World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 25.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Perimeter Editions / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
The Cavern is the debut artist book by Melbourne-based painter Travis MacDonald. Drawing on key works from the last three years, the book forwards MacDonald's quietly idiosyncratic take on the more traditional genres of figuration and landscape painting, revealing a sensitivity and wit that extends to both his surroundings and that of art history.
At once dreamlike in its atmosphere and palette, and dry in its humour, The Cavern speaks not so much to a wider historical narrative, but to fragments of time within it. These works read as untethered; anomalies and oddities (some subtle, some silly) punctuate and reanimate otherwise nondescript, potentially nostalgic scenes. A stretched limousine slips its way along an arched country bridge; a round-shouldered boy sits mutely at the family piano as we await the first strike of the ivories; a girl rides sidesaddle on a white horse (she wears a full-face motorcycle helmet).
From his Cavern, MacDonald offers a contemplative and ever-so slightly incongruous vantage on the world as we thought we knew it.
Travis MacDonald was born in Bunnythorpe, New Zealand, and currently lives and works in Melbourne. He completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 and has been exhibiting since 2009. He has been awarded the Gary Grossbard Drawing Prize and the Lionel Gell Foundation Scholarship. More recently, MacDonald’s work was exhibited in Painting. More Painting at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, and he held his first major solo exhibition Homesick Mascot at Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, in December 2016, followed by a solo exhibition as part of the Melbourne Art Fair, in August 2018. He is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 25.5 x 20 cm
Published by
ICA / London
Artspace / Sydney
$25.00 - Out of stock
Warm Ties accompanies the solo exhibition of Australian artist Helen Johnson in collaboration with ICA London and Artspace Sydney. Johnson weaves and overlays historical and contemporary signifiers creating points of tension and reflection through the medium of painting. In this exhibition, the complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain is dealt with on the level of the body, using large-scale paintings that have become purposefully disassembled installations throughout the space. Profusely illustrated in colour with work, installation and detail documentation, accompanied by texts by Stephen Gilchrist and Helen Hughes.
2015, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 19.5 x 13 cm
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
Minerva / Sydney
$28.00 - Out of stock
Within this book, Helen Johnson considers the operations of painting today, proposing means by which painting, as an aesthetic practice, might continue to make a critical address. She describes the book thus, “Being a painter in a post-medium specific context does not mean approaching painting as some sort of anachronistic refuge, or thinking that the modernist project of the specific medium can be rehabilitated, or even continue to be flogged. As a site for the production of meaning, painting is a rich field of loadings, neuroses and suggestiveness that can mesh with aesthetic qualities to make a charged conceptual space. Focusing on works by Juan Davila and Martin Kippenberger, this book proposes an extended understanding of how painting can operate aesthetically, grounded in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of aesthetic experience as implicitly connected to critical reflection. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement constitutes the basis of a mobilisation of aesthetics for the reading of painting beyond formalism, embracing aesthetic criticality as an open position of refusal, rather than the dogmatic pursuit of a rational conclusion.”
1993, English / French (Japanese translations as inserted booklet)
Softcover (w. dust jacket and booklet insert), 132 pages, 29 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Tokoro / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce and beautifully designed "Mondrian in New York", published by Galerie Tokora in Tokyo, 1993. This heavily researched and profusely illustrated book compiles the exuberant late years of the great Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. His Greenwich Village "Jazz Years". This show was the first of its kind in the world. Mondrian's paintings, sketches, studies, objects, studio, exhibits and surroundings from this period are all captured here in colour and black and white photographs, along with major texts by Christian Derouet and Harry Holtzman. A special feature of the exhibition was the recreation of his 59th St. studio, including his last series of wall compositions, "The Wall Works, 1943-1944", collaged by the artist onto the walls of his studio, alongside his "Three-dimensional Constructions", a series of sculptural studio objects, all documented in this book.
After the devastation of the first First World War, Mondrian and other Dutch artists of the new De Stijl movement would seek to wash away all the tainted and corrupted forms of the past, and create a new language based upon the most basic visual elements. Promoting abstraction in painting, furniture design, and architecture, De Stijl, and other revolutionary art movements of the time, called into question the fundamental viability and wisdom of the long-standing European order. Mondrian's groundbreaking and revolutionary new paintings propelled him to fame in Paris in the interwar years, embraced by the ‘Lost Generation', working prolifically throughout the 1920s-30s.
Escaping the ravages of World War II, Piet Mondrian fled to London, then to New York where he broke new ground in his art. Mondrian delighted in the city's architecture and that great American art form - Jazz, finding its syncopated beat, irreverent approach to melody, and improvisational aesthetic akin to what he called, in his own work, the "destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm." In New York, said Alan Riding in the New York Times, Mondrian finally “freed himself, in his words, ‘from the captivity of black lines.’ In their place came colored lines and even the suggestion of depth…by all accounts, he was also happy in New York, satisfying his passion for jazz in Greenwich Village cafes …” In fact, in spite of the unprecedented devastation taking place in Europe by the Nazis, Mondrian’s paintings displayed a hopefulness and vitality hitherto unseen. Inspired by jazz and spurred onward by the progress of the allies in Europe, Mondrian’s paintings — previously so restrained and disciplined — took on an almost giddy exuberance.
Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian (1872 – 1944), was a Dutch painter and theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Mondrian's art was highly utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
Very Good preserved copy with bright dust jacket and original inserted Japanese text booklet. Light edge spotting/discolouration to endpapers only (and internal booklet cover), otherwise a fine copy - clean and bright.
1997, English / Japanese
Hardcover (cardboard box covers w. glued in booklets, fold-outs, inserts), 84 pages plus fold-outs, 12.5 x 14 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Wateri Museum of Contemporary Art / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce Tony Oursler + Mike Kelley exhibition catalogue / artists' book published in conjunction with a major two-person exhibition held 1997 - 1998 in Tokyo. Includes colour installation images of the exhibition as installed at Documenta X, June 21 - September 28, 1997. "The ongoing 'Poetics Project' serves up a rich mix of visual and aural experiences, while inviting viewers to question the reliability of the shows as history. Artist Mike Kelley says, 'If you don't create your own history, someone else will." Kelley and Tony Oursler's the 'Poetics Project 1977-1997' is a retrospective work that draws from their collaborative efforts in painting, video, sculpture, drawing and music. Although the ostensible subject of this project is Kelley and Oursler's early experiences as performers in a loose-knit musical group called the Poetics, its broader concerns are the processes by which history is constructed, and the reciprocal relationship between the fine arts and popular culture. The conflation of past and present in the 'Poetics Project' makes it difficult at first for the viewer to penetrate the work. Video installations and taped interviews with visual artists, rock musicians and critics are intermingled with paintings, sculptures and stacks of drawings. A precise checklist and diagram prepared by Kelley and Oursler methodically pinpoint the authorship of each work, while serving as a serf-guided tour and critical record of the project. Only with this didactic help do viewers come to realize that the 'Poetics Project' is almost entirely made up of works created in 1997 and 1998, though based on what Kelley and Oursler tell us is a single notebook of sketches and a collection of audio recordings--some little more than notations for never-performed works--which date from the late 1970s and early '80s (the Poetics disbanded in 1983). Filled with irony and steeped in serf-reflexive practice, this work builds upon the radical autobiographical prose of William S. Burroughs and art works and performances by artists such as John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and Andy Warhol. Reminiscent of Warhol's A:A Novel, which records one day in the life of the artist in 384 pages, the 'Poetics Project' is an expanding template of art works which explores how the past can be reconstructed to shed light on the present." -- Diane Shamash, Art in America, October 1998
First and only edition of this unique Japanese publication from these two American artists. Cardboard covers feature decal artwork reproducing the Oursler/Kelley collaborative artwork "Poetics Country", 1997.
2018, English / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Yves Saint-Laurent Museum / Marrakech
$36.00 - Out of stock
Lebanese artists Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal, along with revered American theatre director Robert Wilson together create a universe where poetry, sound and sculpture overlap, as well as a framework that enables them to construct situations in which memories are transformed into objects, objects into memories, fiction into reality, and reality into fiction.
Garden of Memory is based on a succession of these shared memories and experiences, manifested in the form of a mental landscape, a non-linear narrative and a choreography filled with both immutable and variable elements. The thrust behind it all is the reading of a poem by Etel Adnan entitled, Surge.
This book includes poetry, essays, artworks and a conversation between Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal moderated by Mouna Mekouar.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Garden of Memory: Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Bob Wilson at Yves Saint-Laurent Museum, Marrakech (14 May – 16 September 2018).
English and French text.
2015, English / German
Softcover (with dust jacket), 130 pages (4 b/w ill.), 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$22.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Isabelle Graw, Daniel Birnbaum, Institut für Kunstkritik, Frankfurt am Main
First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red. These objects, these things, help the narrator and other characters come into being, but it is paintings that embody who the narrator really is: “Even if I’m their hostage when I look at them, I’m not inferior to them. I lie down, stand, or sit in front of them and, in this moment, I’m everything they affect in me.” Unlike people, paintings are fixed, explicit with their intentions and challenges—in the end they will still be here, outlasting those who made them or who looked at them. A facsimile of the original German publication is included in this volume.
Translated from the German by Nick Mauss and Michael Sanchez
Institut für Kunstkritik series
Design by Surface
This title is now out of print.
2017, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 23 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
The effects and meanings of destruction are central to the work of many of our most influential artists. Since the early 1960s, artists have employed destruction to creative ends. Here destruction changes from a negative state or passive condition to a highly productive category. The destructive subversion of media imagery aims to release us from its controlling effects. The self-destructing artwork extinguishes art’s fixity as arrested form and ushers in the ephemeral and contingent "open work."
This anthology explores artworks that convey the threat of destruction an how they have disrupted the perceived integrity of built structures and institutions. Artistic acts of iconoclasm or risk to the self have raised consciousness of authoritarian oppression. More understated works explore the theme of destruction in armed conflict, media violence, and threats to the environment. These text make up the first collection to be focused systematically on destruction in modern and contemporary art.
Artists surveyed include
Ai Weiwei, John Baldessari, Monica Bonvicini, Alexander Brener, Stuart Brisley, Douglas Gordon, Huang Yong Ping, Enrique Jezik, Milan Knizak, Paul McCarthy, Piero Manzoni, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gustav Metzger, Otto Mühl, Yoko Ono, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Petr Pavlensky, William Pope.L, Walid Raad, Arnulf Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann, Song Dong, Jean Tinguely, Wolf Vostell
Writers include
Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin, Horst Bredekamp, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Medina Cuauthémoc, Dario Gamboni, Richard Galpin, Caleb Kelly, Bruno Latour, Sven Lütticken, Antonio Negri, Sophie O’Brien, Kristine Stiles, Jennifer Walden
About the Editor
Sven Spieker is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and editor of ARTmargins. His books include The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press).
2018, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
Uncollected Texts draws together a number of Carolee Schneemann’s earliest writings – many exceedingly rare and several that are published here for the first time – ranging from letters to the editor, dream journals, and film criticism, to satirical poems, detailed discussions of her art, and pointed feminist critiques. Edited by Branden W. Joseph, the book includes 30 texts by Carolee Schneemann written between 1956 and 1981, as well as an introduction by Joseph.
First published in short-run magazines like Caterpillar, Film Culture, The Fox, Manipulations, and Matter; academic journals such as Performing Arts Journal; and mainstream publications including The New York Times and The Village Voice, the writings gathered in this volume shed light on some of Schneemann’s most important artistic achievements. Schneemann writes about her most famous “kinetic theatre” piece, Meat Joy; anti-Vietnam War works such as Snows, Viet-Flakes, and Divisions and Rubble; the multimedia performance Up to and Including Her Limits; and the double-screen film Kitch’s Last Meal. Frequently referring to one another, the assembled writings produce a densely interwoven tapestry of cross-references that provide unique insights into Schneemann’s artistic development while also foregrounding the artist’s uniquely poetic style.
1996 / 2004, English
Softcover, 315 pages, 21 x 25cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$45.00 - Out of stock
The classic anthology, What Is Appropriation?: An Anthology of Writings on Australian Art in the 1980s & 1990s, on contemporary Australian art. It was first published in 1996 and a second edition was issued in 2014.
It was probably Ad Reinhardt, though it could have been Sherrie Levine or even Andy Warhol, who remarked that you only know you are doing something original when everybody else is doing it. This book explores this and other paradoxes raised by the practice of appropriation the quotation and use of other artists’ work that became widespread in the 1980s. Why was the practice so uniquely popular in Australia? What did it say about the relationship of Australian art to the art of other countries; about white art to Aboriginal art; and about contemporary art to the art of the past? How and why does appropriation fundamentally challenge habitual ways of looking at pictures and thinking about art? The essays and pictures in this book provide answers to these questions, but always in the knowledge that the enigma of appropriation remains.
2016, English
Hardcover, 186 pages, 15 x 24 cm
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$36.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Aileen Burns, Johan Lundh
Texts by Helen Hughes, Ian McLean, Julie Nagam
Gordon Bennett: Be Polite follows the exhibition of largely unseen works on paper by one of Australia’s most visionary and critical artists, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The exhibition and publication are the first to present the work of Bennett since his death. Though rarely seen in exhibition contexts, Bennett’s drawing and writing formed the foundation of his practice.
This publication brings together three newly commissioned essays by art historian Ian McLean and curators and arts writers Helen Hughes and Julie Nagam. The selection of works from the Estate of Gordon Bennett comprises drawings, acrylic/gouache and watercolor paintings, poetry, and essays from the early 1990s to the early 2000s—a period that produced work of remarkable force and revealed the artist’s working methods, research focuses, and ultimately his ambitions for his work.
Copublished with Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
Design by Žiga Testen
1968, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
$30.00 - Out of stock
Battock's definitive 1968 collection of writings by and about the work of the 1960s minimalists, generously illustrated with photographs of paintings, sculpture, and performance, published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York.
A collection of twenty-eight seminal essays by both critics and artists across over 400 pages, analyzing all aspects of Minimal Art at it's height in the late 1960s. Includes Lawrence Alloway (Systemic Painting), Mel Bochner (Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism), David Bourdon (The Razed Sites of Carl Andre), Nicolas Calas (Subject Matter in the Work of Barnett Newman), Bruce Glaser (Questions to Frank Stella and Donald Judd), Lucy R. Lippard (Eros Presumptive), John Perreault (Minimal Abstracts), Irving Sandler (Gesture and Non-Gesture in Recent Sculpture), Peter Hutchinson (Mannerism in the Abstract0, Willoughby Sharp (Luminism and Kineticism), Elayne Varian (Schemata 7), Richard Wollheim (Minimal Art), and texts by Martial Raysse, Michael Fried, Clement Greenberg, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, and more.
Heavily illustrated throughout with 170 photographs featuring the work of Sol LeWitt, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, Hanne Darboven, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Agnes Martin, Christo, Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Kienholz, Anne Truitt, Joseph Kosuth, Piet Mondrian, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Marcel Duchamp, Chryssa, Anthony Caro, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Robert Barry, Larry Bell, Carlo Belloli, William Anastasi, Richard Artschwager, Ronald Balden, John Cage, Walter De Maria, Stephen Antonakos, Walter Darby Bannard, Allan D'Arcangelo, Stuart Davis, Mark di Suvero, Helen Frankenthaler, Jim Dine, Al Held, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Ralph Humphrey, Eva Hesse, Douglas Huebler, Will Insley, Patricia Johanson, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Yvonne Rainer, Julio Le Parc, David Smith, Richard Tuttle, Tony Smith, Keith Sonnier, James Raphael Soto, Clyfford Still, Les Levine, Victor Vasarely, Ad Reinhardt, John McCracken, Robert Morris, Kenneth Noland, Robert Whitman, Jules Olitski, Milton Resnick, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Jack Youngerman, George Rickey, Dorothea Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, Jan van Eyck, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and many others.
Good with general wear and previous owner underlining / notation. Ex-library.
2009, English
Hardcover (w. wax die-cut dust jacket), 336 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$87.00 - Out of stock
In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist's production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his recent gallery shows. Ryman's largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting's conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman's method—an act of ''learning by doing''—as well as his conception of painting as ''used paint'' sets him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists.
Ryman (born in 1930) is a self-taught artist who began to paint in earnest while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the 1950s. Hudson argues that Ryman's approach to painting developed from quotidian contact with the story of modern painting as assembled by MoMA director and curator Alfred Barr and rendered widely accessible by director of the education department Victor D'Amico and colleagues. Ryman's introduction to artistic practice within the (white) walls of MoMA, Hudson contends, was shaped by an institutional ethos of experiential learning. (Others who worked at the MoMA during these years include Lucy Lippard, who married Ryman in 1961; Dan Flavin, another guard; and Sol LeWitt, a desk assistant.) 112 colour plates.
Hudson's chapters—''Primer,'' ''Paint,'' ''Support,'' ''Edge,'' and ''Wall,'' named after the most basic elements of the artist's work—eloquently explore Ryman's ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman's work, she writes, tests the medium's material and conceptual possibilities. It signals neither the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 × 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Robert Hewison
The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created.
John Ruskin helped redefine art criticism in the nineteenth century through his attention to detail, his playful and engaging prose, and the conviction with which he discussed the subjects that mattered most to him. Ruskin’s ekphrastic writing became a way for readers to approach the experience of looking at great art without actually seeing it in person. Despite having written about Giotto on numerous occasions in Stones of Venice and Modern Painters, he never treated the Arena Chapel in its own right. Here Ruskin examines the panels and brings them life, describing their many hidden details, all the result of Giotto’s unrivaled genius. As Ruskin says, “Giotto was…one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
Long out of print, the Arundel Society first published Giotto and His Works in Padua between 1853 and 1860. It stands as Ruskin’s most compelling set of reflections on Giotto’s masterpiece—an artwork that, in Ruskin’s estimation, changed the very course of art history. Originally accompanied by a set of black and white woodcuts of the panels in the Chapel, this new edition presents each panel in vivid color photography, adding a useful visual aid to Ruskin’s lyrical descriptions. The result is a book that serves not only as an introduction for students of art history, but also as a discussion of what it means to be a great artist, by one of most influential writers ever to tackle visual art.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was an English critic of art, architecture, and society, who sought change through his polemical prose. Best know for his five-volume treatise on art, Modern Painters—published volume by volume from 1843 to 1860 – Ruskin applied Romantic thought to art criticism, rather than relying solely on religious tradition. In doing so, he opened up possibilities surrounding the appreciation and understanding of art, through emotive descriptions, rather than illustration. Particularly intrigued by the painting of the Gothic Middle Ages, Ruskin felt that painters such as Giotto and Fra Angelico were the ideal subject for modern painters. Ruskin’s then novel insistence that art and architecture are the direct expression of the conditions in which they were made, continues to influence the study of the fields today.
Giotto (c.1267–1337) is widely known for his role in liberating Italian painting from the Byzantine style of the early Middle Ages. Mainly active in Florence, although he may have been trained in Rome, he also worked in Avignon, Padua and Naples (1328-32). His contribution to challenging and forever changing Italian painting was widely acknowledged by Dante his contemporary, and later by Vasari. His style is associated with a supreme sense of momentous and his individualized, emotive figures are depicted with a new sense of three-dimensionality while inhabiting plausible architectural spaces. Giotto’s main surviving fresco cycles are those in the Arena Chapel, Padua, which probably date from just before 1305, and those in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels in Santa Croce, Florence, probably before 1328.
Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.
2017, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 × 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$20.00 - Out of stock
"As for you, my dear Balthus, you surely know full well the love that connects us. Yours with all my heart, Rilke."
Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating Letters to a Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous Letters to a Young Poet, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different languages, the present volume has been largely overlooked.
In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke’s constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent’s difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest letters.
Writing during his aged years, this volume paints a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, through the perspective of hindsight, and continued to embrace his openness towards other creative individuals. With an introduction by Rachel Corbett, author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (2016), this book is a must-have for Rilke’s admirers, young and old, and all aspiring artists.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a poet and novelist, best known for his highly lyrical poetry. He was born in Prague, but spent significant portions of his life in Paris, where he initially served as the sculptor Auguste Rodin’s secretary before going on to produce much of his important early work. Throughout his life, Rilke was continuously inspired by works of visual art. His biography of Rodin and his Letters on Cézanne, published posthumously, provide insight into the way visual artists, and their art, figured into his creative approach, and establish him as one of the key twentieth-century poets to engage with visual culture.
Dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes the ekphrasis series is part of David Zwirner Books’s ongoing effort to publish new and surprising pieces of writing on visual culture.
1969, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 25.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerije Grada Zagreba / Zagreb
$35.00 - Out of stock
Published by Galerije Grada Zagreba, Zabreb, in 1969, this handsome hardcover forms a comprehensive study of Yugoslav Niave Painting by author Boris Kelemen, profiling the work of Emerik Feješ, Franjo Filipović, Dragan Gaži, Ivan Generalić, Josip Generalić, Bosilj Ilija (Ilija Bašičević), Mijo Kovačić, Franjo Mraz, Vangel Naumovski, Ivan Rubazin, Matija Skurjeni, Ivan Večenaj, Stjepan Vecenaj, and Mirko Virius through full-colour tipped-in plates.
Naïve, or primitive art is a distinct segment of the art of the 20th century. In Croatia, naïve art was at first connected with the works of peasants and working people, ordinary men and women, self-taught, of whom the most successful, over the course of time, became professional artists. An identifiably individual style and poetic nature distinguishes the Naïve from other "amateur" painters and sculptors, often displaying unusual proportions and perspective, and certain illogicalities of form and space. Such characteristics are the expression of a free creative imagination, in a similar way to other 20th-century art movements such as Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Naïve art first appeared in Croatia at the beginning of the 1930s when the Zagreb Art Pavilion showcased an exhibition of the artists' association entitled Country (Zemlja) on 13 September 1931. The artists sought to show that talent does not only reside in certain social classes or privilege and started the association with naïve art and paintings of villages or by artists from the countryside rather than cities.
Very Good condition in original dust jacket (small dj corner chipping now preserved under plastic wrap).
1980, English
Softcover (stapled), 38 pages, 21.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
State Jewish Museum / Prague
$25.00 - Out of stock
Booklet publishing the short history of the experiences of the Czech children imprisoned by the Nazis in the garrison town of Terezín during World War II. The book presents written and illustrated samples of the magazine Vedem, published secretly by young boys, that contained childrens prose and poetry. The book presents paintings, drawings and collages by children from Terezín, depicting the reality of concentration camp life.
Vedem (In the Lead) was a Czech-language literary magazine that existed from 1942 to 1944 in the Terezín concentration camp, during the Holocaust. It was hand-produced by a group of boys living in the Home One barracks, among them editor-in-chief Petr Ginz and Hanuš Hachenburg. Altogether, some 700 pages of Vedem survived World War II. The magazine was written, edited, and illustrated entirely by young boys, aged twelve to fifteen, who lived in Barracks L417, or Home One, which the boys referred to as the Republic of Shkid. Each boy took a nickname to sign his articles. The content of Vedem included poems, essays, jokes, dialogues, literary reviews, stories, and drawings. The boys tried as much as possible to create a real magazine, even jokingly adding a price on the cover. The issues were then copied manually and read around the barracks on Friday night. For some time, it was also posted on the barracks bulletin board, however, it was decided to discontinue this practice because it was deemed dangerous in case of SS inspections. By 1944, most of the inhabitants of Barracks L417 had been deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and no more issues were produced. Of the one hundred boys who participated in the effort to produce Vedem, only about fifteen survived. Only one of them, Zdeněk Taussig, remained in Terezín until its liberation in May 1945. He had hidden it in a blacksmith shop where his father had worked, and brought it back with him to Prague after he was liberated.
Good copy of the only edition.
1985, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$70.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 18
PHANTASM AND SIMULACRA: The Drawings of Pierre Klossowski
July 1985
Edited by Paul Foss, Paul Taylor, Allen S. Weiss
Very special 1985 issue of Melbourne's ART & TEXT, dedicated to the work of Pierre Klossowski.
Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was a significant and influential philosopher, writer, translator and artist who befriended Georges Bataille and formulated an original stance on many theological issues, as well as the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. His first novel, Roberte, ce soir, appeared in 1954 as a limited edition containing six of his own erotic illustrations, after he rejected drawings by his younger brother, the painter Balthus. Following the encouragement of Robert Lebel, Andre Masson and Alberto Giacometti, Klossowski held his first exhibition in Paris in 1956, and subsequently produced numerous life-size drawings of erotic scenes imbued with mythological, allegorical and philosophical connotations. By the 1970s, he had won the acclaim of such eminent thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari. Of Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze once said, “That bodies speak has been known for a long time.”
CONTENTS:
Preface
Pierre Klossowski "On the Collaboration of Demons in the Work of Art"
Pierre Klossowski "SELF-PORTRAITS"
Pierre Klossowski "The Decline of the Nude"
Pierre Klossowski "The Phantasms of Perversion: Sade and Fourier"
J.-M. Monnoyer and Pierre Klossowski "In the Charm of Her Hand"
Rémy Zaugg and Pierre Klossowski "Simulacra"
MONTAGE
Pierre Zucca "From Roberte interdite"
PORTRAITS OF OTHERS
André Masson "Introduction"
Walo Von Fellenberg "Parallel Bars, Parallel Worlds"
Chantal Thomas "The Indiscreet Gaze"
Alphonso Lingis "The Incommunicable"
Allen S. Weiss "A Logic of the Simulacrum, or The Anti-Roberte"
Postface
Paul Foss "On the ”Difficulty” of Picturing the Emotions of Pierre Klossowski"
References
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.
2016, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.8 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$46.00 - Out of stock
This collection of essays by Martin Herbert considers various artists who have withdrawn from the art world or adopted an antagonistic position toward its mechanisms. A large part of the artist’s role in today’s professionalized art system is being present. Providing a counterargument to this concept of self-marketing, Herbert examines the nature of retreat, whether in protest, as a deliberate conceptual act, or out of necessity. By illuminating these motives, Tell Them I Said No offers a unique perspective on where and how the needs of the artist and the needs of the art world diverge. Essays on Lutz Bacher, Stanley Brouwn, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Trisha Donnelly, David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Cady Noland, Laurie Parsons, Charlotte Posenenske, and Albert York.
Martin Herbert is a writer and critic living in Berlin. He is associate editor of ArtReview and writes for international art journals. Previous books include The Uncertainty Principle (2014) and Mark Wallinger (2011).
Design by Fraser Muggeridge studio
2012, English
Softcover, 82 pages, 16 x 22 cm
Published by
Aspen Art Museum / Aspen
$38.00 - Out of stock
This catalogue was produced to accompany the exhibition Lucio Fontana "Ceramics" at the Aspen Art Museum, July 27 - October 7, 2012.
Best known for the slashed and cut canvases of the Concetti spaziali that he created primarily in the 1950s and 60s, Argentine–Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) used ceramics and clay modeling to explore larger problems in sculpture and painting. 'Lucio Fontana: Sculpture' is published in conjunction with the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated solely to the artist’s groundbreaking ceramic work, and explores the innovative and often contrarian ways in which Fontana made use of the medium.
1986, English / Japanese
Softcover, 140 pages, 24 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
Museum of Modern Art / Toyama
National Museum of Modern Art / Kyoto
Seibu / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Fantastic Japanese catalogue published by The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama; The Seibu Musuem of Art, Tokyo; The Asahi Shimbun and others in 1986 to accompany the major travelling exhibition of the work of Lucio Fontana in 1986, spanning five institutions across Japan.
This handsomely design (by Ikko Tanaka) full-colour book, presents the work of Italian artist Lucio Fontana across canvas, ceramic, drawing, and relief, dating throughout the 1930 up until the late 1960s, concentrating on his famous Concetto Spaziale works. Includes text by Franco Russoli in English and Japanese, an artist biography, bibliography and catalogue of works exhibited, plus historical photographs of Fontana.
2018, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Museum Abteiberg / Mönchengladbach
Kunstverein Hannover / Hannover
M HKA / Antwerp
Walther König / Köln
$47.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Monographic catalogue published by Koenig Books on the occasion of a series of exhibitions by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, Kunstverein Hannover, and M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. Heavily illustrated throughout with a broad cross-section of Anne-Mie's history of work in drawing, collage, sound, painting, video, performance, installation, and more. Texts by Menno Grootveld, Anders Kreuger, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Kathleen Rahn, Susanne Titz, Travis Jeppesen. Design by Sara de Bondt.
Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven (also known as AMVK) was born in Antwerp and lives in Antwerp and Berlin. She studied graphic design at the Fine Arts Academy in Antwerp and has been prolific in her output of drawings and other works on paper and synthetic material, as well as short videos, since the early eighties. Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven has been fascinated for a long time with the representation in the mass media of images of women, of interiors, of the kinetic powers of any kind of language. She investigates supra-moral connections in contemporary society s.a. between sex and technology. Her work connects different knowledge systems, explores the areas of the unconscious, and looks at moral aberrations or the obscene from a female point of view. In the nineties, hand-made paper works gave way to computer graphics, while text has always featured alongside images, underlining the message of Van Kerckhoven’s proud, sometimes exhibitionist female figures like song-lyrics. Music plays an important role in Van Kerchkoven’s creative production in parallel to her visual output, and she and Danny Devos have stood as a key pair of the Antwerp experimental music scene under the band name Club Moral (1981–now).
"In opposition to the arbitrary, which is the origin of every written and spoken language, I have placed the unspoken, the mystic. From despair to ecstasy, that is what the mystic is about now. This is the all-devouring lust for life and love. Unification, not feeling separated from the rest. No ego, no boundaries. Creation becomes one with its creator. I call it the analogue. The analogue versus the arbitrary. The analogue is ritual, evil, mystery, desire, yearning, lust, while the digital is control, technology, sublimation, dependence, cleanliness, transparency. The analogue plus the digital is what humans are about: perspective." - Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Some Sort of Manifesto, 2016–17
2017, English
Softcover (spiral-bound), 196 pages, 7.6 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$48.00 - In stock -
A prolific writer and documenter of both her art and her relationships, the public and private, Lee Lozano (1930-99) kept a series of personal journals from 1968 to 1972 while living in New York's SoHo neighbourhood. Eleven of these private books survive. Private Book 2 is the second in a series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles with spiral binding.The notebooks contain notes on her work, detailed interactions with artist friends and commentary on the alienations of gender politics, as well as philosophical queries into art's role in society and humourous asides from daily life. In the decade before her infamous "dropout piece" -- culminating in a move to Dallas where she would remain until her death -- Lozano returned to these notebooks, editing the entries, sometimes blacking out entire pages. Private Book 2 is the second in a series of 11 pocket-sized books, which are printed as facsimiles with spiral binding.
2018, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Raven Row / London
Walther König / Köln
$68.00 - Out of stock
This is the first monograph on K. P. Brehmer to appear in English and the first major publication on the artist since the Museum Friedericianum Kassel catalogue in 1998.
Part of Capitalist Realism – the initiative centred around Galerie René Block in Berlin in the mid to late 1960s, that included fellow artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter – KP Brehmer is increasingly recognised as a key figure in postwar German art in his own right.
Richly illustrated with previously unpublished archival images as well as more recent exhibition photographs, the texts by leading specialists (Jürgen Becker, René Block, KP Brehmer, Mark Fisher, Doreen Mende, Alex Sainsbury, Kerstin Stakemeier) focus on his practice during the 1960s and 1970s when he was developing his unique graphic representations of capital which anticipate todayʼs ubquitious data visualisation systems.