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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2009, English
Softcover, 54 pages, 21.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Paper Monument / New York
$28.00 $15.00 - In stock -
The first small book from Paper Monument, originally published in 2009 and now in its sixth printing. Features contributions from thirty-eight artists, critics, curators, and dealers on the sometimes serious and sometimes ridiculous topic of manners in the art world.
Contributions From:
James Bae, Jay Batlle, Andrew Berardini, Dike Blair, Matthew Brannon, Sari Carel, Naomi Fry, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Michelle Grabner, Ethan Greenbaum, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, A.S. Hamrah, Steffani Jemison, Paddy Johnson, Angie Keefer, Prem Krishnamurthy, David Levine, Pam Lins, Jason Murison, Dan Nadel, Bob Nickas, Wendy Olsoff, Dushko Petrovich, Kaspar Pintis, Richard Ryan, Jessica Slaven, Amanda Trager, Rachel Uffner, Roger White
2017, English
Hardcover, 792 pages, 17.3 x 26.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
First edition, out-of-print.
Created by curator Mathieu Copeland and artist Balthazar Lovay, together with a stellar list of contributors, The Anti-Museum presents the first extensive exploration of the radical and paradoxical concept that is ‘the anti-museum’ – a term so present in Art History and yet that has never been the object of an investigation and definition.
The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up to present day, the museumʼs suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces.
For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion (unpatented but regularly reappropriated) traces the erratic and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions.
From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalogue retracing the history of Closed Exhibitions, from Dada to Noise music, from ‘Everything is Art’ to NO!art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life.
This encyclopedic tome includes the work of over 80 artists and writers including Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Smithson, Jean Tinguely, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yvonne Rainer, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kenneth Goldsmith, George Maciunas, and Bob Nickas.
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
2020, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 19.3 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
Galerie Max Hetzler / Berlin
$110.00 - In stock -
Between art, engineering and architecture: recent works by Robert Grosvenor
This new hardcover monograph on Robert Grosvenor (born 1937)—known for his large-scale architectural sculptures—accompanied his third solo exhibition at Karma, New York, and concurrent exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, presenting recent works of sculpture alongside an essay by renowned curator and critic Bob Nickas.
Texts by Bob Nickas, Suzan Frecon, Rachel Kushner.
Robert Grosvenor (b. 1937, New York, NY) is an American sculptor and photographer known for his surreal captures of vernacular architecture and modernist retrofuturisms. Grosvenor’s monumental sculptures transform a bevy of mid-century technologies, structures, and cultural lores into simple, streamlined forms. These idiosyncratic forms challenge the sculptural conventions of weight, line, movement, and inertia. Grosvenor was included in the historic 1966 Primary Structures survey exhibition at the Jewish Museum, which famously introduced Minimalist art to a broader public. Although his work builds on the aesthetic program of Minimalism, Grosvenor playfully resists the cool austerity emblematic of the genre. Rather he explores the sensuousness of his materials and the nostalgic qualities of their color and design. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Karma, New York (2020); Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris (2020); Consortium Museum, Dijon (2020); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2018); and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2017), among others. Grosvenor’s work is represented in various public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and the Direction Régionale des Affaires Rennes.
As the 2020 recipient of the Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture, Grosvenor’s work will be featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in the spring of 2021.
2015, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 29 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
The much-revered avant-garde guitarist John Fahey (1939–2001) incorporated influences ranging from folk, blues, and bluegrass to classical music, musique concrete, and noise in his primarily acoustic guitar-based compositions. Considered a legend by many, Fahey released upward of three dozen LPs in his lifetime.
Relatively late in life, Fahey extended his so-called American Primitive approach beyond music, and into the creation of a substantial body of paintings created in makeshift studios in and around Salem, Oregon. Painting on found poster board and discarded spiral notebook paper, working with tempera, acrylic, spray paint, and magic marker, Fahey’s intuitive approach echoes the action painters and abstract expressionists. The same alluring and tranquilizing aesthetics that defines much of Fahey’s musical output are equally present in his paintings.
The first publication focusing on his visual output, John Fahey: Paintings, edited in collaboration with Audio Visual Arts (AVA), is illustrated with 92 plates and is accompanied by essays from Keith Connolly, founding member of No-Neck Blues Band, and the critic Bob Nickas.
2021, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 17 x 22.2 cm
Edition of 300,
Published by
Hassla Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
Published in an edition of only 300 copies, 36 Slides 1986–1990 is illustrated throughout and accompanied by text by American curator and critic Bob Nickas.
"The images that comprise this book come from two sheets of slides that I have held onto for almost thirty years now. (Each plastic sleeve holds up to twenty slides, for a total of forty in all. Four of the pockets with these sheets are empty.) Over that time I have projected them in talks I gave here and there, although never a talk devoted solely to the person who took them. That would be Laurie Parsons, an artist who was active between 1986 and 1994, a period of about nine years. In the first three, she focused on found objects, things she would bring back from the urban, natural, industrial environment, or their intersection. The earliest among them were stray pieces of wood, about sixty: splintered, peeling of paint, weathered by the elements, sun-bleached, deeper in the grain. With these, Parsons said she was "interested in the presence they had that I found as powerful as that of a piece of 'art.'" Whatever was brought back to the room where she lived, one side kept clear for an object's consideration, she photographed, always with slide film. She wanted to see the object as an image, her way of determining if it had the potential to be "a piece." [...] — Bob Nickas, 2021
In 1994, after being active with a number of exhibitions in the late 1980s—early 1990s, including exhibits at Lorence-Monk Gallery in New York; Galerie Rolf Ricke in Cologne; Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York; Le Consortium in Dijon, the then-35-year-old American artist Laurie Parsons (born 1959) stopped making art. She became a social worker, helping homeless people and the mentally ill, including adolescent psychiatric patients. After that, no more art. Or at least, no more making new work within explicitly designated art contexts. Parsons didn’t develop an activist art practice or move into what came to be known as socially engaged art; she left, and part of what she left behind is the fact that she left. More recently, though, Parsons’s retreat has garnered new attention and her work has been reappraised alongside that of other women artists such as Andrea Fraser, Lee Lozano, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Charlotte Posenenske, Elaine Sturtevant and Rosemary Tonks, who all stopped working permanently or dropped out of the art world for a significant period of time — in part as a form of critical resistance to a patriarchal and market-oriented art world. .
2020, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 25 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein / Vaduz
$80.00 - Out of stock
The first ever monograph on Steven Parrino.
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was one of the most influential artists of the New York art scene since the late 1980s. Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. Parrino’s work is defined by an unconditional will to be free that stems from American biker culture and is also influenced by punk rock existentialism. Borrowings from underground comics and the “Kustom Kulture” of the motorcycle world with its specific symbolic language are the main themes of his drawings in the early years. His monochrome painting in the tradition of “Radical Painting” evolved in parallel. As early as 1981 he began creating the large monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting. Predominantly a painter, music played a role that was at least as important for his artistic practice. Drawing on various "high" and subcultural sources, Parrino created an oeuvre of painting and music that contradicted increasing social and cultural conformism and also provided a fresh and intelligent contribution to the debate on modernism's demise. Parrino died in a motorcycle accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Parrino “came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.”
Heavily illustrated throughout with mostly full-page colour reproductions of his work, Steven Parrino: Nihilism Is Love includes texts by Konrad Bitterli, Catherine Dossin, Reinhard Ermen, Fabian Flückiger, Amy Granat, Pierre Huber, Friedemann Malsch, Matthew McCaslin, Olivier Mosset, Bob Nickas, Steven Parrino, Mai-Thu Perret, Amy O'Neill, Rolf Ricke, Marc- Olivier Wahler. Published on the occasion of the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in Europe.
2012, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 21.5 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Paper Monument / New York
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment is a unique and wide-ranging anthology featuring essays, drawings, and assignments from over one hundred contributors including John Baldessari, William Pope.L, Mira Schor, Rochelle Feinstein, Bob Nickas, Chris Kraus, Liam Gillick, Amy Sillman, James Benning, and Michelle Grabner. Bringing together assignments, anti-assignments, and artworks from both teachers and students from a broad range of institutions, we hope it simultaneously serves as an archive and an instigation, a teaching tool and a question mark, a critique and a tribute.
2014, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Edition Patrick Frey / Zürich
$88.00 - Out of stock
The girls name "Susie" served as a trademark for Ashley Bickerton's work, he showed during the 1980s in New York until moving to Bali. His intriguing painterly and sculptural pieces derive from commodity aesthetics, marketing language and corporate culture. At the time they were shown in the context of the seminal group of artists – often referred to as "Neo-Geo" – consisting of Bickerton, Halley, Koons and Vaisman at Sonnabend gallery.
Ashley Bickerton – Susie is the first monographic close reading of Bickerton's influential early work. Contributions by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Fredi Fischli, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Bob Nickas, Niels Olsen, Thomas Lawson and John C. Welchmann offer a wide range of critical views on his practice.
Awarded: “Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2014”.
Ashley Bickerton (born 1959 in Barbados, West Indies, lives and works in Bali, Indonesia) graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 and continued his education in the Independent Studies Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A seminal figure in the East Village scene, Bickerton was one of the original members of a group of artists known as “Neo-Geo,” and to this day, he remains an influential figure with a younger generation of artists. Over the last twenty-five years, Bickerton's work has been exhibited extensively in nearly every major museum around the world. His work can be found in numerous museum collections worldwide.
2017, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 17.3 x 22 cm
Published by
MUDAM / Luxembourg
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Carl Andre, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Barbara Bloemink, Jan Boelen, Louise Bourgeois, Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Alex Coles, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Hal Foster, Sigmund Freud, Dan Graham, Isabelle Graw, Sebastian Hackenschmidt and Dietmar Rübel, Graham Harman, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Dave Hickey, Matthew Higgs, Donald Judd, Immanuel Kant, Frederick J. Kiesler, Sven Lütticken, Alessandro Mendini, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jasper Morrison, Bruno Munari, Robert Nickas, Alice Rawsthorn, Jeff Rian, Richard Rinehart, Anthony Vidler
This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the present day, explores man’s rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time. Writers from different fields explore how things interact with materials, structures, and production processes while defining and registering the intangible qualities of the material world. Each author considers the different relationships between the context of a thing and its thingness, describing the ways in which things and ideas intersect.
Copublished with MUDAM Luxembourg
Design by Florence Richard
2016, English
Softcover, 408 pages,17 x 23 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$56.00 - Out of stock
This volume is comprised of years of recent writing by the influential New York–based critic and curator Bob Nickas, widely considered one of the few independent voices still at work today. The 50 essays and interviews, written since 2007, are spread across five chapters, touching on encounters with artists from the 1960s to the ’80s to the present – among them, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, On Kawara, Isa Genzken, Steven Parrino, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kelley Walker and Pierre Huyghe.
2000, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
$19.00 - Out of stock
Robert Nickas is a critic, freelance curator, and editor of the Index magazine (New York). He is also one of the free spirits who were nurtured by the libertarian punk slogan "do it yourself". In this collection, covering twenty years of activity, Nickas combines humour with intellectual rigor, as well as a reliable historical memory to broach works of personalities as diverse as Maurizio Cattelan, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cady Noland, John Miller, Haim Steinbach or Andy Warhol, by way of David Cronenberg, Melvins, Père Ubu and numerous others, also slipping in untimely observations on the alleged death of painting, the "Golden 80s" of New York art world, and the role of the exhibition curator.
Working independently, Robert Nickas has realized more than forty exhibitions for galleries and museums since 1984. He recently co-curated the Biennale of Lyon in France (with the Consortium team), is an editor of Artforum, and a Guest Curator at P.S.1 in New York.
His writings and interviews have appeared in Afterall and Sound Collector, as well as in numerous catalogues and monographs - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, On Kawara, Olivier Mosset, Cady Noland, Andy Wharol.
2010, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 232 pages, 215 x 115 mm
Published by
De Appel / Amsterdam
Open Editions / London
$39.00 - Out of stock
This sleek and serious anthology of new curatorial writing documents the inter-dependent relationships between the curatorial past, present and speculative futures and, instead of following the convention of curators writing about themselves, invites the authors to provide a text about the curatorial work of others. The result is an eclectic volume of accessible responses that provides a dynamic curatorial discourse where critical essays, theoretical explorations, propositions, historical overviews, interviews, exhibition critiques and fictional accounts sit side by side. Essential reading for students and professionals alike.
This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature about exhibition making. Moving away from autobiographical first-person narratives, Curating Subjects instead invites its broad range of contributors to comment upon the curatorial endevours of others. Conflating and colliding the past and present with possible futures, this book unfolds as an idiosyncratic conversation that is at once informative, entertaining and often revealing.
Matthew Higgs
Introduction by Paul O'Neill & Annie Fletcher; Design by Jonathan Hares.
Published with de Appel Arts Centre
2014, English
Softcover, 450 pages, 23 x 30 cm
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$49.00 - Out of stock
Featuring Paul McCarthy, Barbara Kruger, Marianne Faithfull, Olaf Breuning, Paris Hilton, Toilet Paper, Jean-Luc Godard, Bob Nickas, Larry Clark, the first issue of "Purple Travel" and a Tom Sachs studio book from Purple Books, plus much more.
Purple is a bi-annual fashion and art magazine that celebrates the work of the best and most relevant figures in fashion, photography and contemporary art from around the world.
Due to the weight of this volume, your order may incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
2008, English
Softcover, 270 pages (36 b/w ill), 150 x 210 mm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
$24.00 - Out of stock
Gathering together essays and interviews from 1995 to today, this book offers both an insight into Nickas' vision on contemporary art and a portrait of the American art scene over the last few decades. Structured like a novel, this publication traces recent art production to Pop art and Appropriation art; reflects on the importance of Warhol, On Kawara, and Punk in contemporary culture; pays homage to overlooked figures such as Cady Noland, Jamie Reid, and Steven Parrino.
Working independently, Bob Nickas has realized numerous exhibitions for galleries and museums since 1984. He is a regular contributor to "Artforum," and served until 2006 as Curatorial Advisor at P.S.1 in New York.
The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les Presses du réel and dedicated to critical writings.
Awarded in the competition "The most beautiful Swiss books 2008."
2012, English / Italian
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$18.00 - Out of stock
Mousse 35:
Lars Bang Larsen, Albert Serra, John D’Agata, Adam kleinman, Peter Watkins, Jens Hoffmann, Tim Griffin, Kathy Noble, Oscar Murillo, Catherine Wood, Claire Bishop, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jérôme Bel, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zachary Cahill, Camille Henrot, Cecilia Alemani, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Filipa Ramos, Davina Semo, Bob Nickas, Stefano Cernuschi, Aaron Flint Jamison, Lauren Cornell, Darren Bader, Peter Eleey, David Douard, Thomas Boutoux, Samara Golden, Andrew Berardini, Benedict Drew, Michael Portnoy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Charlotte Prodger, Bonnie Camplin, Lucy Reynolds.... and much more!
2011, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 9.25 x 11"
Edition of 500, 1st printing,
Published by
2nd Cannons / Los Angeles
$50.00 - Out of stock
This book brings together new texts written to accompany 79 exhibitions organized by Bob Nickas between 1984 and 2011. Nickas chose one work to represent the memory of each exhibition, and through this visual "lens" he reflects on his activity as a curator, offering many behind-the-scenes views to the art world of the 1980s and 90s, as well as intimate recollections of the artists he worked with, and the art works he encountered over the years. The book, then, can be seen as a sort of memoir. Always placing the artists and their works within a social milieu, while also aware of how art travels across time, he reminds us that both lead multiple lives, as an exhibition can reanimate a work from the past, and occasion the discovery of forgotten and marginalized figures among those who are very well-known. This retrospective catalog is also in many ways an ideal exhibition — or collection — 27 years in the making.
With 90 color and black-and-white reproductions, the book features works by:
Vito Acconci . Richard Aldrich . John M Armleder . Barry X Ball . Lisa Beck . Alan Belcher . Ben Berlow . Walead Beshty . Huma Bhabha . Doug Biggert . Marcel Broodthaers . Henri Cartier Bresson . Graham Caldwell . Vija Celmins . Art Chantry . Larry Clark . Verne Dawson . Jules de Balincourt . Jessica Diamond . Trisha Donnelly . Moira Dryer . Gardar Eide Einarsson . William Gedney . Robert Gober . Daan van Golden . Wayne Gonzales . Felix Gonzalez-Torres . Peter Halley . Richard Hawkins . Adam Helms . Eva Hesse . Peter Hujar . Jacob Kassay . On Kawara . Yves Klein . Louise Lawler . Mark Leckey . Sherrie Levine . Judy Linn . Lee Lozano . Chris Martin . Allan McCollum . McDermott & McGough . Adam McEwen . Ryan McGinley . John Miller . Olivier Mosset . Dave Muller . Chuck Nanney . Bruce Nauman . Cady Noland . Amy O'Neill . Steven Parrino . Laurie Parsons . Raymond Pettibon . Jean Prouvé . David Ratcliff . Alex Rose . Sally Ross . Allen Ruppersberg . Sam Samore . Tom Sandberg . Joan Semmel . Stephen Shore . Harry Smith . Jack Smith . Robert Smithson . Mark Stahl. Haim Steinbach. Rudolf Stingel . Lily van der Stokker . Aaron Suggs . Philip Taaffe . Paul Thek . Wolfgang Tillmans . Betty Tompkins . Josh Tonsfeldt . John Tremblay . Alan Uglow . Kelley Walker . Jeff Wall . Joan Wallace . Wallace & Donohue . Dan Walsh . Andy Warhol . Christopher Wool
2011, English
Softcover, newspaper, 275 pages, 265 x 375 mm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$15.00 - Out of stock
In this issue:
Starring
by Federico Florian, Antonio Scoccimarro
GEOFFREY FARMER
Characters and Characteristics of the Work
by Monika Szewczyk
TALKING ABOUT
Is That All There Is to a Circus?
by Dieter Roelstraete
PHYLLIDA BARLOW
The Work Is Never Finished
by Nicholas Cullinan
PART OF THE PROCESS - DAVID LEVINE
Rothko’s Ruins
by Ana Teixeira Pinto
TALKING ABOUT
Criticism Hurts
by Jan Verwoert
PORTFOLIO - GEORGE KUCHAR
Carnivalesque George Kuchar
by Juan A. Suárez
LOST AND FOUND - LLYN FOULKES
The Lost Frontier: Llyn Foulkes
by Andrew Berardini
TALKING ABOUT
Melete (“The Society Islands”)
by Mark von Schlegell
NICE TO MEET YOU - DAN FINSEL
Art Therapy
by Cecilia Alemani
NICE TO MEET YOU - BEN SCHUMACHER
Things That Look Like Other Things
by Bob Nickas
NICE TO MEET YOU - JOHN HENDERSON
Absorption & Theatricality
by Barbara Casavecchia
NICE TO MEET YOU - WU TSANG
Wu Tsang: Body Quotations, Back-Breaking Sparkle and the Dissemination of Wildness
by Kevin McGarry
TEN FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF CURATING
Chapter 6: What Is an Exhibition?
by Elena Filipovic, visual concept by Nairy Baghramian
TALKING ABOUT
A New Fruit
by Nick Currie
LONDON - CALLY SPOONER
The Wor(l)d Is a Stage
by Michele Robecchi
PARIS - JONATHAN BINET
The Way Things Go: a Conversation with Jonathan Binet
by Vincent Honoré
NEW YORK - TIM ROLLINS & JULIE AULT
Shakers
BERLIN
Starship
by Gigiotto Del Vecchio
ARTIST PROJECT - LUTZ BACHER
The Gift
by Fionn Meade
ENRICO DAVID & THOMAS HOUSEAGO
I’m Fucked Out of Your Mind
ALISON KNOWLES
The Future Will Be Fragrant Bean Fields
by Hans Ulrich Obrist
REPRINT
Time Warp
by Rob Giampietro
TALKING ABOUT
As Little Time on The Ground as Possible. First Attempt on the Possibility of Artistic Significance Beyond Philosophy of History
by Chus Martínez
Books
by Stefano Cernuschi
Diary
WHAT’S ALTERNATIVE? ALTERNATIVE TO WHAT? - ANDREA FRASER
"Alternative to what, exactly?"
by Vincenzo de Bellis
TAMAR GUIMARÃES
A Strange Ritual
by Andrea Lissoni
TALKING ABOUT
Moving Gods Aside
by Philippe Pirotte
JESSICA WARBOYS
Waves Wave
by Emilie Renard