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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER
RE—OPENING JAN 16
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
ORDERS SHIP FROM JAN 6
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.
2016, English
Softcover (w. printed plastic jacket), 124 pages, 10.5 x 16 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$50.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Stefano Cernuschi and Abaseh Mirvali, eds.
Texts by Simon Starling and Maja McLaughlin
Simon Starling: A–Z is a pocket, non illustrated mid-career catalogue raisonné of a practice now spanning over two decades. Every work ever realized by Starling (Epsom, UK, 1967) is listed in alphabetical order and referenced in this compact guide, which also provides a bibliography and connections to other related projects. Halfway through the text flow, three photo inserts and texts by the artist and Maja McLaughlin document the exhibition projects El Eco and Bowl, Plates realized in Mexico City, at the Museo Experimental El Eco and the Luis Barragán House and Studio, in 2015.
2016, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
Materiality has reappeared as a highly contested topic in recent art. Modernist criticism tended to privilege form over matter—considering material as the essentialized basis of medium specificity—and technically based approaches in art history reinforced connoisseurship through the science of artistic materials. But in order to engage critically with the meaning, for example, of hair in David Hammons’s installations, milk in the work of Dieter Roth, or latex in the sculptures of Eva Hesse, we need a very different set of methodological tools.
This anthology focuses on the moments when materials become willful actors and agents within artistic processes, entangling their audience in a web of connections. It investigates the role of materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process, or participation. And it looks at the ways in which materials obstruct, disrupt, or interfere with social norms, emerging as impure formations and messy, unstable substances. It reexamines the notion of “dematerialization”; addresses materialist critiques of artistic production; surveys relationships between matter and bodies, from the hierarchies of gender to the abject and phobic; explores the vitality of substances; and addresses the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality emerging in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation.
Artists surveyed include
Georges Adéagbo, Carl Andre, Janine Antoni, Amy Balkin, Artur Barrio, Helen Chadwick, Mel Chin, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, Tessa Farmer, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Romuald Hazoumè, Pierre Huyghe, Ilya Kabakov, Mike Kelley, Anthony McCall, Teresa Margolles, Robert Morris, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Tino Sehgal, Shozo Shimamoto, Santiago Sierra, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, Paul Thek, Paul Vanouse, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Kara Walker
Writers include
Joseph D. Amato, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Georges Didi-Huberman, Natasha Eaton, Jens Hauser, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Tim Ingold, Wolfgang Kemp, Julia Kristeva, Esther Leslie, Jean-François Lyotard, Dietmar Rübel, Monika Wagner, Gillian Whiteley
About the Editor
Petra Lange-Berndt is Chair of Modern and Contemporary art in the Art History Department at the University of Hamburg and a leading researcher in the field of material studies in art history. She is coeditor, with Dietmar Rübel, of Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Contemporaries and Comrades, the 1970s.
2015, English
Softcover, 629 pages, 19.5 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Leuphana University of Lüneburg / Germany
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$42.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Marie-Luise Angerer, Christoph Behnke, Ana Bogdanović, Larissa Buchholz, Sabeth Buchmann, Kathrin Busch, Bettina von Dziembowski, Daniel Falb, Paul Feigelfeld, Ulrike Gerhardt, Monica Greco, Erich Hörl, Cornelia Kastelan, Stefanie Kleefeld, Valérie Knoll, Roman Kräussl, Susanne Leeb, Hannes Loichinger, Sven Lütticken, Julia Moritz, Volker Pekron, Pierre Pénet, Dieter Roelstraete, Bettina Roggmann, Stefan Römer, Steffen Rudolph, Michael Sanchez, Magnus Schaefer, Stefanie Sembill, Christophe Spaenjers, Paul Stenner, Jeannine Tang, Olav Velthuis, Ulf Wuggenig
Peripheries are profoundly ambiguous regions. While trying to build a relationship with the center, the periphery often finds itself excluded both on a structural and actor-related level, no matter if the center-periphery model is defined in terms of space or along relations of power. However, beyond static perspectives of such struggles, in a dynamic and globalized artistic field increasingly transformed by the digital revolution, temporary mobility attractors deserve our attention.
This publication attempts to shift practices of thought toward both critical realism and new materialism. It is neither committed to today’s wishful thinking regarding horizontalized networks and deterritorialized structures, nor does it fix itself to determinist approaches. In contrast to twentieth-century constructivist approaches and their epistemic fallacies, materialized verticalities and matter-based, infrastructural spaces are brought to the fore.
This book is the result of four years of collaborative work that focused on topics of affect, the return of history, ecology, and art and its markets in today’s power law–based economies. These themes triggered not only the development of new artworks but also gave rise to reflexive discourses and discussions surrounding art theory, philosophy, sociology, and economics. The book contains a visual documentation of a number of group shows—which also included the works of winners of the Daniel Frese Prize—at Agathenburg Castle, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, and Kunstverein Springhornhof. The contributions by critics, curators, theoreticians, and scientists include essays and in-depth conversations.
Works by Art Club 2000, Patterson Beckwith, J. St. Bernard, Angela Bulloch, Daniel Buren, Merlin Carpenter, Gordon Castellane, Diego Castro, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Jeremiah Day, Stephan Dillemuth, John Dogg, Maria Eichhorn, Jana Euler, Loretta Fahrenholz, Renée Green, Karl Holmqvist, Gilta Jansen, Monika Jarecka, Tobias Kaspar, Carola Keitel, Jackie McAllister, Josephine Meckseper, Dirk Meinzer, James Meyer, Shana Moulton, nOffice, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Fabian Reimann, Carissa Rodriguez, Megan Francis Sullivan, Katja Staats, Simon Starling, Buffy Summers, Jan Timme, Daniela Töbelmann, Niko Wolf, Amelie von Wulffen, Phillip Zach
Copublished with Leuphana University of Lüneburg
Design and infographics by Sina Hurnik and Kerstin Warncke
2013, English
Softcover, 237 pages, 15.2 cm x 21.2 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$50.00 - Out of stock
What does 'contemporary' actually mean? This is among the fundamental questions about the nature and politics of time that philosophers, artists and more recently curators have investigated over the past two decades. If clock time -- a linear measurement that can be unified, followed and owned -- is largely the invention of capitalist modernity and binds us to its strictures, how can we extricate ourselves and discover alternative possibilities of experiencing time? Recent art has explored such diverse registers of temporality as wasting and waiting, regression and repetition, deja vu and seriality, unrealized possibility and idleness, non-consummation and counter-productivity, the belated and the premature, the disjointed and the out-of-sync -- all of which go against sequentialist time and index slips in chronological experience. While such theorists as Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman have proposed "anachronistic" or "heterochronic" readings of history, artists have opened up the field of time to the extent that the very notion of the contemporary is brought into question.
This collection surveys contemporary art and theory that proposes a wealth of alternatives to outdated linear models of time.
Artists surveyed include Marina Abramovi, Francis Alys, Matthew Buckingham, Janet Cardiff, Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Bea Fremderman, Toril Johannessen, On Kawara, Joachim Koester, Christian Marclay, nova Milne, Trevor Paglen, Katie Patterson, Raqs Media Collective, Dexter Sinister, Simon Starling, Hito Steyerl, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tehching Hsieh, Time/Bank.
Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Hans Belting, Walter Benjamin, Franco Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Georges Didi-Huberman, D gen Zenji, Peter Galison, Boris Groys, Brian Dillon, Elena Filipovic, Joshua Foer, Elizabeth Grosz, Adrian Heathfield, Rachel Kent, Bruno Latour, George Kubler, Doreen Massey, Alexander Nagel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Daniel Rosenberg, Michel Serres, Michel Siffre, Nancy Spector, Nato Thompson, Christopher Wood, George Woodcock, Mark von Schlegell.
Edited by Amelia Groom.
2014, English
Hardcover, 72 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 21 x 17.5 cm
Published by
City Gallery / Wellington
IMA / Brisbane
Monash University Museum of Art / Melbourne
$20.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Publication produced on the occasion of the traveling exhibition "Simon Starling: In Speculum", Monash University Museum of Art, Victoria: 18 July – 21 September 2013; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane: 5 October - 30 November 2013; City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi: 22 February - 18 May 2014.
Catalogue features new texts by Justin Clemens, Robert Leonard, and Richard Gillespie.
Marked by epic journeys and explorative narratives, Simon Starling's work investigates the social, cultural and material implications of object-making. His ongoing excavation and transformation of the material world takes the form of associational assemblages that incorporate film, photography and sculptural forms, revealing rich, unexpected and complex histories.
The first career survey of the Turner Prize-winning artist’s work in Australasia, Simon Starling: In Speculum, brings together a major new commission and key works from the artist's oeuvre that focus particularly on the site of the studio and workshop, and relationships between art, technology, history and modernity. This aspect of Starling’s research-based practice reflects the form and process of manufacture in both structure and concept.
An artist who often works site-specifically and in response to local geographies, Starling has developed a new work for In Speculum that engages the Great Melbourne Telescope (1868-69). Currently under restoration at Museum Victoria, the telescope was one of the largest in the world at the time of its production in the 19th century. Starling’s new project continues his interest in early scientific exploration and astronomy.
Simon Starling: In Speculum is a joint project by Monash University Museum of Art, the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.
2013, English
Softcover, 147 pages, 20.5 x 29 cm
Published by
Städelschule / Frankfurt
$26.00 - In stock -
Bookbook is a project of the Simon Starling Class at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunst – Städelschule
List of Contents
Anonymous Stage I Contribution
Primary/Secondary (Information) by Benjamin Lobko
Donald Duck Hitler and the Chocolate Factory – a work in progress by Dan Starling
Anonymous Stage I Contributions
Stage II Contributions
Anonymous Stage I Contributions
The Hermit & The Sea by Michael Stevenson
Stage II Contributions
Before This (An Afterword) by Simon Starling
Unlrelated Things Related by Patrick Keaveney
Published by the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunst – Städelschule
2012, English
Softcover, 172 pages, ills colour & bw, 23 x 28 cm
Published by
PIN-UP MAGAZINE
$22.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Pin-Up is a biannual magazine for 'architectural entertainment'.
Issue #13 : JEANNE GANG, PETER SHIRE, OSCAR TUAZON, PHILIPPE MALOUIN, PLUS a 48-page NEW YORK CITY SPECIAL including the fascinating story of the Dia Foundation’s role in a downtown mosque, a week at Paul Rudolph’s Beekman Place penthouse, an exclusive glimpse at the Metropolitan Opera Club, the rise and fall of one of America’s most important fashion designers and his extravagant Fifth Avenue office, the history of the adventure playground in New York City, and a portfolio by young New York architects Leong Leong. Also: A visit to Ricardo Bofill’s Les Espaces d’Abraxas under cover of darkness, an immersion into the nightmarish dream world of Swiss designer H.R. Giger, and a chimeric architectural fantasy rendered in polystyrene and celluloid. Austrian artist Erwin Wurm composes an absurdist architectural reprise, and four design curators present a material portfolio in marble, leather, metal, and wood. Murray Moss gives a behind-the-scenes look at how an unprecedented art and design auction is challenging traditional and disciplinary boundaries, and Dutch designer Jurgen Bey talks about dreams and realities in design education and practice. Also in the issue is an investigation into the resurgent interest in Brutalism, and an examination of the ways in which spaces of political assembly give shape to discourse. Plus a PIN–UP Board showcase featuring architecture for dogs, exciting young Arab architecture practices, Bjarne Melgaard’s Snøhetta-designed house to die in, Shanzhai Biennial, two young Beijing architects’ hardcore inclinations, Jean Prouvé meets Simon Starling, Carlo Scarpa’s legacy with Venetian glass, Richard Neutra, and so much more.
2008, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 230 x 150 mm
Published by
The Power Plant / Toronto
$62.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Cuttings [Supplement] was produced in association with Simon Starling's solo exhibition at The Power Plant in 2008 and includes texts by Gregory Burke, Mark Godfrey, Reid Shier, Sarah Stanners and Simon Starling.The exhibition featured the commissioned work Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) (2007-8), a piece that collapses the history of Henry Moore's sculpture, Warrior with Shield (1953–4), with the zebra mussel infestation in Lake Ontario.This publication is a companion piece to Cuttings (2005), but stands on its own with essays focusing on the commissioned sculpture and works made since Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005. Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006), Nachbau (Reconstruction) (2007) and Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006), are considered with explanatory texts and colour illustrations.This publication is a proud recipient of the 2008 OAAG Awards in the Visual Art Book category.
2006, English/Italian
Softcover, 56 pages, 245mm x 200mm
Published by
Galleria Franco Noero / Italy
$45.00 - Out of stock
'24 hr. Tangenziale' is the exhibition catalogue that accompanied his Galleria Franco Noero show in Turin in 2006. Includes an interview with Fulvio Ferrari & Napoleone Ferrari.
2008, English / Italian
Softcover, 97 pages, 300 x 237 mm
Published by
Galleria Franco Noero / Italy
$20.00 - Out of stock
"Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations" is a catalogue published by Galleria Franco Noero in 2008 for the artist Simon Starling.
2010, German/English/Spanish
Hardcover (clothbound), 184 pages (84 color ills.), 178 x 244 mm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Portikus / Frankfurt
$65.00 - Out of stock
dOCUMENTA (13)’s first artist book records the first stage of a project by Guillermo Faivovich (1977 in Buenos Aires) and Nicolás Goldberg (1978 in Paris). Since 2006, the artists have been researching Campo del Cielo, field of impact of a meteorite shower that occurred in northern Argentina four thousand years ago. El Taco, one of those meteorites, was divided in half in an intricate procedure at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany—halves which have since been located in Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution and Buenos Aires’s planetarium.
The two parts of El Taco will be reunited for the first time at an exhibition at Portikus, a step in their journey toward dOCUMENTA (13), where a future stage of the project A Guide to Campo del Cielo will take place in 2012. This publication documents the meteorite’s long story, which involves the artists approach to bibliographical inquiry, archival research, and oral history through interacting with people who have been engaged in the region’s history and worldwide fieldwork.
Edited by dOCUMENTA (13), foreword by Daniel Birnbaum, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, texts by Tim McCoy, Hernán Pruden, Jutta Zipfel, conversation between Simon Starling and the artists.