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.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 280 pages, 19 x 26 cm
1st Edition, out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Tama Art University / Japan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1st edition of this heavy book published on the occasion of the exhibition "1953 : Shedding Light on Art" at Meguro Museum of Art Tokyo, June 8 - July 21, 1996, an exhibition that looked deeply into the important transitional years of the early 1950s post-war Japanese and the climate of new modern design, architecture and the society that surrounded it. Giving birth to a new avant-garde in Japan, including Mono-ha, Gutai, Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) and other avant-garde movements, this books covers the vast array of artistic activity taking place in Japan in this period, across painting, sculpture, performance, design, architecture, photography, crafts, and more. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white. All texts in Japanese.
Includes inserted exhibition stub.
2014, English
Softcover, 97 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
The Drawing Center / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Featuring a forward Brett Littman and essays by Gregory Burke, Tyler Cahn, and Len Lye.
Len Lye (1901–1980) is arguably one of the twentieth century’s most original artists; a one-man art movement spanning several countries and multiple media over a lifetime and beyond. As a New Zealander practising in London during the pre-war years, and then a key figure in the post-war New York avant-garde art scene, Lye mapped a unique course through Modernism.
This publication was produced on the occasion of a Len Lye exhibition at The Drawing Centre in New York in 2014.
"Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In New York Lye is now well known for his animated experimental films. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance. Motion Sketch reintroduces scholars and audiences in New York to Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.” Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the exhibition will instead reveal how Lye’s concept of "doodling" underpinned his approach to much of his work.
The exhibtion will include a selection of paintings, drawings, and photograms, never before seen in the United States. In The Drawing Center’s Lab gallery, an extensive film program will be presented on video, including such landmark films as Tusalava, 1929; A Colour Box, 1935; andFree Radicals, 1957/1979.
Len Lye: Motion Sketch is curated by Gregory Burke, Executive Director/CEO of both the Mendel Art Gallery and Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan and Co-Curator of the Montreal Biennale, 2014; and Tyler Cann, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art. This exhibition is presented by The Drawing Center in collaboration with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, New Zealand) and draws primarily from the Len Lye Foundation Collection."
2016, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. While her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century pre-dates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich. Af Klint sought to express her feelings transmitted to her form nature and the unseen spiritual world.
After graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1887, af Klint took a studio in the city where she produced and exhibited traditional landscapes, botanical drawings and portraits. However, by 1886 she had abandoned the conventions she learned at the Academy in favour of painting the invisible worlds hidden within nature, the spiritual realm and the occult.
She privately joined four other female artists to form a group called ‘The Five’. They conducted séances to encounter what they believed to be spirits who wished to communicate via pictures, leading to experiments with automatic writing and drawing, which pre-dated the Surrealists by several decades.
This catalogue focuses primarily on af Klint’s body of work, The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), and numerous works from the key series never published before. Consisting of 193 predominately abstract paintings in various series and subgroups, she painted a path towards a harmony between the spiritual and material worlds; good and evil; man and woman; religion and science.
Texts by Daniel Birnbaum, Jennifer Higgie, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julia Peyton-Jones, Julia Voss
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 3 March – 22 May 2016.
2014, English
Hardcover, 80 pages (colour ill.), 28 x 33 cm
Published by
Matthew Marks gallery / New York
$52.00 - In stock -
For over five decades, Ken Price (1935–2012) produced small-scale ceramic sculptures with brightly colored finishes that achieved a balance between form and surface. Then, in the last years of his life, he initiated a dramatic shift in scale and finish. Ken Price: The Large Sculptures unveils this final body of work in its entirety. With dimensions that echo those of the human body, these sculptures speak directly to the viewer’s corporeality. Cast in bronze composite and painted with color-shifting automotive paint, the large sculptures are in one sense the culmination of Price’s long career and in another the beginning of a new path cut tragically short. This large-format book includes a detailed essay by Alex Kitnick that situates these works in the history of modern sculpture. The plates section features multiple views of the works’ seemingly ever-shifting forms. Completing the book are numerous unpublished photographs of the fabrication process at Price’s studio.
2016, English
Softcover, 14 pages, 15 x 20 cm
Published by
Neon Parc / Melbourne
$8.00 - In stock -
Catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition "The effect that is propagated is not from the communication of speech but from the displacement of discourse" at Neon Parc, 25 June - 13 August 2016 by Melbourne artist Elizabeth Newman. Features full-colour documentation of the exhibition installation and individual paintings, alongside an essay by Rex Butler.
Design by Yanni Florence
2016, English / German
Softcover, 448 pages, 24 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite / Berlin
K.M Kunstverein / Munich
$56.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Bart van der Heide and Manuel Raeder.
This book is an overview of the exhibition program of Bart van der Heide from 2010 – 2015, which he realised as the director of Kunstverein München. This program includes exhibitions by Silke Otto-Knapp, Ian Kiaer, Tobias Madison, Keren Cytter, Cathy Wilkes, Group Affinity, Willem de Rooij, Trisha Baga, Richard Tuttle, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Simon Denny, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Ger van Elk, James Richards, and others. Each exhibition is presented by a corresponding booklet, containing all texts and images. These accompanying publications were designed individually for each exhibition in cooperation with Studio Manuel Raeder. The different designs play with various fonts, formats, and graphic elements. Together with these publications, a variety of coloured images of exhibition views conveys the curatorial direction as well as the identity of the Kunstverein in those years. A reflection by Bart van der Heide and all booklet texts are included in both German and English.
designed by Studio Manuel Raeder
2015, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 19.5 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Nieves / Zurich
$30.00 - Out of stock
For the past twenty years, Susan Cianciolo (New York, USA) has moved between fields and formats – from fashion to craft, from performance to filmmaking – and the works presented in The Great Tetrahedral Kite speak to this restlessness. Cianciolo has produced a body of work that wilfully evades categorisation, exploiting the false dichotomies of construction and deconstruction, art and design, event and document.
Susan Cianciolo studied Fashion Design at Parsons The New School for Design and painting at Winchester School of Art. Cianciolo began her career as production manager for Kim Gordon's X-girl line and went on to be assistant collection designer at Badgley Mischka. From 1995–2001 she produced her critically-acclaimed collection RUN, revived in recent years in various forms. Cianciolo has presented her work at in New York at Alleged Gallery, P.S.1 Museum, Andrea Rosen, Sears-Peyton, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, and Ralph Pucci Gallery among others; Internationally at Pitti Immagine Discovery and Kaufmann Repetto, Italy; Purple Institute and Deep Gallery, France; Gallery 360, Presspop, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; MMK Museum fur Modern Kunst and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany. Her work has been featured in publications such as: The New York Times, T Magazine, Vogue, Visionaire, Interview, i-D magazine, Self-Service, Index, Artforum, Hanatsubaki, Vice, Vestoj and Purple amongst others.
1989, English / Japanese
Softcover, 196 pages
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
a+u / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First and only printing from 1989 of this a+u Extra Edition volume dedicated to the work of Peter Cook - English architect, writer, creator of the "Plug-In City" and central founding member of Archigram, an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s - based at the Architectural Association, London and seen as forefathers of radical architecture, leading the way for groups such as Archizoom and Superstudio.
This book is entirely comprised of Cook's incredible, unique and highly influential neofuturistic renderings, airbrush paintings and collages for designs of hypothetical architectural projects, environment design, domestic landscapes and city plans. Through exquisite sci-fi pop technical drawings, Cook created radical alternatives to cities, houses and other architectural archetypes. A large majority of the works never appearing in any other book. Beautifully printed in Japan with vivid full-colour illustrations from cover to cover, including many fold-outs. Texts in English and Japanese. A very lovely volume on this visionary architect and thinker.
2009, English
Softcover, 30 pages, 17 x 20 cm
$10.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition, "Primary Views" at MUMA, Monash University Museum of Art in 2008, curated by artists Stephen Bram, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and Juan Davila, with co-ordinating curator Kirrily Hammond.
Primary Views invited the insights of four artists represented in the Monash University collection. Each has been invited to curate a self-contained exhibition from the Monash University collection, according to their own areas of interest, expertise and aesthetic/discursive predilections. Alternative to classical or canonical art-historical readings, Primary Views considers the role of the artist as curator, encouraging new readings of the collection, and more partial, polemical and aberrant artistic historiographies.
Features texts by the curating artists and Max Delany.
Artists featured in the exhibition were: Howard Arkley, Paul Bai, Chris Barry, Charles Blackman, Peter Booth, Arthur Boyd, Stephen Bram, Horace Brodzky, Janet Burchill & Jennifer Mccamley, Ian Burn, Jane Burton, Domenico De Clario, Clyde Clinton, Noel Counihan, Mutlu Cerkez, Juan Davila, John Dunkley-Smith, Richard Dunn, Louise Forthun, John Heartfield, Bill Henson, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ronnie Van Hout, Raafat Ishak, Rosemary Laing, Robert Macpherson, Tracey Moffatt, John Nixon, Jacky Redgate, William Robins, Paul Saint, Dada Samson, Jan Senbergs, Wolfgang Sievers
2015, English
Hardcover, 220 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 24.4 x 30 cm
Published by
Black Inc / Melbourne
$60.00 - Out of stock
On the eve of All the World's Futures at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Schwartz City is pleased to announce the publication of Let's Destroy Work, the first major monograph on Marco Fusinato. A comprehensive overview of the past two decades of Fusinato's projects in art and music, featured projects include FREE (1998–2004), a series of guerrilla performances in unsuspecting music stores around the world; Mass Black Implosion (2007–), an ongoing series of propositional scores; Aetheric Plexus (2009–2013), a viewer-triggered installation of white noise and white light; and TM/MF (2000), a collaborative project with Thurston Moore.
Included is new writing by Branden W. Joseph, Professor in Art History at Columbia University; a text by US-based music critic Byron Coley; and essays from insurrectional anarchist writer Alfredo M. Bonanno's publication 'Let's Destroy Work, Let's Destroy the Economy'. The book is rich in colour and mono illustrations of Fusinato's works, and a selection of reference images.
Marco Fusinato's practice references the rhetoric of radical politics (its ambitions and failures), noise as music and the conditions and conventions of conceptual art. Through wide-ranging forms of work in gallery contexts and performances, he foregrounds moments of disruption and impact in which lie the possibility of a shift in perception or change in the course of events. Fusinato performs regularly in the international experimental music underground, obliterating the guitar into improvised noise-spit tsunamis.
2006, English
Softcover, 156 pages ( 44 colour ill.) 16.5 x 23.5cm
Published by
Self-Published
$25.00 - Out of stock
"It was a Saturday when I arrived at the embassy. I quickly explained to the guard that I was being 'hunted down to be killed'... I was soon told to come back on Monday as the embassy was closed. On hearing this, and in fear that George would turn up any minute, I threw all my belongings over the gates including my passport, credit card and a large wad of 100 rupee notes."
In 1994 after finishing university disillusioned and working dead end jobs, Stuart Ringholt found himself in India experiencing cheap drugs and the hippy lifestyle. Bingeing on hashish he soon became grossly thought disordered and descended into psychosis and psychiatric hospitals. In honest and simple terms, Stuart reflects on his illness and subsequent ten year recovery process involving drawing, performance art and learning to socialise drug free.
2002, English
Softcover (glue-bound w. fold-out pages), 96 pages, 21 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
ICA / Philadelphia
$65.00 - Out of stock
In Parts: 1998-2001
A Project by Richard Tuttle
Published by ICA Philadelphia
Texts by Ingrid Schaffner and Charles Bernstein.
In "In Parts: 1998-2001", Richard Tuttle draws on 13 discrete bodies of work dating from 1998 to the early 2000s. Fully illustrated catalogue (with elaborate fold-out pages that capture details of Tuttle's work close-up w. surrounding interiors and objects) and designed in collaboration with the Purtill Family Business, this book includes an essay by Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and text by the poet Charles Bernstein, a frequent collaborator with Tuttle.
2014, English
Softcover, 28 pages (colour ill.), 17 x 23 cm
Published by
Bom Dia Boa Tarde Boa Noite / Berlin
$26.00 - In stock -
Bohl has previously employed a wide variety of media accommodating found materials and taking the form of free-standing sculpture, sculptural reliefs, friezes, collages, prints, posters and videos. Bohl’s most recent work consists of drawings that draw references from a wide variety of popular and archetypal imagery familiar to him from his adolescence. They incorporate styles learned from, amongst other things, Aubrey Beardsely (1872 – 1898), Métal Hurlant comic books (1974 – 2004) and Blair Reynolds and other graphic artists associated with Pagan Publishing (1990 – 1993). As with his previous works, these drawings employ modest yet very specific materials.
The title of this book references a mythical peak where gods dwell ‘in the cold waste where no man treads’ described in H.P.Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath’ (1926/27). Lovecraft’s novel itself drew from William Beckford’s gothic horror ‘Vathek’ (1786), Robert W. Chambers’ ‘The King in Yellow’ (1895) and the novels and short stories of Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, 1878 – 1957).
Henning Bohl (b.1975, Oldenburg, Germany) currently lives and works in Hamburg. He studied at the Kunsthochschule, Kassel and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main where he completed his studies in 2004. There have been recent public exhibitions of his work at Kunsthalle Nürnberg and Berlinische Galerie (2013) Pro Choice, Vienna (2012); Kunstverein Hamburg (2011); Artpace, San Antonio and Cubitt, London (2010); Grazer Kunstverein and Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (2009) and at the Oldenburger Kunstverein (2008). His work was recently presented at the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013) and has also been included in group exhibitions at venues including the Kunsthalle Bonn and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2013) Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (2012); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Seattle Art Museum (2011); Kunstverein Schattendorf; Kunstverein Hannover and CCA Andratx , Mallorca (2010); White Columns, New York and Sammlung Grässlin, St. Georgen (2009). He is represented by Galerie Karin Guenther in Hamburg; Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna; Casey Kaplan in New York and Galerie Johann König in Berlin.
2014, English
Hardcover (cloth binding), 320 pages (b/w ills.), 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
Speculative Drawing presents fifteen books—from monographs and translations to collections of essays—that emerged from the research platform Speculative Poetics, conceived by Armen Avanessian in 2011. This book gives a somewhat different introduction to contemporary speculative philosophy, raising questions on how thinking works and how thinking occurs in drawings or illustrations. How does a poetic thinking work that's not about but with art?Andreas Töpfer's drawings in this book are not illustrations of the texts. Rather it's the other way around: they need to be read so that the texts can start to refer to them. In this sense, Speculative Drawing does not provide a shortcut to the theories presented; it does not aim to build a representational relationship between a pictorially correct understanding and a correlative conceptual thought. Instead, the drawings provide an occasion to think about thinking—a speculative thinking and writing in concept and through images.www.spekulative-poetik.deTranslation by Nils F. SchottDesign by Andreas Töpfer
2002, English
Softcover (die cut), 96 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
UQ Art Museum / Brisbane
$25.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This publication features previous and new works produced during a residency at The University of Queensland and accompanied Heliocentricities, an exhibition held at The University Art Museum 28 June–3 August 2002.
1979, English / Dutch
Softcover, 28 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 27.4 x 21 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$80.00 - Out of stock
Publication for Richard Tuttle's 1979 exhibtion at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 352 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$54.00 - Out of stock
In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style. Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. His movements within San Francisco’s counter-cultural scenes were similarly free-wheeling; at home in beat poetry, punk music, and underground film circles, he never completely belonged to any of them. Bruce Conner belonged to Bruce Conner. Twice he announced his own death; during the last years of his life he produced a series of pseudonymous works after announcing his “retirement.” In this first book-length study of Conner’s enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner’s work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins.
Hatch finds a set of abiding concerns that inform Conner’s wide-ranging works and changing personas. A deep anxiety pervades the work, reflecting a struggle between private, unknowable, interior experience and a duplicitous world of received images and false appearances. The profane and the sacred, the comic and the tragic, the enigmatic and the universal: each of these antinomies is pushed to the breaking point in Conner’s work.
Generously illustrated with many color images of Conner’s works, Looking for Bruce Conner proceeds in roughly chronological fashion, from Conner’s notorious assemblages (BLACK DAHLIA and RATBASTARD among them) through his experimental films (populated by images from what Conner called “the tremendous, fantastic movies going in my head from all the scenes I’d seen”), his little-known graphic work, and his collage and inkblot drawings.
Kevin Hatch is Assistant Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.
"Kevin Hatch's study is an overdue corrective to the near absence of Bruce Conner from the major chronicles of contemporary art. The book captures the singularity of each aspect of the artist's heterogeneous oeuvre and convincingly situates it at the very forefront of transformative practices in postwar art."
Bruce Jenkins, Professor, Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
"At long last, a book that seeks to come to terms with the remarkable accomplishments and the pervasive mystery of Bruce Conner's art. Engagingly written and effectively and copiously illustrated, Looking for Bruce Conner is both tribute and analysis. Until now, the achievement of Conner's immense body of work has been lost through its dismemberment into cinema, assemblage, drawing, collage, inkblots, pranks, and so on. One can only be grateful to Kevin Hatch for re-membering the continuities of this achievement. Looking for Bruce Conner is chock-full of interesting and useful information about Conner's thinking and his working process; it will be an important resource for years to come."
Scott MacDonald, Professor of Film History, Hamilton College; author of A Critical Cinema and other books
"Bruce Conner has been a notoriously difficult artist for critics to come to terms with, and his wide-ranging influence on contemporary art and popular culture is only beginning to be understood. The brilliance of Kevin Hatch's approach is not just his intelligent, deep engagement with Conner's work and persona but the insightful and respectful manner in which he lets Conner simply be what he was--a remarkable, ornery, elusive master, impossible and inappropriate to categorize."
Mark Toscano, Film Archivist and Curator
2013, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 208 pages (193 b/w ills.) + photograph insert, 219 x 313 mm
Edition of 25 (signed and numbered),
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
Mass Black Implosion (Treatise, Cornelius Cardew) by Marco Fusinato has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition of the same title held at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 9th October – 16th November, 2013.
In his ongoing series Mass Black Implosion (2007–) Marco Fusinato takes scores by avant-garde composers, drawing lines from every original note to an arbitrarily chosen point as propositions for new noise compositions, or moments of extreme consolidation and intensity, as if every note were played at once.
Mass Black Implosion (Treatise, Cornelius Cardew) is a large-scale work based on seminal composition Treatise by the English experimental music composer Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981). This canonical work of modern Western music comprises 193 pages of graphic score: lines, symbols, and various geometric shapes that eschew conventional musical notation. It has been described as the most significant graphic score of the Twentieth Century.
This limited hardcover publication has been produced in an edition of 25 copies (signed and numbered) and presents all 193 parts of this monumental work by Marco Fusinato. Each score has been reproduced at 65% of its original size and is accompanied by a loose colour photograph documenting the installation.
Mass Black Implosion (Treatise, Cornelius Cardew) will be launched on 8th October, 2013 to coincide with the exhibition opening at Anna Schwartz Gallery and is available directly from Rainoff and World Food Books.
2013, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 28 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$38.00 - Out of stock
"Gilded Keyholes" presents 30 eccentric ink drawings for keyhole escutcheons done in a variety of styles, by Argentine artist Pablo Bronstein (born 1977). It is a follow-up to Bronstein's previous book of doorway designs, "Ornamental Design for the Framing of Doors", and his "A Guide to Postmodern Architecture in London."
2013, English
Softcover, 192pp (colour ill.), 21.5 x 28.5 cm
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
$38.00 - Out of stock
Since the 1980s, Elizabeth Newman’s practice has addressed questions of representation and subjectivity, offering articulate reflections on philosophical propositions, theory, politics, art, artists, aesthetics and everyday life concerns. This publication, which brings imaginative vision to the notion of monograph-as-art-practice, functions both as an artist book and as a survey of Newman’s paintings, installations, objects, collages, text works and writing over the past three decades.
The book documents around 150 works in full colour, and gathers together many of Newman’s own written pieces, along with new commissioned texts from Juan Davila, Damiano Bertoli, Geoff Lowe (with Jacqueline Riva), Kate Briggs, Eve Sullivan and Michael Graf.
The monograph has been designed by Newman in collaboration with Warren Taylor.
2001, English
Hardcover, 90 pages ( 80 colour ill.), 90.8 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - Out of stock
Over three feet wide, Perceived Obstacles presents Richard Tuttle's series of drawings and assemblages at actual size, as they were hung in the gallery. This artist's book radically re-proposes the format of the book as a kind of exhibition--the time taken to literally turn the page being equivalent to the time taken to move from piece to piece in the show--and is printed so exquisitely that Tuttle's sensuous combinations leap off the page in high definition.
Due to the weight of this volume, your order will likely incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
2012, English
Softcover (concertina fold-out), 6 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Artspace / Sydney
IMA / Brisbane
$5.00 - In stock -
Published on the occasion of Marco Fusinato’s The Color of the Sky Has Melted, a major solo exhibition of the artist’s recent projects at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Artspace, Sydney in 2012.
2012, English
Printed acrylic hardcover (ring-bound)
Published by
Pace / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
Full-color, illustrated catalogue published to accompany the exhibition "Richard Tuttle - Systems, VIII-XII", Sept 07 – Oct 13, 2012 at Pace Gallery New York. The exhibition featured five of Tuttle's recent large free-standing sculptures, called “Systems”, alongside new works that pair delicate drawings and intimate wall-mounted sculptural elements.
This stunning new ring-bound publication, designed by the artist himself, includes poems written by Richard for each of his twelve "Systems" created to date.
2008, English / German
84 x 59 cm
Published by
Kölnischer Kunstverein / Köln
$18.00 - Out of stock
Poster for Michael Krebber's Pubertät in der Lehre/Puberty in Teaching 2008 exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein