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
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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.
2018, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 10.5 x 14.8 cm
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Other Versions / Rotterdam
$15.00 - In stock -
The Almanack of Breath tells of two demons: one of whom exists in Medieval texts, and one who Kilmartin invented as a contemporary rebuttal to the first, nasty one. Against the punitive, eavesdropping Tutivillus, also known as the Recording Demon, the author writes the tale of a nameless creature, an invisible and inaudible allegorical gure of Listening. This creature promotes an ethics of listening by collecting and donating different forms of breath to those who need it.
After introducing these characters, the text continues in the form of a month-by-month almanac, each of the twelve ‘Seasons of Breath’ holding advice on the type of breath - a gasp, or yawn or a sigh for example - that the reader should take care to listen for.
Drawings by Collette Rayner illustrate the introduction, and each of the Seasons. Many were drawn as the story was read aloud.
Published in an edition of 100 single-colour Risograph-printed, pamphlets, stitched in three signatures, by Other Versions (Ash Kilmartin), printed at PrintRoom, Rotterdam.
2018, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Zatezalo Press / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Zatezalo Press is a new publishing imprint focusing on paperback books from contemporary Australian artists. Each book will be an edition of 100.
Zatezalo Press’ first release is One Hundred One Word Poems, written by Simon Zoric. Taking it’s cue from Duchamp’s idea of the readymade, it poses the question: If a pre-existing object selected by the artist can be promoted to the status of a work of art, can a single word through the same process be considered a poem?
2013, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Kunstverein / Amsterdam
Macmillan / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
By reviewing the adventurous projects and artworks of a significant group of women involved with the LIP Collective based in Melbourne in the 1970s and 80s, this exciting anthology co-published by Kunstverein Publishing Amsterdam and Macmillan Art Publishing: Melbourne discloses for the first time the scope of the movement. It published Lip: A Feminist Arts Journal; the Earthworks Poster Collective; The Women’s Theatre Group; The Women’s Film Group and a host of exhibitions and critical writings connecting Australian women artists with the activities of their counterparts overseas.
Among the many contributors are Janine Burke, Annette Blonski, Suzanne Davies, Helen Grace, Ponch Hawkes, Sue Johnston, Laleen Jayamanne, Suzanne Spunner and Ann Stephen.
As editor Vivian Ziherl writes:
“Lip magazine was self-published by women in Melbourne from 1976 to 1984 and stood as a lightning rod for Australian feminist artistic practice over the ‘Women Liberation’ era. The art and ideas expressed over Lip’s lifetime track, with ground-breaking moves into performance, ecology, social-engagement and labor politics, stood at an intersection with local realities. The Lip Anthology seeks a figuration of Lip as a composite feminist entity produced with relation to the situational conditions of its production.
The anthology selection is not proposed as a ‘best of’, but rather as cumulative array of materials indicating the range and dynamism of the Lip project. The diversity of the periodical is privileged across multiple disciplinary vantages, as well as among the varied feminist positions brought together through the discursive space afforded by Lip. Collecting and presenting the materials of Lip for the first time since their original appearance, the anthology seeks (re/de)construction and routes of (re)circulation towards points of (re)commencement.
Vivian Ziherl is a curator at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, as well as undertaking independent projects, research and writing. Recent projects include Landings (2013-14) – a research project co-curated with Natasha Ginwala that seeks cross-over readings of land history, geomorphology, rurality and corporeality; and StageIt! (2012-13), a performance series co-curated with Hendrik Folkerts at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Ziherl will be the seventh guest curator invited to the David Roberts Art Foundation ‘Curator Series’ for 2014.
‘The Lip Anthology’ is published by Kunstverein Publishing and Macmillan Art Publishing, co-produced with Grazer Kunstverein and with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts and the TEWRR.
1971, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 23 x 23 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Australian Ballet Company / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
This handsome publication commemorates the 1970-71 season of The Australian Ballet company. Richly illustrated throughout with colour and b/w photography by Australian photographer Paul Cox and others, capturing the rehearsals, performances (with Marilyn Jones, Garth Welch, etc.), souvenir photos of the North American Tour (with Rudolf Nureyev), The Company, Repertoire, The School, and more.
Edited by Noel Petty, texts by John Wallace.
Design by Graham Blacker.
Good copy with heavy cover creasing and general wear.
1988, English
Softcover (staple bound), 16 pages, 26 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Realities Gallery / Melbourne
$30.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published in 1988 to accompany the solo exhibition of Melbourne painter Dale Frank at Realities Gallery, Melbourne. "New Paintings" is illustrated throughout in colour with a text by Frank, as well as exhibition history and bibliography.
Very Good clean copy.
1983, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$40.00 - Out of stock
Published on the occasion of "VOX POP: Into the Eighties" an exhibition of contemporary Australian (figurative) art in the early 1980's at the National Gallery of Victoria, featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Juan Davila, Imants Tillers, Frank, Maria Kozic, Peter Tyndall, David Larwill, Mandy Martin, Linda Marrinon, Maris Kozic, Victor Rubin, Lutz Presser, Jan Murray, Jenny Watson, Peter Taylor, Fraser Fair, Dale Frank, Davida Allen, Peter Booth, John Bursill, Gunter Christmann, Paul Boston and Gareth Sansom. Text by Robert Lindsay and reproductions of works by all artists, plus biographies.
Good copy.
1975, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 24 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
The Craft Association of Victoria / Victoria
$35.00 - Out of stock
A survey of contemporary Victorian crafts, published on the occasion of a large travelling group exhibition held in 1975-1976 (including the National Gallery of Victoria), organised by The Craft Association of Australia.
Landscape in format, each page of this book profiles a Victorian Craftsperson (almost 100 artists included) working across ceramic, jewellery, tapestry, textile, flatware, furniture, glass, leather, paper and much more. Each featuring an example of their work along with bio information and a profile photo.
Designed by David Sampietro.
2011, English
Hardcover, 56 pages, 210 x 210mm
Published by
Self-Published
$15.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
Published on the occasion of Daniel von Sturmer's exhibition, Set Piece at Site Gallery, Sheffield, September 2009
Design by Yanni Florence
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 25.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Perimeter Editions / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
The Cavern is the debut artist book by Melbourne-based painter Travis MacDonald. Drawing on key works from the last three years, the book forwards MacDonald's quietly idiosyncratic take on the more traditional genres of figuration and landscape painting, revealing a sensitivity and wit that extends to both his surroundings and that of art history.
At once dreamlike in its atmosphere and palette, and dry in its humour, The Cavern speaks not so much to a wider historical narrative, but to fragments of time within it. These works read as untethered; anomalies and oddities (some subtle, some silly) punctuate and reanimate otherwise nondescript, potentially nostalgic scenes. A stretched limousine slips its way along an arched country bridge; a round-shouldered boy sits mutely at the family piano as we await the first strike of the ivories; a girl rides sidesaddle on a white horse (she wears a full-face motorcycle helmet).
From his Cavern, MacDonald offers a contemplative and ever-so slightly incongruous vantage on the world as we thought we knew it.
Travis MacDonald was born in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand, and currently lives and works in Melbourne. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 and has been exhibiting since 2009. He has been awarded the Gary Grossbard Drawing Prize and the Lionel Gell Foundation Scholarship. More recently, MacDonald’s work was exhibited in Painting. More Painting at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and he held his first major solo exhibition Homesick Mascot at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, in December 2016, followed by a solo exhibition as part of the Melbourne Art Fair, in August 2018. He is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 25.5 x 20 cm
Published by
ICA / London
Artspace / Sydney
$25.00 - Out of stock
Warm Ties accompanies the solo exhibition of Australian artist Helen Johnson in collaboration with ICA London and Artspace Sydney. Johnson weaves and overlays historical and contemporary signifiers creating points of tension and reflection through the medium of painting. In this exhibition, the complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain is dealt with on the level of the body, using large-scale paintings that have become purposefully disassembled installations throughout the space. Profusely illustrated in colour with work, installation and detail documentation, accompanied by texts by Stephen Gilchrist and Helen Hughes.
2015, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
Minerva / Sydney
$28.00 - Out of stock
Within this book, Helen Johnson considers the operations of painting today, proposing means by which painting, as an aesthetic practice, might continue to make a critical address. She describes the book thus, “Being a painter in a post-medium specific context does not mean approaching painting as some sort of anachronistic refuge, or thinking that the modernist project of the specific medium can be rehabilitated, or even continue to be flogged. As a site for the production of meaning, painting is a rich field of loadings, neuroses and suggestiveness that can mesh with aesthetic qualities to make a charged conceptual space. Focusing on works by Juan Davila and Martin Kippenberger, this book proposes an extended understanding of how painting can operate aesthetically, grounded in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of aesthetic experience as implicitly connected to critical reflection. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement constitutes the basis of a mobilisation of aesthetics for the reading of painting beyond formalism, embracing aesthetic criticality as an open position of refusal, rather than the dogmatic pursuit of a rational conclusion.”
2004, English
Softcover (w. die-cut dust jacket), 32 pages, 20 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Heide Museum of Modern Art / Victoria
$30.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany the solo exhibition of Melbourne artist Anne-Marie May (3 July – 10 October 2004) who responded to the site of Heide II at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, after a period of time researching and developing new work in Alice Springs, Northern Territory.
"Nearly forty years after Heide II, the second home of Cohn and Sunday Reed was built, this significant example of modernist architecture plays host to one of the first projects conceived with a truly site specific intention. With her interests in the relationships between form, materials, design and representation, combined with her attitude of experimentation toward the technical possibilities of creativity, Anne-Marie May is a most appropriate artist to be responding to the built fabric of Heide II."
Profusely illustrated with installation photography throughout, alongside texts by curator Linda Michael, director Lesley Alway, and a conversation with Zara Stanhope.
Born 1965, Melbourne, Victoria; lives and works in Melbourne. Anne-Marie May has been exhibiting since the late 1980s, and was a member of the influential artist-run space Store 5, Melbourne. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004; Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland, 2004; and Murray White Room, Melbourne, 2009, 2011 and 2013. Her work was included in 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia at Heide in 2012.
2015, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 100
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$14.00 - Out of stock
Melbourne artist Christopher LG Hill's "Dissolve Blur Gap Blue Grape Space", published in an edition of 100 copies by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2015.
Born 1980, Melbourne, Victoria; Christopher LG Hill lives and works in Melbourne. A co-founder of artist-run space Y3K, Hill has participated in, and organised, many exhibitions and music-related events and productions. Hill is editor and publisher of Endless Lonely Planet and co-founder of Bunyip Trax.
2016, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 100
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$14.00 - In stock -
Melbourne artist Christopher LG Hill's "Bagged Goods", published in an edition of 100 copies by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2016.
Born 1980, Melbourne, Victoria; Christopher LG Hill lives and works in Melbourne. A co-founder of artist-run space Y3K, Hill has participated in, and organised, many exhibitions and music-related events and productions. Hill is editor and publisher of Endless Lonely Planet and co-founder of Bunyip Trax.
1996 / 2004, English
Softcover, 315 pages, 21 x 25cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$45.00 - Out of stock
The classic anthology, What Is Appropriation?: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s & 1990s, on contemporary Australian art. It was first published in 1996 and a second edition was issued in 2014.
It was probably Ad Reinhardt, though it could have been Sherrie Levine or even Andy Warhol, who remarked that you only know you are doing something original when everybody else is doing it. This book explores this and other paradoxes raised by the practice of appropriation the quotation and use of other artists’ work that became widespread in the 1980s. Why was the practice so uniquely popular in Australia? What did it say about the relationship of Australian art to the art of other countries; about white art to Aboriginal art; and about contemporary art to the art of the past? How and why does appropriation fundamentally challenge habitual ways of looking at pictures and thinking about art? The essays and pictures in this book provide answers to these questions, but always in the knowledge that the enigma of appropriation remains.
2016, English
Hardcover, 186 pages, 15 x 24 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh
Texts by Helen Hughes, Ian McLean, Julie Nagam
Gordon Bennett: Be Polite follows the exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition and publication are the first to present the work of Bennett since his death. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and writing formed the foundation of his practice.
This publication brings together three newly commissioned essays by art historian Ian McLean and curators and arts writers Helen Hughes and Julie Nagam. The selection of works from the Estate of Gordon Bennett comprises drawings, acrylic/gouache and watercolor paintings, poetry, and essays from the early 1990s to the early 2000s—a period that produced work of remarkable force and revealed the artist’s working methods, research focuses, and ultimately his ambitions for his work.
Copublished with Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Design by Žiga Testen
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).
2018, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$40.00 - Out of stock
In Sandra Bridie b. 19--, Eight Fictions, artist Sandra Bridie presents eight fictional artists who bear her own name, but with different birthdates, imagined into the Melbourne art landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries. The artists are presented via interviews and documentation of their artwork. The oeuvres of the eight artists represented here include: photography, conceptual art, sculpture, performance, crafting, curatorship and text-based work. The artists range in age and ability from emerging artists to a grand dame of Melbourne abstract art. By presenting often tragi-comic characters who have to deal with good fortune, destiny, disaster, boredom, malaise, envy, distractions and lack of faith, Sandra hopes to present the artist as a recognisable creature in a familiar locale or milieu.
Self published and designed by Yanni Florence.
2018, English
Softcover (acetate cover, staple-bound), 18 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Diane Incorporated / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
New artist publication by Spencer Lai, "Actor (Snouts)" combines collected texts, reference images and documentation of Lai's artworks, and is published in an open edition by Diane Incorporated, Melbourne, 2018.
Spencer Lai is a Melbourne-based artist, who's work spans sculpture, video, installation, textiles, performance, and the collaborative project Monica’s Gallery with writer/curator Jake Swinson.
2018, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 240mm x 300mm
Published by
common-editions / London
$67.00 - Out of stock
A Dark and Quiet Place accompanies a new moving image work of the same name by Australian artist, David Noonan. Both the film and this artist’s book present a meditation on performance, its associated apparatus, and the physical and imaginary domains they inhabit.
That this is Noonan’s first film work in over a decade is significant, as his practice since has frequently referenced both the material qualities of film and projection, and an ongoing interest in the slippages between figuration and pure abstraction.
For the book, the artist has worked closely with award-winning design studio A Practice for Everyday Life to disassemble the film work back into a rhythmic sequence of still images, employing both the language of design and Noonan’s characteristic strategies of layering and manipulation.
More than a series of film stills, the images that make up this book acquire their own intrinsic quality, proposing new spatial configurations and performative actions.
In response to the work, renowned author Brian Dillon presents a piece of fiction at once speculative and rigorously rational, in which geometric shapes become performers, diagrammatic grids become complex stage sets, and the supremacy of the body is thrown into doubt.
Noonan has had major solo shows at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2009), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2008), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007).
2018, English
Hardcover, 72 pages, 30 x 22.5 cm
Ed. of 300,
Published by
Coracle / Ireland
$90.00 - Out of stock
Published in an edition of only 300 copies, this hardcover book contains all the drawings by Percy Grainger for the Free Music Machines he developed with Burnett Cross towards the end of his musical life. They were mostly drawn between 1951 and 1953.
This is the first time many of these drawings have been seen, and their improvisational notation and sense of invention make them of recurrent interest to both composers, writers and artists working in wider fields.
At the same time the book attempts to be the album in which to present them, and in which they can be viewed at a suitably large and readable scale.
The book and drawings are introduced by an authoritative contextual essay by musicologist Wilfred Mellers written for this publication.
1985, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
$100.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce catalogue and unique valuable resource published to accompany the exhibition "Working Art: A Survey of Art in The Australian Labour Movement in The 1980's", curated by Australian conceptual artist, curator and writer Ian Burn for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1985. Designed by Michael Davies of the Art Workers Union (AWU), this heavily illustrated (in colour and black and white) catalogue surveys the Banners, Posters, Graphics, Photographs, and Media of the Australian Labour movement during the 1980's, as well as a detailed "Historical Sketch" written and compiled by Ian Burn and Sandy Kirby that illustrates the rich history of the Arts in Australian unionism and communities. Alongside the many exhibited prints and textiles, there is photo documentation throughout of marches, performances, artist's at work, historical exhibitions, plus reproductions of newsletters, newspapers, cartoons, announcements, along with further accompanying introductory texts and a bibliography.
Includes inserted Trade Union Information Kit "Art and Working Life : The Victorian Trades Hall Council Arts Workshop" booklet that takes an illustrated look at the activities of the VTHC Workshop in the 1980s. A perfect accompaniment to this catalogue. Also, errata slip enclosed from the NSW catalogue.
Ian Burn (1939-1993) was an Australian conceptual artist, curator and writer who spent the first part of his career working in London and New York. It was here that he began working with Art & Language, a collaborative group who produced the publication Art-Language and whose members included artists Roger Cutforth, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Ramsden. Returning to Australia in 1977 Burn became involved in the Art Workers Union (AWU), a political and social platform that championed artists’ rights and helped change the landscape and expectations under which artists worked in Australia. From 1980 onwards, together with artist and social activist Ian Millis, he worked on a number of initiatives to further the cause of the labour movement, including Union Media Services and the Art and Working Life program. Burn died by accidental drowning in 1993.
A great copy of an important resource on Australia's cultural, industrial and political history, and also an important publication by Ian Burn.
Light general reading/handling creasing to oblong pages, otherwise tight and clean throughout. Previous owner's name penned to title page.
1947, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24.5 x 18.5 cm, 64 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Victorian Artists Society / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
The Australian Artist was founded in 1947 by Richard Haughton James, aka Jimmy James, a legendary figure in the history of Australian design and art, and published quarterly by The Victorian Artists Society in East Melbourne. It was available for three shillings and sixpence.
This issue (Volume One, Part Two: Personality in Art) is filled with articles such as "The Anatomy of Vulgarity" by Clive Turnbull; "Art and Sanity" by Alice Barber; "Sculpture Shown at The Victorian Artists Society"; "The Art of Children" by Frances Derham; and a feature on Pablo Picasso by Paul Haefleiger, alongside many other commentaries, illustrations (Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Rembrandt, Rodin, Georges Rouault, Cassandre, Aubrey Beardsley, Honoré Daumier, etc.) advice, "Food for Thought" and advertisements from late 1940s Melbourne.
General age wear, foxing and tanning to book edges and corners, otherwise bright and clean throughout.
1947, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24.5 x 18.5 cm, 60 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Victorian Artists Society / Melbourne
$25.00 - Out of stock
The Australian Artist was founded in 1947 by Richard Haughton James, aka Jimmy James, a legendary figure in the history of Australian design and art, and published quarterly by The Victorian Artists Society in East Melbourne. It was available for three shillings and sixpence.
This issue (Volume One, Part Three: What is Art Worth?) is filled with articles such as editorial texts "What Is Art Worth?", "What Is Art Training Worth?", "Why be a Sculptor", "The Fact About The Commercial Artist", "The Teaching of Arts in Victorian Schools", a feature on Henry Moore by Douglas Glass; Tom Roberts in retrospect; "Wood Engravings" by Imrie Reiner, alongside many other commentaries, illustrations (Albrecht Durer, Douglas Annand, Pierre Bonnard, George Grosz, Erwin Fabian, Georges Roualt, Henry Moore, Tom Roberts, Russell Drysdale, etc.), advice, "Food for Thought" and advertisements from late 1940s Melbourne.
General age wear, foxing and tanning to book edges and corners, otherwise bright and clean