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
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
2024, English
Hardcover, 180 pages, 24.2 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
Whitney Museum of American Art / New York
$65.00 $50.00 - In stock -
An in-depth look at a public art project by David Hammons with an overview of the enigmatic artist’s career
Published to commemorate David Hammons’s (b. 1943) public art project Day’s End, located in New York City, this book documents the sculpture and offers broader context into Hammons’s enigmatic work. In 2014, Hammons sent the Whitney Museum of American Art a sketch for a monument to Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), paying homage to Matta-Clark’s legendary Day’s End (1975)—an industrial, cathedral-like space of altered architecture—once located near today’s Whitney in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Completed in 2021, Hammons’s work, also titled Day’s End, was realized by the Whitney in collaboration with Hudson River Park, and is on permanent view. One of the most important artists working in the United States, Hammons makes art across mediums, often outside traditional venues. In addition to photographic documentation, the book includes essays on the origins of Day’s End, Hammons’s career scope, and a contribution by poet Ben Okri.
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.
1993/1994, English
Softcover (looseleaf tabloid), 24 + 20 pages, 42 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Untitled / London
$25.00 - In stock -
Rare lot of two issues of Untitled: A Review of Contemporary Art, No. 3 (Winter 1993/94) and No. 4 (Spring 1994). Untitled was the independent British tabloid newspaper of articles, reviews and opinions published and founded by John Stathatos and Mario Flecha following the demise of Artscribe in 1992. Contributors included Yves Abrioux, Tony Godfrey, David Alan Mellor, et al. Illustrated in b/w throughout, featuring Gordon Matta-Clark, Günther Förg, Rachel Whiteread, Art & Language, Candida Höfer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Vong Phaophanit, Artists' Books, Medardo Rosso, Julian Opie, and much more.
Very Good copies, folded.
1997, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 22 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Generali Foundation / Vienna
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare first hardcover edition of the catalogue raisonné of Gordon Matta-Clark's incredible drawings published in conjunction with exhibition held at Generali Foundation, Vienna, May 7—August 10, 1997. Heavily illustrated throughout (243 colour and 548 b/w illustrations) with essays by Sabine Breitwiesser, Peter Fend, and Pamela M. Lee. Includes a biography and bibliography. Text in English and German.
Gordon Matta-Clark (1943—1978) was an American artist best known for site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He was also a pioneer in the field of socially engaged food art.
Fine copy in Fine DJ.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 152 pages, 30.5 x 24.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
MOCA / Los Angeles
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of long out-of-print important catalogue published to accompany Afterimage : Draw Through Process, a major survey of conceptual / post-minimalist drawing at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before travelling to Texas and Washington. Co-published by the MIT Press and MOCA.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and post minimalist art of the 1970s.
The term "process art" describes a moment of radical, a formal experimentation in postwar American sculpture. Through the medium of drawing, Afterimage revisits process art in terms of the artists who defined the movement and suggests a transitional moment when many of its practitioners anticipated the feminist and postminimalist art of the 1970s. Nancy Grossman's use of language, for example, suggests a kind of material abstraction, and Nancy Holt's earth works and related drawings introduced content into a minimalist vocabulary. The book also explores the drawing as a residual object in works in which the process of making dictates the form of the drawing. Examples include Gordon Matta-Clark's stacked cuttings, Robert Morris' "blind time" drawings, and Sol Lewitt's folded construction drawings. Other works, such as those by Bruce Nauman and Robert Smithson, record a particular approach to body-based and process-oriented sculpture. The book, which accompanies an exhibition, contains an essay by Cornelia H. Butler on the historical ambiguity surrounding process art and one by Pamela M. Lee on temporality in work of the late 1960s.
The artists included in the book are William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Mel Bochner, Agnes Denes, Nancy Grossman, Robert Grosvenor, Marcia Hafif, Eva Hesse, Nancy Holt, Barry LeVa, Sol Lewitt, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yvonne Rainer, Dorothea Rockburne, Alan Saret, Joel Shapiro, Robert Smithson, Michelle Stuart, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Whitten.
Very Good copy. Only very light wear to soft dust jacket, light tanning to edges.
1979, German
Softcover, 419 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthaus Zürich / Zürich
Bentelli Verlag / Bern
$80.00 - In stock -
Wonderful over-sized catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Malerei und Photographie im Dialog / Painting and Photography in Dialogue, Kunsthaus Zürich, May 13 to July 24, 1977. Profusely illustrated, this heavy volume documents this historical survey of the relationship between photography and painting from 1840 to the present (late 1970s); with a full catalogue of works, artists' biographies, bibliography. Edited by Erika Billeter with texts throughout by art historian Josef A. Schmoll. Includes the work of Edvard Munch, Urs Lüthi, Wols, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Eadweard Muybridge, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Francis Bacon, Hilla and Bernd Becher, Les Levine, Constant Puyo, Clarence Hudson White, Jan Groover, Jochen Gerz, Duane Michels, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Ruth Francken, Theo Von Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, Ferdinand Hodler, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alighiero Boetti, Klaus Rinke, Giuseppe Penone, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Gerhard Richter, Monika Baumgartl, Yves Klein, Wolf Vostell, Heinrich Kühn, Georges Mathieu, Peter Roehr, Sarkis, Jiro Takamatsu, Michael Heizer, Umberto Boccioni, Hans Bellmer, William Wegman, Raoul Ubac, Margrit Jäggli, André Kertész, Jiri Kolar, Kasimir Malevich, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Dennis Oppenheim, Christian Boltanski, Dan Graham, Jan Dibbets, Jürgen Klauke, Bruce Nauman, Jean Tinguely, Vettor Pisani, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Allen Kaprow, Arnulf Rainer, Mieczyslaw Berman, Jim Dine, George Brecht, Man Ray, Paul Wunderlich, Karin Székessy, Tom Wesselmann, Chuck Close, Eugène Delacroix, Duane Hanson, Heinrich Zille, Félix Vallotton, Carl Durheim, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, Thomas Eakins, Robert Rauschenberg, Édouard Vuillard, Carlo Carrà, Alphonse Mucha, Les Krims, Albert Steiner, Giorgio de Chirico, Keiji Uematsu, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Heinrich Zille, Franco Fontana, Richard Long, Ben Shahn, Edmund Kesting, László Moholy-Nagy, Anton Stankowski, Paul Nash, Rene Magritte, Paul T. Frankl, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Georges Hugnet, Gordon Matta-Clark....
Very Good copy, crease to top cover corner.
1986, English
Softcover, 319 pages, 175 x 229 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
Co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, a veteran of Artforum of the 1960s and early 1970s, Rosalind Krauss has presided over and shared in the major formulation of the theory of postmodernism. In this challenging collection of fifteen essays, most of which originally appeared in October, she explores the ways in which the break in style that produced postmodernism has forced a change in our various understandings of twentieth-century art, beginning with the almost mythic idea of the avant-garde. Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).
"All of her observations are unfailingly original and provocative."—Art Documentation
Very Good copy of original 1986 edition, 1993 printing.
1996, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 18 x 22.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real -- to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-garde, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation -- and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.
Includes the work of David Hammons, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Fred Wilson, Silvia Kolbowski, Larry Bell, Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Allan McCollum, Gerhard Richter, Richard Estes, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, John Miller, Zoe Leonard, Gran Fury, Renée Green, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Lothar Baumgarten, Fred Wilson, Jimmie Durham, and many more.
1971, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 94 pages, 24 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kineticism Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Issue three of the legendary New York quarterly periodical Avalanche, published Fall 1971. Cover features Barry Le Va. Contents: "Rumbles," featuring Jackie Winsor, William Wegman, Allen Ruppersberg, Gilbert & George and Philip Glass; "The Art of Searching," interview with David Tremlett; "Ululations," by Bill Beckley; "Soap," by Joel Fisher; "Jacks," by Gordon Matta-Clark; "Observatory," by Robert Morris; "Christ & Pythagoras," by Italo Scanga; "A Metal Ring Encircling a Tree," interview with Ulrich Ruckriem; "Outcrops," by George Trakas; "Discussions with Barry Le Va," by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp. Edited by Liza Béar, published by Willoughby Sharp, design by Boris Wall Gruphy.
The short-lived New York based art magazine Avalanche, which existed between 1970 and 1976, captured a sense of its time, but also engaged critically with the relationship between printed matter (books, samizdat, etc.) and artwork. Founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp Avalanche pushed artistic ideas, focusing on new forms of art-making (of it’s day), providing a timely format for art’s movement away from galleries and museums and towards the printed page and emerging discourses surrounding Performance and Land art. The interviews, all conducted by Bear and Sharp, employ a loose but thoughtful approach. Often the articles ran as large as 16 pages. The featured artists were at the time relatively unknown, today they read like a Who’s Who of the avant-garde (in particular as defined by Dia:). The square covers of the early issues feature now iconic portraits of artists; Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci (who had the entire Issue of #6 dedicated to him) and Bruce Nauman.
Featured artists were Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Bill Beckley, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Barbara Dilley, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, the Philip Glass Ensemble, Grand Union, Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis, Meredith Monk, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Joel Shapiro, Jack Smith, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, George Trakas, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, the Western Front and Jackie Winsor.
Very Good copy with tanning and light wear.
1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 830 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
documenta / Kassel
$80.00 - Out of stock
First English edition of this monumental 830 page book for documenta X, the last documenta of the twentieth century and the first directed by a woman, the French curator Catherine David, brings together the work of more than 100 of the world's foremost thinkers, writers, and artists in an extraordinary anthology of seminal texts and images of, on, and about the development of Western cultural and critical theory since 1945.
The book "seeks to indicate a political context for the interpretation of artistic activities at the close of the twentieth century, through a montage of images and documents from the immediate post-war period to the present. The range of material treated here is not encyclopaedic; it represents a polemical attempt to isolate specific strands of artistic production and political endeavour which can be taken as references in the contemporary debate over the evolution of our societies. Drawing from distinct yet interrelated territorial and linguistic domains, the book singles out complex cultural responses to the unifying processes of global modernity."—from the book jacket.
A comprehensive work in itself, rich with enmeshed texts and illustrations of artworks, film stills, historical documents throughout in colour and in black and white.
Writers include: Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Celan, Amílcar Cabral, Masao Miyoshi, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, Tadao Sato, Youssef Ishaghpour, Josef Beuys, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rem Koolhaas, Sandra Álvarez de Toledo, Witold Gombrowicz, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Jean-François Chevrier, Marguerite Duras, Edward Said, Henri Alleg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Uwe Johnson, Jerzy Grotowski, James Clifford, Primo Levi, Pierre Clastres, Andrea Branzi, Fabrizio Gallanti, Gérard Chaliand, Stig Björkman, Daniel Defert, Saskia Sassen, Catherine David, Benjamin Buchloh, Paul Virilio, Serge Daney, Étienne Balibar, Nadia Tazi, and many others.....
Artists include : Archigram, Martin Kippenberger, Archizoom Associati, Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Oyvind Fahlström, Samuel Beckett, Franz West, Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig, Nancy Spero, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Jörg Herold, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Robert Adams, Peter Friedl, Paweł Althamer, Liam Gillick, Mike Kelley & Tony Oursler & Diedrich Diederichsen, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ed van der Elsken, Walker Evans, Aldo van Eyck, Heiner Goebbels, William Kentridge, Ulrike Grossarth, Richard Hamilton, Vito Acconci, Raymond Hains, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Siobhán Hapaska, Ecke Bonk, Carsten Höller & Rosemarie Trockel, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Lois Weinberger, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Olaf Nicolai, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Marc Pataut, Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Philipp Müller, Matt Mullican, Antoni Muntadas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Reinhard Mucha, Álvaro Siza, Toyo Ito, John C. Portman Jr., Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Mariella Mosler, Josef Beuys, Steve McQueen, Chris Marker, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean Dubuffet, Kerry James Marshall, Maria Lassnig, Rem Koolhaas, Joachim Koester, Suzanne Lafont, Sigalit Landau, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Brassaï, Le Corbusier, Antonin Artaud, and so many more...
Very Good coy, light wear. Good dust jacket with some creasing and edge wear.
2019, English
Softcover, 678 pages, 21.5 x 27.5 cm
Ed. of 2000,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$89.00 - Out of stock
Out of print.
Edited by Walter Robinson, Edit DeAk, and Joshua Cohn, Art-Rite was published in New York City between 1973 and 1978. The periodical has long been celebrated for its underground/overground position and its cutting, humorous, on-the-streets coverage and critique of the art world. Art-Rite moved easily through the expansive community it mapped out, paying homage to an emergent generation of artists, including many who were—or would soon become—the defining voices of the era. Through hundreds of interviews, reviews, statements, and projects for the page—as well as artist-focused and thematic issues on video, painting, performance, and artists’ books—Art-Rite’s sharp editorial vision and commitment to spotlighting the work of artists stands as a meaningful and lasting contribution to the art history of New York City and beyond.
All issues of Art-Rite are collected and published here.
Featured artists include Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Bas Jan Ader, Laurie Anderson, John Baldessari, Gregory Battcock, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, Marcel Broodthaers, Trisha Brown, Chris Burden, Scott Burton, Ulises Carrión, Judy Chicago, Lucinda Childs, Christo, Diego Cortez, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Ralston Farina, Richard Foreman, Peggy Gale, Gilbert & George, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Leon Golub, Peter Grass, Julia Heyward, Nancy Holt, Ray Johnson, Joan Jonas, Richard Kern, Lee Krasner, Shigeko Kubota, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Babette Mangolte, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rosemary Mayer, Annette Messager, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, Brian O’Doherty, Genesis P-Orridge, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Judy Pfaff, Lil Picard, Yvonne Rainer, Judy Rifka, Dorothea Rockburne, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, David Salle, Carolee Schneemann, Richard Serra, Jack Smith, Patti Smith, Robert Smithson, Holly Solomon, Naomi Spector, Nancy Spero, Pat Steir, Frank Stella, Alan Suicide (Vega), David Tremlett, Richard Tuttle, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, Hannah Wilke, Robert Wilson, Yuri, and Irene von Zahn.
2020, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
CCA / Montreal
$85.00 - Out of stock
Gordon Matta-Clark was born in 1943 in New York, son of American artist Anne Clark, and Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. He entered the architecture program at Cornell University in 1962 but left in 1963 and spent the following year in Paris living with his father and studying French Literature. He returned to Cornell 1964-1968, he did not, however, practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as "Anarchitecture." In mid-1969, Matta-Clark moved to New York City and his architectural "Cuttings", as well as his large corpus of drawings made him a prominent figure among his colleagues, including close friends and collaborators such as Jan Dibbetts and Robert Smithson. His influence as "artist's artist" on future generations cannot be overstated. Matta-Clark died at the age of 35. Many of his works are destroyed.
In 2011, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark handed over the entire archive – his library, manuscripts, films, correspondence, drawings, notes and works of art - to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where it now has been published annotated and edited in an exemplary way in this incredible volume. Only with this publication will his work become fully visible.
This book unpacks the comprehensive Gordon Matta-Clark collection at the CCA (CP138), opening it up to provisional readings from different points of view. Yann Chateigné reorganizes Matta-Clark’s library into areas of inquiry, from alchemy to psychoanalysis, as a framework for gathering traces—written and drawn—of his thinking. Hila Peleg reassembles hours of discarded film footage, challenging the notion of documentation and returning to view the physical and social contexts—the relational space—of Matta-Clark’s interventions. And from hundreds of travel photographs, Kitty Scott constructs a panorama of Matta-Clark’s visual notes on the world around him—a foil to his artworks. In foregrounding seemingly incidental parts of the collection, these studies manifest an exploratory way of working with archives, by which selecting, presenting, and writing are processes of ongoing research. Rather than synthesize, CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the archive by Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, and Kitty Scott extends the scope of what constitutes Matta-Clark’s body of work and thus the physical and intellectual terrain within which to situate it.
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).
2017, English / Portuguese
Softcover, 220 pages, 18 x 25 cm
Published by
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$62.00 - Out of stock
American artist Gordon Matta-Clark is perhaps best known for the site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. His body of work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his “building cuts”. Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, such as film, video, and photography, much of which appears in this catalogue, itself published on the occasion of an eponymous exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and Culturgest, Lisbon. The attractively designed book includes numerous of the artist’s own sketches and plans for various works, plus letters and other material that together form an in-depth portrait.
2016, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 15.2 x 24.1 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$89.00 - Out of stock
Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the "Pictures Generation" the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp's own formative experiences before "Pictures."Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp's life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren's Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max's Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp's life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.
Includes the work of Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Daniel Buren, Charles James, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Peter Hujar, Eva Hesse, Bernardo Bertolucci, Walker Evans, Joseph Cornell, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Tworkov, Robert Ryman, Jane Freilicher, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Stanley Kubrick, Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, Brice Marden, Ellsworth Kelly, Guilio Romano, Andrea Mantegna, Merce Cunningham, Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Alvin Baltrop, Divine, Gordon Matta-Clark, Edgar Degas, Louise Lawler, and so many others.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 20.3 x 26.7 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$80.00 - Out of stock
"Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing."---Gordon Matta-Clark
This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978), whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term “anarchitecture,” combining “anarchy” and “architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx.
The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series Cuts dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with Conical Intersect, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of 17th-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.
2009, English
Softcover, 438 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$60.00 - Out of stock
2015 re-print of this fantastic and hugely popular book from 2009.
Essays by Bart De Baere, Céline Condorelli, Mark Cousins, Wouter Davidts, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Andrea Phillips, Jaime Stapleton, Jan Verwoert, Eyal Weizman & Rony Brauman
With works by Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Peter Nadin, The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters,” Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Muntadas, Lilly Reich, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o.
Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.
Support Structures is a critical enquiry into what constitutes “support,” and documents the collaborative project “Support Structure” by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts , which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. The collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from propositions to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes.
Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.
Produced in co-production with Support Structure:
Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade with James Langdon
www.supportstructures.org
Design by James Langdon
2017, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 23 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art’s fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work."
This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art.
Artists surveyed include
Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell
Writers include
Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O’Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden
About the Editor
Sven Spieker is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of ARTmargins. His books include The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press).
2004, English
Softcover, 87 pages, 18.5 x 12.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
ICA / Pennsylvania
$45.00 - Out of stock
Conceptions of “nothing” are one of the driving themes of twentieth-century art. One thinks of Piet Mondrian's reductivist approach to abstraction, Marcel Duchamp's contention that art resides in ideas, not objects, Mark Rothko's painterly reach for the sublime, Andy Warhol's affirmations of the vacuity of Pop culture. The Big Nothing will focus on themes of nothing, nothingness and negation in contemporary art and culture, surveying the legacy of these and other manifestations of absence made manifest in contemporary art. Artist include Gareth James, Jutta Koether, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, Yves Klein, Bernadette Corporation, John Miller and James Welling, among others. Given its broad connotations, “nothing” provides general audiences with immediate access to looking at and thinking about the art of today.
Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held May 1 - August 1, 2004. Curated and with essays by Ingrid Schaffner, Bennett Simpson, and Tanya Leighton. Additional essay by Paula Marincola. Artists include: Bas Jan Ader, Richard Artschwager, Michael Asher, Michel Auder, Jo Baer, Robert Barry, Larry Bell, Bernadette Corporation, James Lee Byars, Maurizio Cattelan, Thomas Chimes, Bruce Conner, Day Without Art, Jessica Diamond, Roe Ethridge, Lili Fleury, Rene Gabri, Jack Goldstein, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Nicolas Guagnini, David Hammons, Heavy Industries, Nancy Holt, Richard Hoeck, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Gareth James, Ray Johnson, Yves Klein, Joachim Koester, Jutta Koether, Yayoi Kusama, Louise Lawler, Gordon Matta-Clark, Allan McCollum, Patrick McMullen, John Miller, Matt Mullican, Eileen Neff, Gabriel Orozco, Raphael Ortiz, Charlemagne Palestine, Philippe Parreno, William Pope.L, Doris Salcedo, Karin Schneider, Allan Sekula, Arlene Shechet, Santiago Sierra, John Smith, Robert Smithson, Paul Swenbeck, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andy Warhol, James Welling, John Wesley, and Steve Wolfe. Includes checklist of the exhibition.
1981, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 286 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Benteli Verlag / Bern
$30.00 - Out of stock
Large hardcover exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held in Switzerland in 1980. Illustrated in colour and black and white throughout, with many examples of artists from the exhibition. Artists included in the exhibition: Josef Albers, Cuno Amiet, Carl Andre, Jurij Annenkow, Alexander Archipeno, Arman, Gerd Arntz, Hans Arp, Richard Artschwager, Giacomo Balla, Ernst Barlach, Willi Baumeister, Bodo Baumgarten, Walter Bodmer, Lee Bontecou, Carl Buchheister, Erich Buchholz, Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Carlo Carrà, John Chamberlain, Eduardo Chillida, Christo, Joseph Cornell, Joseph Csaky, Robert Delaunay, Jim Dine, Theo van Doesburg, César Domela, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Max Ernst, Dan Flavin, Adolf Fleischmann, Lucio Fontana, Otto Freundlich, Naum Gabo, Paul Gaugin, Julio Gonzalez, Jean Gorin, Gotthard Graubner, Oto Gutfreund, Nigel Hall, August Herbin, Adolf von Hildebrand, Robert Irwin, Robert Jacobsen, Marcel Janco, Jasper Johns, Paul Joostens, Donald Judd, Zoltan Kemény, Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, Käthe Kollwitz, Norbert Kricke, Gary Kuehn, Berto Lardera, Henri Laurens, Fernand Léger, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Sol LeWitt, Jacques Lipchitz, El Lissitzky, Vilhelm Lundstrøm, René Magritte, Aristide Maillol, Manolo, Man Ray, Piero Manzoni, Henri Matisse, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joan Miró, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, François Morellet, Henry Moore, Robert Morris, Louise Nevelson, Ben Nicholson, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Victor Pasmore, Laszlo Peri, Antoine Pevsner, Jean Peyrissac, Pablo Picasso, Anne und Patrick Poirier, Iwan Puni, David Rabinowitch, Robert Rauschenberg, James Reineking, Erich Reusch, August Renoir, George Rickey, Auguste Rodin, Ulrich Rückriem, Christian Schad, Oskar Schlemmer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Jan Schoonhoven, Emil Schumacher, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Segal, George Segal, Richard Serra, Gino Severini, Joel Shapiro, Richard Smith, Jesus Raphael Soto, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Daniel Spoerri, Henryk Stazewski, Frank Stella, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Antonio Tàpies, Wladimir Tatlin, Jean Tinguely, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Ilya Tschaschnik, Leon Tutundjan, Günter Uecker, Bernar Venet, Friedrich Vordemberger-Gildewart, Fritz Wotruba.
Written contributions by Felix A. Baumann, Sabine Kricke-Güse, Ernst Gerhard-Güse, Carola Giedion-Welcker, Sigrid Braunfels-Esche, Margit Rowell, Wulf Herzogenrath, Willy Rotzler, Eduard Trier, and Thomas Deecke. Text in German.
Ex library copy with usual stamps and general wear, bumping, wrinkling, in good original dust jacket.
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.
2016, English
Softcover (over-sized), 136 pages, 25 x 37 cm
Published by
Encens / Paris
$58.00 - Out of stock
encens is a fashion magazine from France, presenting a very selective number of designers, edited by Samuel Drira and Sybille Walter.
encens 35 "Single Mind" (Spring/Summer 2016) features Helmut Newton, Adolf Loos, Celine, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Franceso Brigid, Nehera, Dries Van Noten, Allude, Hermes, Giorgio Armani, Isabel Benenato, Cedric Charlier, Y/Project, Olivier Jacquet, Lucio Vanotti, Hed Mayner, Lemaire, Diorre Homme, Chanel, Saint Laurent Paris, Axl Jansen, Givenchy, Heide Ackermann, Cecile Bortoletti, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mathias Kiss, Sybille Walter, Cartier, Kenzo, Ghislain Mollet-Vieville, Daniel Buren, Sol Lewitt, Carl Andre, Walter de Maria, Niele Toroni, Joseph Kosuth, Christian Dior, YSL, Issey Miyake, and much more.
2014, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 15 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Actar / Barcelona
$35.00 - Out of stock
Beyond Environment presents the potent interchange between architecture, Land Art, and Performance Art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena's idealized collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s. Captivated by a journey to the USA in 1971, Pettena would converse with the American Midwest, a conversation culminating in his meeting with Robert Smithson in Salt Lake City. Earlier in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pettena's experiments in material trans- formations helped create some of the architect's most iconic works. Staged in an abandoned school and in a non-descriptive suburban house, and titled Ice House I and II, Pettena would pour water into the mold works he created around the buildings' perimeter walls. Curing during the winter night to a coat of ice, the houses resonated with their conceptual predecessor, Kaprow's Fluids of 1967, as well as with an incomparable contemporary architectural sensibly concerned with the effects of variedly compounded, highly eidetic archi- tectural surfaces. Emanuele Piccardo is an architect and a curator working from Genoa, Italy; Amit Wolf is an architect, curator, and Lecturer at Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles. With contributions and works of Peter Cook, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta Clark, Superstudio; and interviews with Gianni Pettena, Ugo La Pietra, Lapo Binazzi, Fabio Sargentini.
2011, English
Softcover, 112 pages (32 colour ill.), 152 x 215 mm
Published by
Afterall / London
$26.00 - Out of stock
Gordon Matta-Clark's Conical Intersect (1975) was a torqued, spiralling 'cut' into two derelict seventeenth-century Paris buildings adjacent to the construction site of the Centre Pompidou. With this landmark work of 'anarchitecture', Matta-Clark opened up these venerable residences to light and air, and began a dialogue about the nature of urban development and the public role of art. Considered today, Conical Intersect reveals the multivalent nature of the artist's practice and his prescient focus on sustainability and creative reuse of the built environment.
In this book, Bruce Jenkins examines Matta-Clark's 'non-u-ment', looking closely at the artist's proposals, working process, various forms of documentation, and the dialogue begun by Matta-Clark's decision to transform two abandoned buildings into an 'act of communication'. The text is accompanied by rarely seen photographs of the construction process taken by French artist Marc Petitjean.