptual art in the context of the museum, based on three detailed case studies and an extensive introduction in which the paradox of conceptual art is analyzed. It also elaborates on the history of exhibiting conceptual artworks, and on the influence of curators in their canonization.
The aim of the book is not to offer clear-cut practical solutions, but to raise awareness of the issue and the different ways of dealing with it within the traditional curatorial field. It is relevant for students of art and culture (particularly in museum and curatorial studies), art and museum professionals, and everyone interested in the art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Nathalie Zonnenberg is an art historian and curator. She holds a PhD in Art History from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (NL). Zonnenberg regularly writes on contemporary art, and she lectures at the post-graduate Curatorial Studies programme at KASK/the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (BE).
2020, English
Softcover, 350 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$50.00 - In stock -
Exploring the relationship between art and pop music over the last fifty years.
Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what drew John Lennon, in turn, to visual art? Why, in 1982, did Joseph Beuys record the pop single “Sonne statt Reagan,” and why, around the same time did, West German artists such as Michaela Melián move into pop music?
In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Heiser looks closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. The seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring a pop and art history of more than fifty years, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while he points toward radical alternatives.
2016, English
Softcover, 544 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Paper Monument / New York
$49.00 - Out of stock
edited by Jennifer Liese
Since the turn of the millennium, artists have been writing, and circulating their writing, like never before. The seventy-five texts gathered here — essays, criticism, manifestos, fiction, diaries, scripts, blog posts, and tweets — chart a complex era in the art world and the world at large, weighing in on the exigencies of our times in unexpected and inventive ways.
With Contributions By:
Greg Allen, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Fia Backström, Fiona Banner, Bill Beckley, Caroline Bergvall, Bernadette Corporation, Xu Bing, Gregg Bordowitz, James Bridle, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Molly Crabapple, Critical Art Ensemble, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, David Diao, Jimmie Durham, Shannon Ebner, Harrell Fletcher, Andrea Fraser, Coco Fusco, Rainer Ganahl, Ryan Gander, Mariam Ghani, Renée Green, Deanna Havas, Pablo Helguera, Karl Holmqvist, Ashley Hunt, Juliana Huxtable, Emily Jacir, Helen Johnson, Ronald Jones, Nina Katchadourian, Mike Kelley, John Kelsey, Jutta Koether, Glenn Ligon, Yve Lomax, LTTR, Jill Magid, Josiah Mcelheny, John Miller, Naeem Mohaiemen, Nástio Mosquito, Takashi Murakami, Jayson Musson, Olu Oguibe, Marisa Olson, Şener Özmen, Katrina Palmer, Adam Pendleton, Mai-Thu Perret, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Seth Price, Raqs Media Collective, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Kay Rosen, Peter Rostovsky/David Geers, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Mira Schor, Karin Schneider and Nicolás Guagnini, Michael Schwab, Gregory Sholette, Slavs And Tatars, Cally Spooner, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Koki Tanaka, Ryan Trecartin, Suzanne Treister, Dmitry Vilensky, W.A.G.E., Mary Walling Blackburn, Ai Weiwei, The Yes Men, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and Qiu Zhijie
Praise for Social Medium:
"A thoroughly engrossing read ... entertaining as well as intellectually stimulating."
—Oliver Basciano, ArtReview
"The distinct textures of these individual voices together produce a larger portrait – not of a collective, but of art with a capital A: something far from prescription or cohesion, unable to be contained, requiring the work and words of many."
— Jennifer Krasinski, Frieze
“As this indispensable anthology so engagingly demonstrates, legions of artists armed with laptops have for the past fifteen years brilliantly hacked the ways we think about 21st-century culture and politics. Full of imaginative texts and revolutionary ideas, this is a user’s guide to the postinternet era.”
—Brian Wallis, editor of Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists
“This is such a beautiful book because the real thought balloon of the art world is exactly these brainy and ecstatic citizens’ writings. Hang out a lot with them please — gain everything and miss nothing. Watch ‘democracy’ get palped and monitored, challenged and witnessed here. I’d call Social Medium a deep vacation into the present, which we totally need.”
— Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
2018, English / German
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
The September issue of Texte zur Kunst focuses on Amerika (U.S. America principally): the land, the idea, and all that seems to come with it. What is Amerika today other than a contradiction between brute political reality and a largely fictional self-image, where fiction says as much about fact as “alternative facts” say about the truth? Within this contradiction, this issue tries to imagine modes of engaging with the current political machinery without opting for the one-dimensional dive into micropolitics that has plagued much recent activist discourse. The Trump regime has introduced a new form of politics whose tactics are closer to artistic practice—inventing parallel truths and questioning facts—than anything like traditional governance. As such, those familiar with art are in a unique position to offer an analysis of the specific forms that define contemporary politics in Amerika. We have thus commissioned artists and critics to come up with new strategies for analyzing the rampant barbarism, resisting the urge to sink into paralysis and defeat in the face of the endless onslaught.
Issue No. 111 / September 2018 "America"
Table Of Contents :
Foreword
Prefaces
Colin Lang
- The Horror, Vacui
Ken Okiishi -
Liberty and Justice For All, Not Us
Aria Dean -
Trauma And Virtuality
Letter To A Friend In New York / By Isabelle Graw
The Golden Hoard / Conversation With Andrea Fraser
Sina Najaf - i
The American Dream State
Robert F. Reid-Pharr -
What We Dare Not Remember
New Development
Is Space The Place? / Eva Díaz On Feminist Futures In The Anthropocene
Love Work Cinema
Between Bildersturm And Artistic Research / Rainer Bellenbaum About Films From The Years Around 1968 In The Historical Program Of The Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
Reviews
Decolonialized Narrative In The National Art Temple / Susanne Von Falkenhausen On "Hello World" At Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
That Fluctuating Moment / Jesi Khadivi At The 10Th Berlin Biennale
The Silent Ship / Övül Ö. Durmusoglu On Manifesta 12 In Palermo
Love And Salt / Adrienne Rooney On Adrian Piper At The Museum Of Modern Art, New York
Tracks Of Disappearance / Tobi Maier About Bruce Nauman In The Schaulager, Basel
Man In The Mirror / Dan Kidner On "Picasso 1932 - Love, Fame, Tragedy" At Tate Modern, London
In The Bure Of The Circle / Marietta Kesting About Raster-Noton In The Kunstbau Lenbachhaus, Munich
Looking But Not Seeing? / Darla Migan On Faith Ring Gold At Weiss Berlin
Mad / Ame / Jenny Nachtigall About Jutta Koether At The Museum Brandhorst, Munich
If You Are Once Big / Nadja Abt About Philip Wiegard At Between Bridges, Berlin
Marked By Trade / Sven Lütticken On "Trade Markings" At The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Amazone Retired / Tina Schulz On Astrid Klein In The Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg
Born To Die / Colin Lang On Jeanette Mundt At Société, Berlin
Limitations Of Utopia / Christina Irrgang On Cyril Lachauer In The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
Hereditary Peers / Saim Demircan On Luke Willis Thompson At Kunsthalle Basel
Zoology Of The Falls / Niklas Lichti On Peter Wächtler With Lars Friedrich, Berlin
Below The Surf / Steven Warwick On Georgie Nettell At The Kunstbunker Forum For Contemporary Art, Nuremberg
The Hour Of The Historics / Ariane Müller About Valie Export At The Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Foreign Powers / Johanna Burton On Zoe Leonard At The Whitney Museum Of American Art
Committee Criteria / Kerstin Stakemeier On Henrike Naumann At The Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Related Practices / Sandra Neugärtner On Anni Albers In The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Term (s) Of Endearment / Kathi Hofer On "Milieu" At After The Butcher, Berlin
Obituary
Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018)
Edition
Cecily Brown
Mark Leckey
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 23 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
The first anthology to investigate what contemporary notions of practice mean for art, tracing their development and speculating on where this leads.
“Practice” is one of the key words of contemporary art, used in contexts ranging from artists' descriptions of their practice to curatorial practice, from social practice to practice-based research. This is the first anthology to investigate what contemporary notions of practice mean for art, tracing their development and speculating on where this leads.
Reframing the question of practice offers new ways of reading the history of art and of evaluating particular forms of practice-based art. Once used to denote “doing,” as distinct from thinking and making, today the term can convey associations of political action (praxis), professional activity, discipline, or rehearsal, and signal a shift away from the self-enclosed artwork or medium to open-ended actions, series, processes, and projects. Although the turn to practice might promise freedom from finality or eventfulness, it also reflects the neoliberal pressures to train oneself, to perform, and to rehearse a marketable set of skills. This book offers an indispensible guide to the art history and theoretical framework of art-as-practice, clarifying the complex issues at stake in thinking about and enacting practice.
Artists surveyed include Francis Alys, Arakawa, Rebecca Belmore, AA Bronson, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Andrea Fraser, Madeline Gins, Tehching Hsieh, Mary Kelly, Henri Michaux, Linda M. Montano, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Raivo Puusemp, Rammellzee, Gerhard Richter, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Gregory Sholette, Aliza Shvarts, Situationist International, Jonas Staal, Stelarc, Fiona Tan, Min Tanaka, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Cecilia Vicuña
Writers include Kathy Acker, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Lauren Berlant, Gregg Bordowitz, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Judith Butler, Jennifer Doyle, Okwui Enwezor, Saidiya V. Hartman, Maulana Karenga, Julia Kristeva, Saba Mahmood, Viktor Misiano, Fred Moten, Paul B. Preciado, Lane Relyea, Suely Rolnik, Peter Sloterdijk, Isabelle Stengers, Winnie Won Yin Wong
Part of the Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art series
2016, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$55.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
The multiple platforms of the digital era have not diminished the role of the magazine for artists as an alternative medium and experimental space. Whether printed on paper or electronically generated, the artist’s magazine continues to be a place where new ideas and forms can be imagined as well as a significant site of artistic production. Intrinsically collaborative, including readers’ active engagement, the magazine is an inherently open form that generates constantly evolving relationships. It was integral to the emergence of art criticism in the Enlightenment period and to the development of artistic dialogues around notions of culture, politics, and the public from the modern era avant-gardes to the present.
This collection contextualizes the current condition and potential of the artist’s magazine, surveying the art worlds it has created and then superseded; the commercial media forms it has critically appropriated, intervened in, or subverted; the alternative DIY cultures it has brought into being; and the expanded fields of cultural production, exchange, and distribution it continues to engender. In addition to surveying case studies of transformational magazines from the early 1960s onwards, The Magazineincludes a wide-ranging archive of key editorial statements, from eighteenth-century Weimar to twenty-first century Bangkok, Cape Town, and Delhi.
Artists surveyed include
Can Altay, Ei Arakawa, Julieta Aranda, Tania Bruguera, Maurizio Cattelan, Eduardo Costa, Dexter Sinister, Rimma Gerlovina, Valeriy Gerlovin, Robert Heinecken, John Holmstrom, John Knight, Silvia Kolbowski, Lee Lozano, Josephine Meckseper, Clemente Padin, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, Seth Price, Raqs Media Collective, Riot Grrrl, Martha Rosler, Sanaa Seif, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Scott Treleaven, Triple Canopy, Anton Vidokle
Writers include
Saul Anton, Stewart Brand, Jack Burnham, Johanna Burton, Thomas Crow, Edit DeAk, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jürgen Habermas, Martina Köppel-Yang, Antje Krause-Wahl, Lucy Lippard, Caolan Madden, Valentina Parisi, Howardena Pindell, Georg Schöllhammer, Nancy Spector, Sally Stein, Reiko Tomii, Jud Yalkut, Vivian Ziherl
1996, English
Softcover, 371 pages, 25.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - Out of stock
Adrian Piper joins the ranks of writer-artists who have provided much of the basic and most reliable literature on modern and contemporary art. Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years. Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context. The meta-art essays in Volume I document and examine her artistic practice – often humorous, frequently disturbing.
This publication is now out-of-print.
2009, English
Hardcover, 512 pages (60 b&w ills), 178 x 229 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$105.00 $80.00 - Out of stock
"Institutional critique" is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own housing in galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when--driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art--institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present by gathering writings and representative art projects of artists from across Europe and throughout the Americas who developed and extended the genre. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique. Like Alberro and Stimson's Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance.Artists represented include Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers' Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d'Etudes, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann.
2017, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$60.00 $20.00 - In stock -
'The Serving Library Annual' comprises a number of individual “Bulletins” organized around a theme for an international audience of designers, artists, writers, and researchers. Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. It deals with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors include Hilton Als, Tauba Auerbach, Anne Carson, Mark Leckey, Adrian Piper, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms.