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.
2000, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 17.15 x 24.13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Granary Books / New York
$90.00 $40.00 - In stock -
First edition of this out-of-print volume of Alison Knowles collage journal spanning 30 years.
Once upon a time [composer] Jim Tenney and I went walking in the woods. We came to a clearing and there under a tree was an arrangement of toy locomotives in the middle of nowhere. Pausing, we mused, where were they going, where had they been?
Attempting to write just such an imaginative history of her own life, and its comings and goings, New York artist Alison Knowles has compiled Footnotes—a collection of collage pages made from small, red travel books collected over 30 years, then pasted up and redrawn, in no definite or logical order. The settings of these collages range from Germany to Japan (but always coming back to New York), with a loosely woven context provided by jotted-down ideas and overheard conversations between her friends. These delicate pencil drawings convey a sense of time lost and regained, displacement and reorientation, of the scattered nature of our interior lives.
Alison Knowles (b. 1933) is an American visual artist and a founding member of the Fluxus movement, internationally known for her installations, performances, soundworks, and publications.
Very Good copy with light tanning to edges of book block.
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.
1990, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 512 pages, 29.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Biennale of Sydney / Sydney
$120.00 - In stock -
First edition of the incredible (huge) catalogue published to accompany the 8th Biennale of Sydney 1990 "The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art", held 11 April-3 June 1990 in Sydney across various venues. The eighth Biennale began from ‘a trio of Dada originators’: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. A large number of artists across generations joined these key figures in Artistic Director René Block’s exploration of the ‘readymade’ in twentieth-century art, which aimed to highlight ‘its invention and pure use by Duchamp, to its resurgence in Nouveau Realism, Pop Art, and Fluxus of the 60s, all the way to new versions by young contemporary artists’. Pop, fluxus and conceptual artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Alison Knowles, César, George Brecht, Nam Jun Paik and Piero Manzoni were shown alongside Rosemarie Trockel, John Nixon, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Janet Burchill, Peter Tyndall, Robert Rooney, Rosalie Gascoigne, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, Hans Haacke, Rebecca Horn, Sophie Calle, Jeff Koons, Allan Kaprow, Jenny Holzer, Robert Gober, Jill Scott, Bill Culbert, Stanley Brouwn, Peter Cripps, Terry Fox, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fischli & Weiss, KP Brehmer, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Rot, Hanne Darboven, Robert MacPherson, Jackie Redgate, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Bloom, Oyvind Fahlstrom, amongst so many others. The industrial Bond Store at Millers Point featured site-specific works by artists such as Olaf Metzel and Simone Mangos, and several works were created on-site in Sydney, amplifying Block’s notion of the Biennale as a ‘workshop’. A comprehensive satellite program of music, performance, lectures, symposia, workshops and exhibitions at various Sydney venues complemented the exhibition, with Carles Santos’ piano recital on a barge in Sydney Harbour a highlight. Five satellite exhibitions included On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Alain Fleischer, Fluxus and Broken Record, which featured artist’s experimentations with audio recordings, vinyl and album artwork – from John Cage’s 33 1/3 composition for 12 record players to Milan Knížák’s record-collages.
An incredible Sydney biennale, captured here across over 500 pages conceived and realised by René Block and Jennifer Cook - profusely illustrated with examples of all artists works and accompanying texts throughout by Lynne Cooke, Bernice Murphy, Anne Marie Freybourg, Dick Higgins, René Block and Jennifer Cook. Very Good copy with only general wear/ageing. Bright and clean, includes tanned original dust jacket now preserved under plastic wrap.
Having represented Beuys, Richter and Polke, German gallery owner, art publisher, art collector and curator René Block (born 1942) ranks among the central figures of the 1960s avant-garde.
Very Good copy with original dust jacket. Common tanning to dust jacket spine, now preserved under mylar wrap.
2024, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 26.7 x 35.6 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$44.00 - Out of stock
The Fluxus Newspaper collects all eleven newspapers published by the Fluxus art collective between January 1964 and March 1979. The newspapers were edited by an ever-changing team of artists known as the Fluxus Editorial Council for Fluxus and every issue, except the last two, was designed by Fluxus founder George Maciunas.
Although published irregularly, the newspapers were used to promote Fluxus events and publications, especially the group’s famous multiples and Fluxkits, with advertising materials, order forms, and pricelists interspersed throughout. More than just a space for promotion and information, the Fluxus newspapers featured the work of over sixty artists as well as appropriated newspaper headlines, advertisements, articles, and comic strips that are indicative of the group’s anti-art sensibility and characteristic humour.
The Fluxus Newspaper is exemplative of the 'do-it-yourself' creative attitude characteristic of Fluxus – an approach that is collaborative, interdisciplinary, anti-commercial, humorous, and open to anyone. The periodical is also an early example of the artist newspaper, a medium which grew out of the underground press movement and flourished in the late 60s and 70s as artists began to seek new mediums for presenting and distributing their work.
Artists featured in The Fluxus Newspaper include: Ay-O, Carol Bergé, Joseph Beuys, Elaine Bloedow, George Brecht, Christo, Philip Corner, Walter De Maria, Willem de Ridder, Bern Erismann, Nye Ffarrabas [participating as Bici Forbes], Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Carolyn Krumm, Heinz Gappmayr, Eugen Gomringer, Raymond Hains, Dick Higgins, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Tatsu Izumi, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Allan Kaprow, Milan Knížak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Ruth Krauss, Philip Krumm, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Hans Nordenström, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, James Riddle, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Tomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, Christer Strömholm, Yasunao Tone, Stan VanDerBeek, Ben Vautier, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, Yoshimasa Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, William S. Wilson, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela.
80 pages, 26.7 x 35.6cm, softcover, Primary Information (New York).
1974, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Environments and Happenings by painter and poet Adrian Henri, published by Thames & Hudson in 1974, forms one of the first mainstream book surveys to trace the phenomenon of environmental/performative/total living artworks that became prevalent in the 1960s/70s. This historical study is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with many international works from Fluxus to Zero to Dolle Mina to Nouveau Réalisme to Provo to Gutai to The Situationists and much more. Includes the works of Joseph Beuys, Clarence Schmidt, Ray Johnson, Öyvind Fahlström, Paul Thek, Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Guerllia Art Action Group, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell, Gustav Metzger, Peter Kuttner, Jackson Pollock, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Situationist International, Ferdinand Kriwet, Klaus Rinke, Duane Hanson, A-Yo, Meret Oppenheim, Space Structure Workshop, Ferdinand Cheval, Dolle Mina (Mad Mina), Robert Smithson, Jeff Nuttall, Stefan Wewerka, Christo, Dennis Oppenheim, Vladimir Tatlin, Provo, Barry Flanagan, Andy Warhol, Meredith Monk, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Ed Keinholz, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Gilardi, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Les Levine, James Rosenquist, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Eduardo Paolozzi, and many many more. Includes reproductions of performance scripts, partial chronology, etc.
Very Good copy, previous owner name to front endpaper.
1985, German
Softcover, 736 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Nationalgalerie / Berlin
$40.00 - In stock -
Enormous 700+ page volume about "Art in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945—1985", published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, September 27, 1985—January 21, 1986. Profusely illustrated in colour with many works by Vostell, Baselitz, Beuys, Polke, Richter, Palermo, Klapheck, Darboven, Schultze, Uecker, Horn, Lüpertz, Haacke, Ruthenbeck, Antes, the Bechers, Rinke, Gerz, Erhard Walther, Penck, Knowles, Higgins, June Paik, Maciunas, Christiansen, Filliou, Brecht, Kriwet, Roth, Ulrichs, and many more, accompanied by texts in German, bibliography and index.
Good copy, some rubbing to the cover boards, light wear, bumping with age/size.
English / German
Softcover (+ CD), 188 pages, 18 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Errant Bodies / Berlin
Smart Art Press / Michigan
$70.00 - Out of stock
First English edition, long out-of-print. CD included.
Site of Sound is an anthology focusing on current trends in experimental music, sound art and audio theories, featuring writings, visual works, interviews and artist projects by leading experimental composers, sound-artists, and architects whose work concerns itself with architectural and acoustic space, sound sculpture, field/environmental investigation and recording, and site-specificity. Complementing this are theoretical, fictional and diaristic writings by contemporary authors, cartographers and ecologists."—publisher's statement.
Edited by Brandon LaBelle and Steve Roden. Artists and contributors include Alison Knowles, Achim Wollscheid, Jalal Toufic, Hildegard Westerkamp, Phillip Corner, Christina Kubisch, Giancarlo Toniutti, Jake Tilson, Brandon LaBelle, Rolf Julius, Leif Elggren, CM von Hausswolff, Steve Peters, Ralf Wehowsky, David Dunn, Christof Migone, Loren Chasse, Moniek Darge, Michael Brewster, Max Eastley, Tim Robinson, Steve Roden, Rupert Loydell, Tom Marioni, Pierre Koenig, the Stalacpipe Organ at Luray Caverns, WrK, Minoru Sato, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Jio Shimizu. Includes audio CD featuring many of the featured works.
As New.
2022, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 15 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$66.00 - Out of stock
A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.
Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher. Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.
Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.
2022, English / French
Softcover (w. folded poster dust jacket), 512 pages, 13 x 17 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
$67.00 - Out of stock
An anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance, gathered and presented by Elena Biserna.
Walking from Scores is a hundred or so collection of non site-specific protocols, instructions and textual and graphic scores centred on walking, listening and playing sound in urban environment. It explores the relationship between art and the everyday, the dynamics of sound and listening in various environments and the (porous) frontiers between artists and audiences. It starts with two premises: an interest in walking envisaged as a relational practice and tactic enabling us to read and rewrite space; an interpretation of scores understood as open invitations and catalysers of action in the tradition of Fluxus event scores.
With scores and texts by Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna & Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knížák, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jirí Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Cesare Pietroiusti, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.
Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille, France. She is associate researcher at PRI SM (AMU / CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, "situated" art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, sociocultural processes, the public and political sphere. Her writings have appeared in several publications. As a curator, she has collaborated with different organisations and presented her projects internationally.
1981, English
Hardcover (library bound), 350 pages, 28 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schirmer Books / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
Library hardbound copy of the rare Scores: An Anthology of New Music, edited by Roger Johnson and published in 1981. Wonderful, heavy 350 page collection of New Music scores from a wide cross-section of the most innovative "avant-garde" or "experimental" artists of the time, spanning various categories, schools and movements. Includes the work of Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, Harold Budd, Carole Weber, Philip Corner, Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine, Michael Nyman, Joan La Barbara, Otto Luening, James Tenney, Dick Higgins, Marion Brown, Jana Haimsohn, Jon Gibson, Trevor Wishart, Alison Knowles, Daniel Lentz, Gordon Mumma, Laurie Anderson, Terry Riley, and many others. Expansive chapters of scores throughout the anthology include: "Exercises, Rituals, and Meditations"; "Music For Voices"; "Percussion Music"; "Piano Music"; Music for Instruments"; "Electronic Music"; "Music for Mixed Ensembles"; "Music/Theater/Dance Pieces"; accompanied by composer biographies, a directory of publishers, distributors and agents for New Music, Bibliography, and Index.
Nicely preserved library hardbound copy of this usually very fragile softcover book. Light associated library markings not effecting content pages, a generally very tight, clean copy.
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.
2015, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 13 x 20 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$52.00 - Out of stock
Primary Information reprint of the seminal book, Fantastic Architecture, first published in 1969 by Droste Verlag in German (with the title Pop Architektur) and later in 1970 by Something Else Press as Fantastic Architecture. Edited by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell, this artist’s book/anthology explores the boundaries between pop art and architecture through writings and projects by key artists and thinkers of the 1960s and earlier—from John Cage and Buckminster Fuller to Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys. It will retain the book’s unique design, specifically its Mylar inserts, which add unique depth and elaborate the publication’s content.
Contributors to this publication are Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, Erich Buchholz, Pol Bury, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jan Dibbets, Robert Filliou, Buckminster Fuller, Geoffrey Hendricks, Richard Hamilton, Raoul Hausmann, Michael Heizer, Jan Jacob Herman, Bici Hendricks, Dick Higgins, K.H. Hoedicke, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Addi Koepcke, Franz Mon, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, GerhardRühm, Diter Rot, Carolee Schneemann, Kurt Schwitters, Daniel Spoerri, Frances Starr, Jean Tinguely, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka.
2019, English
Softcover, 273 pages, 20.5 x 27 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$68.00 - Out of stock
Tacit Knowledge provides an insight into the complex artistic and educational practices that characterized the first decade of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). There is a special focus on the conceptual and feminist strategies developed in and from John Baldessari’s Post Studio class as well as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program, which was initiated in 1970 and brought to the newly founded art school in 1971.
As Post Studio and feminist practices at CalArts are often characterized by the specific entanglement of cognitive and (habitual) bodily forms of knowledge, the idea of tacit knowledge, and thus learning through social and performative contexts of action, functions as an overarching principle linking all the contributions in the book.
Including short introductions on artists such as Baldessari, Alison Knowles, Barbara Bloom, Matt Mullican, James Welling, Jack Goldstein and others, texts by Paulo Friere, Peter Plagens, Michael Polanyi and Daniel Buren, in-depth case studies on individual works and a broad range of documental and photographic material, Tacit Knowledge is designed in the style of a magazine, allowing a diverse and lively approach to the ideas shaping the early years of CalArts.
Authors: Kim Albrecht, Lea Becker, Katharina Brandt, Léïla Douliba, Carla Gabriel, Jennifer Gaschler, Pauline Gründing, Verena Kittel, Friederike Krause, Vivien Lambert, Annette Jael Lehmann, Alice Rugai, Jeffrey Schnapp, Anna Sønderup
2019, English
Softcover magazine in folder w. poster, 20 x 20 cm
Ed. of 1500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$48.00 - Out of stock
Originally published in the mid-1970s, Womens Work was a magazine that sought to highlight the overlooked work of female artists working at the cusp of the visual arts, music, and performance. The magazine was edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood and featured text-based and instructional performance scores by the following 25 artists, composers, and choreographers:
Beth Anderon, Ruth Anderson, Jacki Apple, Barbara Benary, Sari Dienes, Nye Ffarrabas (participating as Bici Forbes), Simone Forti, Wendy Greenberg, Heidi Von Gunden, Françoise Janicot, Alison Knowles, Christina Kubisch, Carol Law, Annea Lockwood (also included as Anna Lockwood), Mary Lucier, Lisa Mikulchik, Ann Noël (included as Ann Williams), Pauline Oliveros, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Elaine Summers, Carole Weber, Julie Winter, and Marilyn Wood.
The magazine was designed by Alison Knowles, who deliberately chose off-white paper and brown inks as a contrast to the sterile, white-paged publications prevalent at the time. The works contained in the magazine range in scope and take on a multitude of forms, employing both typed and written text, often with visual elements such as diagrams, drawings, and photographic images. The editors were and remain adamant that the work should be performed; that they not remain static as an artifact.
We wanted to publish work which other people could pick up and do: that aspect of it was really important…this was not anecdotal, this was not archival material, it was live material. You look at a score, you do it. – Annea Lockwood
The first issue, published in 1975, took the form of a saddle-stitched magazine and the second, published in 1978, took the form of a fold-out poster. This facsimile edition reproduces both and houses them in a custom self-folding box. Womens Work is produced in an edition of 1,500 copies.
Alison Knowles (b. 1933) is a conceptual artist known for intermedia works in text, graphics, sound, installations, transvironments, performances, paperworks and publishing. She is a founding member of Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally launched in 1962. Her most recent retrospective was at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2016. In 2019 she debuted in Havana, Cuba.
Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) is an artist and composer whose lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources is reflected in her multidisciplinary work, which has incorporated chamber music, performance, electronic and environmental sound, and visual art. Recent works include commissions for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Thomas Buckner and the S.E.M. Ensemble, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. She is a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award.
2011 / 2015, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$28.00 - Out of stock
Why has the concept of contingency taken on a marked importance both in contemporary philosophy and in contemporary art practice? And if this simultaneity derives from parallel problems met within the two different fields, what are their common roots? Beyond acknowledging the contingent nature of tradition, institutions, and practices, recent speculative philosophies of 'absolute contingency' demand a radical revision of the ways in which we conceive of our interaction with unknowable materialities, and pose a challenge to both probabilistic management and process-driven affirmation of contingency.The book documents the event held at Thomas Dane Gallery in February of 2011 that coincided with the show entitled New York to London and Back. The show featured work by Kristen Alvanson, Hans Bellmer, Liz Deschenes, Thomas Eggerer, Rachel Harrison, Gareth James, Alison Knowles, Sam Lewitt, Scott Lyall, R. H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Raha Raissnia, Jimmy Raskin, Blake Rayne, Pamela Rosenkranz, Pieter Schoolwerth, Amy Sillman and Cheyney Thompson.
In an unprecedented overlapping of the contexts of philosophical, financial, and art worlds, The Medium of Contingency event brought together in discussion Robin Mackay, Reza Negarestani, Elie Ayache, Matthew Poole, Miguel Abreu and Scott Lyall. This publication includes presentations by each of the participants and an edited transcript of the discussion.
Contents
ROBIN MACKAY - Introduction: Three Figures of Contingency
REZA NEGARESTANI - Contingency and Complicity
ELIE AYACHE - In The Middle of The Event
MATTHEW POOLE - Art, Human Capital, and the Medium of Contingency
MIGUEL ABREU, ELIE AYACHE, SCOTT LYALL, ROBIN MACKAY, REZA NEGARESTANI, MATTHEW POOLE - Discussion
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
NEW YORK TO LONDON AND BACK: LIST OF WORKS
1984, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
A Good copy throughout, with cover rubbing and corner bumping. Tightly bound and clean copy internally.
1970, English / German
Softcover, 300 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Kölnischer Kunstverein / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
The great "Happening & Fluxus" book, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 1970, curated by Harald Szeemann.
This exhaustive Fluxus document is illustrated heavily throughout and broken into two important sections : 1. Chronology 1959-1970 (a detailed cataloguing of this incredible period of happenings, actions, concerts, meals, exhibitions and any related events, illustrated with photography along with dates, locations, those involved, and reproductions of the related ephemera), 2. Bibliography 1959-1970 (again heavily illustrated with detailed cataloguing of printed material about Fluxus and related actions, artists, exhibitions, performances, as well as a detailed listing for each featured artist of their publications, writings, art editions, etc). Book includes works by Wolf Vostell, Daniel Spoerri, Nam June Paik, Tetsumi Kudo, Tadeusz Kantor, Dick Higgins, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Claes Oldenburg, Alison Knowles, Robert Filliou, Stanley Brouwn, Bazon Brock, Joseph Beuys, Eric Anderson, Viennese Actionists, Charlotte Moorman, Günter Brus, Emmett Williams, Ben Vautier, Carolee Schneemann, Otto Muehl, Robert Watts, Al Hansen, Henry Flynt, Philip Corner, Henning Christiansen, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and many more.
First major compilation of this material compiled by Harald Szeemann to accompany a now legendary exhibition.
"There is neither here nor in the exhibition, a fix-ready answer to the question: What is happening, what is Fluxus."
1970, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 200 pages, 13 x 20 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Something Else Press / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
First US edition of this seminal, now very collectable book, "Fantastic Architecture", published in 1970 by Something Else Press, New York (and first published in 1969 by Droste Verlag in German with the title "Pop Architektur". Edited by Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell, this artist’s book/anthology explores the boundaries between pop art and architecture through writings and projects by key artists and thinkers of the 1960s and earlier—from John Cage and Buckminster Fuller to Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys.
Contributors to this publication are Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, Erich Buchholz, Pol Bury, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jan Dibbets, Robert Filliou, Buckminster Fuller, Geoffrey Hendricks, Richard Hamilton, Raoul Hausmann, Michael Heizer, Jan Jacob Herman, Bici Hendricks, Dick Higgins, K.H. Hoedicke, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Addi Koepcke, Franz Mon, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, GerhardRühm, Diter Rot, Carolee Schneemann, Kurt Schwitters, Daniel Spoerri, Frances Starr, Jean Tinguely, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Lawrence Weiner, Stefan Wewerka.
Very Good copy of the first English edition, with Very Good dust jacket and all mylar pages intact.
2010, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
The chance situation or random event—whether as a strategy or as a subject of investigation—has been central to many artists' practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But why—a century after Dada and Surrealism's first systematic enquiries—does chance remain a key strategy in artists' investigations into the contemporary world?The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young
Writers include: Paul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Sarat Maharaj, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Sarah Valdez, Katharina VossenkuhlDocuments of Contemporary Art series
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London
1998, German
Hardcover, 366 pages, 22.5 x 31 cm
1st German edition, Out of print title / used / very good,
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$70.00 - Out of stock
The long out-of-print heavyweight "Out of Actions" book (First German hardcover edition) that was published to accompany the spectacular 1998 Paul Schimmel-curated travelling exhibition. "Out of Actions" surveyed the broad international history and influence of post-war Performance Art, and the objects that exist today as its documentation. It features significant texts by Schimmel, Kristine Stiles, Guy Brett, Hubert Klocker, Shinichiro Osaki, Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims, and Keiko Okamura.
This important and heavily researched document is lavishly illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, capturing the work and actions of the artists featured in the exhibition and essays: Marina Abramovic, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Vito Acconci, Genpei Akasegawa, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Rasheed Arseen, Mowry Baden, Artur Barrio, Joseph Beuys, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, George Brecht, Stuart Brisley, Robert Delford Brown, Gunter Brus, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Lygia Clark, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Collective Action Group, Houston Conwill, Paul Cotton, COUM Transmissions, Guy de Cointet, Jim Dine, John Duncan, Felipe Ehrenberg, Roberto Evangelista, Valie Export, Robert Filliou, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Sherman Fleming, Lucio Fontana, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Gideon Gechtman, Gilbert & George, Alberto Greco, Ion Grigorescu, Victor Grippo, Red Grooms, Guerrilla Art Action Group, David Hammons, Al Hansen, Maren Hassinger, Lynn Hershman, Dick Higgins, Tatsumi Hijikata, Susan Hiller, Rebecca Horn, Tehching Hsieh, Joan Jonas, Kim Jones, Michel Journiac, Akira Kanayama, Tadeusz Kantor, Allan Kaprow, Mike Kelley, Juergen Klauke, Yves Klein, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Komar & Melamid, Jannis Kounellis, Shigeko Kubota, Tetsumi Kudo, Yayoi Kusama, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, John Latham, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Lea Lublin, George Maciunas, Leopoldo Maier, Piero Manzoni, Tom Marioni, Georges Mathieu, Gordon Matta-Clark, Paul McCarthy, Bruce McLean, David Medalla, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Gustav Metzger, Marta Minujin, Jan Micoch, Linda Montano, Robert Morris, Otto Muehl, Saburo Murakami, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Bruce Nauman, Paul Neagu, Senga Nengudi, Joshua Neustein, Hermann Nitsch, Helio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Lorenzo Pace, Nam June Paik, Gina Pane, Lygia Pape, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jackson Pollock, William Pope L., Robert Rauschenberg, Carlyle Reedy, Klaus Rinke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Dieter Roth, Zorka Saglova, Niki de Saint Phalle, Alfons Schilling, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Bonnie Sherk, Shozo Shimamoto, Ushio Shinohara, Kazuo Shiraga, Barbara T. Smith, Daniel Spoerri, Petr Stembera, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Jiro Takamatsu, Atsuko Tanaka, Mark Thompson, Jean Tinguely, Rasa Todosijevic, Kerry Trengove, Ulay, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Weibel, Franz West, Hannah Wilke, Emmett Williams, and Zaj.
Scarce first German edition, published by Hatje Cantz.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$150.00 - Out of stock
First, hardcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
Very uncommon hardcover edition, with dust jacket.
2011, English
Softcover, newspaper, 275 pages, 265 x 375 mm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$15.00 - Out of stock
In this issue:
Starring
by Federico Florian, Antonio Scoccimarro
GEOFFREY FARMER
Characters and Characteristics of the Work
by Monika Szewczyk
TALKING ABOUT
Is That All There Is to a Circus?
by Dieter Roelstraete
PHYLLIDA BARLOW
The Work Is Never Finished
by Nicholas Cullinan
PART OF THE PROCESS - DAVID LEVINE
Rothko’s Ruins
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
TALKING ABOUT
Criticism Hurts
by Jan Verwoert
PORTFOLIO - GEORGE KUCHAR
Carnivalesque George Kuchar
by Juan A. Suárez
LOST AND FOUND - LLYN FOULKES
The Lost Frontier: Llyn Foulkes
by Andrew Berardini
TALKING ABOUT
Melete (“The Society Islands”)
by Mark von Schlegell
NICE TO MEET YOU - DAN FINSEL
Art Therapy
by Cecilia Alemani
NICE TO MEET YOU - BEN SCHUMACHER
Things That Look Like Other Things
by Bob Nickas
NICE TO MEET YOU - JOHN HENDERSON
Absorption & Theatricality
by Barbara Casavecchia
NICE TO MEET YOU - WU TSANG
Wu Tsang: Body Quotations, Back-Breaking Sparkle and the Dissemination of Wildness
by Kevin McGarry
TEN FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CURATING
Chapter 6: What Is an Exhibition?
by Elena Filipovic, visual concept by Nairy Baghramian
TALKING ABOUT
A New Fruit
by Nick Currie
LONDON - CALLY SPOONER
The Wor(l)d Is a Stage
by Michele Robecchi
PARIS - JONATHAN BINET
The Way Things Go: a Conversation with Jonathan Binet
by Vincent Honoré
NEW YORK - TIM ROLLINS & JULIE AULT
Shakers
BERLIN
Starship
by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
ARTIST PROJECT - LUTZ BACHER
The Gift
by Fionn Meade
ENRICO DAVID & THOMAS HOUSEAGO
I’m Fucked Out of Your Mind
ALISON KNOWLES
The Future Will Be Fragrant Bean Fields
by Hans Ulrich Obrist
REPRINT
Time Warp
by Rob Giampietro
TALKING ABOUT
As Little Time on The Ground as Possible. First Attempt on the Possibility of Artistic Significance Beyond Philosophy of History
by Chus Martínez
Books
by Stefano Cernuschi
Diary
WHAT’S ALTERNATIVE? ALTERNATIVE TO WHAT? - ANDREA FRASER
"Alternative to what, exactly?"
by Vincenzo de Bellis
TAMAR GUIMARÃES
A Strange Ritual
by Andrea Lissoni
TALKING ABOUT
Moving Gods Aside
by Philippe Pirotte
JESSICA WARBOYS
Waves Wave
by Emilie Renard