World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
SAT 12—4 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1995, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 17.8 x 234 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$70.00 - Out of stock
First 1995 edition and printing of Douglas Crimp's classic, On The Museum's Ruins, published by MIT Press.
On the Museum's Ruins presents Douglas Crimp's criticism of contemporary art, its institutions, and its politics alongside photographic works by the artist Louise Lawler to create a collaborative project that is itself an example of postmodern practice at its most provocative. Crimp elaborates the new paradigm of postmodernism through analyses of art practices broadly conceived, not only the practices of artists—Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Serra, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe—but those of critics and curators, of international exhibitions, and of new or refurbished museums such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
The essays:
Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. He is the author of On the Museum’s Ruins and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, both published by the MIT Press.
“Literate and provocative speculations about art, photography, postmodernism, homoeroticism, Rauchenberg and Mapplethorpe, museums and libraries.”
“Crimp's essays comprise one of the most interesting and incisive bodies of work on practices of contemporary art in relationships to art as institution.”
—Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University
1989, English / German / French
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daadgalerie / Berlin
Gelbe Musik / Berlin
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 edition of Broken Music, an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. Complete with original flexi-disc. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and published in 1989 by DAAD and Gelbe Musik, Berlin. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art. She was married to curator René Block.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
Very Good copy all-round, light cover/corner wear.
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 287 pages, 24 x 31.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skira / Milan
Rizzoli / New York
MOCA / Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago
$200.00 - Out of stock
First and only edition of this incredible out-of-print book, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 is the first book (and exhibition) to focus on one of the most significant transnational developments in contemporary abstract painting: the artist’s literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the physical and psychological destruction wrought by World War II—especially the existential crisis resulting from the atomic bomb—artists ripped, cut, burned, and affixed objects to the canvas in lieu of paint. Destroy the Picture emphasizes this internationally shared artistic sensibility in the context of devastating global change and dynamic artistic dialogues, offering an innovative and expansive view of art making in the postwar period.
As artists from war-torn countries like Italy and Japan—including Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Kazuo Shiraga, and Shozo Shimamoto—channeled their ruined surroundings into artistic form; artists throughout the world—such as Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle in France, John Latham in the United Kingdom, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in the United States, Otto Müehl in Austria, and Manolo Millares in Spain, among others—pursued similar approaches and strategies. Destroy the Picture presents an opportunity to reconsider the profound repercussions of this remarkably coherent approach in painting, from artists’ early experiments with translating gestures into materials to their emphasis on a rupture between two and three dimensions, as well as the expansion of the painting medium to incorporate performance, assemblage, and time-based strategies. In many cases, the exhibition places the work of now-established artists back into the radical context in which it originally emerged.
Organised by Paul Schimmel, former Chief Curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the exhibition and this remarkable accompanying hardcover catalogue mark the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production, expanding the scholarship on this critical moment in history. Alongside major essays by Paul Schimmel, Nicholas Cullinan, Astrid Handa-Gagnard, Shoichi Hirai, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Robert Storr, Destroy the Picture is heavily illustrated throughout with works dating 1949 and 1962 by artists from eight countries, including Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Salvatore Scarpitta, Kazuo Shiraga, Gérard Deschamps, François Dufrêne, Jean Fautrier, Adolf Frohner, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, John Latham, Gustav Metzger, Otto Müehl, Manolo Millares, Saburo Murakami, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Shozo Shimamoto, Antoni Tàpies, Chiyu Uemae, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, and Michio Yoshihara.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in Very Good—Near Fine dust-jacket.
2016, English
Hardcover, 336 pages, 27 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art / New York
$340.00 - In stock -
This groundbreaking, award-winning book, long out-of-print, presents a multidisciplinary analysis that illuminates the making, meaning, and reception of the unfinished in art, from the Renaissance to the present day.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, at The Met, New York, March18—September 4, 2016. Edited by Kelly Baum, Andrea Bayer, and Sheena Wagstaff with further essays by Carmen C. Bambach, Thomas Beard, David Bomford, David Blayney Brown, Nicholas Cullinan, Michael Gallagher, Asher Ethan Miller, Nadine M. Orenstein, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Susan Stewart, and Nico Van Hout.
This exhibition addresses a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. Beginning with the Renaissance masters, this scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in its broadest possible sense, including works left incomplete by their makers, which often give insight into the process of their creation, but also those that partake of a non finito—intentionally unfinished—aesthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cezanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory which can be traced back to the first century has had on modern and contemporary art. The book explores the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional, experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.
Very Good copy, only light wear/marks to boards.
1993, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
Bloomsbury Academic / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print first hardcover edition of Minimalism:Origins by Edward Strickland, published in 1993 by Indiana University Press.
... a landmark work, the first attempt to write a pre-history of minimalism that embraces all the arts. Its importance cannot be overestimated." —K. Robert Schwarz, Institute for Studies in American Music
All told, this book is mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand the history and nature of minimalism." —i/e/ NINE
The death of Minimalism is announced regularly, which may be the surest testimonial to its staying power." This is the opening sentence of Edward Strickland's study, the first to examine in detail Minimalist tendencies in the plastic arts and music.
The term Minimalism appeared in the mid-1960s, primarily with reference to the stripped-down sculpture of artists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd, both of whom detested the word. In the late 1970s it gained currency when applied to the repetitive music popularized by Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
In the first part of the book, "Paint", Strickland shows how Minimalism offered a rethinking of the main schools of abstract art to mid-century. Within Abstract Expressionism Barnett Newman opposed the stylistic complexity of confessional action painting with non-gestural, color-field painting. Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly reconceived the rhythmic construction of earlier Geometrical Abstraction in "invisible" and brilliant monochromes respectively; and Robert Rauschenberg created Dadaist anti-art in pure white panels. Next, Strickland surveys Minimal music from La Monte Young's long-tone compositions of the fifties to his drone works of the Theatre of Eternal Music. He examines the effect of foreign and nonclassical American musics on Terry Riley's motoric repetition developed from his tape experimentation, Steve Reich's formulation of phasing technique; and Philip Glass's unison modules. The third part of the book treats the development of Minimal sculpture and its critical reception. Strickland also discusses analogous Minimalist tendencies in dance, film, and literature as well as the incorporation of once-shocking Minimalist vocabulary into mass culture from fashion to advertising.
Investigating the origins of Minimalism in postwar American culture, Strickland redefines it as a movement the developed radically reductive stylistic innovations in numerous media over the third quarter of the twentieth century. A survey with wit.
Very Good—Fine copy w. VG dust jacket preserved under mylar.
1966, English
Hardcover (Burlap covered boards), 342 pages, 32 x 31cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$400.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1966 burlap-bound edition of this seminal work by Allan Kaprow documenting the milieu of performance art and happenings in the early-mid 1960s. Published by H. N. Abrams, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is a legendary photo-artist-book by “one of the grand antiheroes of contemporary art”, produced in way we would never see today. Wrapped in a heavy, debossed and screen-printed raw burlap hardcover, this massive and visually stunning volume features incredible typography, commentary and lay-out by Kaprow himself, accompanying countless photogravures (photos taken by Oldenburg, Robert McElroy, Peter Moore and others) featuring the work of artists (and non-artists) such as Claes Oldenburg, Tetsumi Kudo, Jean Tinguely, Clarence Schmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, George Segal, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, together with images of works by the Japanese Gutai Group (Murakami Saburo, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, et al) and many more.
Allan Kaprow, “an artist who coined the term ‘happenings’ in the late 1950s and whose anti-art works contributed to radical changes in the course of late 20th-century art,” was a leading member-with artists George Segal, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg-of a group whose performance works were signally influenced by John Cage’s “reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing element in art. Like Cage, Kaprow used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants and no-clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual…” (New York Times).
"Step Right In"
Very Good copy, spotless with tight-As New binding, perfectly preserved.
2022, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 26.8 x 35.5 cm
Published by
Skira / Milan
$110.00 $90.00 - In stock -
Charting the three momentous years in which New York became the global capital of art.
The radical cultural transformations that occurred in New York in the three years between January 1962 and December 1964 ramified across the world. In addition to a whole host of creative innovations across disciplines, the period also saw a shift in the center of artistic gravity from Europe to the United States and the rise of a new leadership in the arts—curators, gallerists and other impresarios.
Modeled on the scale and format of Life magazine (one of the most widely read publications of the era), this lavishly illustrated oversized paperback traces a detailed itinerary of artists and curators, experimental exhibitions and museums, as well as historical and political events that transformed society during this explosive moment. From the New Realists exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 to Robert Rauschenberg's unexpected win of the International Grand Prize in Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale, every groundbreaking event from this incredible three-year period is documented.
Organized chronologically, the book is teeming with images of artworks and archival photographs, and artist interviews conducted by the late great curator Germano Celant.
Artists include: Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Chryssa, Merce Cunningham, Jim Dine, Melvin Edwards, Dan Flavin, Lee Friedlander, Nancy Grossman, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Yayoi Kusama, Norman Lewis, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Faith Ringgold, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, George Segal, Jack Smith, Harold Stevenson, Marjorie Strider, Mark di Suvero, Bob Thompson and Andy Warhol.
Conceived by Germano Celant. Edited with text by Sam Sackeroff, Lerman-Neubauer Associate Curator at the Jewish Museum. Preface by Claudia Gould, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director at the Jewish Museum. Introduction by Michael Rock. Interviews by Germano Celant with Christo and Jim Dine. Text by Claudia Gould, Michael Rock, Sam Sackeroff, Emily Bauman, Ninotchka D. Bennahum, Jennifer G. Buonocore-Nedrelow, Olivia Casa, Laura Conconi, J. English Cook, Maria Corti, Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, Joshua B. Guild, Liz Hirsch, Hiroko Ikegami, Susan Murray, Kristina Parsons, Benjamin Serby, Jennifer Sichel, Robert Slifkin.
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.
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.
1970, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Dada volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1970 and written by Kenneth Coutts-Smith, this heavily illustrated overview spans Dada's activities via central locations and protagonists such as Picabia, Janco, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Grosz, Man Ray, Arp, etc.
Chapters : "Zürich - the beginning", "Anti-art and the irrational", "The roots of Dada", "New York - Duchamp and philosophical irony", "Berlin - political commitment", "Cologne - Ernst and the hallucinatory vision", "Hanover - Schwitters, freedom through lyricism", "Paris - last fling and obsequies", "Dada is dead-long live Dada", "Book list", "Index".
1969, English / German
Flexible plastic covers, screw-bound in acrylic spine, multiple stocks throughout, approx 500 pages, 28 x 15 cm
3rd enlarged edition,
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
$300.00 - Out of stock
The extraordinary, definitive 1960s art exhibition catalogue, in it's 3rd expanded and corrected edition, designed by Wolf Vostell for the Ludwig collection in Cologne in 1969. A work of art itself, "Kunst der sechziger Jahre" perfectly embodies the materiality of the pop-era in book form. Housed in thick blind-stamped clear soft plastic covers bound in a hard acrylic plexiglass spine with stainless steel screws, this remarkable book opens with an introductory text and lexicon in German and English, printed on styrofoam pages and graph stock, with contributions by Gert von der Osten, Peter Ludwig, Horst Keller, and Evelyn Weiss. Featuring 92 artists, all part of the private collection of Peter Ludwig, each artist is presented with a portrait on transparent acetate followed by a selection of glossy offset-printed colour artworks tipped-in (often concertina fold-out!) on thick raw kraft paper pages. This enlarged 3rd edition features over 200 objects in total, a vast expansion on the first editions.
Featuring the greats of European-American Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Informel, Abstraction, Minimalism and more, this mighty tome includes the work of Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Horst Antes, Shusaku Arakawa, Allan D'Arcangelo, Arman, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Larry Bell, Miguel Berrocal, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Gernot Bubenik, Anthony Caro, John Chamberlain, Dan Christensen, Alex Colville, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ronald Davis, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Richard Estes, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Domenico Gnoli, Bruno Goller, Robert Graham, Nancy Stevenson Graves, Gunter Haese, Richard Hamilton, Hans Hartung, Erwin Heerich, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Allen Jones, Donald Judd, Howard Kantovitz, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Kienholz, R. B. Kitaj, Konrad Klapheck, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Morris Louis, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Marisol, Malcolm Morley, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Gerhard Richter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, James Rosenquist, Niki de Saint Phalle, Nicolas Schoffer, Bernhard Schultze, George Segal, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Pierre Soulages, Daniel Spoerri, Lawrence Stafford, Lewis Stein, Frank Stella, Antoni Tapies, Paul Thek, Wayne Thiebaud, Jean Tinguely, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Gunther Uecker, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Wols (Wolfgang Schulze).
A Very Good copy of this fragile and collectible catalogue. The usual bowing to pages, some general ageing, with a split to the lower back of plastic spine where the screw hole is, yet all still intact, nothing missing. Complete copy.
2019, English
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
Broken Music is an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and originally published in 1989 by DAAD. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
1970, Dutch
Hardcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nederlandse Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit / Netherlands
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1970 by Dutch art historian and critic Carel Blotkamp (b. 1945), Na de beeldenstorm: drie opstellen over recente beeldende kunst (3 essays on recent visual art) surveys developments in art at the height of one of the most innovative periods in art history, the 1960s. Blotkamp traces the influence of historical avant gardes (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Duchamp...) into new abstraction, hard-edge, Color Field, Minimalism, Pop, Op Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Povera, Land Art, et al. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with fine examples of work by Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Daan Van Golden, Richard Serra, Kenneth Nolan, Morris Louis, Jo Baer, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Walter de Maria, Yves Klein, Robert Morris, Bridget Riley, Jasper Johns, Lawrence Weiner, Jan Dibbets, Armando, Panamarenko, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Poons, Barry Flanagan, JCJ Vanderheyden, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Richard Long, Wim T. Schippers, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Mario Merz, Carl Andre, Pieter Engels, Andy Warhol, Edward Rushca, Jesús Rafael Soto, Peter Struycken, and many more...
Very Good copy without dust jacket (as issued), light tanning/wear to glossy, foiled boards.
1986, English
Softcover, 156 pages, 23 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Museum of Fine Arts / Boston
$25.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Exhibition catalogue published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1986, surveying their collection of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture. Illustrated throughout in full colour with works by Pierre Alechinsky, Miquel Barcelo, Alfonse Borysewicz, Terry Allen, Siah Armajani, Arman, Richard Artschwager, Jennifer Bartlett, Georg Baselitz, Gerry Bergstein, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Bush, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Anthony Caro, Joseph Cornell, Enzo Cucchi, Willem De Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Richard Estes, Roy Deforest, Robert Freeman, Adolph Gottlieb, Al Held, Yves Klein, Michael Lucero, Louise Nevelson, Katherine Porter, Susan Rothenberg, Cy Twombly, Terry Winters, Gilbert & George, Gregory Gillespie, Ralph Goings, Arshile Gorky, Nancy Graves, Philip Guston, Duane Hanson, Jess, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Joseph Kosuth, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Michael Mazur, John Mcnamara, Catherine Murphy, Alice Neel, A.R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, David Smith, Kenneth Snelson, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, Frank Stella, Gary Stephan, Clyfford Still, Tom Wesselmann, William T. Wiley, Bill Woodrow, Robert Yarber, and many more.
2012, English / Swedish
Softcover, 224 pages, 28 x 21.7cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$68.00 - Out of stock
In the years following the Second World War, artists across the world began to attack the most basic premises of painting, in ways that were both aggressive and playful. The creative act itself was deemed as important as the painting that resulted from it, creating an energetic interzone between painting and performance in which chance procedures, the movement of bodies and the participation of spectators were all recruited as tools.
Explosion! Painting as Action explores the connections and cross fertilizations between painting, performance and conceptual art from the late 1940s to the present. Examining painting, photography, video, performance, dance and sound art, this volume includes works by Lynda Benglis, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Gutai Group, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, Alison Knowles, Ana Mendieta, Rivane Neuenschwander, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Shozo Shimamoto, Lawrence Weiner and many others.
1973, German
Softcover, 138 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum / Cologne
$40.00 - Out of stock
Lovely catalogue published by Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Köln, in 1973 to document the museums extensive collection of international contemporary sculpture. Profusely illustrated in black and white with the works of Jean Arp, Paul Thek, Nancy Graves, John Chamberlain, Larry Bell, Carl Andre, Christo, Eva Hesse, Joachim Bandau, Jacques Lipchitz, Louise Nevelson, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Germaine Richier, Schöffer, Bernard Schultze, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm), John Tweed, Franz Erhard Walther, Hanns Gasser, Merdardo Rosso, Joseph Beuys, Günter Haese, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Jesús Rafael Soto, Richard Tuttle, Helmut Moos, Bruce Nauman, Ansgar Nierhoff, Jim Dine, Gary Indiana, Karl Zeno Rudolf Schadow, Julio Le Parc, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, G. F. Ris, George Segal, Nicolas Schöffer, Anthony Caro, Eduardo Paolozzi, Jean Tinguely, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Arman, Claes Oldenburg, Marisol Escobar, Niki Saint-Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Günther Uecker, Heinz Mack, Wolf Vostell, Miguel Ortiz Berrocal, Pol Bury, Erwin Heerich, Horst-Egon Kalinowski, Brigitte Meier-Denninghoff, Johann Gottfried Schadow, Honoré Daumier, Gasser, Adolf von Hildebrand, Max Klinger, Rosso, Aristide Maillol, Tweed, Julio González, Pablo Picasso, Henri Laurens, and many more... Texts in German.
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 18.3 x 25.4 cm
Published by
MASP / São Paulo
$85.00 - Out of stock
A comprehensive tribute to one of the central figures of postmodern dance in America. Edited with text by André Mesquita. Texts by Adriana Banana, David M. Sperling, Susan Rosenberg, Babette Mangolte, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown.
A founding member of the legendary Judson Dance Theater, American choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown (1936-2017) helped build the tenets of postmodern dance and is now considered one of the most influential figures in American choreography. Trisha Brown: Choreographing Life presents a sizable archive of Brown’s career, with photographs, drawings and video stills that illustrate her lifelong contributions to the world of contemporary dance.
Brown established her own dance company in 1970 and continued to dance until 2008, during which time she created over 100 dances and six operas. One of her most famous pieces was the product of a creative partnership with artists Laurie Anderson and Robert Rauschenberg; after the 1983 premiere of Set and Reset at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, Brown was launched into international acclaim. Brown’s choreography demonstrates an unparalleled cognizance of space and visuality, as indicated by the artistic process apparent in the drawings and diagrams included in this publication. Her work conveys the extent to which movement is an artistic language reflective of the complex relationship between body and mind.
2019, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$77.00 - Out of stock
An examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era.
In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation-from home video to social media-suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms.
Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us-those that we take and share, those that we see and assimilate through mass media and social media, those that we encounter in museums and galleries. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices-and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.
2013, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 178 x 218.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$77.00 - Out of stock
If you're interested in Plato, you're reading the wrong book. If you're interested in difficult childhoods, sexual misadventures, aesthetics, cultural history, and the reasons that a club sandwich and other meals -- including breakfast -- have remained in the memory of the present writer, keep reading. -- from Feelings Are Facts In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film-frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and antiwar causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances -- including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan -- and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life.
2016, English
Hardcover, 280 pages, 31.6 x 3.1 x 26 cm
Published by
Prestel / Munich
$120.00 - Out of stock
The resurgent interest in contemporary painting in recent years has coincided with an explosion of new digital media and technologies. Contrary to canonical accounts premised on medium-specificity, painting’s most advanced positions since the 1960s have developed in productive friction with contemporaneous forms of mass media and culture. From the rise of television and computers to the Internet revolution, painting has assimilated precisely those cultural and technological developments that were held responsible for its presumed “death.” Moving far beyond its technical definition as “oil on canvas,” painting during the information age has consistently offered a site for negotiating the challenges of a mediated life-world.
Featuring over 230 works by 107 artists, Painting 2.0 is one of the largest and most comprehensive exhibitions of contemporary painting in recent years.
Artists include:
Kai Althoff, Ei Arakawa/Shimon Minamikawa, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, Sadie Benning, Judith Bernstein, Joseph Beuys, Ashley Bickerton, Cosima von Bonin, KAYA (Debo Eilers & Kerstin Brätsch), Günter Brus, Daniel Buren, Merlin Carpenter, Leidy Churchman, William Copley, René Daniëls, Guy Debord/Asger Jorn, Carroll Dunham, Mary Beth Edelson, Thomas Eggerer, Michaela Eichwald, Nicole Eisenman, Jana Euler, Louise Fishman, Andrea Fraser, Isa Genzken, Mary Grigoriadis, Philip Guston, Wade Guyton, Guyton/Walker, Raymond Hains, Harmony Hammond, David Hammons, Keith Haring, Rachel Harrison, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, Jacqueline Humphries, Jörg Immendorff, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Yves Klein, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Manfred Kuttner, Maria Lassnig, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Lee Lozano, Konrad Lueg, Michel Majerus, Piero Manzoni, Kerry James Marshall, Hans-Jörg Mayer, John Miller, Joan Mitchell, Ree Morton, Ulrike Müller, Matt Mullican, Elisabeth Murray, Cady Noland, Hilka Nordhausen, Albert Oehlen, Laura Owens, Steven Parrino, Ed Paschke, Howardena Pindell, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, R.H. Quaytman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Reed, Gerhard Richter, Mimmo Rotella, Niki de Saint Phalle, Mario Schifano, Amy Sillman, Sylvia Sleigh, Josh Smith, Joan Snyder, Reena Spaulings, Nancy Spero, Gruppe SPUR, Frank Stella, Walter Swennen, Paul Thek, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly, Jacques de la Villeglé, Kelley Walker, Andy Warhol, Sue Williams, Karl Wirsum, Martin Wong, Christopher Wool, Heimo Zobernig, u.a.
2018, English / Korean
Softcover, 380 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art / Seoul
$105.00 - Out of stock
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, this volume delves into the groundbreaking activities of E.A.T., a non-profit organisation that began actively promoting and exploring the union of art and technology in 1966. The brainchild of artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, it aimed to expand the social role of artists and counteract feelings of alienation brought on by rapid technological advancement. The group hoped to inspire new directions for research, and also to serve as a catalyst in fostering technologies more attuned to the needs of the individual.
Profusely illustrated throughout with photographic documentation and archival material.
2018, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.2 x 25.5 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$58.00 - Out of stock
Using "ordinary" movements, the Judson Dance Theater stripped dance of its theatrical conventions
Taking its name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York's Greenwich Village, Judson Dance Theater was organized as a series of open workshops from which its participants developed performances. Redefining the kinds of movement that could count as dance, the Judson participants--Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Philip Corner, Bill Dixon, Judith Dunn, David Gordon, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, Robert Morris, Steve Paxton, Rudy Perez, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann and Elaine Summers, among others--would go on to profoundly shape all fields of art in the second half of the 20th century. They employed new compositional methods to strip dance of its theatrical conventions, incorporating "ordinary" movements--gestures typical of the street or home, for example, rather than a stage--into their work, along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with a sense of spontaneity.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done highlights the workshop's ongoing significance. The catalog charts the development of Judson, beginning with the workshops and classes led by Anna Halprin, Robert Ellis Dunn and James Waring, and exploring the influence of other figures working downtown such as Simone Forti and Andy Warhol, as well as venues for collective action like Judson Gallery and the Living Theatre. Lushly illustrated with film stills, photographic documentation, reproductions of sculptural objects, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings and archival material, the publication celebrates the group's multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos as well as the range of its participants.
1970, German
Softcover, 92 pages, 11 x 17 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Galerie Rudolph Zwirner / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
"Z" is a great, unsuspecting pocketbook from Galerie Rudolph Zwirner in 1970, collecting together a wonderful group of works by 78 artists (Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, René Magritte, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kenneth Noland, Daniel Spoerri, Frank Stella, Jean Tinguely, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Jasper Johns, Martial Raysse, Dieter Rot, Franz Erhart Walther, Bruno Goller, Morris Louis, Jim Dine, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Konrad Klapheck, Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo, Hundertwasser, Gerhard Richter, Antoni Tapies, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, Robert Graham, Allen Jones, Henri Michaux, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Tanguy, Louis Soutter, Tom Wesselmann, Toyen, Wols, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Panamarenko, Sol Lewitt, etc.) across painting, sculpture, drawings, collage and multiples, all reproduced in black and white across this almost entirely visual volume.
1972, German
Hardcover, 216 pages, 24.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Georg Wenderoth Verlag / Kassel
$60.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
documenta - Dokumente 1955 - 1968 (Four International Exhibitions of Modern Art), was published by Georg Wenderoth Verlag, Kassel in 1972. This clothbound hardcover book of texts (by Dieter Westecker, Carl Eberth, Werner Lengemann, Erich Müller) and photographs of the first four documenta exhibitions, is quite a unique publication. Written at the suggestion of former students and collaborators of Documenta initiator Arnold Bode, it does not replace a documenta chronicle or a scientific study of individual facts. On the contrary, the textual and pictorial material is selected from a technical point of view, processed and presented in a comprehensible form to stimulate detailed investigations into the exhibition-presentations. The bulk of the photographic documentation is of visitor reception and interaction with the installations of artworks, including those of Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Lee Bontecou, Victor Pasmore, Marino Marini, Jean Dubuffet, Konrad Klapheck, George Segal, Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Walter de Maria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Erich Hauser, Ernest Trova, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Peter Brüning, David Smith, Edward Keinholz, Dan Flavin, Morris Louis, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann, James RosenquisThomas Lenck, Francis Bacon, Horst Antes, Shinkichi Tajiri, Christo, Jackson Pollock, Karel Appel, Bernard Schultze, Otto Herbert Hajek, Jacques Lipchitz, Lynn Chadwick, Paul Delvaux, Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Max Bill, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Giogio de Chirico, Victor Vasarley, Zoran Music, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and many others.
Texts in German. First and only edition.
Vert Good copy with original dust jacket.