World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2016, English / German
Softcover, 352 pages, 20 x 12.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$58.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The first comprehensive analysis of Loretta Fahrenholz’s filmic work.
Seven of the artist’s films (2010–2016) are portrayed in synopses through separate series’ of images.
John Kelsey and Caroline Busta analyze the artist’s experimental films, which defy the distinction between fiction and documentary and propose new forms for a post-cinematic present.
Produced in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Zürich on the occasion of Fahrenholz’s solo exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (25 September 2016 – 1 January 2017).
English and German text.
2020, English / German
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 23 cm
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
Who—or what—is Reena Spaulings? Since 2004 the name has stood for various collective artistic activities. Initially Reena Spaulings was the title of a novel written by an undisclosed number of anonymous authors from the circle of the artist collective Bernadette Corporation. Around the same time, a commercial gallery with an exhibition space in New York was founded, which since then has represented artists such as Merlin Carpenter, Jutta Koether, Claire Fontaine, and Klara Lidén. Also in 2004, an artist collective was formed that operates under the name of the fictional artist Reena Spaulings, creating collective paintings that are both reflective of the system and self-deprecating.
This catalogue is Reena Spaulings' first comprehensive publication and contains, among other things, a richly illustrated chronology of the collective's work to date, published following the exhibition HER AND NO at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Reena Spaulings’s first institutional collaboration with a museum. The presentation focused on the collective’s artistic work, including new works, new versions of existing series of works, and existing works that deal with the status of the artist in society in a wider sense.
Profusely illustrated with contributions from Simon Baier, Caroline Busta, Anna Czerlitzki, Yilmaz Dziewior and Claire Fontaine. Edited by curator Anna Czerlitzki.
2011, English
Softcover with dustjacket, 98 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 - Out of stock
Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch (Eds.)
Texts by Ina Blom, Oliver Brokel, Caroline Busta, Stefan Deines, Hal Foster, Stefanie Heraeus, Jutta Koether, Magdalena Nieslony, Michael Sanchez
Many contemporary artworks evoke the human figure: consider the omnipresence of the mannequin in current installations of artists like John Miller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Heimo Zobernig, or David Lieske. Or consider the revival of a minimalist vocabulary, which embraces anthropomorphism as in the works of Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison. This book brings together contributions from the eponymous conference, all of which seek to speculate on the reasons as to why, since the turn of the millennium, we have encountered so many artworks that tend to reconcile Minimalism with suggestions of the human figure. It proposes that this new artistic convention becomes rather questionable when discussed in the light of Franco Berardi’s theory of semiocapitalism—a power technology that aims squarely at our human resources. The participants of this conference were asked to offer possible explanations for this wide acceptance of anthropomorphism—could it be that this is a manifestation of the increasingly desperate desire for art to have agency?
2017, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 $10.00 - In stock -
ISSUE NO. 105 / MARCH 2017 “THEY ARE US / WIR SIND IHR”
With Issue #105, TZK considers the nationalist, conservative, and racist ideologies that have recently become more visible across Europe and the US, giving particular focus to questions of border politics and migration -- of humans, of data, of patrimony, of signs. Advised by Helmut Draxler, Isabelle Graw, and Susanne Leeb, this issue was conceived prior to the US presidential election as a cooler reflection on present political debates. And yet having been produced amid the chaos of the Trump administration's first weeks, it also necessarily stands as a reflection of political-aesthetic thinking during markedly volatile times: Wir sind Ihr? They are us? We are them?
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
FORWARD
PREFACE
ROUNDTABLE
BUT WHO IS “THEY”? / Roundtable discussion with Manuela Bojadžijev, Nikita Dhawan, and Christoph Menke, moderated by Helmut Draxler on Refugee and Migrant Flows as a Challenge for Political Thought
OVERCOMING MUTE RELATIONS, OR, THINKING WITH YOUR FEET / Angela Melitopoulos in conversation with Susanne Leeb
Daniel Keller
NEW DEVELOPMENT
HALFTIME VIBES / John Kelsey on Meditations in an Emergency
WEDER WOHNUNG NOCH WÄHRUNG / Diedrich Diederichsen über den Intendantenwechsel an der Berliner Volksbühne
BEGEHREN IN BETON / Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer über die Feuerle -Collection
LIEBE ARBEIT KINO
OF DREAMS, LIES, AND WIRES / Tom McDonough on Adam Curtis’s “HyperNormalisation”
MEDIALER GESTUS / Rainer Bellenbaum über Douglas Gordons Film
„I Had Nowhere to Go“
EU DESESPERO E ABRAÇO A TUA AUSÊNCIA:
“AQUARIUS” OR CINEMA AFTER NEO-FASCISM / Daniel R. Quiles on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Aquarius”
FAST UNANGENEHM DEUTLICH / Anke Dyes und Anna Voswinckel über Jill Soloways
Fernsehserie „I love Dick“
ROTATION
MACH ES NICHT SELBST / Daniel Loick über „Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene“ von Donna Haraway
(POST-)EMPIRE STATE OF MIND / Emily Segal on Cat Marnell’s “How to Murder Your Life”
RELEVANTE UPDATES / Christian Egger über Raymond Pettibon im
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
SHORT WAVES
Micaela Durand on Heji Shin at Real Fine Arts, New York / Arne Schmitt über Candida Höfer im Neuen Berliner Kunstverein / Hans-Jürgen Hafner über Peter Duka bei Zwinger Galerie / Ana Finel Honigman on Dan Attoe at Peres Projects, Berlin / Tina Schulz über Willem Oorebeek im Magazin 4 in Bregenz
REVIEWS
ZUCKER UND SHAME / Ulrike Bergermann über „Deutscher Kolonialismus“
im Deutschen Historischen Museum, Berlin
MODELS AND AGENCIES / Ben Caton on “The Ulm Model” at Raven Row, London
ART HISTORY, REMASTERED / Abbe Schriber on Kerry James Marshall at the Met Breuer, New York
AESTHETICIZED PLAY / Stefaan Vervoort on Ludger Gerdes at the Museum Haus Lange,
Krefeld, Germany
NACHRUFE / OBITUARIES
BARBARA WEISS (1960–2016)
by Monika Baer and John Miller
by Andreas Siekmann
JOHN BERGER (1926–2017)
by Tom Holert
by Svetlana Alpers
2015, English / German
Softcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 $15.00 - In stock -
ISSUE NO. 100
DECEMBER 2015
„THE CANON“
“Our 100th issue is dedicated to the question of the “canon.” We take up this theme with an interest in reflecting on the journal’s own role in the field of contemporary art — one that, when first initiated in 1990, was markedly counter-canonical, vigorously contesting certain methods of critique while supporting others. And yet, we pause here to acknowledge that after 25 years, we have also doubtlessly played a crucial part in shaping a particular discourse, even normativizing it to some degree. Could it even be said that TzK has established a canon in its own right? With this issue, we now take stock of what TzK’s relationship to the canon might be, and moreover, what the notion of canonicity in 2015 might now represent.”
ISSUE NO. 100 / DECEMBER 2015 “THE CANON”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
TOM HOLERT IN PRAISE OF PRESUMPTUOUSNESS: “KANON-POLITIK ” (1992) REVISITED
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
MIKE KELLEY
SABETH BUCHMANN
MEDIAL (SELF-)MOVEMENT
ISABELLE GRAW
CANON AND CRITIQUE: AN INTERPLAY / Heimo Zobernig
JULIANE REBENTISCH
25 ARTISTS FROM 1990 TO 2015 / And 25 reasons why each belongs in the Texte zur Kunst canon
GERTRUD KOCH
POLYPHONY OR DISSONANCE / Are there artists lost in the canon?
KERSTIN STAKEMEIER
MORE MANNERISM / Ruth May and Jan Molzberger
GUNTER RESKI
EMBEDDED NUDES / Arno Rink
ALEXANDER GARCÍA DÜTTMANN
OLD WOMEN / Maria Lassnig’s “Du oder ich” (You or me), 2005
BEATE SÖNTGEN
ROSEMARIE TROCKEL
NICK MAUSS
IAN WHITE
TESS EDMONSON
DIS
HANNA MAGAUER
POST-INTERNET: THE NEW ORDER
JOSEPHINE PRYDE
THE INDIVIDUAL
CAROLINE BUSTA
BAD CANON
SIMON DENNY
DISRUPT
KEN OKIISHI
CITIZENSHIP
VALENTINA LIERNUR
SELF-REFLECTIVE SUBJECTS
JUTTA KOETHER
FIGURE OF PAINT: ON THE INCONTROVERTIBLE!
ALICE CREISCHER AND ANDREAS SIEKMANN
TUCUMÁN ARDE
PAMELA M. LEE
GROUP MATERIAL
FELIX VOGEL
MARTIN BECK
SVEN BECKSTETTE
STURTEVANT
CLAIRE FONTAINE
TOWARD A CANONIC FREEDOM
SVEN LÜTTICKEN
FALLING APART, TOGETHER
ROBERT KULISEK AND DAVID LIESKE
HUSBANDS HAVE GOT TO DIE! / A conversation about Taryn Simon
BRIGITTE WEINGART
GREAT & SMALL
HELMUT DRAXLER
CANON OF EXISTENCE, ETHICS OF THE BREAK
ROTATION
ELECTROCONVULSIVE LIT / John Kelsey on Sylvère Lotringer’s “Mad Like Artaud”
REVIEWS
VERWISCHTE GRENZEN / Robert Müller über „Radikal Modern. Planen und Bauen im Berlin der 1960er-Jahre“ in der Berlinischen Galerie
AGING INTO NEW WORLDS: DEUTSCH-AMERIKANISCHE FREUNDSCHAFT / Bettina Funcke surveys five fall 2015 shows in New York
ANGEWANDTER HISTOMAT / Ariane Müller über „to expose, to show, to demonstrate, to inform, to offer. Künstlerische Praktiken um 1990“ im Mumok, Wien
ENIGMA IN THE MIRROR / Luis Felipe Fabre on “In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni” at Museo Jumex, Mexico City
WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD / Nuit Banai on R. H. Quaytman at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
IST KUNST EIN SEXUALPROBLEM? / Eva Birkenstock über Lea Lublin im Lenbachhaus, München
HERE'S NOT HERE / Damon Sfetsios and Elise Duryee-Browner on Stephan Dillemuth at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York
WEAK LOCAL LINEAMENTS / Gareth James on Sam Lewitt at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
OBITUARIES
PETER SCHEIFFELE (1971–2015)
by Ilka Becker
CHANTAL AKERMAN (1950–2015)
by Tim Griffin
EDITION
JOHN BALDESSARI
NHU DUONG
PETER FISCHLI/DAVID WEISS
WADE GUYTON
RACHEL HARRISON
SARAH MORRIS
ALBERT OEHLEN
RICHARD PHILLIPS
SETH PRICE
GERHARD RICHTER
ROSEMARIE TROCKEL
2015, English / German
Softcover, 264 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$31.00 - Out of stock
Exile and marginality, network availability, mass- versus subcultural identities, privilege, opting (versus dropping) out – these are elements this issue takes on. The fading of bohemia’s appeal is no doubt linked in part to a growing preference for the web’s promise of total-connectivity. Though could another factor be at work here too: an underlying sense that perhaps the real displacement and disenfranchisement after which romantic notions of “bohemia” were later formed may again be a very real threat?
ISSUE NO. 97 / MARCH 2015 “BOHEMIA”
ENGLISH CONTENTS include:
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN
THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT
“Faces of bohemia at one hundred and fifty”
THE POSSIBILITY OF LIFE AT THE SYSTEMIC EDGE
Three questions for Saskia Sassen
AT THE END OF ALTERNATIVES
An interview with Cornelia Koppetsch
PHILIPP EKARDT
FIORUCCI MADE ME NORMCORE / Five observations on art, style, and scenes today
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
BOHEMIA = UTOPIA?
DANIEL KELLER
HOTTEST NEW ALT MARRIAGE STACK SOLUTIONS / Paratext and Glossary by Ella Plevin
CAROLINE BUSTA
BASIC INSTINCT / Cyber-channels and the female pose
STEPHAN DILLEMUTH
WHAT’S YOUR NAME, BOHEMIA?
THE DEATH OF ILLUSION / An interview with Noura Wedell
MORAG KEIL
BOHEMIA COMMISSION
O CRONENBERG! (A SPOILER) / Mark von Schlegell on David Cronenberg’s recent movie “Maps to the Stars” and novel “Consumed”
Nick Zedd on Greer Lankton at Participant Inc, New York
Tess Edmonson on Amalia Ulman at James Fuentes, New York
Ana Teixeira Pinto on Oliver Laric at Tanya Leighton, Berlin
NOT ONLY THE HEART IS NOT A METAPHOR / Rachel Haidu on Robert Gober at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
TOTAL CONFUSION / Christian Naujoks on Cosima von Bonin at Mumok, Vienna
GLOOM / Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho on the Taipei Biennial 2014
A GLIMPSE AT THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PAINTINGS / Catherine Chevalier on Marcel Duchamp at Centre Pompidou, Paris
LEWIS BALTZ (1945–2014)
by Jeff Rian
EDITION
TOMMA ABTS
AVERY SINGER
2014, Englsih
Softcover, 273 colour (69 b&w ill.), 25.6 cm x 19.2 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$88.00 - Out of stock
This is the first monograph on the work of Bernadette Corporation, the New York-based collective founded in the early '90s.
The book extends from their retrospective exhibition Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years held at Artists Space, New York (2012) and ICA, London (2013), constituting a further site to reframe BC's activities and identity of the past 20 years.
Since the 1990s the New York-based collective has fashioned itself as publisher, filmmaker, designer, novelist, artist, political radical, among other identities. The book extends from their retrospective Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years at Artists Space in 2012, constituting yet another site to reframe the activities of BC spanning the past 20 years.
Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years is structured chronologically, loosely following the year-by-year timeline of the group’s history. The publication gathers a vast array of visual and textual material spanning the rich image grammar and styling of BC’s operations within the realm of so called style-culture, including a fashion line; their interventions into the publishing culture of the ‘90s, including BC’s own short-lived magazine Made in USA; the fragmented output of Pedestrian Cinema developed during the group’s time in Berlin; up to the fusion of poetics, branding and meta-commentary that characterized Bernadette Corporation’s gallery shows of the 2000s.
Edited by Bernadette Corporation, Jim Fletcher, Richard Birkett, Stefan Kalmár
With text contributions by Caroline Busta, Jim Fletcher, Tom Holert and Josef Strau
With photos by Alex Antitch, Mark Borthwick, Dietmar Busse, Anders Edstrom, Jamil GS, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, JMN, Marcelo Krasilcic, Cris Moor, Eline Mugaas, Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett, Wolfgang Tillmans, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, David Vasiljevic, and Wah
Designed by Bill Hayden and Eric Wrenn
2012, English/French
Softcover, 186 pages (b&w ill.), 240 x 175 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$18.00 - In stock -
May issue 9 features: Arab Uprisings and Impersonal Images by Dork Zabunyan; From Montage to Détournement in the Situationist International by Tom McDonough; Shit Happens: The Incredible Chronicle of OWS by Antek Walczak; Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith by Robert McKenzie; Pacific Standard Time, Art, Art in Los Angeles, 1950-1980 by Karl Holmqvist; Judith Hopf by Melanie Ohnemus; Isa Genzken by Karl Holmqvist; David Douard by Benjamin Thorel; Kenneth Goldsmith by Marwan Makki; This Way To The Cupcake Party by Carloine Busta and Amy Yao; much more...
about MAY Revue:
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quaterly, 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.
2011, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21 x 27 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$46.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Caroline Busta, George Baker
This book presents the work of London-based artist Merlin Carpenter. With essays by critic Caroline Busta and art historian George Baker, the book represents the final part of a series of exhibitions entitled, The Opening. These exhibitions were marked by the fact that all the paintings presented were produced at the galleries during the exhibition openings. Hundreds of photos of these opening events offer a fascinating view of the art world from 2007 to 2009. The paintings by the artist are also reproduced, as are numerous gallery invitations announcing Carpenter’s referential, at times irreverent, politically-charged painting actions.
Design by Non-Format
2010, English/French
Softcover, 176 pages, 175 x 240 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$18.00 - In stock -
May Revue is a wonderful arts journal from Paris, edited by Catherine Chevalier and Eva Svennung.
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quarterly, 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.
May #3 features "Grève humaine (interrompue)" Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in conversation, "Lessons from Éric Rohmer" by Julien Mahon, "La Grande Parade" by Dork Zabunyan, "What Is a Bad Exhibition?" by Paul Sztulman, "The Complete Poem" by Chris Kraus, “Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and The Ready-Made Gesture” by Caroline Busta, "CityCat, deflected in response to a system built up from under-examined details. 2 December, 2006 and 9 May, 2009, Brisbane River" by Dave Hullfish Bailey, "Shaping, Structuring, and Editing the Past" Interview with Richard Hertz by Catherine Chevalier and more!!!