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:
CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
(ORDER SHIPPING RESUMES NOV 10)
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1991, Czech
Softcover (2 volumes in wrap), 266 + 50 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Prague City Galerie / Prague
Václav Špála Galerie / Prague
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of the only comprehensive book (a 2 volume survey) ever published on Český informel ("Czech Informel"), a radical current of post-war art that emerged in Prague from specific local conditions at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. The term "Czech Informel" was an afterthought and defined only in the context of this major 1991 exhibition, accompanying symposium and publication. In the 1960s, the term "structural abstraction" was used, which according to Mahulena Nešlehová is inaccurate and misleading, because the term structure refers rather to an order that is internally organized. Informel, a term used from 1945 by the French critic Waldemar-George and later Michel Tapié, on the other hand, works with chance and the projection of spontaneous emotions and represents an "expressive material antipainting". The revolt of about thirty desperate avant-garde artists created a turning point in the history of Czech art, a phenomenon of which had no predecessor in Czechoslovakia. Sharing an emphasis on the aesthetic effect of raw materials and destruction with concurrent post-war European arts, Czech Informel differed in emphasis on its existential basis. The principle of the permanent construction and destruction of the image was a reaction to the severity of the times and an attempt to penetrate to the deeper essence of creation, in which the birth involves at the same time the extinction of the previous and reflects the consciousness of the fragility of human existence itself.
Profusely illustrated in b/w with select colour plates, the first volume traces the painting, sculpture, print and photographic works of the radical current of central Czech Informel artists, including Jan Koblasa, Aleš Veselý, Antonín Tomalík, Zbyšek Sion, Zdeněk Beran, Vladimír Boudník, Čestmír Janošek, Antonín Málek, Jiří Valenta, Miloš Koreček, Emila Medková, Zbyněk Sekal, Čestmír Krátký, Jiří Balcar, Karel Kuklík, Pavla Mautnerová, Jozef Jankovič, Jaroslav Hovadík, Mikuláš Medek, Alois Nožička, and many more.
The second volume is devoted to the life and work of Antonín Tomalík (1939—1968), one of the main artists of the radical Informel. He played a significant and irreplaceable role in the formation of Czech avant-garde and non-conformist art at a time when artists were burdened by an existential crisis as a result of the totalitarian regime. He belonged to a generation of young artists whose skepticism about life found expression in the raw, deliberately anti-aesthetic language of dark material creation, the result of which was an expressively urgent, internally destroyed object. Tomalík died in 1968, the result of an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol.
Texts in Czech by Antonín Dufek, Jiri Valoch, Mahulena Neslehová.
Highly recommended.
Good—VG copy.
1969, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
$300.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1969 printing of the seminal "Art Povera", the phenomenal and now legendary critical/photographic book by the great Italian art historian, critic and curator Germano Celant (1940—2020) that internationally established the so-called Art Povera / Arte Povera movement (meaning "poor art", coined by Celant in 1967) and published by Studio Vista, London and printed in Italy.
Includes profiles of major artists of the movement, including a short text followed by pages of full-page photographs for each artist. Artists featured: Walter de Maria, Michelangelo Pisteletto, Stephen Kaltenbach, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Lawrence Weiner, Luciano Fabro, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets, Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Barry, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Dennis Oppenheim, Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson, Giulio Paolini, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Franz Erhard Walther, Hans Haacke, Gilberto Zorio, Robert Morris, Marinus Boezem, Carl Andre, Emilio Prini, Richard Serra.
"This book does not aim at being an objective and general analysis of the phenomenon of art or life, but is rather an attempt to flank (both art and life) as accomplices of the changes and attitudes in the development of their daily becoming. This book does not attempt to be objective since the awareness of objectivity is false consciousness. The book, made up of photographs and written documents, bases its critical and editorial assumptions on the knowledge that criticism and iconographic documents give limited vision and partial perception of artistic work. The book, when it reproduces the documents of artistic work, refutes the linguistic mediation of photography. The book, even though it wants to avoid the logic of consumption, is a consumer's item. ... This book produces a collection of already old material. ... In this book there is no need to reflect in order to seek a unitary and reassuring value, immediately refuted by the the authors themselves, rather there is the necessity to look into it for the changes, limits, precariousness and instability of artistic work." — text from Celant's introduction "Stating That."
A must.
Very Good copy, usual tanning.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 304 pages, 29.2 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Phaidon / London
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition of Arte Povera, the most complete overview of this movement ever published, edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject.
Arte Povera is Italy's most important and influential post-war art movement. Originally championed by the leading art critic Germano Celant, it included internationally recognized artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this book is the most complete overview of the artworks and writings associated with Arte Povera, an art movement that explored the relation between art and life, made manifest through natural materials and human artifacts, and experienced through the body.
"This is now the definitive English-language sourcebook on Merz, Pistoletto, Paolini and company, thanks to its rich selection of images and texts."―Bookforum
"Get hold of Arte Povera... It is both compendium and critique, with artists' statements, a chronology and commentary. It contextualizes the work, and the pictures are great."―Adrian Searle, Guardian
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a writer and curator living in Rome, who has become an internationally recognized scholar of late twentieth-century Italian art. She has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement and published interviews and texts on artists such as Boetti, Pistoletto, Merz, Fabro and Kounellis. Bakargiev is also a noted curator of contemporary art internationally: her exhibitions include 'Molteplici Culture', Rome, 1992 and a homage to John Cage which she co-curated with Alanna Heiss for the 1993 Venice Biennale.
She was part of the curatorial team for the 'Antwerp 93 European Capital of Culture', devising the major international survey, 'On Taking a Normal Situation and Re-translating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present'. In 1996 Bakargiev curated a large-scale survey on Italian post-war artist Alberto Burri in Rome, Brussels and Munich. In 1997, she curated 'Citta-Natura': a city-wide exhibition of international artists including Anselmo, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pascali and Kounellis, held in Rome.
She is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and was formerly Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. She was co-curator, with Iwona Blazwick, of Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today , Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2004 5.
Good copy with some corner knocking, small tear to top of spine dust jacket, otherwise very good throughout.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First HC Edition.
Environments and Happenings by painter and poet Adrian Henri, published by Thames & Hudson in 1974, forms one of the first mainstream book surveys to trace the phenomenon of environmental/performative/total living artworks that became prevalent in the 1960s/70s. This historical study is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with many international works from Fluxus to Zero to Dolle Mina to Nouveau Réalisme to Provo to Gutai to The Situationists and much more. Includes the works of Joseph Beuys, Clarence Schmidt, Ray Johnson, Öyvind Fahlström, Paul Thek, Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Guerllia Art Action Group, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell, Gustav Metzger, Peter Kuttner, Jackson Pollock, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Situationist International, Ferdinand Kriwet, Klaus Rinke, Duane Hanson, A-Yo, Meret Oppenheim, Space Structure Workshop, Ferdinand Cheval, Dolle Mina (Mad Mina), Robert Smithson, Jeff Nuttall, Stefan Wewerka, Christo, Dennis Oppenheim, Vladimir Tatlin, Provo, Barry Flanagan, Andy Warhol, Meredith Monk, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Ed Keinholz, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Gilardi, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Les Levine, James Rosenquist, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Eduardo Paolozzi, and many many more. Includes reproductions of performance scripts, partial chronology, etc.
Very Good copy in Good DJ some light wear, price-clipping to inner.
1975, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$15.00 - In stock -
1975, profusely illustrated pocket-book survey of the many strands of contemporary art which have emerged since the appearance of Pop culture.
"Art after Pop, if not exactly uncharted territory, is only now beginning to turn into art history. This book sets out to disentangle the many strands which have appeared since Pop started the cult of cool in art. The Pop artists proved that figuration was not dead; and their Photo-Realist successors have carried the icy gloss finish to its limits. The Abstract Expressionists, too, have had successors, who proved that abstraction was not dead either; these were the Hard Edge artists, whose rejection of illusion was part of the trend towards the reduction of form and content to a minimum. With Minimal Art many people expected painting and sculpture to disappear altogether; this has not happened, but they have been joined by a number of would-be successors: Environments, Actions, Land art, photographic records, printed definitions, Conceptual art. The contact with popular culture, with the Rock underground, even with cybernetics and academic philosophy, has changed the physical appearance of art without changing the art world - and without diminishing the resources of creativity which mankind still puts into art."
John A. Walker is a critic of contemporary art and the author of a glossary of twentieth-century art terms.
Good—VG copy, general light wear/tanning/marking, previous owner's name to title page.
1982, English / Japanese / Italian / French
Softcover (w. wax dust jacket), 128 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Japan Foundation / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful Japanese catalogue published in 1982 to accompany an exhibition that brought together the work of 5 Western artists (Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Bruce Mclean, and Giulio Paolini) for a major group show held at the Laforet Museum, Tokyo and The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Each artist has many pages of work reproduced in black and white, accompanied by artists' statements, essays on each artist, and artists' biographies, in English, Japanese, Italian and French. Bound in various raw paper stocks and wrapped in printed wax paper dust-jacket.
Good-Very Good copy. Perfectly preserved with small chips and wear to dust jacket edges.
1964, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 124 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Forum Verlag / Vienna
$50.00 - In stock -
1964 first hardcover edition of this monographic study on the Viennese School of Fantastic Realist Painting and the work of Erich Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner, Wolfgang Hutter, and Anton Lehmden. Illustrated with colour plates throughout and a large gallery of monochrome reproductions of many paintings by each artist. Texts in German by AP Gütersloh, W. Schmied, H. Hakel, and Kurt Eigl.
"René Gustav Hocke calls the group of artists to whom this volume is dedicated "one of the greatest surprises in contemporary intellectual Europe." Five painters are grouped together under the term "Vienna School": Brauer, Fuchs, Hausner, Hutter, and Lehmden. As diverse as the individual, expressive artists' personalities are, they all share a commitment to objective, figurative art; they all paint beautiful, precious pictures with technical perfection, high-quality works full of interesting ideas. In Erich Brauer's pure, luminous colors, an oriental, fairytale world emerges; Ernst Fuchs's painting, trained by the old masters, revolves around religious themes and problems in a sensitive, highly individual way; Anton Lehmden paints, in the words of his teacher, "cities and landscapes that need not be on earth." Rudolf Hausner is, to quote Gütersloh again, "the tragedian and tragedian of this group", the only true representative of international surrealism. Wolfgang Hutter is assigned the cheerful subject, "his botanical drum contains more beautiful flowers than grow in forests and gardens." Thus, each of the five painters represents fantastic realism in their own unique way, an art movement that is gaining increasing attention around the world and deserves to be honored in book form by renowned experts in the field."—from the introduction
VG-NF copy in VG dust jacket, page toning, some dj toning and wear to edges.
1981, English
Softcover (staple-bound + fold-out poster), 32 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
George Paton Gallery / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of the catalogue Australian Women Photographers 1890-1950, published by the George Paton Gallery, Melbourne University Union, 1981, including the A2 size poster for the exhibition folded inside as issued. Illustrated with texts by the Director of the George Paton Gallery at the time, Judy Annear, curator Barbara Hall, and Gael Newton, plus biographies for all photographers and catalogue of work.
Good copy with light wear, tanning and pinching to spine. Poster VG.
1992, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 140 pages, 26 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MIMA / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue edited by Adrian Martin and published in 1990 to accompany experimenta — A Major Survey of Film and Video Art, Melbourne, November 20—December 4, 1990, presented by Modern Image Makers Association Inc. (MIMA) and founded in 1988. Showcasing Australian video art, media art, installation and performance works.
Contents include: An introduction to Experimenta 1992 by Lizzette Atkins, Of Prisms and Tools: The Possibility of an Avant Garde by Vikki Riley, Australian Screenings, Introduction by Steven Ball, Opening Night, Signposts To The Imagination Re-animated; (re)constructing an art, Techknowledge, Dusan Marek's Cobweb On A Parachute — Essay by Arthur Cantrill, David Perry's The Refracting Glasses, Interview with David Perry, Passionate Uncertainty, Text and Textures, Engineering Memory: Views of History, Politics, Culture and Geography, Helical Scans: Diverse Ways of Seeing (Video) Programme 1 and 2, One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin, Sound and Image, Experience and The Other, The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, The Open 'Iron Curtain' and Post-Socialist Drama, Artists seen by artists, Die Mauer—The negative horizon, The Czech Avant Garde 1911-1941 essay by Jaroslav Andel, Programme 1, Programme 2, Video Programmes From 'New Europe' curated by Heiko DaxI, U.K., Intimate Imaginaries, Artist Screening: Michael Maziere, Slow Glass, U.S.A., Shalom Gorewitz-Experimental Television Center, New York, WAX, or the discovery of television among the bees, Flesh Histories, Programme 1, Programme 2, Japan, Emotional Wave: Image Network Japan, V.I.E.W., Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto, Performance: Introduction by Jeffrey Fereday, Artist statements, Installation: Introduction by Jennifer Phipps, Artist statements, Medienkunst—A survey of German, installation art— introduction by Heiko Daxl, Medienkunst-Artist statements, Special Events, Noisefest 2, Techno Garden, Century Endings - An Afternoon of Performance in the Great Hall, Seminars and Talks, Essays: Video As Art: Personal Observations From New York by Shalom Gorewitz, Some Thoughts on the German State of Things: Teaching Video by Ingo Petzke, An Attempt Toward The Anti-Oedipus-Japanese Video Art After The '80s by Junji Ito, Schedule of events, Artist index, Title index...
Includes the work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Arf Arf, Ian Haig, GANG, Jun Kurosawa, Warren Burt, Chris Mann, Anne Ferran, Sadie Benning, Michelle Handelman, Monte Cazazza, Pete Spence, Fiona MacDonald, Cyber Dada Manifesto, Dale Nason, Troy Innocent, Dusan Marek, Critical Art Ensemble, John Maybury, David Perrt, Steven Ball, Karel Hašler, Otakar Vávra, Jiří Lehovec, Michael Maziere, David Blair, Danny Fass, Joe Kelly, Shelly Silver, Laurens Tan, John Gillies, and many more.
VG copy light wear to extremities/DJ.
1998, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Australia Post / Melbounre
Australia Post / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
Rare exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of Designing Australia : Modernity And The Stamp 1936-1998, Postmaster Gallery Australian Philatelic Centre Melbourne, 25 April—6 July 1998, curated by Sally Gray.
In 1997 independent curator, author and scholar in art, design and urban studies, Sally Gray proposed an exhibition concept to Australia Post focusing on Australian modernism as expressed in the graphic design of Australian stamps. She researched and selected examples of proto-modern, modernist and post-modern graphic design for Australian stamps. The preliminary designs and finished printed stamp designs were shown in the Postmaster Gallery at the Australian Philatelic Centre in Melbourne. The catalogue included commissioned essays on styles of representation on stamps, Australian graphic design history and changing perceptions about national visual identity.
Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with works by Gert Sellheim, Sydney Ball, Eric Thake, Erica McGilchrist, Brian Sadgrove, Garry Emery, John Coburn, Mimmo Cozzolino, Phil Ellett, Alex Stitt, and many others.
VG copy.
1990, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 54 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MIMA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue edited by Adrian Martin and published in 1990 to accompany experimenta — A Major Survey of Film and Video Art, Melbourne, November 20—December 4, 1990, presented by Modern Image Makers Association Inc. (MIMA) and founded in 1988. Showcasing Australian video art, media art, installation and performance works, this iteration also included programs of Lettrist Cinema and French Avant-Garde film from the 1980s. Illustrated throughout with information on all of the works, accompanied by essays: Adrian Martin – "The Adventures of Form", John Conomos – "Video as Moonlighting", Christian Lebrat – "The Lettrist Cinema of the 1950s", Vikki Riley – "The Picture Can't Get Any Louder", John Flaus – "In the Eye's Mind - Paul Winkler Retrospective.
Includes the work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Maria Kozic and Ian Haig, Peter Callas, Josko Petkovic, Edward Colless, Tona Keane, Arf Arf, Shelley Lasica, Peter Tyndall, Gerald Murnane, William Yang, John Nixon, Primary Source, Warren Burt, Chris Mann, Stelarc, Pete Spence, Philip Brophy, David Cox, Maurice Lemaitre, Frederique Devaux, Cyber Dada Manifesto, Dale Nason, Troy Innocent, Lydia Lunch, Foil, Swans, Einsturzende Neubauten, Butthole Surfers, Violinda, Steven Ball, and so many more...
VG copy light wear to extremities.
1996, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 300,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$45.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of Transgression And The Culture Industry — Critical Media: Perspectives On New Technologies, the book document of The Gordon Darling Foundation Seminars 1995, with guest convenors Denise Robinson and Julianne Pierce (VNS Matrix), presenting the papers from seminars held at the Australian Centre For Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 8 April—7 October 1995.
Contents:
"Introduction" – Denise Robinson, "Duchamp's Queer Signature" – Rex Butler, "Transgression And The Culture Industry (Australia/1995)" – Lesley Stern, "The Art Curator, Our Cultural Transponder" – Juan Davila, "Normalizing Transgression" – David M. Halperin, "Introduction" – Julianne Pierce, "The Indifference Engine – 1990s Culture And The Corporate Imagination" – David Cox, "Observations" – Linda Wallace, "The Amazing Mcscent™ Machine" – Bridget Mcgraw, "Rehearsal Of Memory" – Graham Harwood.
"This one day symposium is a response to the sliding formations of the concept of 'transgression', as it is appropriated, mobilised or mutated by our contemporary cultural institutions. The event comprised two elements. A two hour film screening of short films included a selection from 1964 by New York underground film maker, Kenneth Anger and a selection of recent contemporary films from Australia by Christopher Ryan and Leone Knight. A second element involved a presentation of papers published here by Rex Butler, Juan Davila, David Halperin and Lesley Stern. The papers were not intended to act as a commentary of the films or the films to reflect the papers, rather the co-existence of these elements were to function more like a folding of the languages of cinema and visual art: as one possible means of illuminating the effects of the historicisation of 'transgressive strategies in relation to the Culture Industry."—DENISE ROBINSON, Introduction
Good copy with sunned spine edge, crease to back cover corner.
1984, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Frölich & Kaufmann / Berlin
$90.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of Design Als Gegenstand (Design as an object), published only in Germany to showcase many of the leading contemporary/radical designers of the early 1980s, visually documenting many incredible and seldom seen works of furniture, industrial objects, electronics, exhibition design, textiles, etc. through object and installation photography, alongside reproductions of design sketches and German texts.
Includes the work of Adolfo Natalini, Thomas S. Bley, Daniele Puppa, Franco Raggi, One Off, Studio Alchimia, Sacha Ketoff, Piero Castiglioni, Winfried Scheuer, Lux, Rouli Lecatsa, Borek Sipek, Paolo Deganello, Lapo Binazzi, Florian Borkenhagen · Harald Krischer, Javier Mariscal, Andrea Branzi, Studio Dada, David Palterer, Ettore Sottsas Jr, Bepi Maggiori, Marco Zanuso Jr., Antonia Astori De Ponti, Denys Santachiara, Juma Francisco, Michele De Luchhi, Nemo, Paola Navone, Jasper Morrison, Zak Ark, Maurizio Corrado, Martine Bedin, Daniel Weil, Totem, Bellefast, Claus Böhmler, Rainer Krause, George James Sowden, Tom Lynham & Lee Curtis, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Jörg Ratzlaff, Dirk Staubert, Matteo Thun.
NF in NF dust jacket.
1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 22.5 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$140.00 - In stock -
First 1988 UK hardcover edition of this excellent book that was issued in variant cover colours, depending on country. The UK edition being a much smaller run to the US edition, and the best colour variant, in our opinion.
An international selection of over 400 objects (over 500 illustrations) such as tableware, furniture, jewellery, glassware and light fixtures designed by more than 50 leading architects. The book provides a cross-section of original ideas to be found in the best of modern design and aims to show the powerful influence that architects continue to have on industrial and furniture design. Furniture and lighting by Norman Foster, tableware by Sottsass, Robert Stern and Venturi, jewellery by Arata Isogaki and Stern, furniture by Ambasz, Mario Botta, Michael Graves and Richard Meier are some of the artefacts included in this study. The architects, Juli Capella and Quim Larreo are editors of the magazine "De Diseno" and are on the board of the architectural magazine "El Croquis" published in Madrid.
Includes an introduction by Alessandro Mendini, "This Book is This Painting".
Features the work of: Emilio Ambasz, Ron Arad, Gae Aulenti, Mario Bellini, Cini Boeri, Pep Bonet, Mario Botta, Andrea Branzi, Santiago Calatrava, Anna Castelli, Achille Castiglioni, Cristian Cirici, Antonio Citterio, Lluis Clotet, Paolo Deganello, Michele de Lucchi, Jonathan de Pas, Donato d'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Vittorio Gregotti, Pierluigi Cerri, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Charles Jencks, Ugo la Pietra, Vico Magistretti, Angelo Mangiarotti, Richard Meier, Alessandro Mendini, Pedro MMiralles, Rafael Moneo, Nemo, Oscar Niemeyer, Peolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Alvaro Siza Vieira, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Robert A.M. Stern, Giotto Stoppino, Kazuide Takahama, Matteo Thun, Elias Torres Tur, José Antonio, Martinez Lapeña, Oscar Tusquets, Robert Venturi, Daniel Weil, Stefan Wewerka, Marco Zanuso.
2024, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 496 pages, 29 x 24 cm
Published by
Mumok / Vienna
Walther König / Köln
$110.00 - Out of stock
The rediscovery of a still underappreciated artist who, along with Auguste Rodin, revolutionised sculpture in the 19th century.
Artist and artisan, art theorist and proto-installation artist, master of high-publicity productions and rival of Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso (b. 1858 in Turin, d. 1928 in Milan) was one of the great pioneers of modernism and a figure as extraordinary as he was eccentric.
Published on the occasion of a comprehensive retrospective curated by Heike Eipeldauer withexhibition design by Florian Pumhösl and Walter Kräutler, devoted to the Italian-French artist’s still little-known oeuvre, with more than fifty sculptures and a large selection of photographs, photocollages, and drawings. The exhibition and catalogue (at almost 500 pages) delves into a thorough analysis of Rosso’s processual and repetitive approach, with which the artist defied all conventions of traditional sculpture. A concise selection of works by artists directly or indirectly influenced by Rosso further unpack and create a dialogue with Rosso’s equally groundbreaking and hermetic work. The show thus adheres to Rosso’s own artistic practice of not exhibiting alone but always in “conversation” with others — among them Francis Bacon, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Andy Warhol - who resonate directly or indirectly with Rosso. The book is profusely illustrated with Rosso's works, as well as the works in dialogue and full installation documentation of this triumphant exhibition.
Artists in dialogue with Medardo Rosso: Giovanni Anselmo / Guillaume Apollinaire / Francis Bacon / Nairy Baghramian / Olga Balema / Phyllida Barlow / Lynda Benglis / Louise Bourgeois / Anton Giulio Bragaglia / Constantin Brâncuși / Eugène Carrière / John Chamberlain / Honoré Daumier / Edgar Degas / Raymond Duchamp-Villon / Luciano Fabro / Loïe Fuller / Isa Genzken / Alberto Giacometti / Robert Gober / David Hammons / Eva Hesse / Jasper Johns / Hans Josephsohn / Ellsworth Kelly / Käthe Kollwitz / Yayoi Kusama / Maria Lassnig / Sherrie Levine / Matthijs Maris / Marisa Merz / Amedeo Modigliani / Robert Morris / Juan Muñoz / Senga Nengudi / Carol Rama / Auguste Rodin / Richard Serra / Georges Seurat / Erin Shirreff / Edward Steichen / Alina Szapocznikow / Paul Thek / Rosemarie Trockel / Hannah Villiger / Andy Warhol / Rebecca Warren / James Welling / Francesca Woodman
Texts by: Jo Applin, Birgit Brunk, Georges Didi-Huberman, Heike Eipeldauer, Elena Filipovic, Ines Gebetsroither, Francesco Guzzetti, Karola Kraus, Lisa LeFeuvre, Megan R. Luke, Esmee Postma, Florian Pumhosl, Nina Schallenberg, Francesco Stocchi, Matthew S. Witkovsky.
Medardo Rosso, b. 1858 in Turin, d. 1928 in Milan, was a resident of Paris from 1889 on. There, he befriended Auguste Rodin, whose collaborator and later rival he became. Both artists sought to radically redefine the ostensibly unmodern medium of sculpture, which had been stuck in the confines of the monumental. Designed in the spirit of a fluid idea of modernism and shaped by the philosopher Henri Bergson's revolutionary concept of space and time, Rosso's sculptures overcame classical characteristics such as solidity and durability in favor of modern phenomena of the transitory and immaterial.
The exhibition, which is organized in close collaboration with the Medardo Rosso Estate, travels from Mumok, Vienna to Kunstmuseum Basel, spanning 2024—2025.
Highly recommended!
1973, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket + slipcase), 475 pages, 28 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Rembrandt Verlag / Berlin
$110.00 - In stock -
Exceptional 1973 hardcover, slipcased first edition volume dedicated the history of Fantastic Painting in all its mutations, compiled by Austrian art historian and critic, curator, literary scholar and writer, Wieland Schmied (1929 – 2014).
"The fantastic and connected with it the remote, the strange, the absurd, the unreal, the irrational and illusionary, the visionary, the hallucinatory and dreamlike belong to the constant undercurrents and countercurrents of all art. Such images remind us that the world is more diverse, richer and more unmistakeable than we sometimes want to admit, that the night pages with their secrets of the dark belong to it in essence like the day with its magic of light. The fantastic art articulates powers and instincts that have a very intense influence on our lives, on our consciousness. It always shakes the questionlessness of the world, it always frightens us: from the abysses within ourselves and from the mysteries of a world that we have not created.
Wieland Schmied, who, as director of the Kestner Society, highlighted the topicality of fantastic and surrealist thoughts in the work of numerous contemporary artists in much-discussed exhibitions, examines in this book the different definitions of the fantastic and tries to distinguish between similar and related phenomena - the poetic, the grotesque, the absurd, the literary - but also to distinguish the fantastic art from the historical currents of Mannerism, Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism, which contain all elements of the Fantastic."
At 475 pages, and profusely illustrated with over 200 plates in colour and b/w, featuring the art of Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, William Blake, Francisco Goya, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern, Rodolphe Bresdin, Félix Labisse, Meret Oppenheim, Horst Janssen, Edward Burra, Jindřich Štyrský, Victor Hugo, Gustave Moreau, Henri Rousseau, Roland Topor, Giorgio de Chirico, Jane Graverol, Unica Zürn, Max Ernst, Pierre Roy, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, Victor Brauner, Hans Bellmer, Richard Oelze, Wifredo Lam, René Magritte, Ivan Albright, Man Ray, Fred Deux, Morris Graves, Joseph Cornell, Max Klinger, Gustave Doré, Max Walter Svanberg, Toyen, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, André Masson, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Kurt Seligmann, Miodrag Đurić (Dado), Karel Teige, Paul Wunderlich, Roland Penrose, Josef Šíma, Paul Delvaux, Óscar Domínguez, Fernando Botero, Leonor Fini, Uwe Bremer, Bernard Schultze, František Janoušek, Josef Vyleťal, František Muzika, Domenico Gnoli, Wols, Heinz Trökes, Otto Tschumi, Jindřich Heisler, Václav Tikal, Gisela Breitling, Pit Morell, Graham Sutherland, Ernst Fuchs, Wolfgang Hutter, Erich Brauer, Anton Lehmden, Ursula, Konrad Klapheck, and so many more....
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket, perfectly preserved in Near Fine-Very Good original-issue publisher's box with some light discolouration.
1971, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
Lovely first print 1971 copy of the Studio Vista/Dutton Pictureback book on Symbolists and Decadents by John Milner. A profusely illustrated study, almost a concise accompaniment to Philippe Jullian's study the same year.
"Thinkers, writers and artists in late-nineteenth-century Europe were impelled by their distrust of the growing materialism of their age towards a search for truths that were of personal and universal significance. The artist embarked on an interior journey and endeavoured to represent his experience of it in an art that would give body and form to emotions and dreams.
Originally a literary movement, Symbolism was born out of this inward search as writers and artists portrayed the longings and nightmares which epitomized the preoccupations of the fin de siècle death and frustration, union and conflict of the sexes, cruel or superfluous beauty, the fatal woman, the siren and the sphinx.
In this new introduction to these fascinating and highly individual artists John Milner traces the Symbolist and Decadent movements from the forerunners in the Pre-Raphaelite movement through the Synthetists (Gauguin and the Pont-Aven group), the Rose +Croix, the German and Austrian Secessions, the personal and fantastic vision of artists such as Odilon Redon and Arnold Böcklin.
Both Symbolist and Decadent painters were concerned with the expression of ideas, mood and emotions. The Decadents, however, in their reaction to a pragmatist and materialist age, withdrew into an exclusive dandyism, and embraced the twin rituals of Catholicism and diabolism; while the search for significance in the forms of Symbolist art was the shadow of a seeking for meaning and spiritual experience in a time of good sense and clear-cut ideas.
Artists of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland and Britain are represented here with 115 compelling illustrations."
John Milner is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Very Good copy.
1997, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 100 pages, 21.5 x 30.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rockin' On / Tokyo
Hysteric Glamour / Tokyo
$380.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of Hélène, the hardcover photobook/catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Purple magazine co-founder Elein Fleiss at Tokyo gallery THE Deep in 1997. Named after actress and nineties icon Hélène Fillières, this book is the most perfect published time-capsule of what was 90s anti-fashion Paris, and probably the most brilliant fashion photobook of the decade. Published in Japan by Hysteric Glamour and Rockin' On, Hélène is cover-to-cover full-bleed gloss pages of photography by Mark Borthwick, Anette Aurell, Camille Vivier, Christophe Brunnquell, Laetitia Benat, Ronald Stoops, and Anders Edstrom, among others. Only available in Japan when published, and now very rare and sought after. This copy complete with bound-in Hysteric Glamour sticker!
Though she began her career as a curator of art exhibitions, Elein Fleiss founded the seminal Purple Magazine with Olivier Zahm at the age of 24. Purple and Fleiss' other editing/curatorial activities were the primary vehicles for the aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion. Purple – in its various incantations, Purple Prose, Purple Fashion, Purple Sexe, Purple Journal, etc. – has gone down in publishing history and changed the relationship between art, literature, architecture and fashion, resisting the obvious and the commercial.
Very Good copy.
1993, English / German
Softcover (french-folds), 296 pages, 22.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Verlag Ritter Klagenfurt / Austria
$50.00 - In stock -
Scarce 1993 book compendium of critical theory edited by Georg Schöllhammer and Christian Kravagna, designed by Heimo Zobernig and Florian Pumhösl, featuring texts by Richard Rorty, Paul Freyerabend, Francisco J. Varela, Robert W. Witkin, Barbara Jaffee, Teresa de Lauretis, Jacqueline Rose, Amy Winter, Silvia Eiblmayr, Peter Gorsen, and Douglas Crimp. Text in English and German.
"REAL TEXT forms, so to speak, the "discursive bracket" between the individual parts of the exhibition (REAL SEX, REAL REAL, REAL AIDS). But it is also a separate exhibition part that, with a view to the consequences for art and aesthetics, outlines the philosophical, art historical and epistemological problem horizon of determining the self between the phantasm of identity and absorption into the structures of our highly differentiated society."—(From the foreword by Georg Schöllhammer and Christian Kravagna)
In bi-lingual English/German, contents include:
Richard Rorty: Trotsky and the Wild Orchids; Paul Feyerabend: Art as a natural product; Francisco J. Varela: The body thinks; Robert W. Witkin: From the touch of the ancients to the gaze of modern times; Barbara Jaffee: Modernity and the Promise of Autonomy; Teresa de Lauretis: drive and habit; Jacqueline Rose: Sexuality in View; Amy Winter: The Surrealismus, Lacan, and the metaphor of the woman without a head; Silvia Eiblmayr: The SurrealIstian eroticism with Hans Bellmer; Peter Gorsen: Hans Bellmer-Pierre Molinier; Douglas Crimp: Portraits of people with AIDS.
VG/NF copy.
2000, English
Bagged set of 19 booklets, softcover (staple-bound), 4-56 pages each, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Den Frie Udstillings Bygning Oslo Plods / Denmark
$150.00 - In stock -
FLOOR BAG, bagged complete set of 18 artist booklets/catalogues published as part of FLOOR SHOW, an Australian / Danish exhibition curated and organized by John Nixon & Ivor Tønsberg, May 13th — June 4th 2000, with Den Frie Udstillings Bygning Oslo Plods, Denmark. Each booklet is edited exclusively by the represented artist. This bagged set includes all 18 booklets, plus additional cover-hand-stamped text booklet, including exhibition text by Nixon and Tønsberg, along with biographies of all artists involved. All artists included : Stephen Bram, Tine Borg, Vicente Butron, A.D.S. Donaldson, Jørgen Fog, Leonard Forslund, Marco Fusinato, Signe Guttormsen, Kent Hansen, Peter Holm, Henrik Jørgensen, Torben Kapper, Stephen Little, Anne-Marie May, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Ivar Tønsberg, Gary Wilson.
Only one copy available.
About Floor Show
It must have been a great show; the one Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gaugin had in the first version of The Fri in 1893. The style of that house and the style of their paintings must have suited each other just right. And that's the problem nowadays -when you are exhibiting in The Fri, you are dealing with spatial conditions that - even though the present house is a later version than the one Van Gogh and Gaugin used - are related not to our time but to the late 19th century. Those were the days of golden frames and lots of different pictures hanging close to one another. It was long before pop, minimalism and conceptual art, and it didn't matter whether the paintings were hung directly on nails or in strings from the ceiling, as they do in The Fri, which is one charismatic exhibition building in the city of Copenhagen, but unfortunately also a most impossible one.
In a strictly formal manner Floor Show is, so to speak, tailor made for The Fri. The majority of the artists included in the exhibition are painters, but - due to the spatial circumstances of the exhibition house - the organizers gave them the task to exhibit only on the floor in The Fri. The walls were not to be used, and the relatively few works (approximately one per Artist) were to be shown in a manner not too close to the installation genre.
What you might extract from Floor Show is, when working with painting you can't take the wall for granted as the only site for display. On the floor the works of the contributing artists explores a range of different media indicating the diversity of their practice and its relation to painting.
With Floor Show, the artists have radicalised the space and the organisers intentions have been realized.
— John Nixon & Ivor Tonsberg
1997, English
Softcover (staple-bound + invitation card), 16 pages. 30 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGA / Canberra
ACCA / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of Love Hotel, a National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition guest curated by Michael Desmond, travelling across five Australian and New Zealand venues throughout 1997-1998, including ACCA on Dallas Brooks Drive. This exhibition, taking its title from the Japanese architectural sex industry phenomenon, included works by Australian and international artists that "comprised self-contained sculptural objects that were neither at home in the museum or the outside world. They seem to exist in a curious hyper-state, in which objects are patently fictions, but somehow more real than real." Illustrated in colour throughout with accompanying texts.
Exhibiting Artists: Nobuyoshi Araki, Richard Artschwager, Aziz+Cucher, Michel Craig-Martin, Peter Cripps, Cheryl Donegan, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley and Sheree Rose, Sylvie Fleury, Nan Goldin, Ann Hamilton, Ronald Jones, Jannis Kounellis, Jana Sterbeck, Rosemarie Trockel, Robert Wilson.
"There is an undefined sense of loss at the heart of our existence, which we romanticise. Post-industrial, postcolonial, post-feminist, post-modern — if we measure every thing in terms of 'what was', by definition we seem to be at the end of a historical moment. In our fin de siécle mood we see the metaphorical cup as half empty, rather than half full. The past seems to loom larger than the present, and we are nostalgic for the sureties of our recent golden age. Paradise is lost. In the art in this exhibition nature is replaced by technology, the State is increasingly in control, money is all-important and image is everything — or so it seems. The objects present themselves as neutral and deadpan, but we sense their perversity as much as their realism. Below the skin a powerful vitality surges, indicating an essential humanity. In Love Hotel each work houses something of the artist and the culture that created it. We imbue all around us with our passions."—Michael Desmond
Very Good copy with invitation card enclosed (featuring Jannis Kounellis artwork). Spine edge sunned with some light pinching.
1996, English
Softcover, 36 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asialink Centre of the University of Melbourne / Carlton
$25.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Australia: Familiar and Strange, curated by Timothy Morrell for the Seoul Arts Center in 1996, published by Asialink Centre of the University of Melbourne, Carlton. The exhibition and catalogue include the work of Howard Arkley, Eugene Carchesio, Dale Frank, Tim Johnson, Maria Kozic, John Nelson, Madonna Staunton, Kathy Temin, Judy Watson, Judith Wright, illustrated with colour plates accompanied by texts and biographies.
Very Good copy.
2013, English / German
Softcover, 214 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Dresden
$50.00 - In stock -
First bi-lingual English/German edition of this lavish exhibition catalogue.
John Constable (1776–1837), Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) were vital in shaping modern art at the threshold of the 18th to the 19th century and they had a formative influence on the age of Romanticism in Europe. Their outstanding paintings continue to serve as sources of inspiration and visual instruction for the generations of artists that have followed in their wake. In this special exhibition, Luc Tuymans, one of the most influential contemporary painters, and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Bischoff trace the influence of these four exceptional artists by presenting paintings by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Gerhard Richter (* 1932) alongside masterpieces of the Romantic period. Works by 16 artists will be presented in sometimes surprising combinations, thus enabling historical references and contexts spanning some 200 years of art history to be explored from new perspectives. The idea at the core of the exhibition is to present the museum as both an artistic workshop and a source of inspiration. The curators demonstrate that art does not come into being solely as the result of a creative act in the artist’s studio, but can often be traced back to the artist’s direct engagement with freely chosen models from art history.
Very Good copy.
1981, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue published to accompany Australian Perspecta '81, the first biennale review of recent Australian art that focuses on more experimental expression as an alternative to the Sydney Biennale, showcasing the work of 65 artists. Micky Allan, Tom Arthur, Davida Allen, David Aspden, Suzanne Archer, Vivienne Binns, Howard Arkley, Tony Bishop, Brian Blanchflower, Gunter Christmann, Peter Booth, Giorgio Colombo, Anna Paci, Mike Brown, Peter Corrigan, Edmond & Corrigan, Peter Callas, Virginia Coventry, Marleen Creaser, Bonita Ely, Sue Ford, John Davis, Rosalie Gascoigne, Lesley Dumbrell, Elizabeth Gower, Richard Dunn, Denise Green, Ivan Durrant, Marr Grounds, Fiona Hall, Douglas Holleley, Marion Hardman, Robert Jacks, Bill Henson, Lorraine Jenyns, Robert Jenyns, Dale Hickey, Stephen Jones, Geoffrey Hogg, Peter Kennedy, Kerrie Lester, Robert Owen, Bea Maddock, Mike Parr, Mandy Martin, Paul Partos, Kevin Mortensen, Ann Newmarch, Lutz Presser, Robert Randall, Frank Bendinelli, Imants Tillers, Sally Robinson, Clifford Possum, Tjapaltjarri Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Charlie Tjapangati, Stelarc,Tony Trembath, Colin Suggett, Stephen Turpie, Peter Taylor, Ken Unsworth, Vicki Varvaressos, Frank Watters, Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Ken Whisson, Dick Watkins, Paul Winkler, Jenny Watson, Ray Woolard…. The expansive catalogue features images and texts on each artist, statements, a full list of exhibited works, and artist biographies. Illustrated in colour and b/w.
Good copy with light wear/tanning.