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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2018, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$55.00 - Out of stock
In the 21st century we have witnessed a significant expansion in the field of transhistorical exhibition practice. A range of curatorial efforts have emerged in which objects and artefacts from various periods and art historical and cultural contexts are combined in display, in an effort to question and expand traditional museological notions such as chronology, context, and category. Such experiments in transcending art historical boundaries can result in fresh insights into the workings of entrenched historical presumptions, providing a space to reassess interpretations of individual objects. With contributions by Mieke Bal, Hendrik Folkerts, Nicola Setari, Maria Iñigo Clavo, and others.
2018, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$55.00 - Out of stock
Now out-of-print, last copies.
Artists and cultural practitioners from indigenous communities around the world are increasingly in the international spotlight. As museums and curators consider the global reach of their collections and exhibitions, this publication draws upon the challenges faced by cultural workers today, both indigenous and non-indigenous, to engage meaningfully and ethically with the histories, presents, and future of indigenous cultural practices and world views. Through sixteen indigenous voices the book charts perspectives across art and film, ethics and history, theory and museology.
Editor: Katya García-Antón
Contributors: Daniel Browning, Kabita Chakma, Megan Cope, Santosh Kumar Das, Hannah Donnelly, Léuli Māzyār Luna’i Eshrāghi, David Garneau, Biung Ismahasan, Kimberley Moulton, Máret Ánne Sara, Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, Irene Snarby, Ánde Somby, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Prashanta Tripura, Sontosh Bikash Tripura, and the OCA contributors: Liv Brissach, Katya García-Antón, Drew Snyder, Nikhil Vettukattil
2016, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$49.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Felicity D. Scott
Disorientation: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs
Critical Spatial Practice 7
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Martin Beck
Viennese émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988) is most frequently recalled for curating “Architecture without Architects,” the famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial structures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Far from simply a romantic or nostalgic invocation of cultures lost to industrial modernity, Rudofsky’s exhibition drew on decades of speculations about modern architecture and urbanism, particularly their semantic, technological, institutional, commercial, and geopolitical influences.
Focusing on Rudofsky’s encounters with Japan in the 1950s—he described postwar Japan as a “rear-view mirror” of the American way of life—architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. In a contemporary world saturated with visual information, Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance.
Design by Zak Group
2017, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 14.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$65.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalisation, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualising them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows: Globalisation in Contemporary Art tells the story of those interventions, dwelling in particular on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.
"Marcus Verhagen is one of the finest art critics writing today, and in these essays he maps the shifting terrain of the global art world with subtle, sceptical intelligence."
—Malcolm Bull, Professor of Art and the History of Ideas, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
"Flows and Counterflows offers an incisive and highly original account of contemporary art’s mutating relationship to the processes of globalisation. In its historical timeliness and critical urgency, it will no doubt become a seminal volume in this field."
—Anthony Downey, Professor of Visual Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, Birmingham City University
"Verhagen’s complete survey of globalisation—covering how art addresses global markers such as tourism and border control; how the art system itself has been reshaped; and how artists resist by building informal networks—is so packed with well-explained contemporary artworks that the result, in practice, is an indispensable history of art for our times."
—Gilda Williams, Goldsmiths MFA Curating, University of London
Design by A Practice for Everyday Life
2016, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Cambridge
$79.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Martin Beck, Nina Beier, Silvia Benedito, Ulla von Brandenburg, Katarina Burin, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Jonas Ekeberg, Alex Farquharson, Fernanda Fragateiro, Simon Fujiwara, James Goggin, Tone Hansen, Owen Hatherley, Henriette Huldisch, Damon Krukowski, Le Corbusier, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, Eline Mugaas, Elise Storsveen, Gloria Sutton, James Voorhies, Naomi Yang, Amy Yoes
New Institutionalism, a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s, evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann, the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, and other influential factors of the time. New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. These approaches posed other possibilities and futures for institutions and exhibitions, challenging the consensual conception, production, and distribution of art. Practitioners engaged the art institution with renewed confidence by imbuing it with the potential for new aesthetic experiences and different relationships among artists, institutions, and spectators beyond engrained modernist ideologies. Working in these new modes, the art institution could become a site of fluidity, unpredictability, and risk.
What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture. The first in a series of readers examining changing characteristics of art institutions, this publication thinks through New Institutionalism by bringing together facsimiles of seminal texts, new critical essays, a history of trends and practices, and commissioned artist projects and contributions. These are complemented by documentation from the inaugural year of programming at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University focused on reimagining CCVA as a twenty-first-century institution.
Copublished with Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Design by James Goggin, Practise
2012, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 18 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$160.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
First and only edition of this quickly out-of-print volume edited by Maria Lind.
Features contributions by Doug Ashford, Beatrice von Bismarck, Boris Buden, Clémentine Deliss, Helmut Draxler, Eungie Joo, and Marion von Osten, with a preface by Johan Öberg. Introduction by Maria Lind.
Within contemporary art, the curator’s mediating function has developed into “the curatorial” itself. The curatorial is akin to methodologies used by artists that focus on post-production approaches—that is, principles of montage, with disparate images, objects, as well as other material and immaterial phenomena that are brought together within a particular time and space-related framework. Because the curatorial has clear performative sides, ones that seek to challenge the status quo, it also includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all practices working with defining, preserving, and mediating cultural heritage in a wider sense. Is curating therefore essentially an act of translation? If so, with what purpose, and can it be performed elsewhere? Performing the Curatorial brings together a diverse group of curators, artists, art historians, educators, and thinkers, all of whom reflect on the curatorial motives, tendencies and tactics, pitfalls, and exegeses in translating, and thus performing, cultural heritage.
Design by Luca Frei
2020, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 22.9 x 15.9 cm
Published by
Mamco / Genève
$63.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
This book documents the scrupulous recreation, inside MAMCO Geneva, of a flat owned between 1975 and 1992 by Parisian collector and self-described agent d’art Ghislain Mollet-Viéville. Mollet-Viéville’s apartment on the rue Beauborg showcased his incredible collection of minimalist and conceptual art; the flat served flexibly as home, gallery and crossroads of international contemporary art. Featuring works by Victor Burgin, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Claude Rutault, Art & Language, John McCracken and Lawrence Weiner, Mollet-Viéville’s collection, and its display in his apartment, defined a radical approach to collecting and played an important role in publicizing the work of these artists in France.
MAMCO acquired Mollet-Viéville’s groundbreaking collection in 2017; The Apartment is the first publication to celebrate and study Mollet-Viéville’s collection and its faithful reinstallation at MAMCO Geneva as a “period room” of contemporary art history. The Apartment features an analysis of each work included in the installation, an interview with Mollet-Viéville conducted by Lionel Bovier and Thierry Davila, and an essay by Patricia Falguières.
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 312 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$87.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Art historian Darby English is celebrated for working against the grain and plumbing gaps in historical narratives. In this book, he explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of black cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, an integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.
1971 takes an insightful look at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their and their advocates' efforts to further that aim through public exhibitions. Amid calls to define a "black aesthetic" or otherwise settle the race question, these experiments with modernist art favored cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight.
The power and social importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a racial metaphor and partly from investigations of color that were underway in formalist American art and criticism. From Frank Bowling to Virginia Jaramillo, Sam Gilliam to Peter Bradley, black modernists and their supporters rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for racial reconciliation. At a time when many debates about identity sought closure, these exhibitions offered openings; when icons and slogans touted simple solutions, they chose difficulty. But above all, as English demonstrates in this provocative book, these exhibitions and artists responded with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.
2019, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 10.8 x 17.6 cm
Published by
Onomatopee / Eindhoven
$39.00 - Out of stock
Permanent Recession: a Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance is an enquiry into the capitals and currencies of experimental, radical and artist-run initiatives in Australia. Edited by Channon Goodwin, director of Melbourne's Bus Projects, the book excavates a shared history of independent practice stretching back to the 1980s, situating new research within a rich continuum of debate about the Australian artmaking context.
Part research, part advocacy document, part literature review, part reader, part position paper, Permanent Recession is a living contribution to current thought. As a handbook, it is a compilation of useful information in a compact and handy form. It should be used!
Authors include: Esther Anatolitis, Peter Anderson, Hana Pera Aoake, Dr Marnie Badham, Terri Bird, Andrew Brooks, Andy Butler, Colleen Chen, Clare Cooper, Dr David Corbet, Dr Ben Eltham, Dr Léuli Eshrāghi, Channon Goodwin, Sarah Gory. Tristen Harwood, Dr Mark Jackson, Dr Kate MacNeill, Dr Anne Marsh, Lucie McIntosh, Georgie Meagher, Dr Jacqueline Millner, Bernice Murphy, Spiros Panigirakis, Dr Lisa Radford, Macushla Robinson, Dr Francis Russell, Catherine Ryan, Kate Scardifield, Dr Pip Shea, Talia Smith, Philipa Veitch, Amelia Wallin, Pip Wallis, Amelia Winata, Katie Winten and Tian Zhang. Graphic design by Paul Mylecharane and Kim Mumm Hansen of Public Office.
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 12.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$59.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Defne Ayas, Ute Meta Bauer, Nicolas Bourriaud, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Joshua Decter, Clémentine Deliss, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Boris Groys, Hou Hanru, María Belén Sáez De Ibarra, Maria Lind, Pi Li, Steven Henry Madoff, Antonia Majaca, Gabi Ngcobo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jack Persekian With Alison Carmel Ramer, Terry Smith, Nato Thompson, Mick Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Tirdad Zolghadr
With the global rise of a politics of shock driven by authoritarian regimes that subvert the rule of law and civil liberties, what paths to resistance, sanctuary, and change can cultural institutions offer? What about activism in curatorial practice? In this book, more than twenty leading curators and thinkers about contemporary art present powerful case studies, historical analyses, and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of activism, protest, and advocacy. What unfolds in these pages is a vast range of ideas—a tool kit for cultural producers everywhere to engage audiences and face the fierce political challenges of today and tomorrow.
What about Activism? is based on the summit “Curatorial Activism and the Politics of Shock,” which took place at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Along with expanded versions of the talks given at the conference, the book includes a transcript of a roundtable discussion moderated by Steven Henry Madoff and Brian Kuan Wood among the speakers and students in the MA Curatorial Practice program at SVA.
2019, English
Softcover, 212 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Muzeum Sztuki / Łódź
$69.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Joanna Bednarek, Ines Doujak & John Barker, Zofia Łapniewska, Raqs Media Collective, Joanna Sokołowska, Marina Vishmidt, Siona Wilson
This book is both a record and a theoretical expansion of the exhibition “All Men Become Sisters” at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Dedicated to the manifestation of sisterhood in art from the 1970s until today, the exhibition and the publication focus on art that resonated with feminist perspectives on work, production, and reproduction. “Sisterhood” is a key concept and an impulse to work with imagination; built on the foundations of second-wave criticism of the patriarchal exploitation of women, it poses questions about the future from the perspective of feminist economics and ethics of care.
Artists: Berwick Street Film Collective, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Sarah Browne, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Jan Czapliński, Ines Doujak in cooperation with John Barker, Köken Ergun, Hackney Flashers, Krystyna Gryczełowska, Margaret Harrison, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Birgit Jürgenssen, Irena Kamieńska, Ola Kozioł/Suavas Levy, Nalini Malani, Marge Monko, Şükran Moral, Teresa Murak, Letícia Parente, Agnieszka Piksa, Marcin Polak, Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Raqs Media Collective, R.E.P., Alicja Rogalska, Daniel Rumiancew, Jadwiga Sawicka, Allan Sekula, Jo Spence, Rosemarie Trockel, Agnès Varda, Mona Vǎtǎmanu/Florin Tudor, Zorka Wollny
Curator: Joanna Sokołowska
Copublished with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź
Design by Monika Zawadzki, Olo Jean-Claude Zawadzki
1969, Italian / English / French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 196 pages, 23 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Alfieri / Milan
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of Metro, "The International Review Of Contemporary Art", published in Milan twice yearly, each issue in dust-jacketed hardcover format and edited by Bruno Alfieri. This 15th edition from 1969 with a wonderful illustrated cover by Pino Pascali. Like it's more widely-known architectural counterpart, Lotus, each issue of Metro features in-depth articles on a selection of artists or events in a format and style far closer to a book than a periodical. This issue also includes articles on Piero Manzoni, Leo Castelli Gallery (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, etc.), Bridget Riley, Documenta 4 in Kassel, Italian sociologist and artist Hans Glauber, and of course Pino Pascali. Also an article that looks at the work of Pascali alongside Lucio Fontana. Texts by Germano Celant, Lea Vergine, Bruno Alfieri, Giulio Carlo Argan, Peter Gorsen, Gillo Dorfles, Maurizio Dell'Arco, Giuseppe Gatt, and others. Text in Italian, English and French.
Good copy with some small closed tears to jacket and edge wear. Now preserved in mylar wrap.
2019, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$49.00 - Out of stock
In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a “curatorial turn” in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard’s exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard’s own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. “Les Immatériaux” can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life’s work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.
Curator, art critic and philosopher, director of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and director of its Portikus Gallery until 2010, currently director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Daniel Birnbaum is is also a member of the board of the Institut für Sozialforschung. A contributing editor of Artforum, he is the author of numerous texts on art and philosophy.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein is professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University. His areas of research include aesthetic theory, with a particular focus on visual arts and architecture, German Idealism, phenomenology, critical theory, and modern philosophies of desire, power, and subjectivity.
1967, French
Softcover, 60 pages, 26 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Musée des Arts Decoratifs / Paris
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the iconic catalogue for the legendary Science-Fiction exhibition, curated by Harald Szeemann and presented as a touring show at Kunsthalle Bern, Musée des arts décoratifs Paris, and Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1967-1968. In the fashion of Szeemann's exhibition-making, Science-Fiction attracted record numbers of visitors whilst triggering controversial debate in the press. In institutions dedicated to the showcasing of contemporary art, Szeemann ventured to compile the unbelievable amount of around 3,000 objects from sociology, technology, science, art, comics, journalism, and literature, around the theme of Science-Fiction. The exhibits were presented in the show ordered in segments: modern spaceflight, art, film, literature, robots, UFOs, humour, toys, comics, as well as science fiction in the real world. Catalogue includes the work of Martial Raysse, Tetsumi Kudo, Roy Lichtenstein, Liliane Lijn, Robert Malaval, H. W. Muller, Bernard Rancillac, Markus Ratz, Shinkichi Tajiri, Edmund Alleyn, Piero Gilardi, Klaus Geissler, Paul van Hoeydonck, Piotr Kowalski, Yaacov Agam, Erró, Takis, Antonio Dias, Frank Franzetta, Guido Crepax, Wally Wood, Giovanni Scolari, Jean-Claude Forest, Al Williamson, and many more. Texts by Pierre Versins, Jacques Sadoul, Demètre Iokimidis, etc. in French. Includes the fold-out "Tableau chronologique de la S.F." compiled by French Science Fiction collector and scholar Pierre Versins.
Very Good copy.
2006, English
Softcover, 375 pages, 35 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
CAPC / Bordeaux
Sculpture Centre / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Over-sized, long out-of-print Grey Flags catalogue edited by Bettina Funcke, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name curated by Anthony Huberman and Paul Pfeiffer. Comprised of nineteen artists with significant individual differences, Grey Flags assembles a group of works that not only resist categorical branding, but also go on in different ways to challenge the very terms of the "arts-apparatus." The exhibition featured the work of John Armleder, Lutz Bacher, Helen Chadwick, Tacita Dean, Claire Fontaine, Liam Gillick, Piero Golia, Michael Krebber, Jonathan Monk, Gabriel Orozco, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad, Allen Ruppersberg, Seth Price, Wilhelm Sasnal, Karin Schneider, Shirana Shahbazi, Kelley Walker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mario Ybarra Jr. and the 375 page exhibition catalogue compiled a sort-of reader/scrap book of bootlegged pages from other catalogues and zines, artworks, text excerpts etc. contributed by all involved. A unique and fascinating catalogue.
"When you stop talking and doing, and close your eyes, what comes to mind? Voices? Images? Feelings? Like landscape seen from a plane, these phenomena hover on a sublime verge between fascinating and boring. Well, that might be true of anything viewed from a distance: the stars, the sea, mountains, the horizon. And what of social phenomena? Same. On any forgotten record, it's in the filler songs that you find the blank, thoughtless strivings laid bare, production patterns of another day, secrets of the ornaments. [...]" - Seth Price
Fine copy, with light shelf wear.
2019, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 16.5 x 23.4 cm
Published by
City Gallery / Wellington
Melbourne University Law School / Melbourne
Liquid Architecture / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
The earliest references to eavesdropping are found in law books. According to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769), 'eavesdroppers, or such as listen under walls or windows, or the eaves of a house, to hearken after discourse, and thereupon to frame slanderous and mischievous tales, are a common nuisance and presentable at the court-leet'. Today, however, eavesdropping is not only legal, it's ubiquitous – unavoidable. What was once a minor public-order offence has become one of the key political and legal problems of our time, as the Snowden revelations made clear.
Eavesdropping addresses the capture and control of our sonic world by state and corporate interests, alongside strategies of resistance. For editors James Parker (Melbourne Law School) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture), eavesdropping isn't necessarily malicious. We cannot help but hear too much, more than we mean to. Eavesdropping is a condition of social life. And the question is not whether to eavesdrop, therefore, but how.
Featuring contributions from Norie Neumark, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Susan Schuppli, Sean Dockray, Joel Spring, Fayen d'Evie and Jen Bervin, Samson Young, Manus Recording Project Collective.
2019, English / German
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
In the current issue of Texts on Art, "Literature," we explore the emergence of the genre of "autofiction": a field in literature that has been taken up between the formally distinct categories of fiction and autobiography. Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, among others, whose works are exemplary in developing the form of writing in which the fictitious ego merges with the voices of others, where these voices are potentially in the social more generally.
ISSUE NO. 115 / SEPTEMBER 2019 "LITERATUR"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
BETWEEN YOU AND ME / A Correspondence on Autofiction in Contemporary Literature between Isabelle Graw and Brigitte Weingart
WOMAN AS SUBJECT OR EXEMPLARY OF HER KIND / A Conversation between Maija Timonen and Rachel Cusk
CLAUDE HAAS
ON - THE DEMISE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE WHIRL OF AUTOFICTION. OR: REALITY TODAY
SURRENDER AS FREEDOM / Interview with Enis Maci by Aram Lintzel
PETER REHBERG
- QUEER AUTOFICTION AS BODY PROTOCOL
DIRK VON LOWTZOW
SOME QUESTIONS FOR LEÏLA SLIMANI
LEANDER SCHOLZ - LITERATURE OF WORKING-CLASS CHILDREN
JUTTA KOETHER -
WHEN YOU PAINT APPLES, DO YOU ALSO FEEL YOUR BREASTS AND KNEES BECOMING APPLES?
NEW DEVELOPMENT
EMPIRE OF ETHER / Colin Lang on the Advent of Drone Exhibitions
ROTATION
LIFE PRESERVER / Sven Lütticken on Alice Creischer’s “In the Stomach of the Predators: Writings and Collaborations”
KLANG KÖRPER
PROTO-WHATEVER-THIS-NEXT-PHASE-IS / Annika Haas über Holly Herndon in der Volksbühne Berlin und im Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel
REVIEWS
BLUE CUBES: VOLLGELAUFENE VOLUMEN / Diedrich Diederichsen über die 58. Biennale in Venedig
THE POWER OF NO / Eva Díaz on the Whitney Biennial 2019
GLOBAL SALE / Simon Baier über El Anatsui im Haus der Kunst, München
TO GIVE AND GIVE SUN / Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu on Cecilia Vicuña at Witte de With, Rotterdam
FREE WILLY / Mikael Brkic on Jana Euler at Galerie Neu, Berlin
UNDERSTANDING THAT EVERYONE IS NOT UNDERSTANDING EVERYTHING / Gunter Reski über Heike-Karin Föll in den KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
CONSIDER NOT THE BIRD’S, BUT THE WORM’S VIEW / Adam Kleinman on Cian Dayrit at Nome Gallery, Berlin
KÜNSTLERIN SEIN / Georg Imdahl über Anna Oppermann in der Kunsthalle Bielefeld
SETTING THE RECORD STRAY / Ana Teixeira Pinto on “Straying from the Line” at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
CHICAGO, NOW! / Hans-Jürgen Hafner über Gustave Caillebotte in der Alten Nationalgalerie, Berlin
HIDE AND SEEK / Magnus Schaefer on Lydia Ourahmane at Bodega, New York
WE NEVER KNOW HOW HIGH WE ARE / Thomas Groetz über Mayo Thompson in der Galerie Buchholz, Berlin
INVOLUNTARY TRACES / Daniel Ricardo Quiles on Jonathas de Andrade at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
POETISCHE SEZIERUNGEN / Isabel Mehl über Cana Bilir-Meier im Hamburger Kunstverein
CAVEMAN BLUES / Saim Demircan on Edith Karlson and Dan Mitchell at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn
DIE MEISTERIN / Stefan Neuner über Lotte Laserstein in der Berlinischen Galerie
STAGING FEMINISM / Luisa Lorenza Corna on “The Unexpected Subject: 1978 Art and Feminism in Italy” at FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, and “Doing Deculturalization” at Museion, Bolzano
WAHRNEHMUNG IST VERSCHIEBBAR / Christina Irrgang über Bea Schlingelhoff in der Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf
GRIT AND VITALITY / Daniel Sturgis on Joan Snyder at Blain Southern, London
NACHRUFE
LINDA BILDA (1963−2019)
by Silvia Eiblmayr
AGNÈS VARDA (1928–2019)
by Jennifer Stob
MICHEL SERRES (1930−2019)
by Lorenz Engell
KLAUS BUSSMANN (1941–2019
by Ulrike Groos and Hans Haacke
EDITION
BIRGIT MEGERLE
STERLING RUBY
2019, English
Softcover, 488 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Städelschule / Frankfurt
$42.00 - Out of stock
‘Since the year 1999, around 800 lectures have taken place at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. The texts are transcripts of thirteen lectures, selected to represent the most recent history, cataloguing ideas that might otherwise be buried and forgotten. This volume is the first of a series and focuses on the diversity of artistic perspectives. It provides an insight into the Städelschule’s educational program and documents a variety of artistic and theoretical approaches that the school seeks to support in art and society at large. The ongoing series will continuously reflect the school’s anatomy and core protagonists—the professors, the curatorial program at Portikus, and the students.’ — Philippe Pirotte (Städelschule Rector)
Städelschule Lectures 1 presents lectures, conversations, and interviews by: Monika Baer, Petra Van Brabandt, Douglas Gordon, Mark Leckey, Joshua Oppenheimer, Philippe Parreno, Philippe Pirotte, Lucy Raven, Willem de Rooij, Martha Rosler, Adi Rukun, Georgia Sagri, Mark von Schlegell, Amy Sillman and Josef Strau. The public lecture program is an integral part of the education at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. This publication is the first of a series cataloguing selected presentations from the past 20 years. Co-published with Städelschule.
2019, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 17 x 23cm
Published by
Herbert Foundation / Belgium
$43.00 - In stock -
Konrad Fischer opened his exhibition space in 1967 with the first European solo presentation of Carl Andre. Located in a converted alley in Düsseldorf, the gallery offered a platform for emerging international artists. Through his exhibition programme, Fischer enabled contact between European and American artists, transforming Düsseldorf into an international hot spot. With this book, the Herbert Foundation pays homage to the atypical art dealer who left an undeniable mark on its collection. The subjective reflection on Fischer’s activities and role within the international art world of the time includes a reprint of Fischer’s first interview in 1971 and a critical essay by Lynda Morris.
1961, English
Hardcover, 252 pages, 29.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Praeger Publishers Inc. / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First scarce hardcover edition of EXHIBITIONS: A SURVEY OF INTERNATIONAL DESIGNS, published by Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1961.
Wonderful collectable clothbound survey of the best (c. 1961) international exhibition design, profusely illustrated with 593 annotated photographs, scale drawings, and architectural plans, of museum exhibits, furniture fairs, world expo pavilions, and much more, with text by Klaus Franck. Discussions include construction, lighting techniques and materials. Also includes a directory of the architects and designers of the 130 presented exhibits from 16 countries, including Good Design (MoMA and The Merchandise Mart, Chicago), documenta '55 and documenta II '59, XI Triennale di Milano (Swiss section, Section of Industrial Design, Finnish section, Japanese section, Compasso d'Oro, and Exhibition of the School of Design, Ulm), San Francisco Showroom of the Herman Miller Furniture Company, San Francisco and Milan Knoll Showrooms, New York Showroom of the Olivetti Corporation, and World's Fair Brussels (Japanese Pavilion, Brazilian Pavilion, Finnish Pavilion, Yugoslav Pavilion, Swiss Pavilion, and more). Designers and architects include Oskar Blase, Max Bill, Gyorgy Kepes, Richard Hamilton, Luciano Baldessari, Vittoriano Vigano, Arnold Bode, Achille Castiglioni, Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Timo Sarpaneva, Charles and Ray Eames, Paul Rudolph, Alexander Girard, Arthur Drexler, Tapio Wirkkala, Will Burtin, Peter Blake, Florence Knoll, Bruno Munari, Walter Kuhn, Rolf Volhard, Studio Architetti, Richard Buckminster Fuller and George Nelson and Company.
Good ex-library copy, without dust jacket.
2018, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 17 x 22 cm
Published by
Casco / Utrecht
Valiz / Amsterdam
$44.00 - Out of stock
Learning is the accumulation of knowledge, skills, and behaviour and is often progress-oriented and institutionally driven. In contrast, unlearning is directed towards embodied forms of knowledge and the (un)conscious operation of ways of thinking and doing. 'Unlearning Excercises' shares a set of exercises as propositions to be useful for and adapted within other specific (institutional) contexts in and beyond the arts. These exercises range from daily practices like ‘Cleaning Together,’ to unresolvable issues of collective authorship and fair wage. They also offer insights into the lively and long-term collective unlearning process.
2016, English
Hardcover, 360 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$75.00 - Out of stock
This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century’s most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his “non-art” work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp’s art through activities not normally seen as artistic—from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework.
Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp’s note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boîte-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Étant donnés into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist’s questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp’s “non-art” labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them.
Through Duchamp’s elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp.
About the Author
Elena Filipovic, an art historian, is Director and Chief Curator of the Kunsthalle Basel. Among her curatorial projects is the traveling retrospective “Marcel Duchamp: A Work That Is Not a Work ‘of Art'” (2008-2009).
Endorsements:
“In the 1970s Lucy Lippard remarked that Duchamp was already too much written about. How, then, is one to contribute effectively to the Duchamp literature today, given that it has become all the more voluminous since? In The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp Elena Filipovic finds a way, and does so with great intelligence. She claims, rightly, that the dominant readings of Duchamp have led to an occlusion of the ‘fugitive actions’ undertaken by Duchamp vis-à-vis the institution of art, and it is there that she locates her incisive study—specifically on ‘his role as administrator, archivist, art advisor, curator, publicist, reproduction maker, and salesman.’ Rather than see these activities as ancillary to his life as an artist, Filipovic locates them, brilliantly, at its center; they are indeed only ‘apparently marginal.’ This is just the book to reanimate discourse around Duchamp.”
—Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor, Princeton University, author of Compulsive Beauty and Prosthetic Gods
“When an artist becomes a curator today, the exhibition is often treated like an extension of the artist’s medium. A century ago when Duchamp, having ceased to consider himself a professional artist, undertook to help out his friends by designing their exhibitions, did he think like a modernist fixated on medium specificity? This is the classic question that lies behind Elena Filipovic’s careful research in the archives. In light of her new syntheses, she rewrites the question to read: just how did Duchamp open up new possibilities for curators? The answer: the medium was not his message. Duchamp worked without professing, in a series of small, nonretinal steps; he avoided creating a single, prototypical model. He left behind a panorama of new ideas. Filipovic has collected them into a book that curators will come to regard as a resource.”
—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art History, Vassar College, author of Their Common Sense
“In 1959, Marcel Duchamp referred to himself as ‘a non-artist.’ Exactly what he meant by this has never been fully explained until now, a lacuna in the vast literature on this artist that finally has been filled by Elena Filipovic’s marvelous new book, the first to deal with the various activities that preoccupied Duchamp when he wasn’t making art, particularly in the realm of curating (not only his own work, but that of his fellow artists in various exhibitions that he oversaw). Filipovic argues that these activities occur with such frequency and consistency in Duchamp’s life that they must be considered an integral component of his creative endeavors. The result is an entirely new way to look at the work of this important and highly influential artist.”
—Francis M. Naumann, author of The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost
“Yes, another Duchamp book. The one we least expected, but perhaps the one that we now need the most. Elena Filipovic’s brilliant book locates a ‘curatorial’ logic at the heart of Duchamp’s (deeply fascinating, often confusing, and impossibly disparate) activities. But more crucial even than its tracing of a long-ignored curatorial modernism, this book will in turn challenge what it might mean to curate today, at precisely the moment curators increasingly claim an artistic dimension for their own work.”
—George Baker, Professor of Art History, UCLA, author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 50 pages, 27 x 33 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tension / South Yarra
$30.00 - Out of stock
Tension 11 (Images - Ideas - Style : Jan / Feb 1987) features Brett Whiteley (interview by Phillip Adams), Stieg Persson (interview by Ashley Crawford), Jean-Marc Lepechoux (interview by Ashley Crawford), Peter Greenaway (interview by Ashley Crawford), Derek Jarman (interview by Melanie Brellis), "Godard, Mieville" (by Adrian Martin), Elfi Mikesch & Monika Trent (interview by Amree Hewitt), Neil Jordon, gallerists Mary Boone & Michael Werner (by Paul Taylor), RAW : Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly (interview by Kerri Phillips), Run DMC / Def Jam Records (by Peter Grace), and much more.
TENSION (1983-1990) was one of the central "popular" culture arts periodicals to come out of Melbourne in the 1980s, emerging from the ashes of Virgin Press. Independently published and edited by critic Ashley Crawford, Tension magazine lasted for 25 bi-monthly issues dedicated to Art, Music, Fashion, Theatre, Film, Photography, across reviews, interviews, reports, critical essays and artist pages. Now an important document of culture in Australia, and especially Melbourne in the 1980s, issues featured the writing and contributions of Paul Taylor, McKenzie Wark, Mike Parr, John Nixon, Catharine Lumby, Philip Brophy, Adrian Martin, Ashley Crawford, Peter Tyndall, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Keith Haring, Gerald Murnane, and many more. In 1985 Crawford, with John Buckley, staged an exhibition issue of the magazine, 'Visual Tension', at ACCA featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Marianne Baillieu, Peter Booth, Paul Boston, Peter Cripps, Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, John Lethbridge, Geoff Lowe, Linda Marrinon, John Matthews, John Nixon, Stieg Persson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, John Young.
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 23.5 x 33.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tension / South Yarra
$30.00 - Out of stock
Tension 12 (Australian and International Arts : December 1987) features Geoff Lowe (interview by Ashley Crawford), Jim Jarmusch (interview by Kerry Doole), Lindy Lee (by Ted Colless), Wim Wenders (by Melanie Brellis), "Images from Japan" (by Ashley Crawford), Nick Cave (interview by Melanie Brellis), 4AD Records (interview by Bruce Elder), Trisha Brown (interview by Shelley Lasica), Syd Mead (interview by Chad Taylor), "Dennis Hopper: Out of the Sixties" by Robin Barden, "Television: A New Aesthetic", Paul Morley's ASK reviewed by McKenzie Wark, and much more.
TENSION (1983-1990) was one of the central "popular" culture arts periodicals to come out of Melbourne in the 1980s, emerging from the ashes of Virgin Press. Independently published and edited by critic Ashley Crawford, Tension magazine lasted for 25 bi-monthly issues dedicated to Art, Music, Fashion, Theatre, Film, Photography, across reviews, interviews, reports, critical essays and artist pages. Now an important document of culture in Australia, and especially Melbourne in the 1980s, issues featured the writing and contributions of Paul Taylor, McKenzie Wark, Mike Parr, John Nixon, Catharine Lumby, Philip Brophy, Adrian Martin, Ashley Crawford, Peter Tyndall, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Keith Haring, Gerald Murnane, and many more. In 1985 Crawford, with John Buckley, staged an exhibition issue of the magazine, 'Visual Tension', at ACCA featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Marianne Baillieu, Peter Booth, Paul Boston, Peter Cripps, Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, John Lethbridge, Geoff Lowe, Linda Marrinon, John Matthews, John Nixon, Stieg Persson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, John Young.