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.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 19.5 x 26.5 cm
Published by
La Loge / Brussels
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$22.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Mark Mann
When first introduced, mass-market paperbacks sparked a publishing revolution. Critics despised them as lowbrow diversions, which did not impact their popularity. But the business model barely worked. Prices were so low, the books needed to sell in incredible numbers to make a profit. An industry norm emerged to pump up sales, whereby most of the novels were wrapped with images of women in provocative settings and states of undress. Many readers were duly provoked to purchase, but this recurring allure eventually lost its sway.
Simultaneously, an opposing theme of essentialism was asserting itself in grocery stores. The No Frills brand presented goods in unadorned packaging. It was as if the very intention to sell had been excised from the label’s straightforward design and terse declaration of contents—SALAD DRESSING, FRUIT PRESERVES, LAUNDRY DETERGENT. No Frills stripped the cloying appeal of traditional marketing and replaced it with a candid offering of canned beets and corned beef, pure and plain.
Inspired by this direct approach, Terry Bisson and art director Frank Kozelek developed the No-Frills book series in the early 1980s. Signature Strengths, conceived and edited by Boy Vereecken, reproduces in full the four books published in the series—Western, Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance—as well as critical evaluations of the fascinating experimental endeavor in genre writing and mass-market publishing.
Copublished with La Loge, Brussels
Design by Boy Vereecken
2009, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$32.00 - Out of stock
The first collection of writings by one of the most innovative architects and educators of the 1950s and 1960s, this book includes a wealth of recently discovered archival materials and many previously unpublished photographs. Featured texts include a selection of Paul Rudolph's published critical writings, which cover such topics as Rudolph's views about the architecture and city planning of his time and the proper way to educate an architectural student. Recent controversies about the preservation of many of Rudolph's buildings--including the landmark Art and Architecture Building at Yale, which celebrates its 45th anniversary and grand reopening in November 2008--make this a timely publication.
Foreword by Robert A. M. Stern
1992, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 84 pages, 14.5 x 20.5 cm
Ed. of 500, 1st edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
Kerb Your Dog / Sydney
$100.00 - Out of stock
Kerb Your Dog was an artist-edited anthology of pages by contemporary Australian and International artists, published in Sydney, Australia. Edited by John Nixon and John Young and published in an edition of 500 copies, this volume from 1992 - "TEXTBOOK" - features pages by John Barbour, Eugene Carchesio, Tony Clark, Peter Cripps, Aleks Danko, John Dunkley-Smith, Clinton Garofano, Ross Harley, Tim Johnson, Lyndal Jones, Maria Kozic, Rosemary Laing, Shelley Lasica, Lindy Lee, Geoff Lowe, Robert Macpherson, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Susan Norrie, David O'Halloran, Robert Owen, Mike Parr, Jacky Redgate, Carole Roberts, Vivienne Shark Lewitt, Peter Tyndall, Ken Unsworth, Geoffrey Weary, Wood / Marsh Architecture Pty. Ltd., John Young, and an essay by Janet Shanks. An invaluable collection of artist's texts from Australia in this very scarce document.
2017, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 9.5 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$15.00 - Out of stock
How did art escape the deadlock of the Situationists’ anti-art refusal? Did the relational artists, with their repetitions of Situationist slogans and techniques, outline a sustainable, micro-political alternative to Guy Debord’s dream of surpassing art and realizing philosophy? Looking back at some of the Situationists’ confrontations with the museum, this book traces a path beyond the tragedy of negativity and the litany of recuperation. At the center is the concept of play; originally adopted as the principle of reconciled life, it returns as the lever of instrumentalization. But in the extraterrestial wasteland of the present, spaces of ludic coexistence and experimentation may remain possible, provided that pessimism can be adequately organized.
part of the All the King’s Horses Series, edited by Daniel Birnbaum and
Kim West
Copublished between Sternberg Press and Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Design by Studio Christopher West
2016, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 14.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$52.00 - Out of stock
While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe—and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North—Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art(2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.
“Decolonizing Nature presents a timely critical analysis of the parameters and limitations of philosophical, artistic, and curatorial models responding to anthropogenic climate change. Rich and informative, the book makes an impassioned argument for a post-anthropocentric political ecology, in which the aesthetic realm enjoins with Indigenous philosophies and environmental activism to challenge the neoliberal corporate-state complex. It invites us to confront tough questions on how we might collectively reimagine and realize environmental justice for humans and nonhumans alike.” — Jean Fisher, Emeritus Professor in Fine Art and Transcultural Studies, Middlesex University
“Astute and ambitious. Essential reading for anyone interested in the arts, activism, and environmental change. Demos moves with impressive ease across national boundaries, cultural forms, social movements, and ecological theories.” — Rob Nixon, Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment, Princeton University
“Demos breaks new ground in art criticism. In an expansive analysis of polyvocal artist-activist practices in the Global South and the North, Demos eschews environmental catastrophism, scientific determinism, and techno-fixes to highlight collaborative resistance to neocolonial violence and neoliberal collusion-to-plunder. He is also searching for what the path forward might be. Rigorous, accessible, and rebellious, Decolonizing Nature is an inspiring and indispensible contemporary art manifesto.” — Subhankar Banerjee, Lannan Chair of Land Arts of the American West and Professor of Art and Ecology, University of New Mexico
“With Decolonizing Nature, Demos extends his formidable intellectual project to a realm that has until recently often been characterized by varying degrees of naïveté, obscurantism, and indeed green-washing: the relationship between art and ecology. The first systematic study of its kind, Decolonizing Nature is an exemplary combination of militant research and contemporary art history that will resonate with activists on the front lines as much as those working in the art field, reframing the latter as a site of struggle in its own right as we come to terms with the so-called Anthropocene.”
—Yates McKee, author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition
“Demos’s ability to distill and interrelate heterogeneous discourses, practices, and eco-political contexts, without flattening them in the process, is a breathtaking feat and, moreover, one that rises to the demands of his complex and urgent subject. As clear in its argumentation as it is dense with information, the meat of this book lies in its detailed discussion of specific artworks and the environmental struggles from which they emerge and to which they ambitiously, and often brilliantly, respond. Decolonizing Nature makes a forceful case for why and how art matters, now more than ever.”
—Emily Eliza Scott, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and coeditor of Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics
Design by Miriam Rech, Berlin
2015, English
Softcover with dust jacket, 380 pages (19 b/w and 47 colour ill.), 12.4 x 19.4 cm,
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$45.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Berenice Abbott, Leonor Antunes, Marcel Broodthaers, Roger Callois, Hanne Darboven and Lucy R. Lippard, Eric Duyckaerts, Max Frisch, Frederich Froebel, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, Florian Hecker and Quintin Meillasoux, Alfred Jarry, On Kawara, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, F. T. Marinetti, Daria Martin, Mario Merz, Helen Mirra, Man Ray, Ben Rivers and Mark von Schlegell, Pamela Rosenkranz and Erik Wysocan, Robert Smithson, Paul Valéry, Iannis Xenakis
In the Holocene is based on a 2012 group exhibition of the same name at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explored art as a speculative science, investigating principles more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought. Through the work of an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition and book propose that art acts as an investigative and experimental form of inquiry, addressing or amending what is explained through traditional scientific or mathematical means: entropy, matter, time (cosmic, geological), energy, topology, mimicry, perception, consciousness, et cetera. Sometimes employing scientific methodologies or the epistemology of science, other times investigating phenomena not restricted to any scientific discipline, art can be seen as a form of inquiry into the physical and natural world. In this sense, both art and science share an interest in knowledge, realism, and observable phenomena, yet are subject to different logics, principles of reasoning, and conclusions.
Works by Berenice Abbott, John Baldessari, Rosa Barba, Robert Barry, Uta Barth, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Carol Bove, Marcel Broodthaers, Matthew Buckingham, Hanne Darboven, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Terry Fox, Laurent Grasso, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Rashid Johnson, Kitty Kraus, Germaine Kruip, Daria Martin, John McCracken, Trevor Paglen, Man Ray, Ben Rivers, Pamela Rosenkranz, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Georges Vantongerloo, Lawrence Weiner
Copublished with MIT List Visual Arts Center
Design by Kloepfer-Ramsey-Kwon
2012, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 25 color ills., 24 b/w ills, 11.2 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$26.00 - Out of stock
In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In the period coinciding with the discovery of Mengele’s skeleton, scientists began to appear in human rights cases as expert witnesses, called to interpret and speak on behalf of things—often bones and human remains. But the aesthetic, political, and ethical complications that emerge with the introduction of the thing in war crimes trials indicate that this innovation is not simply one in which the solid object provides a stable and fixed alternative to human uncertainties, ambiguities, and anxieties.
The complexities associated with testimony—that of the subject—are echoed in the presentation of the object. Human remains are the kind of things from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed. Their appearance and presentation in the courts of law and public opinion has in fact blurred something of the distinction between objects and subjects, evidence and testimony.
Co-published with Portikus, Frankfurt am Main
Design by Zak Group
1968, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 42 pages, 14 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Contemporary Films Limited / London
Federation of Film Societies / London
$15.00 - Out of stock
Film was the magazine of the Federation of Film Societies, published in London.
Vol. 51 Spring 1968 features articles on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eric Rohmer, Kirsten Stenbaek, Jonas Cornell, Vera Chytilova, Dusan Makavejev, Jean Renoir, B. P. Schulberg, and much more.
Cover image: Vera Chytilova's "Daisies"
1984, English
Softcover, 156 pages (260 b/w & 140 colour ill.), 28.0 x 23.0 cm
Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Andrea Branzi, The Hot House was one of the finest books published to trace the history of Italy's radical design studios from 1960 to the dawn of Memphis. Through academic texts and profuse visual documentation of the work of Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Superstudio, Ettore Sottsass, Natalie Du Pasquier, UFO Group, Enzo Mari, Alchymia, Michele De Lucchi, 9999, Archizoom Associati, Mattheo Thun, Memphis, and many others.
2017, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Art Against Art / Berlin
$18.00 - In stock -
EDITORIAL
If a cultural “renaissance” would hypothetically take place, it would require each and every artist to subjectively fight their own decay – opting out of the easy options that contribute to it. Regressive accelerationism, idleness, non-participation, the transformation of the self into geography, the consolidation of a speculative form of branding, conformity, normalization, parasitical absorption of information without surplus on it, speculative mass production, opportunism, self design rather than social design, emphasis on passive free flows, arto-biography without entitlement, reactionary comfort-seeking, unnecessary self indulgence, tautological mirrorings of the market in place of relevance, trolling, rubbish, depression, herd justification of stasis – in terms of game theory, the probability of each and every single artist avoiding any of these modes of participation (which have been offering them traction in varying degrees) – seems to be a long shot. The only way one can collectively encourage “renaissance” is by rewarding negentropy and providing personal merit to the artists who create it.
Of course in game theory, if each individual pursues their private interests, the collective outcome is always worse than if the individual agreed upon a common collective value as true. At best there is a personal advantage in an art world fit for no-one rendering it a solitary place, at worst there is a social darwinism that eventually takes hold of every individual as victim one by one in order of rank. This kind of fierce survival of the fittest system is not actually sustainable as Hobbesians or speculators rely on a majority quotient of Kantians to exist in order to gain an advantage. This means that those who rely on others to produce art (or intellectual ideas or progress for them) are dependent on growth produced by others to sustain themselves. Without growth from somewhere, there is nothing to grab. Without traction, one will see the stagnation of ideas that we are already witnessing, which will embed itself further into our culture.
The danger is...
CONTENTS
Editorial
Mitchell Algus – The Culture of Consensus
Philip Sandifer – Haunt the Future
Image spread by Roy Ascott
Patricia MacCormack – Art: Inhuman Ecstasy
Image spread by Justin Shoulder
Manuel Gnam – What to do with Ambiguity in Art when the Poles Shift
Iain Spence – The Quest for Wholeness Within Atavistic Pop Culture
Artist edition by Matthew Langan-Peck
2016, English / German
Softcover, 540 pages, 22 x 30 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$70.00 - Out of stock
Having represented Beuys, Richter and Polke, German gallery owner , art publisher, art collector and curator René Block (born 1942) ranks among the central figures of the 1960s avant-garde. This publication collects writings by and interviews with Block, scanned from their original publications and organized chronologically, as well as an illustrated published history, artist portraits (taken by Block), performance ephemera, bibliography, and more. An enormous book that, via Block, encompasses the work of so many important movements and figures of 1960s - 1990s art.
Although primarily a German language publication, many of the original articles are in English. Regardless of language, the valuable historical listings translate.
2017, English / German
Softcover, 168 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$39.00 - Out of stock
German filmmaker, visual artist and writer Hito Steyerl (born 1966) is a leading voice on media and the global circulation of images. In this new essay collection, she deals with images and sounds that create new relationships to objects, and themselves become and produce other objects.
2017, English / German
Softcover (w. printed plastic wraps), 340 pages, 16.5 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Kunsthaus Bregenz / Austria
Walther König / Köln
$58.00 - Out of stock
The present book – the fourth and last volume in the series of KUB Arena publications – goes far beyond a documentation of KAMP KAYA’s activities. Rather it is the very first comprehensive publication on KAYA, a joint project initiated by the painter Kerstin Brätsch and the sculptor Debo Eilers in 2010, in collaboration with the then 13-year-old Kaya Serene. In addition to a comprehensive and carefully compiled catalogue raisonné, the publication documents all of KAYA’s past exhibitions and includes seminal essays by Boško Blagojević, Scott Roben, and Kerstin Stakemeier – who have all been following KAYA’s work for many years – as well as a conversation with Burmamyanmar aka Daniel Chew. Altogether the publication provides profound insights into this important and exceptional artistic collaboration. In a similar manner to the volumes that have been published to date (On Performance, Anfang Gut. Alles Gut. Actualizations of the futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1913), and Art and Ideology Critique After 1989), this last volume in the series could also potentially become one of the key references on the topic.
Edited by Eva Birkenstock
with texts by Boško Blagojević, Scott Roben, and Kerstin Stakemeier
Graphic design: HIT Berlin
2013, English / German
Softcover, 165 pages, 23.5 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$40.00 - Out of stock
On Performance is the first volume published in this series; it not only documents the performance project that took place in the KUB Arena in the winter of 2010/11, but also contains in-depth essays by Giles Bailey and Eva Meyer examining the theory and history of performance. Artists’ contributions especially created for the publication by Ruth Buchanan, “Coming to Have A Public Life, Is It Worth It?”, Simon Fujiwara, Suchan Kinoshita, Kooperative für Darstellungspolitik, Falke Pisano, and Ian White appear alongside an interview with the participating artists by Eva Birkenstock and Joerg Franzbecker, with accompanying comments by Marina Vishmidt.” (KUB)
2014, English / French
Hardcover, 240 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Published by
Carré d'art / Nîmes
$48.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Branka Stipančić.
Texts by Jean-Marc Prevost, Branka Stipančić, Igor Zabel, Ana Devi.
Personal Cuts focus is conceptual tendencies, in the broadest sense of the term, starting with the neo-avant-garde from the periods of 1950s and 1960s, the “New Art Practice” of the 1970s and expands to include some art of today that has a strong conceptual background. “Conceptual Art” in Zagreb is understood differently to the “western canon” and covers an enormous range and means of expression, a wide array of works and practices. The artists moved towards new materials, media, methods and behavior they shifted their interests from objects to the “conduct” of making art in search of a redefinition of the role of the artist towards social, political, and economical realities and within the places they were (and are) living.
After the Croatian cultural season in France in 2012 and the entry of this state in the European Union in 2013, Carré d'Art-Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nimes hosting in 2014 an exhibition with a historical perspective on contemporary artistic production from Zagreb both innovative and committed. This publication is a direct extension of the show, opening with the chronology of radical production and its context, in which Branka Stipančić backs on the 1950s to 1970s, notably with the Gorgona Group, Exat 51 and to contemporary productions.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Carré d'art, Nîmes, from October 17, 2014 to January 11, 2015.
Works by Gorgona Group, Josip Vaništa, Julije Knifer, Dimitrije Bašičević, Mangelos, Ivan Kožarić, Tomislav Gotovac, Goran Trbuljak, Sanja Iveković, Dalibor Martinis, Mladen Stilinović, Vlado Martek, Boris Cvjetanović, Igor Grubić, David Maljković, Andreja Kulunčić, &, Božena Končić, Badurina.
Branka Stipančić, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1983 to 1993, director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1993 to 1996, she is now an art historian, curator and editor based in Zagreb. She holds degrees in art history and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb.
2017, English
Hardcover (spiral bound in box-card covers), 48 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$28.00 - In stock -
University Construction was a one-day exhibition by David Homewood and Bronté Lambert. The exhibition was open from 11am to 7pm on 23 June 2015. It was held in a classroom of John Medley Building at the University of Melbourne. The exhibition presented a variety of readymade, found and modified objects—many sourced from the University campus—in geometric configurations on the classroom floor, accompanied by a flyer and information sheet.
The publication University Construction serves as a record of the exhibition. It includes photographs of the exhibition, along with scans of the flyer and information sheet. The publication also includes More Minor Constructions, a series of photographs taken several weeks after the exhibition closed, in the classroom where the exhibition was held.
The publication serves a documentary function; it also builds a discursive context around the exhibition. It features texts by David Homewood, Helen Johnson, Paris Lettau and Elizabeth Newman. The texts draw out ideas, issues and themes related to the exhibition, directly and indirectly. Each text engages an old question that continues to exert a hold on the present—the question of the relationship between art and the university, and the university and art.
Editor: David Homewood
Sub-editor: Bronté Lambert
Copy-editors: Michael Ascroft, Helen Hughes and Audrey Schmidt
Designers: David Homewood and Matt Hinkley
Photographer: Christo Crocker
Published in an edition of 100 copies.
1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 342 pages, 270 x 280 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
U.M.I. Research Press / Michigan
$150.00 - Out of stock
First, hardcover edition of "LOOKING CRITICALLY: 21 YEARS OF ARTFORUM MAGAZINE", the heavy 342 page volume anthology of the first 21 years of the world's most important modern and art journal. An incredibly valuable collection of art theory.
Edited by Amy Baker Sandback, designed by Roger Gorman and Mary Beath and published in 1984 by U.M.I. Research Press, this dense volume, bound in hardcover to the dimensions of a copy of ARTFORUM, begins with an Ed Kienholz review at the Ferus Gallery from ARTFORUM's June 1962 inaugural issue, and ends with Barbara Kruger reviewing the film "TRON" for the November 1982 issue. An amazing compendium of articles and reviews from the magazine's important first 21 years, featuring contributions by the likes of John Cage, Robert Morris, Kate Steinitz, Henry T. Hopkins, Don Factor, Robert Pincus-Witten, Dennis Adrian, John Coplans, Hilton Kramer, Harold Rosenberg, Henry Geldzahler, John Cage, Walter Hopps, Ed Ruscha, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rosenblum, Dan Flavin, Boris Groys, Sam Wagstaff, Billy Kluver, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert Rosenblum, Roger Shattuck, Ad Reinhardt, Mel Bochner, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Barbara Rose, Manny Farber, Michael Fried, Robert Morris, Philip Leider, Hollis Frampton, Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Lawrence Alloway, Barbara Kruger, Jane Livingston, Lizzie Borden, Kenneth Baker, Laurie Anderson, Agnes Martin, Cindy Nemser, Sidney Tillim, Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Roberta Smith, Peter Plagens, Peter Schjeldahl, J. Hoberman, Hal Foster, Richard Flood, Carter Ratcliff, Stuart Morgan, Max Kozloff, Donald Kuspit, Dan Graham, Walter De Maria, Komar & Melamid, Edit De Ak, Lawrence Weiner, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anselm Kiefer, Thomas McEvilley, Louise Bourgeois, Ingrid Sischy, and too many more to list. Artists featured include: Josef Albers, Richard Tuttle, Jo Baer, Carl Andre, Ant Farm, Hans Arp, Max Bill, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Lee Bontecou, Constantin Brancusi, Bertholt Brecht, Richard Avedon, Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Lynda Beglis, Larry Bell, Terry Fox, James Byers, Rober Barry, Marcel Breuer, AA Bronson, Luis Buñel, Daniel Buren, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Caro, Marcel Broodthaers, John Chamberlain, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Merce Cunningham, Sonia Delauney, Walter de Maria, Bruce Connor, Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Walker Evans, Dan Flavin, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Lucio Fontana, Hollis Frampton, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Gilbert & George, Philip Glass, John Cage, Nancy Graves, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Nancy Grossman, Walter Gropius, Hans Haacke, Hairy Who, David Hockney, Douglas Huebler, Jorg Immendorff, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward Keinholz, Paul Klee, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, André Masson, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, Jannis Kounellis, Markus Lüpertz, El Lissitzky, Rene Magritte, Robert Mapplethorpe, John McCracken, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell, Ree Morton, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzio, A. R. Penck, Irving Penn, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Larry Poons, Ken Price, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Roman Polanski, Jackson Pollock, Steve Reich, Gerrit Rietveld, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Dorothae Rockburne, James Rosenquist, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, Lucas Samaras, Kurt Schwitters, Oscar Schlemmer, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Robert Venturi, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Saul Steinberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Taut, Jean Tinguely, Anne Truitt, Paul Wunderlich, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Hitchcock, and so many more.
Very uncommon hardcover edition, with dust jacket.
2011, English
Softcover, 374 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$48.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
‘Every kind of change belongs to a form of community art,’ states the Italian philosopher Antonio Negri. This is the inverse of the premise that community art can be an integral component of desired social changes. Negri confronts community art, its supporters and critics with a challenging responsibility, and extends this to include everyone who wants to bring about change in social, political, economic, technological or ecological arenas. Communal and artistic thinking go hand in hand. In Community Art, visual and performing artists and theorists employ diverse modes of thinking and writing to explore the practices and concepts of community art in western and non-western societies. The book does not offer a cut-and-dried theoretical model, but presents a new critical reformulation of community art in society.
Contributors: Tilde Björfors, Bertus Borgers, Paul De Bruyne, Luigi Coppola, An de bisschop, Miguel Escobar Varela, Jan Fabre, Alison M. Friedman, Pascal Gielen, Sonja Lavaert, Carol Martin, Antonio Negri, Alida Neslo, Tessa Overbeek, Lionel Popkin, Richard Schechner, Hein Schoer, Ricky Seabra, Jonas Staal, Klaas Tindemans, Luk Van den Dries, Quirijn Lennert van den Hoogen, Hans van Maanen, Bart Van Nuffelen, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Zhang Changcheng
Editors: Paul De Bruyne, Pascal Gielen
Design: Metahaven
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 15.5 x 22 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$58.00 - Out of stock
First edition (hardcover) of this first in-depth book on architect Rudolph Schindler, published in London in 1971.
The Los Angeles-based architect R.M. Schindler (1887 Vienna - 1953 Los Angeles) is regarded today as one of the central figures of the Modern movement. Trained in Vienna under Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Schindler then migrated to Los Angeles under the apprenticeship of Frank Lloyd Wright. Surrounded by a clientele of progressive thinkers in the emerging intellectual culture of Hollywood, Schindler created a radical and intensely personal architectural conception, resulting in some of the seminal works of the twentieth century.
Gebhard's Schindler, first issued in 1971, is the only full-length account of Schindler's prolific yet unfulfilled career. Illustrated heavily throughout with photographs of Schindler's buildings and interiors, his plans, schemes and projections.
Chapters are: Preface by Henry-Russell Hitchcock; New worlds and old; American apprenticeship; The years with Wright; Opportunity: California in the twenties; Theories in practice; The making of a personal style; Schindler's 'de Stijl'; The depression: a new clientele; Living space; Modern versus Moderne; Business commissions; The uses of wood; The final phase; Schindler's place in architecture.
Charles Moore said, "David Gebhard's book about Rudolph Schindler was, for me, the most moving story of an architect that I have read since I was astonished at an early age by Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography."
Includes a preface by Henry-Russell Hitchcock.
1970, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 354 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Crosby Lockwood Staples / London
$67.00 - Out of stock
First English edition, in hardcover.
Architects' Data (German: Bauentwurfslehre), also simply known as the Neufert, is an essential reference book for spatial requirements in building design and site planning. First published in Germany in 1936 by Ernst Neufert, its 39 German editions and translations into 17 languages have sold over 500,000 copies. This first English version was published in 1970.
Ernst Neufert (15 March 1900 – 23 February 1986) was a German architect who was one of the first students of the Bauhaus, going on to become chief architect under Walter Gropius in one of the most prominent architecture studios of the Weimar Republic. In collaboration with Gropius, Neufert realized the new Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and the completion of the masters' houses for Muche, Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. As well as being well known as the assistant of Walter Gropius, Neufert was an influential teacher in Weimar and member of various standardization organizations, and is especially known for his essential handbook Architects' Data, which became an architectural library standard across the world.
Architects' Data provides, in one concise volume, the core information needed to form the framework for the more detailed design and planning of any building project. Organised largely by building type, it covers the full range of preliminary considerations, and with over 6200 diagrams it provides a mass of data on spatial requirements. Most illustrations are dimensioned and each building type includes plans, sections, site layouts and design details. An extensive bibliography and a detailed set of metric/imperial conversion tables are included.
1977, English
Softcover, 208 pages (146 ill.), 152 x 229 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$50.00 - Out of stock
Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments. This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl.
Robert Venturi is an award-winning architect and an influential writer, teacher, artist, and designer. His work includes includes the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Galler; renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; dozens of major academic projects; and the groundbreaking Vanna Venturi House. Denise Scott Brown is a Founding Principal of Venturi, Scott, Brown, and Associates (VBSA) whose work and ideas have influenced generations of architects and planners. Steven Izenour (1940-2001) was coauthor of Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1977) and a principal in the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc (VSBA). His most noted projects at VSBA include Philadelphia's Basco showroom, the George D. Widener Memorial Treehouse at the Philadelphia Zoo, the Camden Children's Garden, and the house he designed for his parents in Stony Creek, Connecticut.
"...a brilliant document of the times...a work which uses history knowledgeably, skillfully, and creatively: a rarity." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
"...professionally informed, competitively astute, and perversely brilliant..." The Yale Review
"...these studies are brilliant...the kind of art history and theory that is rarely produced." The New York Times Ada Louis Huxtable
1972, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Penguin Books / Australia
$18.00 - Out of stock
1972 revised edition of the classic Robin Boyd book, The Australian Ugliness. Introduction by John Betjeman.
Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd’s bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In it Boyd railed against Australia’s promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish imitation of all things American.
‘The basis of the Australian ugliness,’ he wrote, ‘is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle—as she estimates the middle—of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them.’
Boyd was a fierce critic, and an advocate of good design. He understood the significance of the connection between people and their dwellings, and argued passionately for a national architecture forged from a genuine Australian identity. His concerns are as important now, in an era of sustainability, suburban sprawl and inner-city redevelopment, as they were half a century ago.
Caustic and brilliant, The Australian Ugliness is a masterpiece that enables us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes.
Robin Boyd (1919–71) is arguably Australia’s most influential architect. He was an idealist, a visionary, who believed that good design would improve the quality of people’s lives. A tireless public educator and outspoken social commentator, he designed more than two hundred buildings and wrote such classics as The Puzzle of Architecture and Australia’s Home.
1987, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 18 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Art Gallery of New South Wales / Sydney
Artspace / Sydney
$65.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce Australian catalogue published on the occasion of the great exhibition "Sighting References: Ciphers, Systems and Codes in Recent Australian Visual Art" held in 1987 as a collaborative venture between Artspace Sydney and the Art Gallery of NSW and curated by Gary Sangster. This exhibition presents 'a range of sites of art production and reception', addressing the exhibition as a discursive and creative conjunction of (written and visual) information. Features the work of Juan Davila, Julie Brown-Rrap, Maria Kozic, Tim Johnson, Richard Dunn, Peter Tyndall, alongside essays by Elizabeth Grosz, Michael Carter, Ross Gibson, Meaghan Morris.
1985, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
The Art Gallery of Western Australia / Perth
$50.00 - Out of stock
Scarce Australian catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Pleasure of The Gaze : Image and Appearance in Recent Australian Art", held at the The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1985, and curated by Bruce Adams.
Profusely illustrated in colour and black and white across exhibiting artist biographical sections and essay accompaniment illustrations, this publication features the work of Julie Brown-Rrap, Peter Callas, Richard Dunn, Merilyn Fairskye, Marinka Kordis, Maria Kozic, Lindy Lee, John Lethbridge, Akio Makigawa, Sue Paull, Stieg Persson, Robert Randall and Frank Bendinelli, Carol Rudyard, Peter Tyndall, Vicki Varvaressos, and John R. Walker. Essays include "Eye, Image, Picture, Screen (and all that Junk)" by Adrian Martin; "Sticky Television" by Meaghan Morris; "Re Re-Orientation: The Image as Fantasy and Furniture in Japan" by Peter Callas. Plus an introduction by Adams.
Design by Wohlnick Design.