World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
SAT 12—4 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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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.
1972, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 8 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jiyugaoka Gallery / Tokyo
$55.00 - In stock -
Incredibly scarce Japanese Mario Ceroli catalogue, published on the occasion of an exhibition at Jiyugaoka Gallery, Tokyo in 1972. Opens with texts (in Japanese) "Hommage a Ceroli" by architect Tadashi Yokoyama, and "Art Manufacture of Ceroli" by Nobuji Abuku, director of Jiyugaoka Gallery. Focussing primarily on Ceroli's editioned works, all fourteen exhibited works are illustrated and listed, along with an exhibition history and portrait.
Very Good copy with light ageing.
Mario Ceroli is an Italian sculptor, educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He began his career realising ceramic sculptures, but his interest soon migrated towards Pop Art and the creation of his first wooden silhouettes. In the 1960s, he was already considered one of the great masters of Italian Pop Art and Arte Povera, becoming a very prominent contributor to the reformulation of the artistic language of that time and to the development of installation art in Italy. Ceroli’s production features natural and humble materials, particularly untreated wood, but also fabric, plastic or aluminium, sometimes polychrome and serialised. In 1966 he achieved international recognition with a prize at the Venice Biennale for the Cassa Sistina, an architectonic work conceived as an open relationship with the public and marking a transition into an art that engaged with the environment. In 1967-1968 he exhibited heavily alongside other artists associated with the Arte Povera and Italian Pop Art movements. Ceroli’s interest in various disciplines led him to transcend the boundaries of the mere work of art, and to explore how it interacts with other fields, such as architecture or theatre. He undertook the decoration of many public spaces and to this day works as a theatre set designer, cooperating with the likes of Teatro Stabile in Turin (1968) and La Scala in Milan (1971).
1971, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 23 x 25 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mathews Miller Dunbar / London
$70.00 - Out of stock
First English edition from 1971, Udo Kultermann's "Art-Events and Happenings", published by Mathews Miller Dunbar of London, translated by John William Gabriel. A deep reflection on an important part of Art's development throughout the 1960s - the turn to action through performance and conceptual art - surveying happenings, protests, theatre, ritual, land art and much more, and featuring a vast collection of black and white photographic illustrations of the work of Allan Kaprow, Ann Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Otto Mühl, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Piero Gilardi, Charlotte Moorman, Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys, Tetsumi Kudo, Lygia Clark, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Hermann Nitsch, Günther Brus, Dennis Oppenheim, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Andy Warhol, Jan Dibbets, Carl Andre, Barry La Va, Rafael Ferrer, Marinus Boezum, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Claes Oldenburg, Piero Manzoni, Peter Hutchinson, Christo, Robert Morris, and many more.
Very good copy (some tanning, previous owners name to first page)
1982, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 24 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Electa / Milan
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce exhibition catalogue published in 1982 by Electra International, Milano, to accompany Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, 'a thorough example of what Italian artistic research has produced in recent years' curated by Luigi Ballerini. Featuring the work of Alighiero Boetti, Italo Bressan, Pietro Coletta, Dadamaino, Alberto Garutti, Marco Gastini, Paolo Icaro, Jannis Kounellis, Vittorio Matino, Eliseo Mattiacci, Mario Merz, Maurizio Mochetti, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Claudio Olivieri, Giulio Paolini, Claudio Parmiggiani, Sergio Sermidi, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Gilberto Zorio, the exhibition was staged at the Power Gallery, University of Sydney, and the University Art Museum, University of Queensland. Profusely illustrated throughout with accompanying texts in English, biographical notes and bibliography.
Very Good copy.
1975, English
Softcover, 23 pages, 18 × 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Monash University Exhibition Gallery / Victoria
$160.00 - Out of stock
Very rare early catalogue/artists' book by John Davis, published on the occasion of an exhibition at Monash University Exhibition Gallery, Department of Visual Arts, September 2 - 26 1975.
Staple-bound landscape catalogue contains introduction, biography, artist texts and photographic documentation of the works "Time", "Space" and "Place"
A perfect copy.
John Davis (16 September 1936 – 17 October 1999) was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art. An Australian exponent of Arte povera, he famously developed a new mode of Site-specific art at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in the early 1970s. John Davis established a critically acclaimed reputation as an influential sculptor and installation artist whose practice synthesised material diversity with an idiosyncratic concept of landscape and ecology. Davis travelled widely and exhibited regularly in America, Japan and Australia. As well as participating in the inaugural Mildura Sculpture Triennial, and he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Davis initially worked in wood and later in fibreglass and aluminium, becoming known for his multiples and for his distinctive formalist style. By 1973, Davis had become increasingly interested in conceptual, process-based and land art practices, and his mature works reflect his sensitivity to elemental forces, the organic world, and his profound connection to the ecological fragility and beauty of landscape.
1982, Japanese
Softcover, 6 pages, 21 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ina Ceramics Co. / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Incredibly scarce Japanese exhibition catalogue on Australian artist John Davis, published to accompany his 1982 solo exhibit at the gallery of Ina Ceramics. Ina-Art (or sometimes Ina-X) Art News was the catalogue/newsletter series that the gallery produced with each exhibition, presenting a selection of the artist's works and photographic portraits, alongside texts, artist biography, and exhibition history (all in Japanese). Includes a great selection of Davis' sculptural installations, both indoor and outdoor from the mid-late 1970s, plus a portrait of the artist in Japan.
John Davis (16 September 1936 – 17 October 1999) was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art. An Australian exponent of Arte povera, he famously developed a new mode of Site-specific art at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in the early 1970s. John Davis established a critically acclaimed reputation as an influential sculptor and installation artist whose practice synthesised material diversity with an idiosyncratic concept of landscape and ecology. Davis travelled widely and exhibited regularly in America, Japan and Australia. As well as participating in the inaugural Mildura Sculpture Triennial, and he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Davis initially worked in wood and later in fibreglass and aluminium, becoming known for his multiples and for his distinctive formalist style. By 1973, Davis had become increasingly interested in conceptual, process-based and land art practices, and his mature works reflect his sensitivity to elemental forces, the organic world, and his profound connection to the ecological fragility and beauty of landscape.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 6 pages, 21 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Ina Ceramics Co. / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Incredibly scarce Japanese exhibition catalogue on Australian artist John Davis, published to accompany his 1986 solo exhibit at the gallery of Ina Ceramics. Ina-Art (or sometimes Ina-X) Art News was the catalogue/newsletter series that the gallery produced with each exhibition, presenting a selection of the artist's works and photographic portraits, alongside texts, artist biography, and exhibition history (all in Japanese). Cover depicts Davis' great Walden State Freeway installation work from 1984, in Los Angeles, alongside a selection of his installations and wall-reliefs from the 1980s.
John Davis (16 September 1936 – 17 October 1999) was an Australian sculptor and pioneer of Environmental art. An Australian exponent of Arte povera, he famously developed a new mode of Site-specific art at the Mildura Sculpture Triennial in the early 1970s. John Davis established a critically acclaimed reputation as an influential sculptor and installation artist whose practice synthesised material diversity with an idiosyncratic concept of landscape and ecology. Davis travelled widely and exhibited regularly in America, Japan and Australia. As well as participating in the inaugural Mildura Sculpture Triennial, and he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1978. Davis initially worked in wood and later in fibreglass and aluminium, becoming known for his multiples and for his distinctive formalist style. By 1973, Davis had become increasingly interested in conceptual, process-based and land art practices, and his mature works reflect his sensitivity to elemental forces, the organic world, and his profound connection to the ecological fragility and beauty of landscape.
1977, German
Heavy card slipcase (4 vols.), 323 pages; 357 pages; 378 pages; 40 pages; 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Paul Dierich / Kassel
$100.00 - Out of stock
Complete 3 volume boxset exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with Documenta 6, the sixth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 24 June and 2 October 1977 in Kassel, Germany, and the artistic director was Manfred Schneckenburger. The title of the exhibition was: Internationale Ausstellung – international exhibition.
Box contains volume 1: painting - sculpture - performance (320 pages) / volume 2: photography - film - video (357 pages) / volume 3: drawings - utopian design - books (376 pages + show) / special edition of exhibition information booklet (40 pages + show); essays by Lothar Romain, Bazon Brock, Karl Oskar Blase, Klaus Honnef, Evelyn Weiss, Manfred Schneckenburger, Arnold Bode, Wieland Schmied, and Lothar Lang.
Artists featured throughout include Francis Bacon, Jennifer Bartlett, Georg Baselitz, Gerd Baukhage, Enzo Cacciola, Louis Cane, Chuck Close, Ulrich Erben, Winfred Gaul, Raimund Girke, Kuno Gonschior, Camille Graeser, Gotthard Graubner, Nancy Graves, Alan Green, Richard Hamilton, Heijo Hangen, Bernhard Heisig, Michael Heizer, Edgar Hofschen, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Attila Kovács, László Lakner, Roy Lichtenstein, Markus Lüpertz, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Gerhard Merz, Rune Mields, Carmengloria Morales, Malcolm Morley, Claudio Olivieri, Roman Opalka, Palermo, A.R. Penck, Lucio Pozzi, Hans-Peter Reuter, Gerhard Richter, Claude Rutault, Willi Sitte, Frank Stella, Werner Tübke, Bernar Venet, Andy Warhol, Reindert Wepko van de Wint, Gianfranco Zappetini, Jerry Zeniuk, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Christian Boltanski, Bettina Brand, Heinz Breloh, James Collins, Zdenek Felix, Reinhold Hohl, Gabrielle Honnef-Harling, Erich Kuby, Werner Lippert, Bernd Lohse, Felix H. Mann, Hilmar Pabel, Georg Reinhardt, Liselotte Strelow, Ann Wilde, Jürgen Wilde, Peter Ackermann, Michael von Biel, Fernando Botero, Miguel Condé, Renato Guttoso, Horst Janssen, Giacomo Manzù, Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Schmitz, Rudolf Schoofs, André Thomkins, Bodo Baumgarten, Blythe Bohnen, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Rupprecht Geiger, Hetum Gruber, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Nino Malfatti, Bob Ryman, Jan Schoonhoven, Lee U-Fan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick.
Texts in German.
Also includes an exhibition guide booklet in the same format as the 3 main catalogue volumes.
Good copy throughout with general tanning and age wear to box and books, some knocking and tape-mended cracking to the box binding corners and edging.
1971, German
Softcover, 464 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
DuMont / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
Huge, densely-illustrated volume compiled by German publisher/editor/essayist/curator Walter Aue, who worked closely with conceptual and performance artists in the 1960s-1970s. Laid-out by Aue himself, the book feels like a very natural scrap-book compendium of artist contributions, reproducing artworks, documentation of happenings, texts, photographs, diagrams, collages, news-clippings, instructions, etc. across over 450 pages, with Aue's type-written opening essay and cataloguing throughout. Features the most notable conceptual, actionist and performance artists of the period, spanning Fluxus, Arte Povera, radical architecture, Nouveau Realisme, etc. including Dieter Rot, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Pino Pascali, Stanley Brouwn, Jannis Kounellis, Klaus Rinke, Ben Vautier, Al Hansen, Walter Pichler, Hilla and Bernhard Becher, Giuseppe Penone, Ettore Sottsass, Gilbert and George, Walter De Maria, Wolf Vostell, Hans Hollein, Imi Knoebel, Barry Flanagan, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, Hamish Fulton, Christo, Elfriede Jelinek, Dennis Oppenheim, Urs Lüthi, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Rühm, Blink Palermo, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Ruscha, HA Schult, Hermann Nitsch, James Lee Byars, Jan Dibbets, Jochen Gerz, Mauricio Kagel, Nam June Paik, Otto Mühl, Arnulf Rainer, Jan Voss, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Franz Erhard Walther, Timm Ulrichs, Daniel Spoerri, Erich Reusch, Paul Pechter, Rainer Giese, Jörg Immendorff, Henning Christiansen, Gilberto Zorio, Panamarenko, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, Dick Higgins, Ian Baxter, Mel Bochner, Haus-Rucker-Co, Markus Raetz, Sottsass, Nam June Paik, Hans Haacke, Tetsumi Kudo, Bruce Mclean, On Kawara, and so many more.
Depending on the artist, texts are in English, German, Dutch, etc. Opening essay in German.
Very Good, light wear/tear to top spine.
2018, English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 23 x 27.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Eykyn Maclean / New York-London
$79.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Carl Andre, Meg O’Rourke, Caroline Weber, Lynn Zelevansky, Thea Westreich
The catalogue Ornament and Crime accompanies the group exhibition curated by Meg O’Rourke at Eykyn Maclean in New York (May 2–June 15, 2018). With Adolf Loos’s eponymous 1908 diatribe against excessive ornamentation as its guide, the exhibition draws on the tenets set forth by Loos—simplicity, purity, freedom—with particular attention to their philosophical implications and their persistence into the latter twentieth century. The catalogue traces a genealogy of form from the dogmatism of Loos and Piet Mondrian; to the experimental systems of Yves Klein, the Zero group, and Ad Reinhardt; and finally, to the austere formalism of Minimalism and Arte Povera. When superficial surfaces and superfluous decorations are stripped away, the unknown is opened up—into the void, that is, what lies beyond the surface; down to the elemental, a deeper engagement with material that exceeds mere abstraction; and toward the eternal, where aesthetic asceticism points toward spiritual and psychic transcendance. The texts comprise an introduction by Meg O’Rourke, an historical essay by Lynn Zelevansky, a creative abecedarium by Caroline Weber, and an interview with Carl Andre conducted by O’Rourke and Thea Westreich. They offer historical context and draw out the resonances between the artworks represented, which are included here in full-color standalone and installation views.
Features Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre, Piet Mondrian, Yves Klein, Otto Piene, Ad Reinhardt, John McCracken, Lucio Fontana, Frank Stella, and more.
Copublished with Eykyn Maclean, New York / London
Design by A Practice for Everyday Life
2015, English / German / Dutch
Softcover, 560 pages, 25cm x 25cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
Fire, light, movement, space, demonstrations, and performances: this major publication forms a historic survey of the innovative, international avant-garde artists’ group, ZERO.
In 1957, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene devised the name ZERO for a new art movement and magazine. The brevity of the term ZERO and the fact that it retained its meaning in many languages helped the group to become an international “brand” in the ‘60s. After the Second World War and the grim years of post-war reconstruction, the term ZERO marked the coming of a new, optimistic, experimental, and pioneering kind of art. Piene described it as “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” While the ZERO movement was under formation, Dutch artists Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, and herman de vries established the Nul group in the Netherlands. Like-minded artists in France, Italy, and Belgium – such as Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jesús Rafael Soto, Lucio Fontana, Pierre Manzoni, Dadamaino, and Christian Megert – were also formulating similar artistic strategies - many affiliated with other movements such as Nouveau réalisme, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Op Art, Land Art and Kinetic art. They joined up with the trio of artists from Dusseldorf: Mack, Piene, and Günther Uecker. Together, the artists began to organize exhibitions in galleries, museums, and in their own studios. They also co-created artworks, experimenting with the most innovative materials and media, as well as gave performances and happenings, produced multiples, and published magazines and other publications. In 1962, the Stedelijk Museum staged the first museum presentation of ZERO. A few years later, a more comprehensive survey, Nul 1965, followed, a presentation widely considered as one of the movement’s highlights. Precisely fifty years later, in 2015, the Stedelijk presented an historical survey that sheds light on how the network’s artists redefined the meaning and form of art forever.
This extensive, deeply researched and richly illustrated (over 900 plates) publication, edited by curator Margriet Schavemaker, and Dirk Poerschmann, academic staff member of the ZERO Foundation, includes essays by Antoon Melissen, Johan Pas, Francesca Pola & Thekla Zell, and the transcript of a conversation between Mattijs Visser and Daniel Birnbaum. Organized by the ZERO foundation and including some 200 objects, ZERO is one of the most comprehensive resources available on this self-consciously avant-gardist international movement.
Includes the work of Arman, Armando, Bernard Aubertin, Pol Bury, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hermann Goepfert, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Gotthard Graubner, Hans Haacke, Jan Henderikse, Paul van Hoeydock, Oskar Holweck, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Walter Leblanc, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Almir Mavignier, Christian Megert, François Morellet, Saboro Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Uli Pohl, George Rickey, Dieter Roth, Hans Salentin, Jan Schoonhoven, Jesús Raphael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Gunther Uecker, Jef Verheyen, Nanda Vigo, herman de vries.
1991, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 22.5 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arnoldo Mondadori Arte / Milan
Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris / Paris
$200.00 - Out of stock
Large comprehensive English-language catalogue that was published in the occasion of a major 1991 retrospective survey of the late, hugely influencial, Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni held at the Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, curated by the Italian art critic, author and curator Germano Celant.
This rare monographic volume spans 242 pages profusely illustrated in colour and black and white images of Manzoni's painting, releifs, sculpture and editioned works, performances, printed ephemera, and more, as well as additional texts by Germano Celant, Jean Pierre Criqui, Jens Hendrik Sandberg, Francisco Calvo Seraller, Nancy Spector, and Suzanne Page. Also includes an exhibition checklist, chronology, bibliography and exhibition history, with all texts in English.
Piero Manzoni (July 13, 1933 – February 6, 1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values". His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II. Italian artists such as Manzoni had to negotiate the new economic and material order of post-war Europe through inventive artistic practices which crossed geographic, artistic, and cultural borders.
A fine example of this very scarce book on the great Piero Manzoni.
2017, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 235 x 287 cm
Published by
Monacelli Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
SuperDesign charts the Italian Radicals' bold experimentation in modern design from its birth through its continued influence on design today. Radical Design was launched by art, architecture, and design students in Italy in the mid-1960s. What started as a youthful rally against the establishment and a rejection of design norms became a movement that brought together some of the most dynamic and avant-garde thinkers and makers across the country. Through enigmatic, confrontational, and clever furniture and objects--such as the iconic lip-shaped Bocca sofa, or the Cactus coat-rack in green foam--as well as more public innovations including discotheque interiors and subversive performances, the Radicals projected design's new era as equal parts Pop Art, play, Surrealism, and futurism. Told through exclusive interviews, unreleased photographs, original drawings and artwork unearthed from personal archives, and newly commissioned photography of rarely seen works, SuperDesign explores this fervent period of design that played out against the era's social and political turmoil. Featured designers include Archizoom Associati, Lapo Binazzi (UFO), Pietro Derossi (Gruppo Strum), Piero Gilardi, Ugo La Pietra, Gaetano Pesce, Gianni Pettena, Studio65, and Superstudio. The culmination of a decade of collecting and researching original examples of some of the most important and iconic works of the period, SuperDesign offers a unique new introduction to the legacy of the Italian Radicals.
1972, German
Hardcover, 216 pages, 24.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Georg Wenderoth Verlag / Kassel
$60.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
documenta - Dokumente 1955 - 1968 (Four International Exhibitions of Modern Art), was published by Georg Wenderoth Verlag, Kassel in 1972. This clothbound hardcover book of texts (by Dieter Westecker, Carl Eberth, Werner Lengemann, Erich Müller) and photographs of the first four documenta exhibitions, is quite a unique publication. Written at the suggestion of former students and collaborators of Documenta initiator Arnold Bode, it does not replace a documenta chronicle or a scientific study of individual facts. On the contrary, the textual and pictorial material is selected from a technical point of view, processed and presented in a comprehensible form to stimulate detailed investigations into the exhibition-presentations. The bulk of the photographic documentation is of visitor reception and interaction with the installations of artworks, including those of Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Lee Bontecou, Victor Pasmore, Marino Marini, Jean Dubuffet, Konrad Klapheck, George Segal, Robert Indiana, Claes Oldenburg, Walter de Maria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Phillip King, Erich Hauser, Ernest Trova, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carl Andre, William Tucker, Peter Brüning, David Smith, Edward Keinholz, Dan Flavin, Morris Louis, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris, Frank Stella, Tom Wesselmann, James RosenquisThomas Lenck, Francis Bacon, Horst Antes, Shinkichi Tajiri, Christo, Jackson Pollock, Karel Appel, Bernard Schultze, Otto Herbert Hajek, Jacques Lipchitz, Lynn Chadwick, Paul Delvaux, Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Max Bill, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Giogio de Chirico, Victor Vasarley, Zoran Music, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and many others.
Texts in German. First and only edition.
Vert Good copy with original dust jacket.
1984, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
A Good copy throughout, with cover rubbing and corner bumping. Tightly bound and clean copy internally.
1969, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 240 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Praeger Publishers Inc. / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover US printing of "Art Povera", the now legendary critical/photographic book by Germano Celant (Italian art historian, critic and curator) documenting the so-called "Art Povera /Arte Povera" movement (meaning "poor art", coined by Celant in 1967) and published by Studio Vista, London in 1969 and Praeger, New York, the same year.
Includes profiles of major artists of the movement, including a short text followed by pages of full-page photographs for each artist.
Artists featured: Walter de Maria, Michelangelo Pisteletto, Stephen Kaltenbach, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Lawrence Weiner, Luciano Fabro, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets, Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Barry, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Dennis Oppenheim, Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson, Giulio Paolini, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Franz Erhard Walther, Hans Haacke, Gilberto Zorio, Robert Morris, Marinus Boezem, Carl Andre, Emilio Prini, Richard Serra.
"This book does not aim at being an objective and general analysis of the phenomenon of art or life, but is rather an attempt to flank (both art and life) as accomplices of the changes and attitudes in the development of their daily becoming. This book does not attempt to be objective since the awareness of objectivity is false consciousness. The book, made up of photographs and written documents, bases its critical and editorial assumptions on the knowledge that criticism and iconographic documents give limited vision and partial perception of artistic work. The book, when it reproduces the documents of artistic work, refutes the linguistic mediation of photography. The book, even though it wants to avoid the logic of consumption, is a consumer's item. ... This book produces a collection of already old material. ... In this book there is no need to reflect in order to seek a unitary and reassuring value, immediately refuted by the the authors themselves, rather there is the necessity to look into it for the changes, limits, precariousness and instability of artistic work." -- text from Celant's introduction "Stating That.
Good ex-library copy with light associated markings, without dust jacket. Otherwise clean, tightly bound Very Good copy throughout (never loaned).
2018, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25x 31 cm
Published by
Getty Publications / Los Angeles
$126.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Glenn Phillips, Doris Chon, Pietro Rigolo, Philipp Kaiser
Harald Szeemann is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate of avant-garde movements like conceptualism and post minimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture.
Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a "Museum of Obsessions." This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through the materials he collected and produced while researching and organising his exhibitions, including letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists' books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes.
This book documents all phases of Szeemann's career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apartment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realised projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005.
The book contains essays exploring Szeemann's curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and exhibition documents as well as many other materials from the curator's archive.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
"Tanya Harrod is our leading scholarly voice on craft. [This] invaluable anthology...is an ideal introduction to the intellectual landscape of craft, and an essential tool for those already invested in the topic." - Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art
Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through ‘craft’, materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on ‘craft’ as process, product and ideology.
Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Aaron Angell, Ruth Asawa, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Edmund de Waal, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Sheila Hicks, Ana Lupas, Lu Shengzhong, Enzo Mari, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Bridget Riley, Ettore Sottsass, Studio Formafantasma, Peter Voulkos.
Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin.
Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian who lives in London and who writes widely on craft, art and design. She is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and is author of The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999), The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew (2012) which won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World (2015).
2017, English
Softcover, 142 pages, 20 x 28.7 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Museum of Contemporary Art / Antwerp
$54.00 - Out of stock
Edied by Antony Hudek
Joseph Beuys was captivated by Eurasia, the vast expanse connecting East and West. Through drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, films and multiples, Beuys sought to imagine the fluid contours of Eurasia, a space built upon history and myths yet firmly grounded in the present.
This book takes Beuys’ 1968 Eurasienstab action, performed with Henning Christiansen at the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp, as a starting point for a reflection on territories, real and imagined. It is through Beuys’ connections to the Wide White Space that he first met fellow artists Marcel Broodthaers and James Lee Byars.
2018, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 17 x 23.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$69.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Stefanie Hessler
Foreword by Markus Reymann
Essays, research, and art projects that formulate a Tidalectic worldview, addressing our most threatened ecosystem: the oceans.
The oceans cover two-thirds of the planet, shaping human history and culture, home to countless species. Yet we, as mostly land-dwelling humans, often fail to grasp the importance of these vast bodies of water. Climate change destabilizes notions of land-based embeddedness, collapses tropes of time and space, and turns our future more oceanic. Tidalectics imagines an oceanic worldview, with essays, research, and artists' projects that present a different way of engaging with our hydrosphere. Unbound by land-based modes of thinking and living, the essays and research in Tidalectics reflect the rhythmic fluidity of water.
Tidalectics emerges from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21)–Academy, the only Western arts organization entirely dedicated to work on climate change and the oceans. In 2016, TBA21–Academy became the first cultural organization to gain UN observer status at the International Seabed Authority Assembly. The book presents newly commissioned work from a range of disciplines and often-neglected perspectives, alongside classic “anchor texts” by such writers as Rachel Carson. The contributors include an anthropologist from Fiji, a Norwegian scholar who specializes in maritime legal history, the author of the first comparative history of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures, and a poet from Barbados who coined the term “tidalectics” as a play on “dialectics.” The art projects documented in the book form part of an exhibition curated by the volume's editor, and include a video of the infinite whites, blues, and grays of Antarctica; a collection of oceanic smells from the Caribbean and Pacific coasts of Costa Rica; and a quartz submersible capsule designed to communicate with cetaceans. Tidalectics provides a unique collection of the strongest voices in oceanic thinking, bridging arts, oceanography, history, law, and environmental studies.
With contributions by Nabil Ahmed, Tamatoa Bambridge, Kamau Brathwaite, Guigone Camus, Rachel Carson, Cynthia Chou, Paul D'Arcy, Tony deBrum, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Keller Easterling, Bill Graham, Francesca von Habsburg, Stefan Helmreich, Stefanie Hessler, Cresantia Frances Koya Vaka'uta, Rosiana Lagi, Stéphanie Leyronas, Chus Martínez, Astrida Neimanis, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Markus Reymann, Philip E. Steinberg, Khal Torabully, Lingikoni Vaka'uta, Davor Vidas, Susanne M. Winterling
Artists surveyed in the book : Atif Akin, Darren Almond, Julian Charrière, Em'kal Eyongakpa, Tue Greenfort, Ariel Guzik, Newell Harry, Alexander Lee, Eduardo Navarro, Sissel Tolaas, Janaina Tschäpe & David Gruber, Jana Winderen, Susanne M. Winterling
1994, French
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 158 pages, 28.7 × 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Norma Editions / Paris
$180.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first French edition of "L'Utopie du Tout Plastique 1960-1973", published in 1994 by the great Norma Editions. Long out of print, this comprehensive volume quickly became an invaluable bible of sorts for plastic collectors of the 1960s, 1970s period. In 1994, on the occasion of a major exhibition in Brussels, editors Philippe Decelle, Diane Hennebert, and Pierre Loze compiled the most detailed printed survey of plastic products to date, from Art, Functional Furniture, Fiberglass, Inflatable PVC, Transparent PMMA, Pop and Radical Design, Cookware, Electronics, Mod Fashions, Utopian Architecture. Heavily researched and lavishly illustrated throughout with close to 200 of the finest examples, L’ Utopie has become the standard reference on 1960s plastic design - an essential aid in identifying the designers, companies and manufacture details of many classic plastic objects from this era.
Includes detailed biographies of the artists, designers, architects, manufacturers, plus a chronology and bibliography.
Translated blurb:
"The sixties are marked by unprecedented prosperity and technological progress. To this optimism corresponds an extraordinary freedom of creation until the oil crisis of 1973 which tempers this enthusiasm. The vogue of plastic is linked to this society of abundance. Yellow, red, orange, soft, hard, inflatable, it identifies with cheap, serial and disposable productions. Starting from a private collection unique in the world, the book offers a selection of plastic objects created between 1960 and 1973. Tupperware box, Kelton watch, Courrèges dress, Ettore Sottsass portable typewriter Valentine for Olivetti, first chair of Verner Panton, Joe Colombo ABS plastic chair, Niki de Saint Phalle's Nana, Caesar's Compression, cupola of the United States Pavilion by Richard Buckminster Fuller at the Montreal World's Fair or Frei Otto and Günter Behnisch overhead roof for the stadium of the Olympic Games in Munich, all show their diversity, their spirit and sometimes their beauty of the inventiveness of the time."
Features the work of Pierre Paulin, Sergio Mazza, Vico Magistretti, César, Studio 65, Nicola L, Piero Gilardi, Verner Panton, Arman, Gianfranco Frattini, Jonathan De Pas, Donato d'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Gae Aulenti, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Joe Colombo, Enzo Mari, Iseo Hosoe, Mario Bellini, Dorothée Maurer-Becker, Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, Günter Beltzig, Maurice Calka, Eero Aarnio, Wendell Castle, Alberto Rosselli, Quasar Khanh, Rossi Molinary, Ennio Lucini, Ugo la Pietra, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Archizoom, Roy Adzak, Studio Gruppo 14, Dieter Rams, Reinhold Weiss, Marco Zanuso, Rodolfo Bonetto, Roger Tallon, Pierre Cardin, Courreges, Frei Otto, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Maneval, Paolo Soleri, Archigram, and many more.
Fine copy!
1989, German
Softcover, 289 pages, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Christians / Hamburg
$48.00 - Out of stock
Large catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Einleuchten: Will, Vorstel und Simul in HH." curated by Harald Szeemann, 11 November 1989 to 18 February 1990, Hamburg.
Profusely illustrated in full-colour and b&w with biographies on all exhibiting artists, alongside texts by Harald Szeemann, Heinz Liesbrock, Christoph Schenker, and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen
Artists include : Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselme, Donald Baechler, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Christian Botanski, Daniel Buren, Lawrence Carroll, Hanne Darboven, Thierry De Gordier, David Deutsch, Martin Disler, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Etienne-Martin, Dan Flavin, Günther Förg, Isa Genzken, Robert Gober, Thomas Grünleid, Tishan Hsu, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Harald Klingelhöller, Wollgang Laib, Cary S. Leibowitz, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Ingeborg Lüscher, Gerhard Merz, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Reinhard Mucha, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Cady Noland, Holt Quentel, David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch, Ulrich Rückriem, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Serge Spitzer, Niele Toroni, Rosemarie Trockel, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Jan Vercruysse, Michel Verjux, Didier Vermeiren, Bill Viola, Mark Wallinger, Lawrence Weiner, Franz West, Rachel Whiteread, Jerry Zeniuk, Otto Zitko
Very good copy with some bumping to top right corner.
2017, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 23 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art’s fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work."
This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art.
Artists surveyed include
Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell
Writers include
Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O’Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden
About the Editor
Sven Spieker is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of ARTmargins. His books include The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press).
1992, German / English
Hardcover (in original slipcase), Vol. 1 : 255 pages; Vol. 2 : 310 pages; Vol. 3 : 619 pages, 18.5 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$120.00 - Out of stock
Hardcover edition, three volume exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany, June 13 - September 9, 1992.
Documenta 9 is remembered as one of the most popular of all documenta exhibitions, thanks not least of all to the influence of its artistic director, the charismatic Belgian curator Jan Hoet. Hoet wanted to make the human being and our sensual, perceptual, agonized corporeality, which had been progressively displaced by the digitized, virtual world, the focus of attention at his exhibition. “From body to body to bodies” was the meaningful, poetic motto of documenta 9. Hoet described his curatorial mission in the following words: “At a time in which the human race is confronted more than ever with such dangers as AIDS and multinational wars, nuclear catastrophes, and global climate disasters, at a time in which threats are growing increasingly abstract and the fears more and more diffuse, I see reflection on the physical conditions of life as an appropriate answer.”
Texts by Jan Hoet, Denys Zacharopoulos, Bart de Baere, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Claudia Herstatt, Joyce Carol Oates, Jacques Roubaud, Cornelius Castoriadis, Heiner Müller, Paul Robbrecht, Hilde Daem.
Artists include Marina Abramovic, Absalon, Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, Marco Bagnoli, Nicos Baikas, Miroslaw Balka, Matthew Barney, Jerry Barr, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Michael Biberstein, Guillaume Bijl, Dara Birnbaum, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Brandl, Ricardo Brey, Tony Brown, Marie José Burki, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Michael Buthe, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Waltercio Caldas, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Ernst Caramelle, Lawrence Carroll, Saint Clair Cemin, Tomasz Ciecierski, Tony Clark, James Coleman, Tony Conrad, Patrick Corillon, Damian, Richard Deacon, Thierry De Cordier, Silvie Defraoui & Chérif Defraoui, Raoul De Keyser, Wim Delvoye, Braco Dimitrijevic, Eugenio Dittborn, Helmut Dorner, Stan Douglas, Marlene Dumas, Jimmie Durham, Mo Edoga, Jan Fabre, Luciano Fabro, Belu-Simion Fainaru, Peter Fend, Rose Finn-Kelcey, FLATZ, Fortuyn/O'Brien, Günther Förg, Erik A.Frandsen, Michel François, Vera Frenkel, Katsura Funakoshi, Isa Genzken, Gaylen Gerber, Robert Gober, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Angela Grauerholz, Michael Gross, George Hadjimichalis, David Hammons, Georg Herold, Gary Hill, Peter Hopkins, Rebecca Horn, Geoffrey James, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Tim Johnson, Andrej N. Joukov, Ilya Kabakov, Anish Kapoor, Kazuo Katase, Tadashi Kawamata, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly, Bhupen Khakhar, Per Kirkeby, Harald Klingelhöller, Kurt Kocherscheidt, Peter Kogler, Vladimir Kokolia, Joseph Kosuth, Mariusz Kruk, Guillermo Kuitca, Suzanne Lafont, Jonathan Lasker, Jac Leirner, Zoe Leonard, Eugène Leroy, Via Lewandowsky, Bernd Lohaus, Ingeborg Lüscher, Attila Richard Lukacs, James Lutes, Marcel Maeyer, Brice Marden, Cildo Meireles, Ulrich Meister, Thom Merrick, Gerhard Merz, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Meuser, Jürgen Meyer, Liliana Moro, Reinhard Mucha, Matt Mullican, Juan Muñoz, Christa Näher, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus, Pekka Nevalainen, Nic Nicosia, Moshe Ninio, Jussi Niva, Cady Noland, Manuel Ocampo, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Tony Oursler, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, A. R. Penck, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Hermann Pitz, Stephen Prina, Richard Prince, Martin Puryear, Royden Rabinowitch, Rober Racine, Philip Rantzer, Charles Ray, Martial Raysse, readymades belong to everyone, José Resende, Gerhard Richter, Ulf Rollof, Erika Rothenberg, Susan Rothenberg, Ulrich Rückriem, Thomas Ruff, Stephan Runge, Edward Ruscha, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Remo Salvadori, Joe Scanlan, Eran Schaerf, Adrian Schiess, Thomas Schütte, Helmut Schweizer, Maria Serebriakova, Mariella Simoni, Susana Solano, Ousmane Sow, Ettore Spalletti, Haim Steinbach, Pat Steir, Wolfgang Strack, Thomas Struth, János Sugár, Yuji Takeoka, Robert Therrien, Frederic Matys Thursz, Niele Toroni, Thanassis Totsikas, Addo Lodovico Trinci, Mitja Tušek, Luc Tuymans, Micha Ullman, Juan Uslé, Bill Viola, Henk Visch, James Welling, Franz West, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Wool, KeunByung Yook, Heimo Zobernig, Gilberto Zorio, and Constantin Zvezdochotov.
Very Good condition volumes in hardcover (much less common edition than usual softcover), preserved in their original illustrated slipcase (with common repaired splitting and bumping damage).
2007, English / Italian
Softcover, 285 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Corraini / Italy
$90.00 - Out of stock
The critical catalogue raisonné of artist's books from the Arte Povera movement 1966-1980, compiled by Giorgio Maffei.
Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio: the protagonists of the most important Italian artistic movement after World War II are presented not through "traditional" works, but from the point of privileged view of their editorial production. Artist books conceived, constructed and reinvented as works "in itself", some of them with a programmatic value that makes them extremely important for the comprehension of the whole movement. A rich and in-depth introduction transversely analyzes the current of Arte Povera for people, times, places and texts, while each artist is presented individually through the review of their books and personal exhibitions, richly illustrated with the documents described. This generous volume is completed by an accurate chronology of collective exhibitions (1966-2005) and a vast bibliography of essays and articles that appeared in books and art magazines (1966-2006).
"The task this book faces is to provide news, data, and stories through documents, if not certain, at least considered reliable, and to overcome the temptation to penetrate events and present them in the simplest way possible." - from Giorgio Maffei's introduction.
Text in English and Italian.