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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
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.
2016, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 124 pages, 25 x 21 cm
Published by
Art and Theory Publishing / Stockholm
$110.00 - Out of stock
"Originally published in 1967, Poste Restante has become one of the most collectible photography books from the mid-twentieth century, ranking alongside the better-known publications of Robert Frank and Ed van der Elsken. This photographic autobiography details Strömholm's extensive travels across the globe in a book constructed as an Existentialist diary. Juxtaposing the urbane and the macabre, combining portraiture and street scenes with abstract photographic fragments, the book uses metaphor and visual pun in an unrelenting stream of consciousness. In its sequence and design, it is a book that prefigures much of contemporary photographic publishing and art practice." (from the never published 2010 reprint-announcement)
Christer Strömholm, born in 1918 in Sweden, began his photographic career in earnest in 1958, traveling to places like Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Calcutta, and Nairobi. This is the first English edition of most acclaimed collection, ‘Poste Restante’, a book originally published in Swedish in 1967. It comprises the original photographs, layout, and texts, including the unrevised introduction from 1967, a text based on a taped interview with Strömholm conducted over five days at a hotel in Paris titled “Before the Photographs”, wherein he recounts childhood memories and his experiences during World War II.
Included in "The Photobook: A History Volume I" by Parr/Badger.
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Nero / Italy
$59.00 - In stock -
A reference book containing all the transcripts of Simone Forti's News Animations.
The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti's News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always "danced" the news, it's the way she tells them. But, above all, it's the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities.
The volume collects Simone Forti's News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.
American dancer and choreographer Simone Forti (born 1935 in Florence, Italy) has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over more than fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. Investigating the relationship between object and body, through animal studies, news animations and land portraits, she reconfigured the concept of performance and dance. Forti emigrated from Italy with her family via Switzerland to Los Angeles in 1938, where she subsequently studied for four years with choreographer Anna Halprin and has since spent most of her life. She joined the experimental downtown art scene in New York during the emergence of performance art, process-based work and Minimal Art and spent a fruitful time in Rome in the late 1960s, where she used the spaces of L'Attico to study and perform. Her work is seen as a precursor of the famous Judson Dance Theater—a group of artists experimenting with dance, including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer—and Minimal Art, although she prefers to be referred simply as a "movement artist."
Forti has worked with artists like Dan Graham, Robert Whitman, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg and composers like Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, and La Monte Young.
Introduction by Luca Lo Pinto.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 240 pages, 13.9 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Goldsmiths Press / London
$49.00 - Out of stock
A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.
If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility--by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves--we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good.
Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including the futilitarian condition, homo futilitus, and semio-futility--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness.
This urgent and provocative book chimes with the mood of the time by at once mapping the historical relationship between utilitarianism and capitalism, developing an original framework for understanding neoliberalism, and recounting the lived experience of uselessness in the early twenty-first century. At a time of epoch-defining disasters, from climate emergencies to deadly pandemics, countering the futility of neoliberal existence is essential to building an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.
2019, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$49.00 - Out of stock
Startling pulp theory-fictions, forays into cyberculture, occultural studies and popular numerics, paranoid cosmic conspiracy, and schizoid tactics for escaping the reality system recovered from the prehistoric lore of Lemurian Time Sorcery.
From before the beginning (which was also, according to them, already the end), the adepts of the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton have worked tirelessly to secure the past, present, and future against the incursions of Neolemurian time-sorcery, eliminating all polytemporal activity, stitching up the future, sealing every breach and covering every track. According to the AOE, the CCRU "does not, has not, and will never exist." And yet...
The texts collected here document the CCRU's perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence-a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery-before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity.
Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, palate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing facade of reality.
One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the CCRU's work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance-to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 164 pages, 21.7 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
A wide-ranging exploration of the present, and the future, of the Unconcious.
The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the way in which the Unconscious emerges within the "psychosphere" of society. In the early 20th century, Freud characterized the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-order framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force ceaselessly bringing to the fore new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly portraits the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.
Franco 'Bifo' Berardi is a theorist and cultural agitator. He was the founder of the pirate radio station Radio Alice in 1976. One of the most prominent members of Autonomia, Berardi, worked closely with the French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari throughout the 1980s. His latest books in English are Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility; And: Phenomenology of the End; Breathing: Chaos and Poetry.
2022, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 25 x 16 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$89.00 - In stock -
"Wolfgang Tillmans is not only a great artist, he's a joyous intellectual whose generosity, wit and good-natured skepticism is political, authentic and playfully profound." — John Waters
"For over 30 years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been surveying culture and politics, as attentive to the production of news as he is to the radical intimacies of the nightclub or protest. Through his lens the world recovers its complexity. In an era of dangerous simplifications, we need his work more than ever." — Olivia Laing
This volume offers a panoramic collection of interviews and writings from an artist for whom language has always been a significant means of creative expression. Arranged chronologically, the assembled texts reflect Tillmans' thinking on photography, music, politics, nightlife, astronomy, spirituality and activism. The sources are as varied as their content, with statements and conversations that originally appeared in exhibition catalogues rubbing up against social-media posts and song lyrics.
Whether discussing his own work as a photographer or drawing out the thoughts of others, Tillmans is a generous interlocutor with a refreshing clarity of thought. This visually rich and timely publication tracks Tillmans' contributions to art and cultural criticism in tandem with the social and cultural shifts of the past 30 years.
Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) is among the most influential contemporary artists, and the impact of his work registers across the arts, intersecting with fashion, music, architecture, the performing arts, and activism. Known for his genre-defying practice and ongoing investigation into the photographic medium, Tillmans is the recipient of the Turner Prize (2000) and the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2015). His foundation, Between Bridges, supports the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBTQ rights.
2017, English / German
Softcover, 431 pages, 20.3 x 27.1 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$65.00 $15.00 - In stock -
This publication documents the first forty years of exhibitions at the Museum Ludwig through an archive of installations and ephemera. It includes impressions from all the directors of the institution as well as the architects of the building. The conceptual starting point is the anniversary exhibition "We Call It Ludwig: The Museum Is Turning 40!" (2016), which is reflected here in a complete overview of all the works on display. For the anniversary exhibition, which was jointly conceived by the director and all the museum’s curators, twenty-five international artists and artist collectives were invited to engage in depth with the institution and to react to the question of what the Museum Ludwig means to them.
Participating artists included Georges Adéagbo, Ai Weiwei, Ei Arakawa & Michel Auder, Minerva Cuevas, Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Meschac Gaba, Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, Diango Hernández, Candida Höfer, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Kuehn Malvezzi, Christian Philipp Müller, Marcel Odenbach, Ahmet Ögüt, Claes Oldenburg, Pratchaya Phinthong, Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmuş, Gerhard Richter, Avery Singer, Jürgen Stollhans, Rosemarie Trockel, Villa Design Group, Christopher Williams.
The expansive archive portion of this large book includes important work by countless artists spanning 40 years.
Edited by Yilmaz Dziewior
2021, English
Hardcover, 592 pages, 22 x 29 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$132.00 - In stock -
Finally back in print, the first volume of Batia Suter’s Parallel Encyclopedia. Batia Suter’s work intuitively situates found images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. ‘Parallel Encyclopedia’, which she conceived between 2004 and 2007, contains a precise composition of numerous images taken solely from other books. Significant underlying themes expressed in the Amsterdam-based, Swiss artist’s practice are the “iconification” and “immunogenicity” of old images, and the circumstances by which they assume or become charged with new associative values. This is a reprint of Suter’s voluminous book, originally published in 2007 and covering a pictorial plethora of human history, science, philosophy, art, and culture.
2016, English
Hardcover, 592 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$132.00 - Out of stock
Second volume of the "Parallel Encyclopedia". Batia Suter’s work intuitively situates found images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. This volume follows on from the first ‘Parallel Encyclopedia’, published in 2007. Underlying themes of Suter’s practice are the “iconification” and “immunogenicity” of old images, and the circumstances by which they become charged with new associative values. “In my work, I collect groups of images based on various themes and characteristics, and I investigate how they can manipulate each other, depending on where and how they are placed. In the process of making this book, narrative lines unfolded before my eyes as I shifted images around.”
1969, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 28.2 x 24.1 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Viking Press / New York
$65.00 $45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1969 by New York’s Viking Press and edited by the great editor Barbara Plumb, who also brought us "Houses That Architects Live In" (1977), "Young Designs in Living" is "a rich source of lively ideas that reflect the visual currents of our time. Young design is not the property of any particular age group; more than anything else, it is a point of view that says “today.” Boldness of color, a rejection of provinciality, an indication that we are living in a jet age of new themes and new materials, a spirit of fun and informality, a new approach to scale and space are all elements apparent in varying degree in the exciting interiors which Barbara Plumb presents in these pages."
Richly illustrated throughout with large photographs of incredible international interiors (inc. those of residences designed by Paul Rudolph, Luis Barragan, Aarno Ruusuvuori, Poul Kjærholm, William Turnbull Jr., Marco Zanuso, Charles W. Moore, Harry Bates, Richard Meier, Ludovico Magistretti, Robert A.M. Stern, Olivier Mourgue), with art and furniture by the likes of Pierre Paulin, Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, Poul Kjærholm, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Marcel Breuer, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, and many more.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 120 pages, 22 x 29 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Studio Vista / London
The Whitney Library of Design / New York
$140.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
First English hardcover edition of Living Spaces, originally published in 1977 by Milan's Gorlich Editore as “L'Arredamento Oggi”, the translated edition of this lavish interior design book was published in 1978 by the great Studio Vista and the Whitney Library of Design, New York.
"Living Spaces" walks you through a collection of modern international furnished interiors, capturing 150 of the finest examples of interior architecture and decoration of the late 1970's. Showcased across saturated full-colour pages are the designs and productions of Alvar Aalto, Ugo La Pietra, Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Gaetano Pesce, Ettore Sottsass, Duggie Fields, Charles and Ray Eames, Joe Colombo, Gufram, Studio 65, Piero Gilardi, Eero Aarnio, Knoll, Verner Panton, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Robert Stern, Mario Ceroli, plus so many more.
First English edition in dust jacket.
Good copy in Good dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap. Discounted due to one missing page (pg 11/12), otherwise a beautifully preserved copy throughout.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 25 x 32 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$70.00 - Out of stock
Not your everyday gardening book! Through the metaphor of gardening, this book offers insights on the convergence of nature and culture, ecology, climate, and care for the environment, with themes such as Arcadia, Control, Ecofascism, Guerilla Gardening, Queer Ecology.
For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm, in which the broader relationships between nature and culture are played out on small scale. From this long cultural tradition also raises a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the Earth.
On the Necessity of Gardening tells the story of the garden as a rich source of inspiration. Over the centuries, artists, writers, poets and thinkers have each described, depicted and designed the garden in different ways. In medieval art, the garden was a reflection of paradise, a place of harmony and fertility, shielded from worldly problems.
However, the garden is not just a neutral place and intended solely for personal pastime, it is a place where the world manifests itself and where the relationship between culture and nature is expressed. In the eighteenth century this image shifted: the garden became a symbol of worldly power and politics. The Anthropocene, the era in which man completely dominates nature with disastrous consequences, is forcing us to radically rethink the role we have given nature in recent decades.
There is a renewed interest in the theme of the garden among contemporary makers. It is not a romantic desire that drives them, but rather a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the earth, by connecting different fields of activity in landscape, art and culture. Through many different essays and an extensive abecedarium, On the Necessity of Gardening reflects on the garden as a metaphor for society, through concepts such as botanomania and capitalocene, from guerrilla gardening to queer ecology and zen garden.
2002, English
Hardcover (dust jacket), 140 pages, 31 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Umberto Allemandi / Milan
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare first English hardcover edition of this outstanding survey, exhibition catalogue and invaluable reference to the fascinating light objects produced in Italy between 1967 and 1972 — a period generally known as "gli anni d´oro" (The Golden Years). Published in 2002 by Milan's legendary Allemandi publishing house and compiled by light designer and writer Fulvio Ferrari and author behind all the best books on Carlo Mollino, Napoleone Ferrari. Lavishly illustrated in colour and b/w on gloss stock, this large volume offers and outstanding survey of Italian light-design with more than 150 objects illustrated and detailed entries on each and every one, including materials and exhibition histories. Includes the work of designers, artists and manufacturers Livio Castiglioni & Gianfranco Frattini, Archizoom, Cini Boeri, Ettore Sottsass, Nanda Vigo, Ugo La Pietra, Achille Castiglioni, Lapo Binazzi, UFO, Angelo Lelli, Ingrid Hsalmarson, Gino Sarfatti, Rinaldo Cutini, Gae Aulenti, Superstudio, Gaetano Pesce, Angelo Mangiarotti, Joe Colombo, Gianfranco Fini, Mario Bellini, Memphis, Fabrizio Cocchia, Alchimia, Sergio Asti, Tomoko Tsuboi Ponzio, Gianni Gamberini & Studio ARDITI, Fulvio Ferrari, Gino Marotta, Studio Uno, Cesare Casati, Theodore Waddell, George Sowden, Arteluce, Zanotta, Stilnovo, Valenti, Kartell, Poltronova, Arredoluce, Flos, Lumenform, Zanotta, and many more. Also includes introductory essays and a full index of designers and manufacturers.
Very Good-Fine copy in VG-Fine dust jacket.
1957, Italian
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 25 x 20 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Conchiglia / Milan
$390.00 - Out of stock
Very rare comprehensive study on Spatialism ("Origins and Developments of an Artistic Trend"), the art movement founded by Lucio Fontana in Milan in 1947. Published by Conchiglia, Milan, Italy, in 1957, and edited by Giani Giampiero, this lavish volume republishes all the original manifesto documents of the movement, beginning in Buenos Aires with the Manifiesto Blanco of 1946 through Fontana's subsequent Spazialismo declarations, alongside theoretical texts and drawings by Fontana and associates; extensive photographic documentation of social gatherings and landmark exhibitions of the movement; beautiful and generous surveys of the work by all representative exponents of the movement, with multiple works reproduced through vivid colour plates, texts and photographic portraits; plus more. An indispensable historical reference on one of the most important post-war modern art movements of 20th century Italy. Features the work of Lucio Fontana, Ettore Sottsass, Emilio Scanavino, Cesare Peverelli, Gino Morandis, Enrico Donati, Bruno De Toffoli, Mario Deluigi, Roberto Crippa, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Aldo Bergolli, Edmondo Bacci. This is the expanded second edition in blue jacket and produced with various paper stocks throughout (first, in yellow jacket, published 1956).
Spatialism (Italian: Spazialismo) is an art movement founded by Italian artist Lucio Fontana in Milan in 1947 in which he grandiosely intended to synthesize colour, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art. The main ideas of the movement were anticipated in his Manifiesto blanco (White Manifesto) published in Buenos Aires in 1946. In it he spoke of a new "spatial" art in keeping with the spirit of the post-war age. It repudiated the illusory or "virtual" space of traditional easel painting and sought to unite art and science to project colour and form into real space by the use of up-to-date techniques such as neon lighting and television. Five more manifestos followed; they were more specific in their negative than their positive aspects, and carried the concept of Spatialism little further than the statement that its essence consisted in "plastic emotions and emotions of colour projected upon space". In 1947 Fontana created a "Black Spatial Environment", a room painted black, which was considered to have foreshadowed Environment art. His stabbed and slashed canvases (beginning in 1949 and 1959 respectively) are also considered to embody Spatialism. Although Fontana's ideas were vague, his outlook was influential, for he was one of the first, certainly the first European artist to truly promote the idea of art as gesture or performance, rather than as the creation of an enduring physical work.
Good copy. Some damage to dust jacket with some chipping. As common with this fragile volume a page has disconnected from binding, but all present and in clean order. Overall a very nicely kept copy with standard age wear. A rare and precious work.
1994, French
Softcover, 158 pages, 28.7 × 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fondation pour l'Architecture / Brussels
$190.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first Belgian edition of "L'Utopie du Tout Plastique 1960-1973", published in Brussels in 1994 by Fondation pour l'Architecture. Long out of print, this comprehensive volume quickly became an invaluable bible for plastic collectors of the 1960s, 1970s period. In 1994, on the occasion of a major exhibition in Brussels, editors Philippe Decelle, Diane Hennebert, and Pierre Loze compiled the most detailed printed survey of plastic products to date, from Art, Functional Furniture, Fiberglass, Inflatable PVC, Transparent PMMA, Pop and Radical Design, Cookware, Electronics, Mod Fashions, Utopian Arhitecture. Heavily researched and lavishly illustrated throughout with close to 200 of the finest examples, L’ Utopie has become the standard reference on 1960s plastic design - an essential aid in identifying the designers, companies and manufacture details of many classic plastic objects from this era.
Includes detailed biographies of the artists, designers, architects, manufacturers, plus a chronology and bibliography.
Translated blurb:
"The sixties are marked by unprecedented prosperity and technological progress. To this optimism corresponds an extraordinary freedom of creation until the oil crisis of 1973 which tempers this enthusiasm. The vogue of plastic is linked to this society of abundance. Yellow, red, orange, soft, hard, inflatable, it identifies with cheap, serial and disposable productions. Starting from a private collection unique in the world, the book offers a selection of plastic objects created between 1960 and 1973. Tupperware box, Kelton watch, Courrèges dress, Ettore Sottsass portable typewriter Valentine for Olivetti, first chair of Verner Panton, Joe Colombo ABS plastic chair, Niki de Saint Phalle's Nana, Caesar's Compression, cupola of the United States Pavilion by Richard Buckminster Fuller at the Montreal World's Fair or Frei Otto and Günter Behnisch overhead roof for the stadium of the Olympic Games in Munich, all show their diversity, their spirit and sometimes their beauty of the inventiveness of the time."
Features the work of Pierre Paulin, Sergio Mazza, Vico Magistretti, César, Studio 65, Nicola L, Piero Gilardi, Verner Panton, Arman, Gianfranco Frattini, Jonathan De Pas, Donato d'Urbino, Paolo Lomazzi, Gae Aulenti, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Joe Colombo, Enzo Mari, Iseo Hosoe, Mario Bellini, Dorothée Maurer-Becker, Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, Günter Beltzig, Maurice Calka, Eero Aarnio, Wendell Castle, Alberto Rosselli, Quasar Khanh, Rossi Molinary, Ennio Lucini, Ugo la Pietra, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Archizoom, Roy Adzak, Studio Gruppo 14, Dieter Rams, Reinhold Weiss, Marco Zanuso, Rodolfo Bonetto, Roger Tallon, Pierre Cardin, Courreges, Frei Otto, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Maneval, Paolo Soleri, Archigram, and many more.
Very Good copy, only light wear and edge tanning.
1995, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 279 pages, 30 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Design+Design / Hamburg
$220.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce 1995 "Braun+Design Collection" - an exhaustive hardcover book that catalogues every product ever designed for the iconic German company Braun. Includes charts that list each product, serial number, colour, designer, and other design specs. Each product is beautifully documented through black and white photographs showcasing every striking design from Hans Gugelot's radio beginnings in the mid 1950s through Dieter Rams' (chief design officer from 1961-1995) finest examples of functionalist industrial design. Gugelot (together with Otl Aicher and Wolfgang Schmittel) developed for Braun a completely new, groundbreaking design culture in the 1950s, considered one of the finest examples of Germany's "second modernity" in product design, in which the rational principles of 1920s Bauhaus were echoed in new industrial form. A stunning and collectable volume for anyone interested in modern design - Braun to its core represented Dieter Rams' design philosophy "less, but better" (an ethos this book follows perfectly), captured here through 40 years of the most innovative, functional product design of the twentieth century, securing Rams and Braun worldwide recognition and appreciation.
Includes an illustrated company history and complete designer profiles and references. Texts in German.
Edited by Jo Klatt and Gunter Staeffler
Very good, tight, clean copy in original dust jacket (one small repaired tear, some creasing), preserved under plastic wrap. Excellent ex-library copy with minimal stamping, stickers.
1968, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 23.2 x 16.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Architectural Press / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
First edition of "Exhibitions, Exhibits, Industrial and Trade Fairs", published in 1968 by the Architectural Press in London.
Deeply researched and profusely illustrated with exceptional black and white photography, architectural plans and diagrams, with text by author Wolfgang Clasen, this unique and inspiring book makes the point that "Architectural documentation is particularly important when dealing with a category of works of architecture which are not built to last."
This book perfectly captures a special and most innovative period in modern design and architecture. As the jacket announces: "We are living in an Exhibition Age: Expo 67 in Montreal is scarcely over and we are already looking ahead to the next World Exhibition in Osaka in 1970. In addition to their primary function of communication, exhibitions have a secondary function of almost equal importance: for because of the temporary nature of most exhibition buildings they provide architects and designers with a testing ground where new ideas, new structures and techniques can be tried out.
This book illustrates and describes eighty examples of exhibitions of all kinds taken from thirteen countries and all five continents; the period covered is from 1960 to the present day. Particular emphasis is laid on the newest trends and on such things as nature of most exhibition buildings they provide architects and designers with a testing ground where new ideas, new structures and techniques can be tried out."
Amongst the many fine examples of cultural exhibitions, commercial and trade expos and temporary pavilions are examples of works by Gio Ponti, Buckminster Fuller, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Le Corbusier, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Wim Crouwel, Total Design, Vittorio Gregotti, Eero Saarinen, Angelo Mangiarotti, Will Burtin, Charles and Ray Eames, Paolo Nestler, Henri Kay Henrion, Rolf Gutbrod, Xenakis, Frei Otto, Ulf Linde, Per-Olof Ultvedt, Will Burtin, Walter Kuhn, and many more.
Separate chapters on fair stands, display units and exhibit systems round off this exhaustive treatise on exhibition architecture with a full index of architects and designers.
Text in English and German.
Very good copy, with original Gio Ponti dust-jacket protected under mylar wrap. Light wear/tan/dust to edges.
1967, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 37 x 28.5 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Viking Press / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Handsome and rare first 1967 hardcover edition of "English Style In Interior Decoration", A Studio Book, published in London by Bodley Head and in New York by The Viking Press, and edited by Mary Gilliatt and Michael Boys. This gorgeous over-sized landscape-format interior design book covers the chapters: the Post-Festival influence; Sturdy English; the Purists; the New Wave; English Style; old-houses renewed; Fantasy in Fashion; the English Decorators; Synthesis - surveying a diverse array of English interiors from the end of the 1960's through the large full-colour photographs of Michael Boys.
Includes interiors, furniture and artwork by Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, Arne Jacobsen, Marcel Breuer, Lynn Chadwick, Robin Day, Lucienne Day, Anthony Caro, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eduardo Paolozzi, Eero Saarinen, Francis Bacon, Le Corbusier, Terence Conran, Olivier Mourgue, William Morris, Phillip King, Milton Avery, Clement Meadmore, Tim Scott, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Cecil Beaton, Mario Praz, Edinburgh Weavers, George Nelson, Donald Brothers fabrics, Biba, Habitat, and many more.
Very difficult to find preserved with the original dust jacket. Very Good copy with Good jacket, only light wear to this large book.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21.5 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$84.00 - In stock -
Writings 1973–1983 on Works 1969–1979 is an essential document of a decade of formative work by Michael Asher. Originally published in 1983, the book presents 33 works through the artist’s writings, photographic documentation, architectural floor plans, exhibition announcements, and other ephemera.
Asher did not create traditional art objects; instead, he chose to alter the existing institutional apparatus through which art is presented, creating work dependent on the architectural, social, or economic systems that undergird how art is produced and experienced. For example, in 1974, he removed the partition wall dividing the office and gallery space of the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles. In another work from 1978, Asher had a bronze replica of a nineteenth-century sculpture of George Washington moved from the exterior of the Art Institute of Chicago to a room in the museum that housed eighteenth-century art, changing its location, but also its function from a public monument to an indoor sculpture, as it was originally intended.
Due to its site specificity and immateriality, Asher’s work ceased to exist after an exhibition, which makes this highly sought-after book the definitive mode through which one can gain insight into the work he made during this period. As the artist states in the introduction: “This book as a finished product will have a material permanence that contradicts the actual impermanence of the art-work, yet paradoxically functions as a testimony to that impermanence of my production.”
Initiated by Kasper König, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 was originally co-published by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and was largely shaped by Asher’s close collaboration with art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who succeeded König as editor of the press.
Managing Editor: James Hoff
Managing Designer: Rick Myers
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in hard cloth-covered slipcase w. softcover supplement), 252 pages, 34 x 25 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$190.00 - In stock -
Duchamp’s historic 1959 catalogue raisonné-cum-artist's book now back in print in a facsimile English edition. ‘Marcel Duchamp’ became the go-to book on the artist for many decades following its publication in late 1959, when exclusive grand-deluxe and deluxe editions in French, along with trade editions in French and English, were simultaneously released. While Trianon Press’s French trade edition was reprinted numerous times, the Grove Press English edition languished out of print for the better part of two generations—until now, with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ fully authorized facsimile re-edition.
By Robert Lebel. Edited by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Association Marcel Duchamp. Foreword by Harald Falckenberg. Introduction by Michaela Unterdörfer. Text by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Henri-Pierre Roché, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Man Ray, Michael Taylor.
Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s first legendary monograph and draft catalogue raisonné, was written by art historian and novelist Robert Lebel and published in French in 1959; later that same year, it was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton for Grove Press. The book was a cooperation between Lebel and Duchamp, and beyond Lebel’s extensive writing and bibliography, additional chapters were authored by Duchamp, H.P. Roché and André Breton. The coupling of these texts with diverse archival photographs and an illustrated compendium of Duchamp’s artworks delivered a complex and personal rendering of the artist’s life and inner circle. For the first time since its release more than 60 years ago, this landmark publication is back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ meticulous facsimile of the English edition, reflecting everything from its hand-tipped images to its recto-verso dust jacket appearing as close to the original as possible.
Fully authorized by artist Jean-Jacques Lebel—Robert Lebel’s son—and the Association Marcel Duchamp, the facsimile is accompanied by a supplement volume of essays and archival material that tells the story of Duchamp and Lebel’s close collaboration, and, as contributor Michael Taylor writes, how the original publication signified a "sea change in the artist’s receptivity to critical interpretation." The supplement includes texts by both Robert and Jean-Jacques Lebel and a newly discovered note by Man Ray, among a bevy of photographs from the Lebel and Duchamp archives, extending the story presented in the 1959 edition.
Robert Lebel’s analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre remains fresh to this day, as does the book’s design, which was personally supervised by the artist. Hauser & Wirth Publishers reanimated Marcel Duchamp with the curatorial-design firm fluid, who recast the original typefaces as digital fonts, positioning each letter and image exactly as it was in the original. To achieve a near-exact facsimile, fluid consulted with paper conservators and printers to recreate the book with modern materials that match those available in 1959. This precise production quality assures that today’s readers will experience this historic book as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel intended.
1976, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
E P Dutton / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First 1976 printing of this fantastic and now rarely seen classic book collection of essays by internationally acclaimed writer, art critic, activist and curator, Lucy R. Lippard.
"FROM THE CENTER : Feminist Essays on Women's Art" is broken into three sections: GENERAL ESSAYS, MONOGRAPHS, and FICTION. GENERAL ESSAYS include 12 major essays such as "Sexual Politics : Art Style", "Household Images in Art", "Fragments", "What is Female Imagery", "Making Up: Role-Playing and Transformation in Women's Art", "The Pains and Pleasures of Rebirth: European and American Women's Body Art", "The Womens' Art Movement - What Next?" and more. MONOGRAPHS is made up of writings dedicated to single artists, including essays on the work of Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, Jo Baer, Joan Mitchell, Hanne Darboven, Ree Morton, Irene Siegel, Rosemarie Castoro, Louise Bourgeois, Faith Ringgold, Yvonne Rainer, Judy Chicago, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Graves and many more. A suburb collection, illustrated throughout with examples of the artists written about, including a colour plate section.
Very Good copy with cover/spine tanning, light wear.
1970, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 25 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Whitney Museum / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
1970 catalogue published to accompany the first major survey of Jim Dine at the Whitney Museum of American Art from February 27 to April 19, 1970. Illustrated profusely throughout with the works of Dine, along with many portraits (inc. by Lee Friedlander), essay by John Gordon, autobiographical note by Jim Dine, biography, bibliography, exhibition list, etc.
Jim Dine (b. 1935) is an American artist whose œuvre extends over sixty years. Dine’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking (in many forms including lithographs, etchings, gravure, intaglio, woodcuts, letterpress and linocuts), sculpture and photography; his early works encompassed assemblage and happenings. Dine has been associated with numerous art movements throughout his career including Neo-Dada (use of collage and found objects), Abstract Expressionism (the gestural nature of his painting), and Pop Art (affixing everyday objects including tools, rope, articles of clothing and even a bathroom sink) to his canvases, yet he has actively avoided such classifications. At the core of his art, regardless of the medium of the specific work, lies an intense process of autobiographical reflection, a relentless exploration and criticism of the self through a number of highly personal motifs which include: the heart, the bathrobe, tools, antique sculpture, and the character of Pinocchio. Dine’s approach is all-encompassing, incorporating his entire lived experience.
Good copy with light cover wear and creasing, including the very common split at the base of the die-cut heart motif (tape repaired from behind).
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 28 pages, 25 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$25.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Self, Memory & Desire: New Romanticism in Italian Painting, Australian Centre For Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, 19 September — 1 November, 1987. Illustrated in colour throughout with works by exhibiting artists Alberto Abate, Roberto Barni, Ubaldo Bartolini, Carlo Bertocci, Lorenzo Bonechi, Luigi Campanelli, Walter Gatti, Paola Gondolfini, Stephano di Stasio, accompanied by artist biographies and an essay by Italian art critic Italo Mussa.
Very Good copy.
1980, French
Softcover, 122 pages, 23 x 39 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Parenthèses / Marseille
$150.00 - Out of stock
First French edition of this visionary book by Italian architect Paolo Soleri (1919 Turin — 2013 Scottsdale, Arizona), published by Editions Parenthèses, Marseille, in 1980. This stunning over-sized landscape book reads like a manifesto/blue-print/scrap-book of Soleri's Arcology (Architecture+Ecology), through his own words (here in French) and 120 pages of his intricate and fantastic architectural drawings.
"I am advocating a Lean Hypothesis about reality and a Lean Alternative to our materialistic culture. With the lean urban development I put tangibility to my conjecturing. Years ago I declared that Leanness is frugality fraught with sophistication. The gazelle is lean, i.e. frugality wrapped in grace. Can anyone imagine a frozen tundra or a scorching Sahara colonized by millions of hermitages, single homes? A nightmarish American Dream incapable of supporting any kind of dignified life, let alone the evolution of a civilization. Is the exurban (ever-expanding suburban) metastasis a bejeweled dream? Of food and shelter, the two indispensable needs of life, shelter is the direct responsibility of planners; architects, urban planners, builders, developers, speculators, politicians, students ... time to wake up!" — Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti, Arizona
Through his work as architect, urban designer, artist, craftsman and philosopher, Paolo Soleri has been exploring the countless possibilities of human aspiration. The envisioned future taking shape in his mind has been expressed in various media. One outstanding endeavor is Arcosanti, an urban laboratory, constructed in the high Arizona desert. It attempts to demonstrate an alternative human habitat much needed in this increasingly perplexing world. This project also exemplifies his steadfast devotion to creating an experiential space to "prototype" an environment in harmony with man. Through his articulated philosophy "Arcology (Architecture+Ecology)", Soleri formulates a path that may aid us on our evolutionary journey toward a state of aesthetic, equity and compassion. The half century work of his broad-ranging and coherent intellect (so scarce in the age of specialization) has influenced many in the field in search of a new paradigm for our built environment. — Tomiaki Tamura
Very Good copy with light bump to top-right cover corner, light tanning and ex-shop sticker mark.