World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
Thu–Fri 12–6, Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 304 pages, 24.1 x 29.8 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$85.00 - Out of stock
"Only appearances are not deceiving." - Josef Albers
Josef Albers (1888-1976) was one of the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism: he was an extraordinary teacher, writer, painter, and color theorist, who is best known for the Homages to the Square (painted 1950-76) and The Interaction of Color, published by Yale University Press in 1963.
This generously illustrated overview of Albers's work, accompanying the first major exhibition on the artist in more than thirty years, features all aspects of his long, creative career. Beginning with Albers's time at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, the publication follows the artist to America and describes major themes of his work there as well as the importance of his frequent travels to Mexico. Paintings, prints, furniture, household objects, works in glass, photographs, and pre-Columbian sculptures are beautifully reproduced and discussed by a team of experts. The juxtaposition of Renaissance sculptures and icons with paintings by Albers underlines the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of his art, and Albers's influence on 1960s Minimalist art is also explored.
Including a comprehensive biography, the book convincingly demonstrates how this great artist transformed modern design by using line, color, surface, and space to challenge the perception of the viewer.
1971, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 23 x 25 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Mathews Miller Dunbar / London
$70.00 - Out of stock
First English edition from 1971, Udo Kultermann's "Art-Events and Happenings", published by Mathews Miller Dunbar of London, translated by John William Gabriel. A deep reflection on an important part of Art's development throughout the 1960s - the turn to action through performance and conceptual art - surveying happenings, protests, theatre, ritual, land art and much more, and featuring a vast collection of black and white photographic illustrations of the work of Allan Kaprow, Ann Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Otto Mühl, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Piero Gilardi, Charlotte Moorman, Franz Erhard Walther, Joseph Beuys, Tetsumi Kudo, Lygia Clark, Carolee Schneemann, Stan Brakhage, John Cage, Hermann Nitsch, Günther Brus, Dennis Oppenheim, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Andy Warhol, Jan Dibbets, Carl Andre, Barry La Va, Rafael Ferrer, Marinus Boezum, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, Claes Oldenburg, Piero Manzoni, Peter Hutchinson, Christo, Robert Morris, and many more.
Very good copy (some tanning, previous owners name to first page)
1981, English
Softcover (w. John Nixon insert), 68 pages, 18.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$60.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 2
Winter 1981
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS:
"On Some Alternatives to the Code in the Age of Hyperreality: the Hermit and the City—Dweller" by John Young and Terry Blake
"The Desire of Maria Kozic" by Adrian Martin
"David Wilson’s New Sculpture" by Patrick McCaughey
"Modernism and Realism: Some Orientations" by Terry Smith
"Culture Corner" by Peter Tyndall
Manifestos:
"Manifesto for a future Sculpture Triennial" by Judy Annear
"Manifesto for a Renewed Art Practice 1980" by John Nixon
Book Reviews:
"About Looking by John Berger" by Ian North
"The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change by Robert Hughes" by David Bromfield
"The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism 1959 — 1968 by Gary Catalano" by Noel Hutchison
note: this is a rare copy that still contains the insert manifesto "Manifesto for a Renewed Art Practice 1980" by John Nixon
Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
Very Good - general wear/tanning. Includes Nixon's inserted manifesto.
1983, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$45.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 11
Spring 1983
Edited by Paul Taylor
Blurb by Malcolm McLaren
CONTENTS:
"The Precession of Simulacra" by Jean Baudrillard (translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton
"Kristeva, Bakhtin and Carnival" by Kateryna Arthur
"Performance Art As Politicised Epistemology" by Thomas Huhn
"Anything Still" by John Young
"Duck Rock" by Andrew Preston
"A Melbourne Mood" by Frances Lindsay
"Made by →↑→" by Mary Eagle
"Horrality" by Philip Brophy
Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
Very Good - general wear/tanning.
1989, English
Softcover, 134 pages, 21 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$80.00 - Out of stock
Institute of Modern Art 1975-1989 - A Documentary History, was edited by Bob Lingard, Sue Cramer in Brisbane in 1989, and takes an in-depth look at the history of a very important period of one of Australia's oldest contemporary art spaces. Through essays by Bob Lingard and Peter Anderson, exhibition photography, a full list of exhibitions, catalogues and bulletins, this publication retrospectively showcases the directorship years of Robert Jadin de Fronenteau, John Buckley, John Nixon, Barbara Campbell, Peter Cripps and Sue Cramer, exhibiting John Olsen, Robert MacPherson, Ian Hamilton, Sidney Nolan, John Baldessari, Peter Cripps, Gunter Christmann, David Hockney, Diane Arbus, Jenny Watson, Chuck Close, Joseph Kosuth, Paul Sharits, Mike Parr, Arthur Boyd, Robert Jacks, John Davis, Mario Merz, Peter Tyndall, Hilary Boscott, Imants Tillers, John Nixon, Elizabeth Gower, Janet Burchill, Tony Clark, Dale Frank, Henri Chopin, Scott Redford, Tim Johnson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Vivienne Shark Lewitt, Fiona McDonald, Fiona Hall, Joanna Flynn, Jan Nelson, Joanna Ritson, Robert Hunter, Stephen Roach,Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Lehan Ramsey, Hiram To, John Dunkley-Smith, Stieg Persson, Merilyn Fairskye, Linda Marrinon, Bill Henson, Fritz Rahman, Melinda Harper, Geoff Lowe, Lindy Lee, Eugene Carchesio, Diena Georgetti, Maria Kozic, Lyndal Jones, amongst many others!
"This publication documents the history of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane from its inception in 1975 until the present day (1989). In doing so, it provides a partial record, both visual and verbal, of the life of one particular institution and an insight into a fifteen year history of exhibition-making within contemporary art. There can be no doubt that “Contemporary Art Spaces” (previously institutions such as the IMA were known as “alternative spaces”) have a crucial and unique role in supporting and developing contemporary art and curatorial practices within Australia. As the photographs of exhibitions, and the essays in this publication show, the Institute has played a significant role over its fifteen years as a venue not only for the exhibition of art that is being made in Brisbane itself, but also that of artists working elsewhere in Australia and overseas. It is worth remembering too that the Institute is the second oldest of the Contemporary Art Spaces in Australia. With this in mind, the Institute’s archive, from which this publication has been drawn, becomes a valuable resource in the study of recent art. The photographs published here ofier a visual record of individual works by many contemporary artists, a number of which may not have been published elsewhere. It is hoped therefore, that this publication might fruitfully be regarded as a source book from which more detailed projects of research can be undertaken. It is impossible in one publication to cover all of the activities and personalities, ideas, debates and discussions that have made up the life of the gallery. Alongside the exhibition program, the Institute has generated forums, lectures, film screenings and publications as an important part of its activities..."
SUE CRAMER DIRECTOR, June 1989
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 44 pages, 23.5 x 33.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tension / South Yarra
$30.00 - Out of stock
Tension 13 (Australian and International Arts : June 1988) features John Nixon (by Sue Cramer), Maria Kozic (by Adrian Martin), Jenny Watson (by Rose Lang), Robert Mapplethorpe (by Paul Taylor), Julian Schnabel (by Paul Taylor), "Masterpieces of Medical Photography", "Curatorial Strategies", exhibition reviews, and much more.
TENSION (1983-1990) was one of the central "popular" culture arts periodicals to come out of Melbourne in the 1980s, emerging from the ashes of Virgin Press. Independently published and edited by critic Ashley Crawford, Tension magazine lasted for 25 bi-monthly issues dedicated to Art, Music, Fashion, Theatre, Film, Photography, across reviews, interviews, reports, critical essays and artist pages. Now an important document of culture in Australia, and especially Melbourne in the 1980s, issues featured the writing and contributions of Paul Taylor, McKenzie Wark, Mike Parr, John Nixon, Catharine Lumby, Philip Brophy, Adrian Martin, Ashley Crawford, Peter Tyndall, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Keith Haring, Gerald Murnane, and many more. In 1985 Crawford, with John Buckley, staged an exhibition issue of the magazine, 'Visual Tension', at ACCA featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Marianne Baillieu, Peter Booth, Paul Boston, Peter Cripps, Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, John Lethbridge, Geoff Lowe, Linda Marrinon, John Matthews, John Nixon, Stieg Persson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, John Young.
1989, English
Softcover (staple bound), 72 pages, 23.3 x 33.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tension / South Yarra
$30.00 - Out of stock
Tension 18 includes features on Peter Tyndall by Ashley Crawford, Howard Arkley by Richard Brown, Recent Australian Painting by Charles Green, Robert McPherson by Ingrid Perez, Neil Emmerson by Chris McAuliffe, Colin McCahon by Tony Green, Imants Tillers by Jenny Harper, Ken Orchard by Nicholas Baume, Robert Jesson by Ashley Crawford, reviews on Jenny Watson/Lindy Lee/Maria Kozic, John Dunkley-Smith, Brent Harris, Herb Ritts, and so much more.
TENSION (1983-1990) was one of the central "popular" culture arts periodicals to come out of Melbourne in the 1980s, emerging from the ashes of Virgin Press. Independently published and edited by critic Ashley Crawford, Tension magazine lasted for 25 bi-monthly issues dedicated to Art, Music, Fashion, Theatre, Film, Photography, across reviews, interviews, reports, critical essays and artist pages. Now an important document of culture in Australia, and especially Melbourne in the 1980s, issues featured the writing and contributions of Paul Taylor, McKenzie Wark, Mike Parr, John Nixon, Catharine Lumby, Philip Brophy, Adrian Martin, Ashley Crawford, Peter Tyndall, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Keith Haring, Gerald Murnane, and many more. In 1985 Crawford, with John Buckley, staged an exhibition issue of the magazine, 'Visual Tension', at ACCA featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Marianne Baillieu, Peter Booth, Paul Boston, Peter Cripps, Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, John Lethbridge, Geoff Lowe, Linda Marrinon, John Matthews, John Nixon, Stieg Persson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, John Young.
2018, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 20 x 26 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
$45.00 - Out of stock
Guy Mees’s (1935–2003) photographs, videos, and above all his fragile works on paper are characterized by a formal rigor combined with sensitivity and delicacy. The uniqueness of his oeuvre lies precisely in its avoidance of conventional aesthetics and discursive classifications. A leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, Mees left behind an outstanding body of work that transgresses geometric abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and applied art.
The Weather is Quiet, Cool, and Soft is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (February 1–April 8, 2018), and at Mu.ZEE, Ostend (November 25, 2018–March 10, 2019). Borrowed from a note the artist jotted down on one of his works on paper, the title pays homage to the atmospheric impermanence of Mees’s works, as well as his infra-ordinary, relativistic, and poetic approach. With emblematic works and unpublished archival materials from the artist’s creative phases spanning the 1960s to 2000s, the publication emphasizes the idiosyncrasy and significance of Mees’s practice and personality. These are complemented by two new essays by Lilou Vidal and François Piron; a translation of a text by Fernand Spillemaeckers from the 1970s; and an interview conducted with Mees’s friend and accomplice Wim Meuwissen, his long-standing gallerist Micheline Szwajcer, and Dirk Snauwaert, who produced the first retrospective and a definitive monograph dedicated to Mees’s work.
Edited by Lilou Vidal
Texts by François Piron, Fernand Spillemaeckers, Lilou Vidal, Wim Meuwissen, Dirk Snauwaert, Micheline Szwajcer
Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien
Design by Joris Kritis
1980, English / German
Softcover (single folded sheet), 84 x 59 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Württembergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$80.00 - Out of stock
Great, scarce catalogue published in 1980 by Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart to accompany an exhibition by American minimalist sculptors Donald Judd and Richard Serra. Publication is made up entirely of images of the exhibited works, details and installation photography of the exhibition (including the reception and installation) beautifully designed together as a fold-out booklet that becomes a 84 x 59 cm single-sheet poster.
1977, German
Heavy card slipcase (4 vols.), 323 pages; 357 pages; 378 pages; 40 pages; 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Paul Dierich / Kassel
$100.00 - Out of stock
Complete 3 volume boxset exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with Documenta 6, the sixth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 24 June and 2 October 1977 in Kassel, Germany, and the artistic director was Manfred Schneckenburger. The title of the exhibition was: Internationale Ausstellung – international exhibition.
Box contains volume 1: painting - sculpture - performance (320 pages) / volume 2: photography - film - video (357 pages) / volume 3: drawings - utopian design - books (376 pages + show) / special edition of exhibition information booklet (40 pages + show); essays by Lothar Romain, Bazon Brock, Karl Oskar Blase, Klaus Honnef, Evelyn Weiss, Manfred Schneckenburger, Arnold Bode, Wieland Schmied, and Lothar Lang.
Artists featured throughout include Francis Bacon, Jennifer Bartlett, Georg Baselitz, Gerd Baukhage, Enzo Cacciola, Louis Cane, Chuck Close, Ulrich Erben, Winfred Gaul, Raimund Girke, Kuno Gonschior, Camille Graeser, Gotthard Graubner, Nancy Graves, Alan Green, Richard Hamilton, Heijo Hangen, Bernhard Heisig, Michael Heizer, Edgar Hofschen, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Attila Kovács, László Lakner, Roy Lichtenstein, Markus Lüpertz, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Gerhard Merz, Rune Mields, Carmengloria Morales, Malcolm Morley, Claudio Olivieri, Roman Opalka, Palermo, A.R. Penck, Lucio Pozzi, Hans-Peter Reuter, Gerhard Richter, Claude Rutault, Willi Sitte, Frank Stella, Werner Tübke, Bernar Venet, Andy Warhol, Reindert Wepko van de Wint, Gianfranco Zappetini, Jerry Zeniuk, Bernhard and Hilla Becher, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Christian Boltanski, Bettina Brand, Heinz Breloh, James Collins, Zdenek Felix, Reinhold Hohl, Gabrielle Honnef-Harling, Erich Kuby, Werner Lippert, Bernd Lohse, Felix H. Mann, Hilmar Pabel, Georg Reinhardt, Liselotte Strelow, Ann Wilde, Jürgen Wilde, Peter Ackermann, Michael von Biel, Fernando Botero, Miguel Condé, Renato Guttoso, Horst Janssen, Giacomo Manzù, Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Schmitz, Rudolf Schoofs, André Thomkins, Bodo Baumgarten, Blythe Bohnen, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Rupprecht Geiger, Hetum Gruber, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Nino Malfatti, Bob Ryman, Jan Schoonhoven, Lee U-Fan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick.
Texts in German.
Also includes an exhibition guide booklet in the same format as the 3 main catalogue volumes.
Good copy throughout with general tanning and age wear to box and books, some knocking and tape-mended cracking to the box binding corners and edging.
1971, German
Softcover, 464 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
DuMont / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
Huge, densely-illustrated volume compiled by German publisher/editor/essayist/curator Walter Aue, who worked closely with conceptual and performance artists in the 1960s-1970s. Laid-out by Aue himself, the book feels like a very natural scrap-book compendium of artist contributions, reproducing artworks, documentation of happenings, texts, photographs, diagrams, collages, news-clippings, instructions, etc. across over 450 pages, with Aue's type-written opening essay and cataloguing throughout. Features the most notable conceptual, actionist and performance artists of the period, spanning Fluxus, Arte Povera, radical architecture, Nouveau Realisme, etc. including Dieter Rot, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Pino Pascali, Stanley Brouwn, Jannis Kounellis, Klaus Rinke, Ben Vautier, Al Hansen, Walter Pichler, Hilla and Bernhard Becher, Giuseppe Penone, Ettore Sottsass, Gilbert and George, Walter De Maria, Wolf Vostell, Hans Hollein, Imi Knoebel, Barry Flanagan, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneemann, Hamish Fulton, Christo, Elfriede Jelinek, Dennis Oppenheim, Urs Lüthi, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Rühm, Blink Palermo, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Ruscha, HA Schult, Hermann Nitsch, James Lee Byars, Jan Dibbets, Jochen Gerz, Mauricio Kagel, Nam June Paik, Otto Mühl, Arnulf Rainer, Jan Voss, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Franz Erhard Walther, Timm Ulrichs, Daniel Spoerri, Erich Reusch, Paul Pechter, Rainer Giese, Jörg Immendorff, Henning Christiansen, Gilberto Zorio, Panamarenko, Joseph Kosuth, Dan Graham, Dick Higgins, Ian Baxter, Mel Bochner, Haus-Rucker-Co, Markus Raetz, Sottsass, Nam June Paik, Hans Haacke, Tetsumi Kudo, Bruce Mclean, On Kawara, and so many more.
Depending on the artist, texts are in English, German, Dutch, etc. Opening essay in German.
Very Good, light wear/tear to top spine.
2013, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
$45.00 - Out of stock
Essays, an interview, and a roundtable discussion on the work of one of the most influential American artists of the postwar period.
This October Files volume gathers essays, an interview, and a roundtable discussion on the work of Robert Morris, one of the most influential American artists of the postwar period. It includes a little-known text on dance by Morris himself and a never-before-anthologized but influential catalog essay by Annette Michelson. Often associated with minimalism, Morris (b. 1931) also created important works that involved dance, process art, and conceptualism. The texts in this volume focus on Morris's early work and include an examination of a 1971 Tate retrospective by Jon Bird, an interview with the artist by Benjamin Buchloh, a conversation from a 1994 issue of October about resistance to 1960s art, and an essay by this volume's editor, Julia Bryan-Wilson, on the labor involved in installing the massive works in Morris's 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney. Spanning 1965 to 2009, these writings map the evolution of critical thought on Morris over more than four decades.
October Files is a series of inexpensive paperback books edited by the editors of October journal. Each book addresses a body of work by an artist of the postwar period who has altered our understanding of art in significant ways and prompted a critical literature that is sophisticated and sustained. Each book in this series traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. Series Editors are George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Leah Dickerman.
1974, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 30.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio International / London
$50.00 - In stock -
February 1974 issue of Studio International with specially designed covers by Robert Natkin. Includes articles : "The situation of the artist in Yugoslavia since 1945" by Cyril Barrett, "'Art-Language' at the Lisson Gallery" by Paul Wood, "Ivan Karp on Marcel Duchamp / an interview with Moira Roth", "Definition and theory 'Of the current avant garde / materialist / structural film" by Peter Gidal, "Edvard Munch: scene, symbol and allegory" by Frank Whitford, "Profile : Hans Haacke", "The shape of colour" by Patrick Heron, and the first of a three-part major article series on the work of Robert Ryman titles "Unfinished 1 (Materials)" by Barbara Reise. Reviews section. Correspondence. Much more.
An issue from the great Peter Townsend as editor years.
As editor of Studio International magazine from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Peter Townsend oversaw its transformation from a mainstream Britain-centric publication into a vanguard journal chronicling some of the most radical artistic endeavours in the UK and internationally.
Robert Natkin (November 7, 1930 – April 20, 2010) was an American born abstract painter whose work is associated with Abstract expressionism, Colour field painting, and Lyrical Abstraction.
Very Good copy, with light general wear.
1974, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 30.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio International /
Studio International / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
The special "Belgian Issue" of Studio International, with famous front and back covers designed by Marcel Broodthaers, with text by Broodthaers on page 114 ("Wiertz Museum"). Also includes a long and rich essay entitled "'Incredible' Belgium : Impressions" by Barbara Reise, focussing on the years 1973-1974 and reviews the important events that marked the contemporary art scene in galleries or private collections, plus articles on Pol Bury and André Balthazar's "The Daily Bul" by André Balthazar, "Museums, Collectors, Policies" by Karl Geirlandt, "Some Notes on Hyper-realists" by Karl Geirlandt and Jean-Pierre van Tieghem, Panamarenko by Irmaline Lebeer, "Construction and Structure in Form and Colour" by Phil Mertens, "Aspects of the Avant-Garde in Belgium" by Michael Baudson and Yves Gevaert, and much more. Artist pages by Younger Belgian Artists: Paul De Gobert, Guy Mees, Maurice Roquet, Malcolm Lauder, Krokus, Jan Dries, Group Cap. Belgian comics. Reviews section.
A now very collectable issue from the great Peter Townsend as editor years.
As editor of Studio International magazine from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Peter Townsend oversaw its transformation from a mainstream Britain-centric publication into a vanguard journal chronicling some of the most radical artistic endeavours in the UK and internationally.
Marcel Broodthaers (28 January 1924 – 28 January 1976) was a Belgian a polymorphic artist, poet, visual artist, filmmaker, photographer, who anticipated the reflection on the relationship between the artwork, the museum and the public.
Good copy, but with previous owner inscription on cover and decent age/rubbing to covers.
2018, English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 23 x 27.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
Eykyn Maclean / New York-London
$79.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Carl Andre, Meg O’Rourke, Caroline Weber, Lynn Zelevansky, Thea Westreich
The catalogue Ornament and Crime accompanies the group exhibition curated by Meg O’Rourke at Eykyn Maclean in New York (May 2–June 15, 2018). With Adolf Loos’s eponymous 1908 diatribe against excessive ornamentation as its guide, the exhibition draws on the tenets set forth by Loos—simplicity, purity, freedom—with particular attention to their philosophical implications and their persistence into the latter twentieth century. The catalogue traces a genealogy of form from the dogmatism of Loos and Piet Mondrian; to the experimental systems of Yves Klein, the Zero group, and Ad Reinhardt; and finally, to the austere formalism of Minimalism and Arte Povera. When superficial surfaces and superfluous decorations are stripped away, the unknown is opened up—into the void, that is, what lies beyond the surface; down to the elemental, a deeper engagement with material that exceeds mere abstraction; and toward the eternal, where aesthetic asceticism points toward spiritual and psychic transcendance. The texts comprise an introduction by Meg O’Rourke, an historical essay by Lynn Zelevansky, a creative abecedarium by Caroline Weber, and an interview with Carl Andre conducted by O’Rourke and Thea Westreich. They offer historical context and draw out the resonances between the artworks represented, which are included here in full-color standalone and installation views.
Features Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre, Piet Mondrian, Yves Klein, Otto Piene, Ad Reinhardt, John McCracken, Lucio Fontana, Frank Stella, and more.
Copublished with Eykyn Maclean, New York / London
Design by A Practice for Everyday Life
2015, English / German / Dutch
Softcover, 560 pages, 25cm x 25cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
Fire, light, movement, space, demonstrations, and performances: this major publication forms a historic survey of the innovative, international avant-garde artists’ group, ZERO.
In 1957, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene devised the name ZERO for a new art movement and magazine. The brevity of the term ZERO and the fact that it retained its meaning in many languages helped the group to become an international “brand” in the ‘60s. After the Second World War and the grim years of post-war reconstruction, the term ZERO marked the coming of a new, optimistic, experimental, and pioneering kind of art. Piene described it as “a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning.” While the ZERO movement was under formation, Dutch artists Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, and herman de vries established the Nul group in the Netherlands. Like-minded artists in France, Italy, and Belgium – such as Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jesús Rafael Soto, Lucio Fontana, Pierre Manzoni, Dadamaino, and Christian Megert – were also formulating similar artistic strategies - many affiliated with other movements such as Nouveau réalisme, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Op Art, Land Art and Kinetic art. They joined up with the trio of artists from Dusseldorf: Mack, Piene, and Günther Uecker. Together, the artists began to organize exhibitions in galleries, museums, and in their own studios. They also co-created artworks, experimenting with the most innovative materials and media, as well as gave performances and happenings, produced multiples, and published magazines and other publications. In 1962, the Stedelijk Museum staged the first museum presentation of ZERO. A few years later, a more comprehensive survey, Nul 1965, followed, a presentation widely considered as one of the movement’s highlights. Precisely fifty years later, in 2015, the Stedelijk presented an historical survey that sheds light on how the network’s artists redefined the meaning and form of art forever.
This extensive, deeply researched and richly illustrated (over 900 plates) publication, edited by curator Margriet Schavemaker, and Dirk Poerschmann, academic staff member of the ZERO Foundation, includes essays by Antoon Melissen, Johan Pas, Francesca Pola & Thekla Zell, and the transcript of a conversation between Mattijs Visser and Daniel Birnbaum. Organized by the ZERO foundation and including some 200 objects, ZERO is one of the most comprehensive resources available on this self-consciously avant-gardist international movement.
Includes the work of Arman, Armando, Bernard Aubertin, Pol Bury, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hermann Goepfert, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Gotthard Graubner, Hans Haacke, Jan Henderikse, Paul van Hoeydock, Oskar Holweck, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Walter Leblanc, Adolf Luther, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Almir Mavignier, Christian Megert, François Morellet, Saboro Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Uli Pohl, George Rickey, Dieter Roth, Hans Salentin, Jan Schoonhoven, Jesús Raphael Soto, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Gunther Uecker, Jef Verheyen, Nanda Vigo, herman de vries.
1988, English / Dutch
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
Whitechapel / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Lucio Fontana catalogue published on the occasion of the major 1988 exhibition at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and London's Whitechapel.
Heavily illustrated throughout with over 200 pictures, this book surveys the work of Italian artist Lucio Fontana across canvas, ceramic, drawing, and relief, including his famous Concetto Spaziale works. Includes essays, biography, and much more.
Lucio Fontana (19 February 1899 – 7 September 1968) was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of Argentine birth. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism. He was also affiliated with the ZERO movement.
Text in English and Dutch.
First edition, ex-libris copy with loan card and associated markings to title page and endpapers. General library wear, with some internal markings.
1991, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 22.5 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arnoldo Mondadori Arte / Milan
Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris / Paris
$200.00 - Out of stock
Large comprehensive English-language catalogue that was published in the occasion of a major 1991 retrospective survey of the late, hugely influencial, Italian Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni held at the Musee D'Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, curated by the Italian art critic, author and curator Germano Celant.
This rare monographic volume spans 242 pages profusely illustrated in colour and black and white images of Manzoni's painting, releifs, sculpture and editioned works, performances, printed ephemera, and more, as well as additional texts by Germano Celant, Jean Pierre Criqui, Jens Hendrik Sandberg, Francisco Calvo Seraller, Nancy Spector, and Suzanne Page. Also includes an exhibition checklist, chronology, bibliography and exhibition history, with all texts in English.
Piero Manzoni (July 13, 1933 – February 6, 1963) was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything from rabbit fur to human excrement in order to "tap mythological sources and to realize authentic and universal values". His work is widely seen as a critique of the mass production and consumerism that was changing Italian society (the Italian economic miracle) after World War II. Italian artists such as Manzoni had to negotiate the new economic and material order of post-war Europe through inventive artistic practices which crossed geographic, artistic, and cultural borders.
A fine example of this very scarce book on the great Piero Manzoni.
1970, German
Softcover, 92 pages, 11 x 17 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Galerie Rudolph Zwirner / Köln
$55.00 - Out of stock
"Z" is a great, unsuspecting pocketbook from Galerie Rudolph Zwirner in 1970, collecting together a wonderful group of works by 78 artists (Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, René Magritte, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kenneth Noland, Daniel Spoerri, Frank Stella, Jean Tinguely, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Linder, Jasper Johns, Martial Raysse, Dieter Rot, Franz Erhart Walther, Bruno Goller, Morris Louis, Jim Dine, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Konrad Klapheck, Lucio Fontana, Blinky Palermo, Hundertwasser, Gerhard Richter, Antoni Tapies, Andy Warhol, George Grosz, Robert Graham, Allen Jones, Henri Michaux, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Oskar Schlemmer, Yves Tanguy, Louis Soutter, Tom Wesselmann, Toyen, Wols, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Panamarenko, Sol Lewitt, etc.) across painting, sculpture, drawings, collage and multiples, all reproduced in black and white across this almost entirely visual volume.
1984, English
Softcover, 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$50.00 - Out of stock
Softcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
A Good copy throughout, with cover rubbing and corner bumping. Tightly bound and clean copy internally.
2018, English
Hardcover, 432 pages, 25x 31 cm
Published by
Getty Publications / Los Angeles
$126.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Glenn Phillips, Doris Chon, Pietro Rigolo, Philipp Kaiser
Harald Szeemann is associated with some of the most important artistic developments of the postwar era. A passionate advocate of avant-garde movements like conceptualism and post minimalism, he collaborated with artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Cy Twombly, developing new ways of presenting art that reflected his sweeping vision of contemporary culture.
Szeemann once stated that his goal as an exhibition maker was to create a "Museum of Obsessions." This richly illustrated volume is a virtual collection catalogue for that imaginary institution, tracing the evolution of his curatorial method through the materials he collected and produced while researching and organising his exhibitions, including letters, drawings, personal datebooks, installation plans, artists' books, posters, photographs, and handwritten notes.
This book documents all phases of Szeemann's career, from his early stint as director of the Kunsthalle Bern, where he organized the seminal Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969); to documenta 5 (1972) and the intensely personal exhibition he staged in his own apartment using the belongings of his hairdresser grandfather (1974); to his reinvention as a freelance curator who realised projects on wide-ranging themes until his death in 2005.
The book contains essays exploring Szeemann's curatorial approach as well as interviews with collaborators. Its more than 350 illustrations include previously unpublished installation photographs and exhibition documents as well as many other materials from the curator's archive.
2018, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
"Tanya Harrod is our leading scholarly voice on craft. [This] invaluable anthology...is an ideal introduction to the intellectual landscape of craft, and an essential tool for those already invested in the topic." - Glenn Adamson, Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art
Craft is a contested concept in art history and a vital category through which to understand contemporary art. Through ‘craft’, materials, techniques and tools are investigated and their histories explored in order to reflect on the politics of labour and on the extraordinary complexity of the made world around us. This anthology offers an ethnography of craft, surveying its shape-shifting identities in the context of progressive art and design through writings by artists and makers, and drawing on poetry, fiction, anthropology and sociology. Reflections on new technologies and materials, lost and found worlds of handwork and the politics of work all throw light on ‘craft’ as process, product and ideology.
Artists surveyed include Anni Albers, El Anatsui, Aaron Angell, Ruth Asawa, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Annie Cattrell, Edmund de Waal, Harun Farocki, Lucio Fontana, Theaster Gates, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Sheila Hicks, Ana Lupas, Lu Shengzhong, Enzo Mari, Martin Puryear, Jessi Reaves, Bridget Riley, Ettore Sottsass, Studio Formafantasma, Peter Voulkos.
Writers include Glenn Adamson, Elissa Auther, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Joan Key, Ulrich Lehmann, Sarat Maharaj, Karl Marx, Sadie Plant, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Roberts, Jenni Sorkin.
Tanya Harrod is an independent design historian who lives in London and who writes widely on craft, art and design. She is co-editor of The Journal of Modern Craft and is author of The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1999), The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew (2012) which won the 2013 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and The Real Thing: Essays on Making in the Modern World (2015).
1985, German
Softcover, 157 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$95.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the great 1985 Blinky Palermo monograph, "Palermo : Werke 1963-1977", wrapped in grass-green covers and published to accompany the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Winterthur 18 September - 11 November, 1984; Kunsthalle Bielefeld 27 January - 17 March, 1985; Stedelijk Museum 30 March - 12 May, 1985. Heavy illustrated throughout with examples of Palermo's work inc. his famed monochromatic, abstract canvases and "fabric paintings", installations, studio, etc, alongside texts by his friend and teacher Joseph Beuys, Laslo Glozer, Bernhard Burgi, and Erich Franz, in German.
Blinky Palermo (2 June 1943 – 18 February 1977) was a German abstract painter.
He adopted his outlandish name in 1964, during his studies with Bruno Goller and Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1962 and 1967. The name refers to Frank "Blinky" Palermo, an American Mafioso and boxing promoter who managed Sonny Liston. In 1969, Palermo moved to Mönchengladbach and set up a studio he would share with Imi Knoebel and Ulrich Rückriem. After a stay in New York in the early 1970s, he moved into Gerhard Richter's former Düsseldorf studio.
Over the course of his 14-year artistic career Palermo tirelessly probed the limits of abstract painting. Having begun his brushwork on more traditional surfaces, he shifted his activity to less conventional supports, experimenting with diverse materials and forms, exploring the relationships that can exist between the wall and the space delimited by the painting. Palermo was best known for his spare monochromatic canvases and "fabric paintings" made from simple lengths of colored material cut, stitched and stretched over a frame. He painted on aluminum, steel, wood, paper and Formica, often making lines out of tape instead of paint. Under Beuys, he became increasingly interested in the organized spatial relationship between form and colour, a polarity which is manifest throughout the rest of his oeuvre. In the mid 1960s, Palermo moved away from conventional rectangular canvases and increasingly opted for surfaces such as the circle, triangle, cruciform, totem pole and even the interior walls of buildings. Between 1964 and 1966, Palermo produced a small series of paintings on canvas in which he experimented with constructivist principles of order. Blinky Palermo died in 1977, aged 33, during a trip to the Maldives.
Good-Very Good - light rubbing edge wear to covers.
1989 / 1992, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21.5 x 14.7 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cantz Verlag / Berlin
$190.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce 1992 hard cover edition (the one issued with a dust jacket) of the original book on Donald Judd's architectural projects, written by Judd himself. Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Donald Judd - Architektur" at Westfälische Kunstverein, Münster, 1989, this now very collectable hardcover book (in any of it's editions) is a comprehensive illustrated guide (colour and black and white photography as well as plans and drawings) through all of Judd's architectural (and furniture) works with texts throughout that develop beyond mere commentary to gain deeper insight into Judd's own architectural theory. All texts are in both English and German, with an introductory text by Marianne Stockebrand.
Good copy with light ex-libris stamping. Good original dust jacket with only light chipping, now preserved under plastic wrap.