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
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
2024, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 27.2 x 20 cm
Published by
Brooklyn Museum / Brooklyn
Phaidon / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice
Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
2008, English
Softcover, 489 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$58.00 - In stock -
Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure.
Rather, by drawing on Deleuzian notions of the “minor” and the Foucauldian problematization of authorship found in Conrad’s own artistic/musical project, Early Minimalism, it disperses him into an “author function.” Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad’s collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of the time.
“A tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity.”—Art Bulletin
2022, English
Hardcover, 260 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
A sweeping selection of Donald Judd’s iconic and ambitious works alongside a diverse collection of newly commissioned writings.
One of the most significant American artists of the postwar period, Judd rigorously experimented with color, form, material, and space. The works in this catalogue range from the artist’s expansive installations to self-contained single units, yielding valuable new insights into his process and approach. The survey includes one of his largest and most intricate installations of wall-mounted plywood boxes, conceived in 1986. Other works include variations on some of Judd’s most recognizable forms, executed in materials such as Corten steel, plexiglass, copper, plywood, brushed aluminum, and painted aluminum. Brilliant and exacting reproductions capture these works in vivid detail. Following the major Judd retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020, this book serves as a companion volume.
With contributions from a wide range of voices—art historians, critics, writers, and performers— this publication includes rich new writings on Judd’s oeuvre, art criticism, and enduring influence. Artworks 1970–1994 is published on the occasion of the eponymous 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner New York.
Foreword by Flavin Judd. Texts by Johanna Fateman, Lucy Ives, Branden W. Joseph, Marta Kuzma, Thessaly La Force, Anna Lovatt, Lauren Oyler, Wendy Perron, Michael Stone-Richards, and Mimi Thompson.
2021, English / French
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$32.00 - Out of stock
I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack… — Felix Bernstein
Finally, a new issue of long standing favourite May revue, with a cover feature on American filmmaker, actor, performance artist and pioneer of underground cinema, Jack Smith (1932 –1989)!
Jack Smith (Michael Krebber, Felix Bernstein, Enzo Shalom, Branden W. Joseph), Gary Indiana, Bruce Hainley and Sohrab Mohebbi, Jean-Luc Godard by Ferdinand Gouzon, Leilah Weinraub by Juliana Huxtable, Nina Könnemann by Megan Francis Sullivan, Louise Lawler by Nick Irvin, Claire Fontaine by Anita Chari, Robert Malaval by Valentin Gleyze, Afuma (Stefan Tcherepnin & Taketo Shimada) by Keith Connolly, Park McArthur by Noah Barker, Ken Okiishi by Felix Bernstein...
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, twice a year, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisment typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.
2020, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$50.00 - Out of stock
A handsomely redesigned edition of essays examining af Klint's final abstractions, edited Kurt Almqvist and Louise Belfrage.
The result of a series of lectures delivered during the 2016 Serpentine Galleries exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, this volume gathers essays examining the last abstract series made by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). The paintings were all created in the first half of the year 1920 and are the last paintings af Klint made before turning to watercolor. Reproductions of these images are complemented by essays from Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden W. Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum, which shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes. Beautifully redesigned by Sweden's most famous designer, this book is a key contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on this immensely popular painter.
2018, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 19.4 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$75.00 - Out of stock
Edited with text by Cathleen Chaffee. Text by Rachel Adams, Vera Alemani, Constance DeJong, Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Elms, David Grubbs, Henriette Huldisch, Branden W. Joseph, Andrew Lampert, Christopher Müller, Annie Ochmanek, Tony Oursler, Tina Rivers Ryan, Jay Sanders, Paige Sarlin, Christopher Williams.
Tony Conrad (1940-2016) was a pioneering American avant-garde video artist, experimental filmmaker, musician, composer, sound artist, teacher, and writer.
Throughout his six-decade career he forged a unique path through numerous artistic movements and defined a vast range of culture, including rock music and public access television.
In music, Conrad was an early member of the Theatre of Eternal Music (The Dream Syndicate), which included John Cale and La Monte Young. In the early 1960s he was also influential in the origins of the iconic band, The Velvet Underground. In film, Conrad was associated with the Structuralist movement which included filmmakers such as Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton.
This richly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth introduction to Conrad’s life and career: presenting his early Structuralist films projects in which he treated film as a sculptural and performative material; his Invented Acoustical Tools which presented as sculptures themselves; the ambitious films about power relations, set in the military and in prison; and his final sculptures and installations, which evoke and critique what he perceived as an emerging culture of surveillance, control, and containment.
This book also includes Conrad’s own writings writings from 1966 to 2016, as well as texts by curators, theorists and notable artists such as Tony Oursler, Christopher Müller, and Christopher Williams.
Accompanying the exhibition, Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2018), MIT List Visual Arts Center and Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University (2018/2019), and ICA, University of Pennsylvania (2019).
2017, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 25 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
Now out of print and very collectable, this unique volume contains the last abstract images series made by Hilma af Klint in the 1920ʼs which are previously unpublished in their entirety. These images are followed by ground breaking essays which shed new light on the pioneering abstract artist af Klint and her importance for artists today. These images are complemented by essays based on lectures delivered during the exhibition Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen, at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2016. Briony Fer, David Lomas, Branden Joseph, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum shed new light on af Klint and her importance for artists today, also addressing the need for a broader conception of art history that her work proposes.
Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944) was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings were amongst the first abstract art. A considerable body of her abstract work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of women who shared her belief in the importance of trying to make contact with the so-called "High Masters" – often by way of séances. Her paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams, were a visual representation of complex spiritual ideas.
2018, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 33.5 x 24.1 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$75.00 - Out of stock
Edited with text by Dieter Daniels, Inke Arns. Text by Brandon LaBelle, David Toop, Dörte Schmidt, Julia H. Schröder, Jan Theben.
Contributions by Hans-Friedrich Bormann, William Letterman, Kyle Gann, Branden W. Joseph, et al.
John Cage's (1912–92) 4'33" premiered on August 29, 1952, distilling the composer's philosophical explorations of silence into four minutes, thirty-three seconds of performed, charged silence. Elegantly, provocatively, the piece asked: what does silence sound like?
Cage's questions about the nature of silence and sound continue to reverberate decades later; this volume—the most comprehensive on the piece to date—brings together new theoretical writings and artistic works exploring Cage's composition. A wide-ranging list of contributors, contemporary and historical—from Merce Cunningham to Rage Against the Machine—weigh in on Cage's work alongside Cage's original scores and the composer's own subsequent engagements with his most famous piece.
2010, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 145 x 210 mm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
The chance situation or random event—whether as a strategy or as a subject of investigation—has been central to many artists' practices across a multiplicity of forms, including expressionism, automatism, the readymade, collage, surrealist and conceptual photography, fluxus event scores, film, audio and video, performance, and participatory artworks. But why—a century after Dada and Surrealism's first systematic enquiries—does chance remain a key strategy in artists' investigations into the contemporary world?The writings in this anthology examine the gap between intention and outcome, showing it to be crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The book provides a new critical context for chance procedures in art since 1900 and aims to answer such questions as why artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice; what new possibilities this suggests; and why the viewer finds the art so engaging.Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, William Anastasi, John Baldessari, Walead Beshty, Mark Boyle, George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Marcel Duchamp, Brian Eno, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Huang Yong Ping, Douglas Huebler, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Jiri Kovanda, Jorge Macchi, Christian Marclay, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Daniel Spoerri, Keith Tyson, Jennifer West, Ceryth Wyn Evans, La Monte Young
Writers include: Paul Auster, Jacquelynn Baas, Georges Bataille, Daniel Birnbaum, Claire Bishop, Guy Brett, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Stanley Cavell, Lynne Cooke, Fei Dawei, Gilles Deleuze, Anna Dezeuze, Russell Ferguson, Branden W. Joseph, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Lacan, Sarat Maharaj, John Miller, Alexandra Munroe, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, Jasia Reichardt, Julia Robinson, Sarah Valdez, Katharina VossenkuhlDocuments of Contemporary Art series
Copublished with Whitechapel Gallery, London
2018, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Uncollected Texts draws together a number of Carolee Schneemann’s earliest writings – many exceedingly rare and several that are published here for the first time – ranging from letters to the editor, dream journals, and film criticism, to satirical poems, detailed discussions of her art, and pointed feminist critiques. Edited by Branden W. Joseph, the book includes 30 texts by Carolee Schneemann written between 1956 and 1981, as well as an introduction by Joseph.
First published in short-run magazines like Caterpillar, Film Culture, The Fox, Manipulations, and Matter; academic journals such as Performing Arts Journal; and mainstream publications including The New York Times and The Village Voice, the writings gathered in this volume shed light on some of Schneemann’s most important artistic achievements. Schneemann writes about her most famous “kinetic theatre” piece, Meat Joy; anti-Vietnam War works such as Snows, Viet-Flakes, and Divisions and Rubble; the multimedia performance Up to and Including Her Limits; and the double-screen film Kitch’s Last Meal. Frequently referring to one another, the assembled writings produce a densely interwoven tapestry of cross-references that provide unique insights into Schneemann’s artistic development while also foregrounding the artist’s uniquely poetic style.
2017, English
Hardcover, 398 pages, 30.5 x 23 cm
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
Walther König / Köln
$98.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue is the first comprehensive publication on Price’s varied oeuvre. It offers an unflinching portrait of contemporary, mediated Western life. The exhibition at Stedelijk Museum is the first survey of the American artist’s work.
A key theme in Price’s work is the self under technological pressure. This is often expressed in terms of the ‘skins’ of surface, packaging, and wrapping: a photographic study of a person’s skin obtained through the technologies Google employs for mapping; a vacuum-formed plastic relief presenting a body part stranded in plastic; a large wall sculpture depicting the negative space between two people engaged in intimate action, greatly enlarged from a tiny internet jpeg.
‘Seth Price is a key figure in addressing technology and artistic authorship. His work traces an important art historical shift from the concept of collage, where chance played a major role and the image was constructed of multiple layers, to the concept of a unified image, which envelops us in an endless, undifferentiated, digital stream.’ – Beatrix Ruf, Director of Stedelijk Museum
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Seth Price: Social Synthetic, at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (15 April – 3 September 2017), and at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (12 October 2017 – 18 March 2018).
Texts by: Cory Arcangel, Ed Halter, Achim Hochdörfer, Branden W Joseph, John Kelsey, Michelle Kuo, Rachel Kushner, Laura Owens, Ariana Reines, Beatrix Ruf.
2012, English
Softcover, 108 pages, 124 x 178 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$30.00 - In stock -
In 1972, New York filmmaker Tony Conrad toured Europe with Andy Warhol superstar, Beverly Grant. The path they followed would not only bring them into contact with some of the most interesting figures of European underground cinema-including Malcolm Le Grice, Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, Valie Export, Kurt Kren, Otto Muehl -but also initiate an internationl dialogue about the crisis of experimental cinema that would resonate on both sides of the Atlantic Following the trajectory of Conrad and Grant, the book surveys the transformations in international experimental cinema and its relation to other visual arts during the 1970s.
2013, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 25.4 x 30.6 cm
Published by
Prestel / Munich
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$140.00 - Out of stock
From the mid-1970s, Mike Kelley assembled an incredibly diverse and often controversial body of work. A multi-disciplinary impresario, he created works on paper, paintings, sculpture, video, installation, and performance art that managed to be at once shocking yet humorous, and complex yet accessible. This companion volume to the much-anticipated 2013 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) brings a fresh understanding to the artist's work by seeking to address the more poetic aspects of Kelley's work through Eva Meyer-Hermann's unique curatorial approach. Here she presents individual works in new combinations that cross the boundaries of chronology, bodies of work, and former artistic project groups. Identifying themes such as architecture, language, identity, Informe, power, modernisms, nostalgia, and religion, the book represents ideas that have informed Kelley's work throughout his career. As a result, the overarching lines of his oeuvre become visible and accessible. This book features essays (by John C. Welchman, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Branden W. Joseph, and George Baker), a fully annotated plate section of abundant full-colour images of Kelley's history of work, and a newly researched and revised biography and bibliography of Kelley's work.
The publication promises to be the definitive work on the artist.
A huge publication! Extra shipping charges may apply.
2014, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 182 pages (36 b/w ills.), 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$24.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Branden W. Joseph
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.
Institut für Kunstkritik series
Design by Surface
2015, English
Hardcover, 220 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 24.4 x 30 cm
Published by
Black Inc / Melbourne
$60.00 - Out of stock
On the eve of All the World's Futures at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Schwartz City is pleased to announce the publication of Let's Destroy Work, the first major monograph on Marco Fusinato. A comprehensive overview of the past two decades of Fusinato's projects in art and music, featured projects include FREE (1998–2004), a series of guerrilla performances in unsuspecting music stores around the world; Mass Black Implosion (2007–), an ongoing series of propositional scores; Aetheric Plexus (2009–2013), a viewer-triggered installation of white noise and white light; and TM/MF (2000), a collaborative project with Thurston Moore.
Included is new writing by Branden W. Joseph, Professor in Art History at Columbia University; a text by US-based music critic Byron Coley; and essays from insurrectional anarchist writer Alfredo M. Bonanno's publication 'Let's Destroy Work, Let's Destroy the Economy'. The book is rich in colour and mono illustrations of Fusinato's works, and a selection of reference images.
Marco Fusinato's practice references the rhetoric of radical politics (its ambitions and failures), noise as music and the conditions and conventions of conceptual art. Through wide-ranging forms of work in gallery contexts and performances, he foregrounds moments of disruption and impact in which lie the possibility of a shift in perception or change in the course of events. Fusinato performs regularly in the international experimental music underground, obliterating the guitar into improvised noise-spit tsunamis.
2008, English
Softcover with dust jacket, 148 pages, 11 b/w ill., 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$22.00 - In stock -
Contributions by George Baker, Johanna Burton, Merlin Carpenter, Melanie Gilligan, Isabelle Graw, Tom Holert, Branden W. Joseph, John Kelsey, André Rottmann, Julia Voss
Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.
“It was especially interesting for us to watch a kind of transatlantic divide happening. While the US-American participants mostly declared criticism as obsolete while hoping for turning its weakness into a strength, most European participants departed from the opposite diagnosis: that criticism has never been as strong as it is today, since it is now part of a knowledge-based economy.” Isabelle Graw/Daniel Birnbaum
Design by Surface, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin
September 2010, German/English
Softcover Journal, 280 pages (colour/bw ill.), offset, 230 x 165 mm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
"LIFE AT WORK"
This issue of "Texte zur Kunst" bears the programmatic title "Life at Work". Admittedly, this means to take up quite a bit, for at issue is nothing less than revaluating a theoretical and historical relation that has determined the history of modern and contemporary art like almost no other: Since "around 1800", the forms of art have been ascribed a quasi-organic life of their own. An important trend in modern aesthetics sought to evoke liveliness, with the aim of offering resistance to the commodified world of capitalism itself. But how does this problematic pose itself today? Is a critical reference to "life" in art and beyond at all possible after theories of biopolitics have insistently argued that capitalism has permeated all areas of life?
Plus reviews from Berlin, Madrid, Zurich, Basel, Tel Aviv, Vienna, Barcelona, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Leverkusen, and Kraichtal
Includes : SVEN LÜTTICKEN - ACTS IN THE AGE OF VIRTUOSO PERFORMANCE, BRANDEN W. JOSEPH - LEE LOZANO'S DREAM OF LIFE, ERIC C. H. DE BRUYN - INTERMITTENT CONVERSATIONS ON LEAVING THE FACTORY, PATENTED IDEALISM - A Conversation between Sven Lütticken and Hito Steyerl, SABETH BUCHMANN - LIFE AS ALLEGORY On Joseph Beuys's "La revoluzione siamo Noi", RACHEL HAIDU - PERFORMANCE LIFE, PAUL CHAN - MIRACLES, FORCES, ATTRACTIONS, RECONSIDERED, ALEXANDER ALBERRO - THE SILVER LINING OF GLOBALIZATION
(On "The Potosí Principle" at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid), MICHAEL SANCHEZ - A DOSE OF FEELING (On Michael Krebber at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin)
etc.
One of the finest art journals, period. TEXTE ZUR KUNST stands for controversial discussions and contributions by internationally leading writers on contemporary art and culture. Alongside ground-breaking essays the quarterly magazine, founded in Cologne in 1990 by Stefan Germer (†) and Isabelle Graw and published in Berlin since 2000, offers interviews, roundtable discussions and extensive reviews on art, film, music, market and fashion as well as on art history, theory and cultural politics. Since 2006 the comprehensive main section section, each time devoted to a different topic, and selected reviews are published in both German and English.