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.
2020, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 14.9 x 21 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
Whitechapel / London
$38.00 - In stock -
Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on major themes and ideas in contemporary art.
The first major anthology to focus on relationships between science fiction and contemporary art, with topics ranging from accelerating technological change to global urbanization.
Over the past two decades, artists and writers have increasingly used science fiction as a lens through which to search for fragments of truth emerging from the past or the future. The proliferation of science fiction in contemporary art practice and discourse reflects an increased understanding of how this narrative field continues to grow in relevance. This book is the first major anthology to focus on relationships between science fiction and contemporary art, and offers an essential read for all those exploring this vital genre.
Organizing its contributions according to four distinct approaches—"estrangement,” “futures,” “posthumanism,” and “ecologies”—this unique collection gathers key examples of the influence of science fiction in recent cultural development. It considers topics that include the integration and acceleration of technological change, global urbanization and concepts of futurity, the boundaries of social structures and nonhuman life, and the threatening evidence of climate change.
Artists surveyed include :
Laylah Ali, Pawel Althamer, Ama Josephine Budge, Lee Bul, Ellen Gallagher, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eduardo Kac, Patrick Keiller, Josh Kline, Lawrence Lek, Anne Lislegaard, Mariko Mori, Wangechi Mutu, The Otolith Group, Suzanne Treister
Writers include :
Peio Aguirre, Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Rosi Braidotti, Rachel Carson, Dawn Chan, T.J. Demos, Donna J. Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Wanuri Kahiu, Tom McCarthy, David Musgrave, Alondra Nelson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Darko Suvin
2014, English
Softcover (2 volume set), 784 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$75.00 - Out of stock
The first retrospective collection of 50 years of writing by our leading Arab-American innovative writer.
This landmark two-volume edition follows Adnan’s work from the infernal elegies of the 1960s to the ethereal meditations of her later poems, to form a portrait of an extraordinarily impassioned and prescient life. Ranging between essay, fiction, poetry, memoir, feminist manifesto, and philosophical treatise, while often challenging the conventions of genre, Adnan’s works give voice to the violence and revelation of the last six decades as it has centered, in part, within the geopolitics of the Arab world, and in particular the author’s native Beirut. Among the key works reproduced in their entirety are Sitt Marie Rose (1978); The Arab Apocalypse (1980); Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986); and Of Cities & Women (1993).
Love, for Adnan, is our only way to endure upheaval. It is not sentimental love. It is an ethics that seeks to preserve what we have rather than see it destroyed. It is a particular bravery, too. “Love in all its forms is the most important matter that we will ever face, but also the most dangerous, the most unpredictable, the most maddening,” Adnan writes.“But it is also the only salvation I know of.” - Andrew Durbin, novelist and Editor in Chief of Frieze Magazine
2020, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 12.7 x 20.4 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$28.00 - Out of stock
Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us. The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and questioning.
Part of the "Emergent Strategy" series, the book is divided into eighty short meditations, each grouped into “movements” with names like “Listen,” “Breath,” “Stay Black,” and “Go Deep.” A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do—or might—adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances. Gumbs’s narrative moves seamlessly between dolphins born in captivity and Black political prisoners giving birth behind bars, between the migratory patterns of dolphins and the Atlantic slave trade. [publisher's note]
2020, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Nightboat Books / New York
$42.00 - Out of stock
Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.
features the work of : Aaron El Sabrout, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Aeon Ginsberg, Akasha-Mitra, Kamden Hilliard, Amy Marvin, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Andrea Abi-Karam, Kay Gabriel, Ari Banias, Laurel Uziell, Bahaar Ahsan, Leslie Feinberg, Bianca Rae Messinger, Levi Bentley, Bryn Kelly, Liam O'brien, Caconrad, Listen Chen, Caelan Ernest Logan February Callie Gardner Lou Sullivan Cameron Awkward-Rich Mai Schwartz, Caspar Heinemann, Maxe Crandall, Charles Theonia, Miles Collins-Sibley, Ching-In Chen, Nat Raha, Clara Zornado & Jo Barchi, Natalie Mesnard, Nm Esc, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Noah Lebien, Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Nora Fulton, Evan Kleekamp, Nora Treatbaby, Faye Chevalier, Peach Kander, Harry Josephine Giles, Rachel Franklin Wood, Hazel Avery, Raquel Salas Rivera, Holly Raymond, Ray Filar, Ian Khara Ellasante, Rocket Caleshu, Jackie Ess Rowan Powell Jamie Townsend Samuel Ace Jayson Keery Stephen Ira Jesi Gaston, Sylvia Rivera, Jessica Bet, T Fleischmann, Jimmy Cooper, Trish Salah, José Díaz, Ty Little, Joshua Jennifer, Valentine Conaty, Espinoza, Xandria Phillips, Joss Barton, Xtian W & Anais Duplan, Zavé Martohardjono
2020, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
CCA / Montreal
$85.00 - Out of stock
Gordon Matta-Clark was born in 1943 in New York, son of American artist Anne Clark, and Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. He entered the architecture program at Cornell University in 1962 but left in 1963 and spent the following year in Paris living with his father and studying French Literature. He returned to Cornell 1964-1968, he did not, however, practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as "Anarchitecture." In mid-1969, Matta-Clark moved to New York City and his architectural "Cuttings", as well as his large corpus of drawings made him a prominent figure among his colleagues, including close friends and collaborators such as Jan Dibbetts and Robert Smithson. His influence as "artist's artist" on future generations cannot be overstated. Matta-Clark died at the age of 35. Many of his works are destroyed.
In 2011, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark handed over the entire archive – his library, manuscripts, films, correspondence, drawings, notes and works of art - to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where it now has been published annotated and edited in an exemplary way in this incredible volume. Only with this publication will his work become fully visible.
This book unpacks the comprehensive Gordon Matta-Clark collection at the CCA (CP138), opening it up to provisional readings from different points of view. Yann Chateigné reorganizes Matta-Clark’s library into areas of inquiry, from alchemy to psychoanalysis, as a framework for gathering traces—written and drawn—of his thinking. Hila Peleg reassembles hours of discarded film footage, challenging the notion of documentation and returning to view the physical and social contexts—the relational space—of Matta-Clark’s interventions. And from hundreds of travel photographs, Kitty Scott constructs a panorama of Matta-Clark’s visual notes on the world around him—a foil to his artworks. In foregrounding seemingly incidental parts of the collection, these studies manifest an exploratory way of working with archives, by which selecting, presenting, and writing are processes of ongoing research. Rather than synthesize, CP138 Gordon Matta-Clark: Readings of the archive by Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, and Kitty Scott extends the scope of what constitutes Matta-Clark’s body of work and thus the physical and intellectual terrain within which to situate it.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 176 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$34.00 - Out of stock
Everyone is a designer. But while many practitioners may be looking for solutions or ideological certainties, Easterling argues that solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Instead, Medium Design speaks to anyone looking for alternative approaches to the world's unresponsive or intractable dilemmas-from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. Such an approach joins many disciplines in considering not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them.
In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new innovations but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but put them together into productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organization of all kinds.
Reviews
“Easterling is one of our most provocative theorists of infrastructures and the critical actions that might make them better. Here she gives us ways to remix, radically, their ingredients. Who else could parse the ‘canine mind’ of the canny designer and city-dweller to show that we already know how to break the deadlock formed by binaries and manipulative media loops? Read this immensely engaging book to find a new toolkit for infiltrating, occupying, and recasting the mediated and material world.” – Caroline A. Jones, Professor in the Department of Architecture, MIT
2020, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 14 x 19 cm
Published by
Light Cone Editions / Paris
$40.00 - Out of stock
This new publication, Robert Breer A to Z, published by Light Cone Editions, is a self-portrait of Robert Breer. His life and work are presented as an imaginary lexicon, a form which he always admired as being emblematic of the joyous, unexpected, and chaotic nature of life itself.
Drawn from interviews, personal letters and public statements from 1957 to 2009, Robert Breer A to Z brings into a single volume the artist’s reflections on his films and his multiple forays into painting, drawing and kinetic sculpture.
Robert Breer has spent fifty years building up a totally atypical body of work which plays with different genres and abolishes the notions of space and time. Starting off as a painter, he then deconstructed his neoplastic works and ended up with kinetic objects. He dealt next with the thresholds of awareness and perception, both as a sculptor and a filmmaker. His films are composed of a jumble of images that pass at great speed, while his Floats move almost imperceptibly, in accordance with an unpredictable logic. Robert Breer developed his light yet rigorous style while associating with the New York underground in the Pop years. Continuing his subtle exploration of movement, his work still today causes the space of reality -irrevocably unstable- to waver.
Published under the direction of Scott Hammen with an introduction by Simon Rees, Robert Breer A to Z is co-published by Light Cone Editions and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.
2019, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$44.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This publication collects writings on the art scene of Kosovo over the past twenty years. In the 1990s Kosovars felt—as many other countries in the Balkan region did—the urgency to shape their own scene: in a search for identity, for nation building, in continuing or ending political conflicts, by trying to find a language to grasp recent social and political developments, or simply by continuing their practice in new, unstable times. This collection of writings and interviews offers insight into these processes through various perspectives (from curators, artists, and philosophers) on the latest artistic developments, and fosters reflection on how a local, prospering scene continuously raises new questions and addresses undiscovered topics hand in hand with the region’s historical struggles and current challenges in being the youngest state in Europe.
Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo is published in the context of the tranzit.at Glossary Series, which aims to encourage reflection on new approaches to creating common knowledge that are more in sync with our time than the prevalent epistemological models. The series focuses on changing global conditions—and on the fact that we require more equality in creating knowledge under these conditions—and the need to redefine artistic geographies so that they can attune themselves to this new situation.
Contributions by Sezgin Boynik, Charles Esche, Alush Gashi, HAVEIT, Astrit Ismaili, Shkëlzen Maliqi, Cathrin Mayer, Miran Mohar, Edi Muka, Vanessa Joan Müller, Kathrin Rhomberg, Vesa Sahatçiu, Dardan Zhegrova
A tranzit.at book
Design by Bardhi Haliti
2018, English / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
WIELS / Brussels
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
This book is the fourth volume in Vincent Meessen’s publication series Prospectus and published following the artist’s solo exhibitions “Sire, je suis de l’ôtre pays” at WIELS, Brussels, in 2016, and “Omar en mai” at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2018. The book is structured around the four major installations that made up these shows, and are placed in parallel with newly commissioned essays by scholars Pedro Monaville, Stefano Collicelli Cagol, and Ruth Baumeister, and a conversation between Tom McDonough and Vincent Meessen.
At the heart of these contributions are the untold histories and unexpected topicality of the Situationist International, modernity’s last international avant-garde, which reconsidered so radically the relationships between art, politics, and everyday life. Previously unpublished texts and reprints by Guy Debord, Lungela Diangani, and Omar Blondin Diop explore the Situationist International’s influence in sub-Saharan African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Senegal.
Installation views of the exhibitions show furthermore how Meessen uses original documents in order to re-evaluate their political potential in the present. As such, the book generously reflects on the artist’s discursive, collaborative, and para-curatorial activity of the past four years.
Edited by Vincent Meessen
Texts by Ruth Baumeister, Stefano Collicelli Cagol, Pedro Monaville; conversation by Tom McDonough
2020, English / Italian
Softcover (w. booklet), 300 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Danilo Montanari Editore / Ravenna
$80.00 - In stock -
The volume examines the most interesting and innovative photographic books that appeared in Italy in the decade in which "modern" photography developed in our country. A boundary publishing industry, which oscillates between autonomous visual research (starting from the rediscovered experimentalism in the futurist field) and a 'functional' use of photographic illustration, in the two parallel and often crossed fields of advertising and propaganda.
The large Italian companies (Olivetti, Fiat, Snia Viscosa, Montecatini, etc.) recognized in those years the importance of linking their image to innovative graphic projects, in which photography plays a much more effective role than drawing; at the same time the fascist regime, having concluded its first phase of expansion and consolidation, discovers the power of photography and avant-garde techniques, especially photomontage, in the context of those promotional and self-celebrating practices which it increasingly needs to drive and maintain consent.
The book collects and illustrates about one hundred works, which emerge from an almost forgotten (if not removed), but conspicuous and often high-level editorial production, many of which due to the work of leading artists of the period, including Antonio Boggeri, Erberto Carboni, Franco Grignani, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Pagano, Luigi Veronesi: tracing, we can say, the brief and intense history of graphic and photographic modernism in Italy.
Giorgio Grillo lives and works in Florence. He has dealt with Italian literature of the twentieth century, including the critical edition of Dino Campana's Canti Orfici. For some time he has been collecting photographs and photographic books, with particular attention to the photography of the origins and the historical avant-gardes of the last century.
2019, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 15 x 21cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
Serpentine Gallery / London
$85.00 $50.00 - In stock -
This already out-of-print major survey on renowned French artist Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) chronicles seminal works from the last decade, including his iconic Documenta 13 project "Untilled." An interview between Huyghe and Hans Ulrich Obrist and an essay by Dorothea von Hantelmann accompany drawings, diagrams, photographs, film stills and more.
As New with light cover wear (hence reduced price)
2018, English
Softcover, 286 pages, 17 x 23 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$56.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Ernst van Alphen, ‘Failed Images’ attempts to understand the divergence between photography and the reality it portrays, analysing the various ways the photograph transforms that which exists before the camera. Because the photographic medium enables very different practices, which in turn results in many kinds of images, it must also be examined from a perspective outside of the dominant approach to the medium, generally called the “snapshot”. This book therefore explores the photographic image by focusing on practices which refuse this conventional approach, namely staged, blurred, under- and overexposed, and archival photography.
2020, English
Softcover, 204 pages, 10.5 x 17 cm
Published by
Lenz Press / Milan
$36.00 - In stock -
When she started writing the Corona Tales, Chus Martínez had been weighing how people and the media were addressing the outbreak of the virus as an unprecedented disaster. One possible contribution, as curator and writer, would be to write a short story a day and post it on an Instagram account that many could access…
Martínez grew up with her grandparents till she was four, and so did her cousin, while both their parents migrated to a big city—hers to Barcelona, his to Basel—to work. The grandparents' childhood was marked by extreme poverty: the Spanish flu left the grandfather orphan of both parents; the grandmother's family, from the same small village in the north west coast of Spain, was also forced to encourage their children to help and work for money. These circumstances were reflected by them—with no trace of sorrow or bitterness. The recovery was so slow that the author's mother could not afford to attend school and it was only when she married that she and her father enrolled a night course. The stories about these two generations, posted daily, from Basel, around 7pm, offered a chance for gathering, if just virtually, demanding to identify vulnerabilities, how the COVID-19 crisis was being generalized, and how to research ways of doing. Accompanied for the first time in this book by new imagery, they provide tools for reflecting in the past and present tense.
“The effort to smile in the face of devastating circumstances is a sign of generosity that is embedded in our cultural codes. So, what could I do to entertain? Would they smile with the sweet embarrassment of reading stories on an open instagram account?” (Chus Martínez)
Chus Martínez (born 1972 in Ponteceso, Spain) has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Before she was the Chief Curator at El Museo Del Barrio (2012-2014), New York. She was dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department, and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008-2011), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005-2008) and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002-2005).
For the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Catalonia with the filmmaker Albert Serra; for the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005) she also curated the Cyprus National Pavilion; in 2014/2015 served as alliance of the 14th edition of the Istambul Biennial; in 2008 served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal among others; and a series of group exhibitions including “Pensée Sauvage” and “The Great Game To Come”. She was also the founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program for international artists, art writers and curators. While at MACBA Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, “Are you ready for TV?” In 2008 Martínez was the curator of the Deimantas Narkevičius retrospective exhibition, “The Unanimous Life” at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which traveled to major European museums.
Martínez lectures and writes regularly including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum, Mousse and Spike, among other international journals.
2021, English
Softcover, 424 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$54.00 - Out of stock
Experimental Jetset’s second volume in its self-reflective series is an inquiry into the role of the city as an infrastructure for language and vice versa, seen through the lens of four significant movements: Constructivism, Situationist International, Provo, and Post-Punk. Emerging from a research project and exhibition by the design studio, the book features extensive footnotes by 20 guest authors, including Linda van Deursen, Owen Hatherley, Adam Pendleton, Simon Reynolds, Lori Waxman, Mimi Zeiger, and others. An added bonus: it comes with a 26-page zine, zooming in on the design typology of the original exhibition.
2020, English
Softcover (w. supplement), 280 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$49.00 - Out of stock
Four years after 'Statement and Counter-Statement' (2015), Experimental Jetset returns with their second paperback for Roma Publications. Whereas the previous publication had a more overall monographic scope, 'Full Scale False Scale' focuses on a single project: the large, site-specific installation that the studio recently created for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, commissioned to coincide with the museum’s reopening in October 2019. Part reader, part collage, the book forms a subjective archive of research material, just as constructed as the installation itself – an investigation that took them from esoteric colour theories to dark political alliances, and from modernist diagonals to postmodern arches.
2008, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Clouds / Auckland
$55.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
A comprehensive anthology, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader provides a snapshot of digital art practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Editors Stella Brennan and Su Ballard present essays, artists' pageworks and personal accounts that explore the production and reception of digital art. Ranging from research into the preservation of digital artworks to the environmental impact of electronic culture, from discussions of lo-tech aesthetics to home gaming, and from sophisticated data mapping to pre-histories of new media, this book presents a screen grab of digital art in Aotearoa New Zealand.
All contributors are members of Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA), New Zealand's only digital artists' network. With its mix of work by artists, theorists and educators, this reader represents some of the best new thinking about digital art practices in Aotearoa New Zealand, reflecting the politics of location, yet highly relevant to the wider contexts of digital media art and culture.
Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard
Texts by Adam Hyde, Andrew Clifford, Caroline McCaw, Danny Butt, Douglas Bagnall, Eu Jin Chua, Helen Varley Jameison, Jacquie Clarke, Janine Randerson, Julian Oliver, Julian Priest, Karl D.D. Willis, Kurt Adams, Lissa Mitchell, Maree Mills, Melanie Swalwell, Morgan Oliver, Sally Jane Norman, Sean Cubitt & Bevin Yeatman, Stella Brennan, Stephen Cleland, Su Ballard, Trudy Lane & Ian Clothier, Vicki Smith & Adam Hyde, Zita Joyce
Published by Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds
2013, English
Softcover, 344 pages (249 color ills.), 18 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$105.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Jan Verwoert, Our Literal Speed, Boris Groys, Pavel Pepperstein, Renata Salecl, Benedict Seymour, Konstanze Schmitt, Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle, Ritwik Ghatak, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Stephan Dillemuth, Roee Rosen, Christian von Borries, Keti Chukhrov, Josef Dabernig, Olga Chernysheva, Władysław Strzemiński, Carlfriedrich Claus et al.
Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly, a new triennial of contemporary art. The project—which takes the form of an exhibition and this book—imagines a contemporary rewriting of the novel as an archipelago of fictitious research institutes. Through an aggregate narrative of essays, works of fiction, artworks, heterogeneous research materials, and curatorial notes, it delves into the idea that contemporary “artistic research” may be the place where the dialectical materialist magic of Monday Begins on Saturday has its afterlife.
Design by textandpictures
2020, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Cosa Mentale / Marseille
$53.00 - Out of stock
Jorge Luis Borges, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Yasushiro Ozu, Mark Rothko, Jorge Oteiza - a writer, an architect, a filmmaker, a painter, a sculptor. Five personalities of the 20th century separated by their mediums, their subjects of investigation and their disciplines. They are brought together in this book by the need to save art from its current alteration, and to bring it back to a more contemplative and introspective dimension.
It is a form of spiritual revolt that architect Carlos Martí Arís (Barcelona, 1948 - 2020) highlights through this transversal analysis of different artistic expressions that mix and meet to enrich his reflection. The key words of this consideration, which has the appearance of a manifesto, are: silence, contemplation, renunciation, transparency, anonymity and atemporality. Twenty years later, the lesson of Carlos Martí Arí is contemporary and of fundamental importance for our discipline today
Edited by Claudia Mion and Fabio Licitra
Cosa Mentale is a collective and independent publishing project which promotes new reflections within the field of architecture.
2021, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$70.00 - In stock -
In this thorough critical appraisal, 20 specialists on modern art, art history, philosophy and religious studies examine the unique art, the cultural circumstances and art-historical positioning of Swedish abstractionist Hilma af Klint. Topics explored range from early abstract art and the impact of Darwinism to Goethe’s colour theory, as well as the importance of occult religious movements such as theosophy and anthroposophy that influenced the early modernists, and discussions of af Klint’s own personal diary notes and research.
The book is based on the seminars that were held in conjunction with the exhibition Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction in 2013. This extremely successful exhibition attracted a record number of visitors to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, after which it continued to the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 452 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the legendary Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde by P. Adams Sitney, published by Oxford University Press in 1974.
Critics hailed Visionary Film as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling, and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in 1974. "Without question it is the first such book on the avant-garde film - the first one that probes this field in such depth, with such perspective and vision, with such insight and intelligence." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
From the book jacket:
The first book to provide a coherent view of the avant-garde film tradition in America, this is also the first book to assess in depth the work of the major film-makers in this tradition. Twenty-four film-makers are fully discussed and many films of each are analyzed, including Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Jonas Mekas's Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, and Michael Snow's Wavelength. Liberal use of original and previously unpublished documents and statements by the film-makers themselves shows the theoretical contributions of these film-makers to the general theory of film and adds richness and weight to the study. Sixty-six still photographs from films further enhance the value of the text.
P. Adams Sitney's approach is historical as well as analytical. He relates the avant~garde film tradition to a larger native American tradition encompassing all the arts: that of visionary romanticism. He also connects it to the European avant-garde film of the 1920s, seeing the origin and development of a subjective cinema (and the forms it generates) in the kind of responses that the independent film-makers of the late 1940s made to their Dadaist and Surrealist sources. Sitney shows that far from being a chaos of different styles, the American avant-garde film tradition consists of an ordered progression of types: the 'trance' film, the 'mythopoeic' film, the 'graphic' film, the 'lyrical' film, the 'diary' film, and the 'structural' film. With hundreds of independent films being made each year, with the increased acceptance of avant-garde films by the nation's film archives and the academic community, the need for this kind of study has long been felt. It is sure to be widely read and discussed.
About the author:
P. Adams Sitney is Co-Director of the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and teaches cinema at New York University. He has also lectured extensively on film at museums of modern art, universities, and cinematheques in Europe and in South America. An editor of Film Culture magazine, he is the editor of the Film Culture Reader.
Chapters: 1. Meshes of the Afternoon 2. Ritual and Nature 3. The Potted Psalm 4. The Magus 5. From Trance to Myth 6. The Lyrical Film 7. Major Mythopoeia 8. Absolute Animation 9. The Graphic Cinema: European Perspectives 10. Apocalypses and Picaresques 11. Recovered Innocence 12. Structural Film 13. Notes 14. Index
2021, English
Hardcover, 512 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Lars Müller / Zürich
$100.00 - Out of stock
In the 1890s, the Berlin artist, sculptor and teacher Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) started to photograph plants, seeds and other illustrative material from nature for the purpose of teaching his students about the patterns and designs found in natural forms. His close-ups of the smallest plant parts, magnified up to 30 times their natural size, startle us as they dramatically highlight the geometrical and sculptural properties of plants. Published in 1928, his first collection of photographs, Urformen der Kunst (later translated into English as Art Forms in Nature) became an international bestseller and remains one of the most significant photobooks of the 20th century.
Karl Blossfeldt: Variations is the first monograph to examine the reception of Blossfeldt’s work. Drawing on unpublished materials, it analyzes the photographs’ replication in teaching materials, pattern books, art books and in the pages of the illustrated press. The six sections of the book trace the paths that Blossfeldt’s legendary plant motifs took in their incarnations as specimens, illustrations, patterns, analogues, models and abstractions from 1890 to 1945. Thematic contemporary appraisals illustrating the rediscovery of Blossfeldt's motifs in design and architecture over the past 20 years complement this new perspective on the beloved German photographer.
Ulrike Meyer Stump is a lecturer in the Knowledge Visualisation program in the Department of Design at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland. She holds an MA in Museology from the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and a PhD in Art History from Princeton University. Her work as a writer, editor, and curator focuses on the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt, contemporary photography, and the history of the photo book.
2020, English
Softcover with flaps, 120 pages, 12.5 x 19. 5cm
Published by
MACK / London
$22.00 - Out of stock
"The tension implicit in any photograph is the tension between an inert, black-and-white, two-dimensional object, and an event that actually existed in the phenomenal world. A successful photograph mediates, though never completely resolves that tension.”
In 1972, as his career was beginning to take off, Lewis Baltz conducted a revealing interview, his first considered statement about photography. Never published, the interview has recently resurfaced, and is printed here for the first time. In an increasingly sardonic exchange Baltz describes the character of his practice, articulates his position within and against the world of photography, and comments on his intellectual heritage and professional ambition. A penetrating exploration of the character of his medium, Baltz’s artistry and mercurial presence are strikingly laid bare.
Baltz’s interview is fully annotated with an introductory essay by Duncan Forbes.
DISCOURSE is a series of small books in which a cultural theorist, curator or artist explores a theme, an artwork or an idea in an extended illustrated text.
2018, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Kunstverein / Amsterdam
$34.00 - Out of stock
'The Joke Book' is the first printed edition of the complete jokes & messages file that was found on the computer of famed American art dealer, curator, author, researcher and champion of conceptual art Seth Siegelaub (1941-2013) by his partner Marja Bloem. It contains jokes, quotes, and pieces of advice, that he collected since 1999 and regularly redistributed via email amongst his friends.
With contributions by Alex Alberto, John Baldessari, Marja Bloem, Myrna Bloom, Martin Browne, Alan Kennedy, David Kunzle, Joel Miller, Loren Miller, Kay Robertson, Laurent Sauerwein, Seth Siegelaub, Joan Simon, Kira Simon-Kennedy, Peter Sinclair, Steven Wright, and an introduction by Huan Hsu (written after a long conversation with Marja Bloem).
2017, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.7 x 22.8 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$65.00 - Out of stock
The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken's tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken's studio.
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken's oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor's engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty.
Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken's work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.