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
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2019, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 24.1 x 29.8 cm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
Air de Paris / Paris
$75.00 - Out of stock
The artist as cook and lover
Since the 1960s, Dorothy Iannone has attempted to represent ecstatic love, "the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure." Today her oeuvre, encompassing painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist's books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female sexuality, and political and feminist issues. As Robert Filliou stated as early as in 1972, "She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation." A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.
Created in 1969, when she was living with Swiss artist Dieter Roth, "A Cookbook" is a perfect example of how she mixes daily life and an existential approach, culminating in her vision of cooking as an outlet for both eroticism and introspection. A book of real recipes full of visual delights, "A Cookbook" contains densely decorated pages with patterned designs, packed text, and vibrant colors. Personal sentences are interspersed among the lists of ingredients, revealing the exultations and tribulations of her life between the lines of recipes. Filled with wit and wordplay, associations between aliments and idiosyncratic thoughts—"At least one can turn pain to color" accompanies the recipe for gazpacho; "Dorothy’s spirit is like this: green and yellow," is written next to the ingredients for lentil soup—" A Cookbook" constitutes a mundane but essential self-portrait of the artist as a cook and a lover.
Born in 1933 in Boston, Dorothy Iannone lives and works in Berlin.
This publication is a facsimile of the original 1969 "Cookbook." Introduced by Dorothy Iannone, it is wrapped in a dust jacket specially designed by the artist in 2018.
This facsimile of "A Cookbook" is published in collaboration with Air de Paris, Paris.
Edited by Clément Dirié
1966, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 21.5 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
LACMA / Los Angeles
$55.00 - Out of stock
The great catalogue for a major exhibition held in Los Angeles in 1966 on the work of Man Ray. Published by LACMA for the occasion, this 148 page English catalogue is very generous in its content, with reproductions of much of Man Ray's work across painting, sculpture and photography, amongst much more, it also features an introduction byJules Langsner, Man Ray's writings on his own work and observations, texts about Man Ray by his friends (Paul Éluard, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Rrose Sélavy, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter), plus other texts, catalogue of the exhibition, Chronology, Major Exhibitions, and Selected Bibliography.
Good-Very Good copy.
2019, English / Swedish
Softcover, 172 pages, 23.5 x 17 cm
Published by
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
Koenig Books / London
$68.00 - Out of stock
New lavishly illustrated monographic catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: The Same Different at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 September 2018 – 10 March 2019).
Rosemarie Trockel’s breakthrough came in the 1980s, and ever since she has been critically examining art, the structures of society, and gender roles with analytical acuity and humour and with a sensuality that is all her own. Anyone who looks for a recognisable style in her work is looking in vain. She evades anything that might lock her down and confine her. The catalogue allows the reader to follow the artist’s career from her feminist examinations of the 1990s to later works in which she addresses issues of animal ethics, artistic processes, and what art can be. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: The Same Different at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 September 2018 – 10 March 2019).
English and Swedish text.
Co-published by Koenig Books and Moderna Museet.
1995, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 28 x 23 cm
Ed. of 1000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Witte de With / Rotterdam
D.A.P. / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
English language edition of the rare first major monographic catalogue on Paul Thek, published in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition staged at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, June 3 - October 8, 1995. The exhibition went on to Berlin, Barcelona, Zürich, Marseille, accompanied by this important book on the history of one of America's great artists.
Lavishly illustrated throughout with Thek's notebooks, sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings, photographs, writings, and much more, accompanied by important historical texts by Ann Wilson, Anke Bangma, Harald Szeemann (interview with Thek), Richard Flood, Marietta Franke, Holland Cotter, Roland Groenenboom, and Rebecca Quaytman. Includes a selected bibliography.
Printed in an edition of 1000. Scarce in the English edition.
2012, English/Dutch
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 536 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$83.00 - Out of stock
The great Roma Publications compiled (almost) encyclopedic book which covers Dutch artist Mark Manders' entire oeuvre from the late 1980s until the present. It contains facsimiles of the artist's publications and a focus on a large number of recent, never-published works. Well over 500 pages wrapped in hardcovers.
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
2017, English / German
Hardcover, 128 pages, 18 x 26 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
Editioned work holds a special place within Sigmar Polkeʼs artistic oeuvre. To him it represented another possibility for conducting intensive and excessive variations on his experiments, enabling an endless discourse between himself and the world.
Like an alchemist, he expected different techniques to serve his creative ego, thus his editions comprise objects, books, folders, photography, photocopies, collages and numerous prints.
This catalogue contains all of the artistʼs editions, a total of around 200 works.
Accompanies the exhibition Sigmar Polke – The Editions, 28 Apr – 27 Aug 2017, The Collectors Room, Berlin. Curated by Tereza de Arruda.
German and English text.
1965, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket, cloth-bound), 116 pages, 28 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Éditions Denoël / Paris
$70.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Les Dessins Magiques de Victor Brauner, published in France in 1965 and dedicated entirely to the drawings of Romanian Surrealist artist Victor Brauner. Known as the "avant-God of Surrealism", which he predated by 15 years, this book illustrates Brauner's lifelong interest in magic and the occult through a wonderful collection of his bizarre line drawings, alongside commentary by the French art historian Sarane Alexandrian. Numbered edition 2410.
Victor Brauner (1903-1966) was a Romanian Surrealist painter and sculptor, and one of the most important members of the Romanian avant-garde. Born on June 15, 1903 in Piatra Neam?, Romania, he studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1916 to 1918. Soon after, he began painting landscapes and, as he put it, went through all the "Dadaist, Abstractionist, Expressionist" idioms. Brauner helped found the Dadaist review 75 HP in Bucharest. In Bucharest in 1929 Brauner was associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist review UNU. Brauner settled in Paris in 1930 and became a friend of his compatriot Constantin Brancusi. Then he met Yves Tanguy, who introduced him to the Surrealists by 1933. André Breton wrote an enthusiastic introduction to the catalogue for Brauner’s first Parisian solo show at the Galerie Pierre in 1934. The exhibition was not well-received, and in 1935 Brauner returned to Bucharest, where he remained until 1938. That year he moved to Paris, lived briefly with Tanguy, and painted a number of works featuring distorted human figures with mutilated eyes. Some of these paintings, dated as early as 1931, proved gruesomely prophetic when he lost his own eye in a in violent argument between Oscar Domínguez and Esteban Francés in 1938. At the outset of World War II Brauner fled to the South of France, where he maintained contact with other Surrealists in Marseilles. Later he sought refuge in Switzerland; unable to obtain suitable materials there, he improvised an encaustic from candle wax and developed a graffito technique. Brauner returned to Paris in 1945. He was included in the Exposition internationale du surréalisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947. His postwar painting incorporated forms and symbols based on Tarot cards, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and antique Mexican codices. In the fifties Brauner traveled to Normandy and Italy, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and in 1966. He died in Paris on March 12, 1966. The artist is buried in the famed Montmartre cemetery, where his epitaph reads: “Painting is life, the real life, my life.”
Very Good ex-library copy w. light stamping and plastic covered dust jacket. Clean and tight throughout.
1966, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Something Else Press / New York
$100.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover English edition, published in 1966 by Something Else Press, New York, of "An Anecdoted Topography of Chance", arguably the most important and entertaining "Artist's Book" of the post-war period. A unique collaborative work by four artists associated with the FLUXUS and Nouveau Realisme movements, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, and Roland Topor.
What is the Topography? Hard to explain an idea so simple yet so brilliantly executed. Following a rambling conversation with his dear friend Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on the table in his room, adding a rigorously scientific description of each. These objects subsequently evoked associations, memories, anecdotes; not only from the original author, but from his friends as well: a beguiling creation was born. Many of the principal participants of FLUXUS make an appearance (and texts by Higgins, Jouffroy, Kaprow, Restany, and Tinguely are included, among others). It is a novel of digressions in the manner of Tristram Shandy or Robbe-Grillet; it's a game, a poem, an encyclopaedia, a cabinet of wonders: a celebration of friendship and creativity.
The Topography personifies (and pre-dates) the whole FLUXUS spirit and constitutes one of the strangest and most compelling insights into the artist's life. From out of the banal detritus of the everyday a virtual autobiography emerges: of four perceptive, witty and eloquent members of the human species.
Translated from the French and further anecdoted by poet Emmett Williams.
First 1966 hardcover edition in Very Good condition, with dust jacket (minor ex-libris markings)
Couldn't be more highly recommended.
1985, English
Softcover (w. dust-jacket), 200 pages (ill. throughout), 21 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions du Regard / Paris
$180.00 - Out of stock
The exquisite "Café du Reve" book by the British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz.
This is a copy of the very first French printing by Editions du Regard from 1985.
Very scarce these days, this beautiful artists book's content is entirely composed, designed and collated from cover to cover by Chaimowicz in the style of a somewhat autobiographical scrap-book. Each page is designed by hand and illustrated with Chaimowicz's decorative motifs and patterns that carry upon them his hotel letterhead correspondence, writings and poetry, paired with photographs of objects, places and people - snapshots taken by Chaimowicz or appropriated from magazines.
"Café du Reve" remains a perfect early example of Chaimowicz's encompassing artistic practice that is immersed in the spatial and emotional experience of environments and décor, literature, the domestic sphere, interior design, ceramics, applied art, wallpaper and textiles.
Highly recommended. A Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket, preserved under plastic wrap.
2012, German
Softcover, 166 pages, 28 x 24 cm
Published by
Kerber Verlag / Berlin
Museum Tinguely / Basel
$50.00 - In stock -
In unusual independence from the art world, Robert Breer (1926-2011) created a diverse and individual oeuvre since the 1950s. He has examined central human themes in dynamic abstractions, filmed collages and poetic meditations. His high-speed films and super-SloMo sculptures stand at odds with the art landscape of their time and often go beyond both technical and aesthetic borders of their medium and of contemporary taste. It only from the viewpoint of today that their true explosive force can be recognised.
This catalogue presents for the first time a retrospective of the extraordinary work of Robert Breer, aiming to contribute to the rediscovery of this major “artists’ artist”. Published on the occasion of the survey exhibition at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2011 and Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2012.
German language.
2019, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 23.5 x 20.5 cm
Ed. 0f 200,
Published by
Ruin Press / Sydney
$35.00 $15.00 - In stock -
With an accompanying essay by Francis Plagne
Limited to 200 copies
"Punter’s Club, 2001: the set started when he threw himself against the wall, amplified of course. The crying began then didn’t stop. He hit the microphone repeatedly with his forrid, initiating a hypnotic rhythm with intermittent irregularities, frizzy hair jagged. The ritual had begun, everyone was in. After a sustained 10 minute crescendo, Rizili went out into the street, using the pole outside Joe’s Garage the same way as he used the microphone. The crowd followed, bystanders were agape. By the time he ran down Brunswick St, wheezing at an alarming volume, the club was going off, everyone high on possibility, amazed to be there. The set kind of ended when no one knew where Nik was.
I’m writing in Berlin, it’s raining and I was going to go to a gig tonight, but already knew what it sounded like so I didn't. The avant-garde has auto-dissolved once again, at least in this town. Gig’s like Rizili’s don’t happen here, and if they do they’re documented into a tidy art-history oblivion, contextualised into suffocation, given no room to stand free and for themselves. There’s no Berlin MS: a Menstruation Sisters gig comes off genuinely unhinged, pure animal energy distilled into sound.
These drawings capture the unnameable energy of those gigs, an astonishing nexus of detail and mess, a mutation of reference and alterity, another lineage of thought altogether. The visual articulation of the psyche, the clarity of form, its explosion into these exquisite beauties shifts our perception of what figurative drawing can be. These images could only gestate in the most disciplined and isolated of minds, living in stern denial of the comfy pull towards corporate arts hell, creating space to quietly formulate ideas that transcend any concept of relation or community."
1972, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dustjacket), 110 pages, 20.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Academy Editions / London
$140.00 - In stock -
Beautifully produced, scarce hardcover monographic volume dedicated entirely to reproductions of Surrealist visionary Hans Bellmer's incredible drawings. This is the first English edition, published by Academy Editions London in 1972 following the 1966 French edition. With an introduction by Constantin Jelenski. A stunning book.
German artist Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975), was best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
Very Good in original dust jacket, light tanning/wear to jacket. Small notation to front endpaper.
1969, English
Softcover (stapled), 20 pages, 20.5 x 26.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$20.00 - In stock -
Wonderful and scarce catalogue for the exhibition "The Art of Drawing", a major survey of drawing through the centuries, held in 1969 at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Introduction by Ursula Hoff with full exhibition check-list across blue textured paperstock. Illustrated pages featuring works by William Blake, Andreas del Sarto, Parmigianino, Jacques de Gheyn, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Annibale Carracci, Aert de Gelder, Rembrandt, Thomas Gainsborough, François Boucher, Pablo Picasso, William Dobell. Exhibition also included Eric Thake, Henri Matisse, Arthur Boyd, Carlo Maratta, Annibale Carracci, Russell Drysdale, Jacob Epstein, Rupert Bunny, Eduardo Paolozzi, John Brack, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Jan Brueghel The Elder, Jean Francois Millet, Hans Heysen, Ben Nicholson, Auguste Rodin, Robert Klippel, Inge King, Henry Moore, Albert Dürer, Léon Bakst, Margaret Stones, and many others.
Ursula Hoff (1909-2005) was an Australian scholar, academic, curator, writer, critic, and lecturer. She was Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1968–1973).
Good-Very Good ex-Australian National Gallery reference copy.
1968, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 370 pages, 22 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Württembergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$120.00 - Out of stock
The amazing Bauhaus book, published in 1968 and designed and typeset to abolish all Upper Case letters by Herbert Bayer (one of the most influential members of the Bauhaus) for the first major Bauhaus survey exhibition after the Second World War, curated by Prof. Ludwig Grote, dr. Dieter Honisch, Herbert Bayer and Hans Maria Wingler, at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.
This is the hard cover edition of what is without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and characteristic Bauhaus reference books ever published.
370 pages (with multiple paper stocks) contain no less than 650 colour and black and white illustrations selected from the Bauhaus Archiv, documenting the output of the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin. This heavy, exhaustive volume is split into the following sections : preliminary course and teaching (includes Iteen, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Schlemmer, Hirschfield-Mack, Klee and Schmidt); workshops (includes Teaching on Architecture, Sculpture, Stage, Stained Glass, Photography, Metal, Carpentry, Pottery, Typography, Mural Painting and Weaving); architecture and design (includes Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer, Brenner, Heiberg, A. Mayer, Stam Wittwer, Arndt, Bayer and Breuer); painting, sculpture, graphics (includes Josef Albers, Arndt, Bayer, Feininger, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Marcks, Moholy-Nagy, Muche, Schlemmer, Wols, etc.); life at the bauhaus; continuation of the teaching; biographies; bibliographies; index.
Includes introductory essays by Ludwig Grote, Walter Gropius, Heinz Winfried Sabais, Otto Stelzer, Hans Eckstein, Nikolaus Pevsner, Jurgen Joedicke, Will Grohmann and Hans M. Wingler.
Artists included: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Gunta Stolzl, Joost Schmidt, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Peterhans, Georg Muche, Lilly Reich, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannes Meyer, Gerhard Marcks, Johannes Itten, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Alfred Arndt, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Herbert Bayer, Paul Klee, Josef Hartwig, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Christian Dell, Otto Lindig, Theodor Bogler, Wols, and so many others.
Includes references to all aspects of the Bauhaus, including: Itten's Preliminary Course, Klee's Course, Kandinsky's Course, Color Experiments, Carpentry Workshop, Stained Glass Workshop, Pottery Workshop, Metal Workshop, Weaving Workshop, Stage Workshop, Wall Painting Workshop, Display Design, Architecture, Typography and Layout; the Bauhaus Press, the Weimar Exhibition, 1923, Moholy-Nagy's Preliminary Course, Albers' Preliminary Course, Bauhaus Building, The Masters' Houses, Other Buildings in Dessau, Architecture Department, Weaving Workshop, Typography Workshop: Printing, layout, posters, Photography, Exhibition Technique, Wall Painting Workshop: Wall paper, Sculpture Workshop, Stage Workshop, Extracurricular Activities, Spread of the Bauhaus Idea, Bauhaus Teaching in the United States and much more.
All texts in German.
Of all the artists to pass through the Bauhaus, none lived the Bauhaus ideal of total integration of the arts into life like Herbert Bayer (1900 - 1985). He was a graphic designer, typographer, photographer, painter, environmental designer, sculptor and exhibition designer. Between 1925 and 1928, Bayer was head of the printing workshop at the Bauhaus and produced many designs that became standards of a Bauhaus "style." Bayer was instrumental in moving the Bauhaus to purely sans serif usage in all its work, and is especially known is his lowercase, which continues in this 1968 catalogue.
Hardcover 2nd edition w. illustrated dust jacket (protected under plastic wrap) - good copy throughout, with the common bind-splitting at some intervals due to old glue and paper weight (seems to have been previously repaired). All pages still bound and present. Heavy spotting to outer top block edge, tanning to pages edges, otherwise bright and very clean throughout. Good jacket, only light wear.
1988, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 234 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First Edition of "A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages", published in 1988 in conjunction with a large exhibition of Claes Oldenburg's singular work, with focus on his incredible collaborative projects with his late wife, sculptor, art historian, and critic, Coosje van Bruggen. Since 1976, Oldenburg and van Bruggen produced three decades of monumental sculpture that van Bruggen would call Large-Scale Projects. This book documents these works and much more. Includes essay and introduction by Germano Celant, texts and personal notes by the artists, along with hundreds of colour and black and white drawings, sketches and photographs. A beautiful book.
Since the early 1980s van Bruggen worked as an independent critic and curator. She contributed articles to Artforum magazine from 1983 to 1988, and served as senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art in 1996-97.
Claes Oldenburg is an American Pop artist, best known for his soft sculptures and public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects.
Very Good copy.
1970, German
Softcover, 92 pages, 11 x 17 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Galerie Rudolph Zwirner / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
"Z" is a great, unsuspecting pocketbook from Galerie Rudolph Zwirner in 1970, collecting together a wonderful group of works by 78 artists (Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, René Magritte, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kenneth Noland, Daniel Spoerri, Frank Stella, Jean Tinguely, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Jasper Johns, Martial Raysse, Dieter Rot, Franz Erhart Walther, Bruno Goller, Morris Louis, Jim Dine, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Konrad Klapheck, Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo, Hundertwasser, Gerhard Richter, Antoni Tapies, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, Robert Graham, Allen Jones, Henri Michaux, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Tanguy, Louis Soutter, Tom Wesselmann, Toyen, Wols, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Panamarenko, Sol Lewitt, etc.) across painting, sculpture, drawings, collage and multiples, all reproduced in black and white across this almost entirely visual volume.
1971, French
Hardcover (clothbound w. dustjacket), 88 pages, 25 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Filipacchi / Paris
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this great monographic book on the work of Surrealist visionary Hans Bellmer, published in 1971 by Editions Filipacchi, Paris. Heavily illustrated throughout with wonderful reproductions of Bellmer's incredible drawings, photography, sculptures, paintings, alongside texts in French, biography and bibliography.
German artist Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975), was best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925)."
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 (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 120,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$14.00 - Out of stock
"Turtle Fur" is a limited edition publication by New York artist Quintessa Matranga. Published in 2018 by Innen Books in Zürich in an edition of 150 copies only on the occasion of Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, February 24 — 26, 2017.
Quintessa Matranga is an American artist working in many mediums and was a curator at Mission Comics, a gallery operating in the back room of a comic book shop in San Francisco.
2015, English
Hardcover, 168 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
Matthew Marks / New York
$95.00 - Out of stock
Edited with text by Dan Nadel.
This is the first complete presentation of the artists' books, posters, prints and ephemera produced by The Hairy Who (Chicago, 1966-69), which was composed of Jim Falconer (born 1943), Art Green (born 1941), Gladys Nilsson (born 1940), Jim Nutt (born 1938), Suellen Rocca (born 1943) and Karl Wirsum (born 1939).
Over the course of five exhibitions in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, DC, The Hairy Who represented a de facto rebuke to the chilly ironies of Pop and forged new ways of crafting figurative painting. As likely to use Plexiglas as canvas and employing a language based on verbal confusion, visual puns and an almost ecstatic use of line and color, the members of the Hairy Who produced publications, posters and even buttons, and their exhibitions were immersive environments unequalled at the time.
The Hairy Who has enjoyed a renewed popularity recently, thanks to a documentary film and multiple exhibitions by the contributing artists. This publication presents all of the printed works related to the Hairy Who exhibitions--important documents in the history of contemporary art and artists' books. Formatted like comic books, they are among the very first full-color self-published artists' books, containing work made especially for publication. Studying these works is important to an understanding of post-1960s art and artists' books.
1969, English
Hardcover, 86 pages, 22 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
New York Graphic Society / New York
National Collection of Fine Arts - Smithsonian Institution / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
First edition hardcover catalogue on the work of Milton Avery, published in 1969 by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, New York. Illustrated throughout with examples of Avery's paintings in colour and black and white, accompanied by an introduction by Adelyn D. Breeskin and commemorative essay by Mark Rothko. Includes biography and bibliography.
Milton Clark Avery (March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965 ) was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting—while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations and is not concerned with creating the illusion of depth as most conventional Western painting since the Renaissance has. Avery was often thought of as an American Matisse, especially because of his colorful and innovative landscape paintings. His poetic, bold and creative use of drawing and color set him apart from more conventional painting of his era. Early in his career, his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational.
1984, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
A Good copy throughout, with cover rubbing and corner bumping. Tightly bound and clean copy internally.
1990, English / German / Italian
Softcover, 88 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Signed copy,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ikon Galerie / Frankfurt am Main
$850.00 - In stock -
Ettore Sottsass signed copy of this incredibly scarce publication from 1990. "Ettore Sottsass : Drawings over 4 decades / Zeichnungen aus 4 Jahrzehnten" was published by Ikon Galerie fur Design-Zeichnungen (Frankfurt am Main), reproducing sketches for furniture, glass, ceramic, jewellery, lighting, interior and architectural projects by influential Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917 – 2007), which are interspersed throughout the text design of this catalogue, which includes a lively interview by Rainer Krause with the artist (a founder of the highly influential Memphis group and Sottsass Associati, as well as designer with Alchimia, Alessi, Olivetti, Arredoluce, Poltronova, Fiorucci, Esprit, Knoll, and many others), text by fellow collaborator and architect/designer/artist Andrea Branzi, and Sottsass's lengthy informal essay presenting his personal view of the sociological significance of the chair.
All texts are in both English and German, with interview also in Italian.
This special copy has been signed by the designer with a large "Sottsass" across the title page in black pen. Not a personalised dedication. A super collectable copy of this already very rare and special book on one of the world's most influential designers and visionaries. Who rarely signed a book!
Very Good copy.