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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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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.
2021, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 24.5 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite / Berlin
$74.00 - Out of stock
This publication assembles three phases of Termite Economies, a major series of artworks produced between 2018 and 2020 by the Australian artist Nicholas Mangan.
In Termite Economies (Phase 1) Mangan researched an anecdote that termite abilities might one day lead humans to gold deposits. Phase 2 explored termite eusociality, pheromonal communication, building behavior, biomimicry, superorganism and swarm intelligence. Phase 3 deployed termite collectivism as a speculative model for rerouting human neural pathways. Within each phase, Mangan developed specific methods to explore these phenomena formally, spatially, and through moving images.
Termite Economies grappled with the potentiality of collective social behavior and complexities of systematic exploitation of non-human intelligence.
The book presents each phase in the order of the exhibition series. It includes process and research photographs, diagrams, installation and detailed imagery. It includes an essay by Artist Mariana Silva, a fictional text by writer ST.Lore, a conversation between Mangan and cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto, and a republished essay by Dr. Guy Theraulaz Research Director Member of Team CAB: Collective Animal Behavior Center for Research on Animal Cognition, CNRS.
Alert to both history and science, Nicholas Mangan (born 1979, Geelong, Victoria, lives and works in Melbourne) is a multi-disciplinary artist known for interrogating narratives embedded in a diverse range of objects. With a keen interest in the processes of forming meaning from objects, culture and natural phenomena, Mangan creates unnerving drawings, montages, sculptures and installations. His work addresses a wide range of themes, including the ongoing impacts of colonialism, humanity's fraught relationship with the natural environment, contemporary consumptive cultures and the complex dynamics of the global political economy.
Mangan completed a two year studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, in 2002. He has been awarded numerous international residencies, including Recollets Artist Residency, Paris, 2011 and Australia Council's New York Green Street Residency, 2006. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, resulting in post graduate studies at Universität der Künste in Berlin, Germany.
Edited by Nicholas Mangan and Žiga Testen.
Texts by Nicholas Mangan, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Guy Theraulaz, Mariana Silva.
Graphic design: Žiga Testen.
2016, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket, poster and postcard), 246 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
MUMA / Victoria
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$46.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Aileen Burns, Charlotte Day, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Johan Lundh
Texts by Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna (Latitudes), Helen Hughes, Ana Teixeira Pinto
This publication accompanies Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan’s survey exhibition “Limits to Growth.” The exhibition and book bring together four of Mangan’s most significant works of the past seven years, alongside a new commission. The works in the show tackle narratives from his own geographical region—Asia Pacific, in which his home country of Australia plays a colonial role—and weaves them into a bigger picture to take into account the global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun. Featuring an in-depth series of conversations between the artist and the Barcelona-based curatorial collective Latitudes, and essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Helen Hughes, this publication is richly illustrated with documentation of Mangan’s artworks and historical source material.
Copublished with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne
Design by Žiga Testen
English
Softcover, 122 pages + 8 page booklet insert, 182 x 257 mm
Edition of 1000,
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
$25.00 - Out of stock
Some Kinds of Duration presents the results of Nicholas Mangan’s research into the improbable links between: the Walter Burley Griffin Pyrmont incinerator in Sydney (now demolished); the Mayan Palace of the Governor of Uxmal in the Yucatan, Mexico; George Kubler’s treatise on ‘The Shape of Time’; and the form and function of a Canon NP6030 photocopier. This book can be read as a visual thesis, proposing new narratives and frameworks for considering innovation, destruction, reproduction and mutation.
2011, English
Softcover, 194 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 500,
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
Minimal Domination collects a selection of Justin Clemens’ art writings from the past decade. The title is drawn from contemporary mathematics: a minimally dominating set is the smallest set of points that neighbour all other points of a graph. A minimally dominating set is therefore a multiple and a structure which has privileged access to that which it is not. This is the secret of contemporary art: it creates discrete selections from which we can survey the whole.
Justin Clemens, former art critic for The Monthly, has written extensively on contemporary art. The essays in Minimal Domination discuss the work of Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Bennett, Juan Davila, Mike Parr, Ricky Swallow, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, Christian Capurro, Philip Hunter, and others.
2019, English
Softcover, 215 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$77.00 - Out of stock
Unthought Environments brings together art influenced by the forces that are integral to our daily lives, yet are easily forgotten or overlooked, such as the ancient elements of air, fire, water, and earth; weather systems; geopolitics; and the hidden physical components of our virtual world. Informed by media studies, ecology, and philosophy, these multi-media artworks explore the elemental sphere as it intersects with the human-made.
This exhibition catalog brings together images from the exhibition (Unthought Environments, February 17–April 8, 2018, The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago) alongside texts that engage directly with the works as well as the larger issues that drive them. Essays by Karsten Lund, John Durham Peters, Keller Easterling, Ina Blom, Marissa Lee Benedict, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, and Peter Fend are included, as well as a conversation with Lund, Nicholas Mangan, Robin Watkins, and Nina Canell.
Artists included : Daniel G. Baird, Marissa Lee Benedict, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Cécile B. Evans, Peter Fend, Florian Germann, Jochen Lempert, Nicholas Mangan, Miljohn Ruperto, Xaviera Simmons
2017, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$30.00 - In stock -
In art historical and art critical texts, the concept of “idiom” – an expression or mode of speaking that cannot be translated – is frequently used, even if it is rarely spoken of as such. TZK issue 108 explores how the idea of “idiom” might allow us to coherently engage with art's disparate materialist and iconographic connections at a time when the vitality of historical Western-centric cannons are fading (see: Documenta 14) and the traditional relations within and among artistic systems are ever less self-evident. The "Idiom" issue of TZK asks: What languages does art speak?
ISSUE NO. 108 / DECEMBER 2017 "IDIOM - LANGUAGES OF ART“
Table Of Contents
Preface
Susanne Leeb - Idioms: The Minor "A"s Of Art
Artist's Choice
Mirjam Thomann - Chapter 3: Women And Space
Anja Kirschner - In A Manner Of Speaking
Michael Dean
Linda Stupart - Didacticore: An Artist's Statement
Bouchra Khalili - Mother Tongue
Lawrence Abu Hamdan - Hear, Hear
Giovanna Zapperi - Body Of Evidence, Gestures Of Dysfunction / Technology As Practice In The Work Of Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Yvonne Volkart - From Trash To Waste / On Art's Media Geology
Monica Juneja - To Enter The Image / The Performative Self As Idiom*
Dieter Lesage - Research And Form / On "Artistic Research" And Its Aesthetic
Sven Lütticken - Modernist Memories / On The Conteporaneity of Günther Frg
Bildstrecke
Philipp Gufler
Maybe Devotion Is The Only Thing I Can Offer You
New Development
Once More With Feeling / Philipp Wüschner Über Das Symposium „Image Testimonies – Witnessing In Times Of Social Media“
Cloudism / Library Stack On Blockchain Archives And Library Futures
Liebe Arbeit Kino
Lauf, Genosse! / Madeleine Bernstorff Über „Cours, Cours, Camarade, Le Vieux Monde Est Derrière Toi. Das Kino Von Med Hondo“ Im Kino Arsenal, Berlin
Glück Auf! / Esther Buss Über Ben Russells „Good Luck“, 70. Locarno Festival
Reviews
Handlungsräume / Sophie Goltz Über „Radical Women“ Im Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The Downward Spiral / Steven Warwick On “Trigger: Gender As A Tool And A Weapon” At The New Museum, New York
„Überlast“ Und Emanzipation – „Ich Weiss Nicht, Ob Mein Stand Es Erlaubt.“ / Isabel Mehl Über „Klassensprachen“ Im District Berlin
Katie Serva On “The Overworked Body: An Anthology Of 2000s Dress” At Ludlow 38 And Mathew Gallery, New York
Beiläufig Grundsätzlich / Bert Rebhandl Über Harun Farocki Im Neuen Berliner Kunstverein
Rien Ne Va Plus / Nuit Banai On Ericka Beckman At Secession, Vienna
Familienausstellung / Inka Meißner Über Verena Dengler In Der Kunsthalle Bern
Do You Like To Read? / Christian Berger Über „Hanne Darboven. Korrespondenzen“ Im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum Für Gegenwart, Berlin
After Hours / Andrew Durbin On Thomas Eggerer At Petzel Gallery, New York
Remembering The Future / Bennett Simpson On William Leavitt At Honor Fraser, Los Angeles
Garten, Werkstatt, Oper – Alexander Kluge In Ausstellungen / Rainer Bellenbaum Über Alexander Kluge In Der Fondazione Prada, Venedig, Und Im Württembergischen Kunstverein Stuttgart
Getting Real / Helena Vilalta On Lee Lozano At Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
Queere Subjektivität Und (Anti-)Koloniale Begehren / Jenny Nachtigall Über „Odarodle – Sittengeschichte Eines Naturmysteriums, 1535–2017“ Im Schwulen Museum, Berlin
Herrschaftszeichen Noch Mal! / Clemens Krümmel Über Michael Dreyer Im Badischen Kunstverein, Karlsruhe
Nachruf
Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017)
Edition
Candida Höfer
Ed Ruscha
2015, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 17 x 23 cm
Published by
Witte de With / Rotterdam
$38.00 - Out of stock
Art In The Age Of… was published on the occasion of the eponymous yearlong cycle presented at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (23 January 2015 – 3 January 2016). This series articulated itself through three exhibitions; Art In The Age Of…Energy And Raw Material, Art In The Age Of…Planetary Computation, and Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare, alongside a related discursive program and film screenings.
Art In The Age Of… was staged to investigate future vectors of art production in the 21st century, highlighting the circulation of art and its underlying economies rather than its territorial location, its spread and infectious expanse rather than its arrest within narrowly defined genealogies and media.
With a focus on topical areas of urgency within art’s creation and its dispersal, spanning energy and raw materials, planetary computation, and asymmetric warfare, the Art In The Age Of… publication both records and expands research feeding this year-long program through interviews and essays by key contributors, alongside specially commissioned artist interventions.
Edited by Defne Ayas (director, Witte de With), Natasha Hoare (associate curator, Witte de With), and Adam Kleinman (chief editor, WdW Review), the book features interviews with artists involved in the various exhibitions of Art In The Age Of…, including Rossella Biscotti, James Bridle, Céline Condorelli, John Gerrard, Femke Herrengraven, David Jablonowski, Navine G. Kahn-Dossos, John Menick, Trevor Paglen, Susan Schuppli, Tom Tlalim; commissioned essays by theorists, curators and cultural historians involved in its discursive program, including contributions by Alexandra Bradford, Natasha Ginwala, Mike Jay, and Mohammad Salemy; interventions by artists Nina Canell and David Jablonowski; as well as visual documentation of the three exhibitions.
2015, English / Italian
Softcover (newspaper), 302 pages, 37 x 26 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$18.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
In this issue:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Art and Literature, Darja Bajagić, Walter Dahn, Fiction in Reality, Have We Become the Internet?, Lynn Hershman Leeson, The History of Exhibitions, Intimacy in Art, Nicholas Mangan, Park McArthur, The Multiplication of Moving Perspectives, Opening up to the Unexpected, Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, Systems Prosthetics, Time as Material, The Withdrawal of the Artist, Betty Woodman, Steina and Woody Vasulka.
Driven by the energy of art writing and artists' writing, contemporary literature seems to be consciously migrating into the art world. Some artists exist halfway between the two worlds and are evolving the most innovative characteristics of the literary canon. Brian Dillon attempts to analyze this type of writing, its practice and its potential.
Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, a philosopher, writer and activist at the helm of the Independent Studies Program of the MACBA, raise ground-breaking questions ranging from the coercion of the public by the institution to processes of disidentification from dominant sexual identities, in a conversation conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Starting in the 1990s, the history of exhibitions has taken on greater resonance in art writing. One precursor of this fundamental type of research was Bruce Altshuler, with his The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. Altshuler, Jens Hoffmann and Elena Filipovic engage in an extensive conversation on the history of exhibitions and the role artists have in organizing them.
Chus Martínez analyzes the beauty of an ecology of events of little interest for the market, but driven by an energy that might pressure the system to open to the unexpected, to balance out the impulse to guarantee results before any attempts have been made to break new ground.
The work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan reveals how the forensic linguistics applied to test the accents of political asylum applicants is often unreliable, on a par with the many audio charlatans hired to ascertain the origins of individuals. The artist discusses all this with Mihnea Mircan.
Youthful transgressions, previously fueled by romantic literature, have been transformed into desire for extreme self-assertion modeled on "first-person-shooter" video games and action movies. Ingo Niermann wonders about how it might be possible to reverse this trend, through the introduction of a positive kind of transgression.
What does it mean to be human in the light of increasingly pervasive technological developments? Omar Kholeif moderates a conversation between Constant Dullaart, Zach Blas and James Bridle, artists who have reflected at length on the impact of the integration of software and algorithms on everyday life.
Michael Wang explores the aesthetics of an art that actively engages with different systems, and the perspective of artists as they consider the objectives, limits and structure of a work that is no longer a matter of objects, but nimbly moves through the folds of these systems as energy.
A handful of artists over the last 50 years have "self-absconded" from the public eye and the social whirl of the system. Martin Herbert discreetly tracks several of them to formulate a hypothesis that reflects an increasing schism between the needs of artists and those of the art world.
Lynn Hershman Leeson's work is an incessant exploration of the nature of consciousness and its extension via technology. Kathy Noble gives an exhaustive overview of her versatile output, from the early pieces to films on identity, cloning and feminist politics featuring Tilda Swinton.
Confession in art can lead to works plagued by egocentric attitude or can bring results of genuine "alongsideness," where the social becomes visible without recourse to reconstruction. Lauren Cornell and Johanna Burton analyze works and artists that have been able to make critical use of intimacy.
Nice to Meet You:
The theme of access and the tensions involved in its possibility are the fulcrum of Park McArthur's production and the focus of this interview with Daniel S. Palmer.
Natalia Sielewicz talks to Darja Bajagić whose work recontextualizes saucy images seen as stereotypes by Western eyes, granting them a sort of liberating ambiguity.
Steina and Woody Vasulka are leading exponents of the video experimentation that began in the late 1960s. Elyse Mallouk analyzes their works from various decades in the light of our growing relationship with the inorganic systems that nurture our relationships of feedback.
Joan Jonas, Ken Okiishi, Jennifer West, and Lucy Raven meet on the common ground of work located at the intersection between visual arts, moving image and performance. In a conversation introduced and moderated by Filipa Ramos they share their ideas and discuss their practice and its relation to time, history, popular culture, theater and narrative.
Australian artist Nicholas Mangan talks to Mariana Cánepa Luna about his work that investigates the troubled relationship between man and the natural environment, and analyzes contexts and objects capable of freeing up narratives that take stock of reality.
Andrew Berardini visits the big clay-dusted studio-vase of Betty Woodman. Her chubby ceramic odalisques, with their alluring forms, covered with fragments of precious stones, embroideries and miniatures, tug him into a grand theater of forms and colors, wild things and aquatic creatures.
Walter Dahn indicated a path for art after conceptualism with his new way of thinking about painting. Daniel Schreiber met with the artist in his home in Cologne to talk about the artist's story and recent works, a series of silkscreens linked to the revolutionary power of music.
After the linear perspective of the Renaissance, new perspectives have been explored, starting with chronophotography and the overturning of vertical or bird's-eye perspective. Jennifer Allen investigates these various perspectives in relation to a number of contemporary artists who have reached multiple, mobile and fragmented visions.
The Artist as Curator
Issue #6 an insert in Mousse Magazine #47
Mel Bochner, Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, 1966
Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let's Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1966
2013, English
Loose-leaf collection of Y3K ephemera (folded A3 exhibition posters, plus A4 inserts), 21 x 29.7 cm
Edition of 100,
Published by
Y3K / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
Y3K was a two-year (2009-2011) proposition initiated by James Deutsher and Christopher L G Hill, a gallery practice as-an-extension-of an art practice and-in-support-of a wider art and design community in Melbourne and Internationally.
Over two-years Y3K exhibited World Food Books, BLESS, Christopher L.G. Hill, Emmeleine deMooij, Jota Castro, Kinga Kielczynska, Melanie Bonaj, fabrics interseason, ffiXXed, Heinz Peter Knes, James Deutsher, Matt Hinkley, Olivia Barrett, Pat Foster, Jen Berean, Rob McKenzie, SIBLING, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Jon Campbell, LOST Projects, Alex Vivian, Daniel du Bern, Nick Selenitsch, Kain Picken, Next Wave, A Constructed World, Joshua Petherick, Helen Johnson, Bianca Hester, Misha Hollenbach, David Griggs, Sam Kiyoumarsi, Robert Langenegger, Nick Mangan, Matt Griffin, Masato Takasaka, Fiona Connor, Tahi Moore, Ida Ekblad, Art Centre Ongoing, Kit Lee, Kate Newby, Sriwhana Spong, Dylan Statham, Simon Taylor, Sophia Mitchell, Rowan Mcnaught, MM Yu. Ilia Farah Rosli, Marco Fusinato, TATE Modern, Marie Gaultier, Anna Hess, Veronica Kent, Jarrod Rawlins, Keith Al-Hasani, Ruby Lowe, Justin Clemens, Daniel Munn, Simon Denny, Dan Arps, Andrew Barber, Structural Integrity, Marco Fusinato, Rose Nolan, Dan Bell, Kate Smith, Ardi Gunawan, Nikos Pantazopoulos, Ben Tankard, Steve Kado, Virginia Overell, Mateo Tannatt, Sean Peoples, Inri Cristo, Tara Rawlins, Chateau 2F, Oscar Yanez, Hany Armanious, Ash Kilmartin, Elizabeth Gower, Lizzy Newman, Nina Sers, Maria Kozic, Ellen Pittman, Juan Davila, Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCarthy, Constanze Zikos, Hao Guo, Pow Martinez, Carissa Rodriguez, Tobias Kaspar, Piotr Łakomy, Natalie Rognsøy, Katherine Huang, Taree McKenzie, Ester Partegas, Mikala Dwyer and John Spiteri and more.
Each exhibition was accompanied by an A3 double sided unique limited edition poster designed by the artists and gallerists. These posters now form the basis for the Y3K publication.
Included in this publication, and on the occasion of it's launch to the public two years after the cessation of the Y3K gallery space, is an accompanying text from
Fayen D’Evie.
The Y3K publication is a limited edition of 100, and is available from World Food Books.
2012, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
Institute Zagreb 1986/The Air of Conquerors are two new novella-length works of fiction by the Melbourne-based writer S.T. Lore that are presented in a flip novel. The book is the first solo publication by Lore, featuring stories that pivot around characters immersed in scenes of claustrophobia, obsessive archiving, impossible architectures, image-saturation and delusion.
Institute Zagreb 1986 intertwines two narratives about a religion conceived by a pair of demographic analysts on the rooftop of an abandoned building, and a rock-collecting character named The Saxon. The narrative is collated through a process of uncovering archived audio recordings retained by an ʻexplosion proofʼ telephone. Institute Zagreb 1986 is interspersed with a series of graphic elements created for the publication by Joshua Petherick.
The Air of Conquerors is a piece of surreal detective fiction set against a backdrop of the South Australian Desert scattered with ruined Parisian monuments. It chronicles two investigatorsʼ search for a lonely telephone operator who has disappeared into a subterranean hotel. The narrative was written in reference to a series of photographs that were taken by Nicholas Mangan in Paris in November 2011 and sent to the author as part of a project exploring the fictionalisation of images — both historical and the everyday.
Since 2009, Lore has written fictional texts to accompany a number of exhibitions by Melbourne- based artists and curators, including: Christopher LG Hill, Dylan Martorell, Liv Barrett, Nathan Gray, Alex Vivian, Marco Fusinato, A Constructed World/Speech & What Archive, James Deutsher, Gambia Castle/The Reader, Joint Hassles/Harriet Morgan, Helen Hughes, Genevieve Osborn, and Nicholas Mangan. He is also a regular contributor to the Melbourne-based contemporary art journal Discipline, in which he is publishing the serialised novel, Watts' Tale of Endless Ore — one chapter per issue.
2012, English
Softcover, staple/tape/ribbon bound, offset/xerox/risograph printing, includes poster, catalogue, photographic inserts, 4gb data disc, 297 x 210 mm
Edition of 100,
Published by
Endless Lonely Planet / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
Endless Lonely Planet is a yearly periodical in print and data featuring Christopher L G Hill, Joshua Petherick, Nicholas Mangan, Evergreen (Olivia Barrett and James Deutsher), Alex Vivian, Kate Newby, Y3K, Review Swapper, Discipline, Bunyip Trax, Matthew Benjamin, S.T. Lore, Virginia Overell, Nicholas Selenitsch, Darren Banks, Elizabeth Newman, VDO, Theodore Whong, Oliver Van Der Lugt, Hessian Jailer, Jason Heller, Olle Holmberg, Justin K Fuller, Matthew Brown, Ardi Gunawan, Counterfeitness First, Emile Zile, Fictitious Sighs, Porpoise Torture, Bum Creek, Simon Denny… and others
Self published by contributors and Christopher L G Hill, and each copy coming with 4GB of data.
Limited to 100 copies.
2010, English
Hardcover (w. iris cloth-binding), 88 pages (colour and b/w ill.), offset, 115 x 217 mm
Edition of 500
Published by
The Narrows / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
This beautifully designed hard-cover book is the first monograph of Australian artist, Nicholas Mangan, and serves as an archive and expansion on Mangan's most recent projects revolving around the island of Nauru, as well as a generous overview of much of Mangan's body of work from throughout the past 5 years.
Text by Shelley McSpedden, with introduction by Geraldine Barlow
Designed by Warren Taylor and Nicholas Mangan
Published by The Narrows in association with Sutton Gallery.