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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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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.
1987, French / Japanese
Softcover, 74 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Louis Vuitton / Paris
$90.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Very collectable Louis Vuitton product catalogue from 1987, Japanese industry edition!
These wonderfully designed and heavily detailed books illustrate all LV luggage, bags, wallets, purses, scarves, umbrellas and other Louis Vuitton accessories, listed with details and specifications for each item presented in 1987, largely featuring the famed LV Toile Monogram.
1991, English / Italian
Softcover, 130 pages, 24.5 x 33 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Versace / Italy
$120.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1991 catalogue look-book for Versace's "Collezione Uomo Primavera Estate 1991" with photography by Herb Ritts.
These early 1990s Versace over-sized photo catalogues perfectly visually embody the Versace aesthetic in book-form, with page after page filled with colour-saturated images of luxurious catwalk photography, textile details, model photoshoots, accessories, shoes, backstage, Versace advertisements, graphics and Versace's diary (with Italian and English text).
Good copy with some cover damage.
1991, English / Italian
Softcover, 134 pages, 24.5 x 33 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Versace / Italy
$120.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1991 catalogue look-book for Versace's "Collezione Donna Primavera Estate 1991" with photography by Irving Penn and Pasquale Abbattista.
These early 1990s Versace over-sized photo catalogues perfectly visually embody the Versace aesthetic in book-form, with page after page filled with colour-saturated images of luxurious catwalk photography, textile details, model photoshoots, accessories, shoes, backstage, Versace advertisements, graphics and Versace's diary (with Italian and English text).
With Linda Evangelista gracing the cover, the entire book features numerous photographs of Helena Christensen, Linda Evangelista, Yasmeen Ghauri, Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour, Naomi Campbell and many more. Photography by Irving Penn, Pasquale Abbattista and others.
2016, English
Hardcover (cloth), 214 pages, 14 x 19 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$42.00 - Out of stock
The Absolute Gravedigger, published in 1937, is in many ways the culmination of Vítězslav Nezval’s work as an avant-garde poet, combining the Poetism of his earlier work and his turn to Surrealism in the 1930s with his political concerns in the years leading up to World War II. It is above all a collection of startling verbal and visual inventiveness. And while a number of salient political issues emerge from the surrealistic ommatidia, Nezval’s imagination here is completely free-wheeling and untethered to any specific locale, as he displays mastery of a variety of forms, from long-limbed imaginative free verse narratives to short, formally rhymed meditations in quatrains, to prose and even visual art (the volume includes six of his decalcomania images).
Together with Nezval's prior two collections, The Absolute Gravedigger forms one of the most important corpora of interwar Surrealist poetry. Yet here his wild albeit restrained mix of absolute freedom and formal perfection has shifted its focus to explore the darker imagery of putrefaction and entropy, the line breaks in the shorter lyric poems slicing the language into fragments that float in the mind with open-ended meaning and a multiplicity of readings. Inspired by Salvador Dalí's paranoiac-critical method, to produce what he called "hand-painted dream photographs," the poems go in directions that are at first unimaginable but continue to evolve unexpectedly until they resolve or dissolve – like electron clouds, they have a form within which a seemingly chaotic energy reigns. Nezval’s language, however, is under absolute control, allowing him to reach into the polychromatic clouds of Surrealist uncertainty to form shapes we recognize, though never expected to see, to meld images and concepts into a constantly developing and dazzling kaleidoscope.
translated from the Czech by Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická
frontispiece by Jindřich Štyrský
decalcomania by the author
1970, Dutch
Hardcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nederlandse Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit / Netherlands
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1970 by Dutch art historian and critic Carel Blotkamp (b. 1945), Na de beeldenstorm: drie opstellen over recente beeldende kunst (3 essays on recent visual art) surveys developments in art at the height of one of the most innovative periods in art history, the 1960s. Blotkamp traces the influence of historical avant gardes (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Duchamp...) into new abstraction, hard-edge, Color Field, Minimalism, Pop, Op Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Povera, Land Art, et al. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with fine examples of work by Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Daan Van Golden, Richard Serra, Kenneth Nolan, Morris Louis, Jo Baer, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Walter de Maria, Yves Klein, Robert Morris, Bridget Riley, Jasper Johns, Lawrence Weiner, Jan Dibbets, Armando, Panamarenko, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Poons, Barry Flanagan, JCJ Vanderheyden, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Richard Long, Wim T. Schippers, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Mario Merz, Carl Andre, Pieter Engels, Andy Warhol, Edward Rushca, Jesús Rafael Soto, Peter Struycken, and many more...
Very Good copy without dust jacket (as issued), light tanning/wear to glossy, foiled boards.
2021, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 30 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
This extensive hardcover overview of Swiss Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri's (b. 1930) 60-year-long career, presents reproductions of archival material as well as rarely seen artworks from Spoerri's incredible artistic history of installations, assemblages, (including his famous "snare works"), performances, editions, and other activities as a protagonist of Fluxus, Nouveau réalisme and Eat Art. Includes texts by Ingried Brugger, Veronika Rudorfer, Hans Peter Hahn, Barbara Räderscheidt, Daniel Spoerri, Katerina Vatsella.
2019, English
Softcover, 175 pages, 14 x 19 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
"With pride because I finally believed in my ability to say something that I’d had trouble saying. I told myself, I am strong for once, I speak. I tell the truth."
In this unforgettable and moving memoir, the last book written before her death, the legendary film director Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) blends her matter-of-fact writing style with family photographs and stills from her own films in order to better describe and speak toward the most tender of human elements: her family, her lovers, and, most urgently, the deterioration of her mother’s health along with her own mental health.
While addressing universal experiences–the pain found woven into love, the end of relationships, difficult family histories, self-doubt, the end of life–Akerman‘s sharp eye toward memory raises questions about what it means to love and care for oneself and for another, and in the end, what the personal cost of those decisions can be.
Chantal Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and professor. She is best known for her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which was dubbed a "masterpiece" by the New York Times. During her 42 years of active filmmaking, Akerman's influence on queer, feminist, and avant-garde cinema remains unmatched, her films highlighting a near physical passage of time.
Translated by Corina Copp
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dustjacket), 288 pages, 28 x 22 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
$110.00 - Out of stock
Isa Genzken – Works from 1973 to 1983 is dedicated to the artist’s early œuvre. The publication opens with works from her time as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts (1973–1977) and details the evolution of her art up to 1983.
The works shown include sculptures, computer printouts, extensive series of drawings, photographs and films. The artist blends conceptual approaches with personal themes; many works that initially seem to be exercises in geometric abstraction prove upon closer examination to be traces of her own existence, telling stories of personal relationships and the vagaries of desire. Her work during this period also responds to Minimalism and Conceptual Art, two dominant approaches in America and Western Europe at the time.
Essays by Simon Baier, Jutta Koether, and Griselda Pollock examine various aspects of Genzken’s body of work.
1972, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce early Lee Bontecou catalogue published on the occasion of the first large survey of her work, held at MCA Chicago March 24 – May 7, 1972. Illustrated throughout with b/w illustrations and essay by Carter Ratcliff.
One of the most widely recognized female artists of the 1960s, Lee Bontecou creates welded wall reliefs, hanging sculptures, and miniature, mystical drawings that reflect her interest in natural and man-made forms. Brown and black in tone and often with ominous, organic voids at their centers, her large-scale patchwork accumulations of canvas, leather, wire mesh, and muslin recall nests, machines, ancient architecture, and the human body. She constructs her massive, free-hanging forms from constellations of steel, shaped canvas, porcelain curios, and explosive lengths of wire that reach far into space. Through such works, Bontecou has sought to capture “as much of life as possible—no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense,” she says.
Very Good copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 18 cm x 11 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Devised as a way to indulge in their interest in literature and explore the parallels between systematic painting and formulaic writing, the artists Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael present their collection of crime stories Unlawful Assembly.
First published in private limited edition it was intended as a cheap holiday read to titillate and entertain summer visitors to the Mediterranean island of Stromboli, and as a piece of site-specific work; the location of the action and the place in which it is read being the same.
The Unlawful Assembly cast of characters are united by narcissism, ineffectuality and paranoia, and like fast food's ratio of fat, salt and sugar to protein, these stories confront pathology in a similarly consumable (and cynical) package of calibrated sex, violence and humour.
Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael have familiarised themselves with the methodologies of illusionistic painting, trompe l'oeil and photorealism respectively. The visual art subsequently generated by Unlawful Assembly includes work by Josephine Pryde, with whom the artists collaborated to produce this second edition's cover image.
2016, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 12 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$32.00 - Out of stock
With contributions by Tobias Berger, Guy Brett, Simon Groom, Sophia Yadong Hao, Lisa Le Feuvre, Ma Lin, Markus Miessen and Federica Bueti, Tom Morton, Vanessa Joan Müller, Wang Nanming, Paul O’Neill, Edgar Schmitz, Gemma Sharpe
Hubs and Fictions, originally a touring forum, invited international curators, writers, and producers to probe how fiction plays out in a globally distributed art-world ecology, and how infrastructures are invented against its background. In 2012, the forum was staged sequentially at Cooper Gallery (Dundee), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), Goldsmiths University of London, and operated as a satellite event to Edgar Schmitz’s exhibition “Surplus Cameo Decor,” curated by Sophia Yadong Hao at Cooper Gallery.
The book functions as a deliberately discontinuous reader; it juxtaposes documents, negotiations, and reflections from and on these conversations. The publication also includes a preface by Andrea Phillips, a new image sequence by Schmitz, and a suite of reflexive annotations exchanged between Hao and Schmitz.
Design by Marco Stout, Stout/Kramer
2016, English / German
Softcover, 288 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Zoe Butt, Kevin Chua, Patrick D. Flores, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Tony Godfrey, Yin Ker, Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Seng Yu Jin, Simon Soon, Nora A. Taylor, David Teh
This publication focuses on the practice of curating in Southeast Asia, a region experiencing a time of increased global visibility as well as nation and institution building. How do curators engage with the intricacies of a particular place, and how do they respond to the specificities of the local under the expectations of the international? The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems. What emerges is a highly diverse art system that shifts away from traditional formats to embrace new or alternative platforms—from symposia to fieldwork—with the aim of emphasizing curating as a process of critical thinking that goes beyond presentations and representations.
The Jahresring series is edited by Brigitte Oetker and published on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e. V.
Design by Surface
2014, English / German
Softcover, 248 pages, 82 color ill., 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Contributions by Manuela Ammer, Julie Ault, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Gerry Bibby, Jennifer Bornstein, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Dragana Bulut, Katarina Burin, Françoise Cactus, Leidy Churchman, Ann Cotten, Juan Davila, Dominic Eichler, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yusuf Etiman, Isa Genzken, Susanne Ghez, Margaret Harrison, Daniel Herleth, Annette Kelm, Janette Laverrière, Adam Linder, Lee Lozano, Charlie Le Mindu, Shahryar Nashat, Gina D’Orio, Stephen Prina, Dean Spade, Ming Wong
The Jahresring series is one of the longest continually published annual journals for contemporary art in Germany. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions from visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Bringing together a discursive array of forms and timbres, it takes an intertextual and interdisciplinary approach to exploring some contemporary cultural resonances with respect to gender and sexuality. In this sense, a “PS” or postscript might be understood as a place where relations or realities not explicitly stated in the main body of any given text, but nevertheless underpinning them, are revealed. A “PS” is a place of interpersonal agency; a compelling textual gesture that might add a “by the way” and an “also” and a “you know what we’re really talking about.” By its nature, a “PS” is contextualized and contextualizing. Though it may parade as the last word, it never is.
The Jahresring is published annually on behalf of Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI e.V.
Design by Lambl/Homburger
2018, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Texts by Mara Ambrožič, Anastasia Chaguidouline, Nicola Guastamacchia, Anne Kølbæk Iversen, Camma Juel Jepsen, Johanne Løgstrup, Clarissa Ricci, Camilla Salvaneschi, James Schofield, Trine Friis Sørensen, Sevie Tsampalla, Marianna Tsionki, Andy Weir; with Michael Birchall, Geoff Cox, Joasia Krysa, Jacob Lund, Simon Sheikh, Angela Vettese
Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” Gathering together artists/ curators/researchers through an open call, we asked how the temporal complexity that follows from the coming together of different temporalities in the same present could be made known in the context of contemporary art research, and particularly through practices that involve exhibitionary forms. The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 10
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
2019, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$29.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Curatorial projects are increasingly understood as research projects with extended time frames and complex interactions across diverse sectors. This book presents “100 Years of Now,” a research project taking place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 2015 to 2019, as a critical investigation into the temporality of contemporaneity—both in terms of its structure and content. To address the expanding temporality of the now, the book argues for the need to include other forms of knowledge in curatorial process, and for contemporary cultural institutions to facilitate the development of collective curatorial processes and research practices.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 11
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
2016, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$88.00 $40.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Bettina Steinbrügge
Texts by Renee Gladman, Melissa Gronlund, Ed Halter, Andrea Picard, et al.
Ways of Worldmaking is the first comprehensive monograph on British experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers (born 1972). In recent years, Rivers has been celebrated as one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation. The series of exhibitions collected in this book explore the diversity and breadth of his work. Often following people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds. This publication has been published thanks to the support of four museum institutions – Camden Arts Centre, London; Kunstverein in Hamburg; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and La Triennale di Milano – who all have presented (or will be presenting) solo exhibition dedicated to Rivers’s practice.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$28.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action. They all persuasively describe a breakdown of former historical categories but paradoxically end up understanding this breakdown as the end of politics tout court. Analysis and “position” thus merge, and the analytic diagnosis of a disavowal of the future (and the past) ends up as a disavowal of politics.
The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 09
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum
Design by Dexter Sinister
1979, Engish
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 33 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Octopus / London
$80.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover 1979 print of SPACE WARS: WORLDS AND WEAPONS, "a dramatic and exciting account of the conflicts which engulfed the Galactic worlds during the first five millennia on the cosmic calendar. Stunningly illustrated are the machines, the spacecraft and weaponry used by the Empires of the first three Federations during the Zone Wars. Blueprints and technical specifications of some of the enormous battlecruisers, transporters and artificial worlds are published for the first time. The ingeniously researched text, taken from the records of contemporary journalists and authors, traces the history of these fierce fighting years." Illustrated throughout with contributions by many of the leading fantasy artists of the 1970s. Scarce in the original hardcover 1979 edition, more commonly available in the popular 1988 softcover print.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
2017, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Hyphen Press / London
$75.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Richard Hollis was the graphic designer for London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in the years 1969-73 and 1978-85. The book reproduces much of what was printed for the Whitechapel during the two periods in which Hollis worked for the gallery. Christopher Wilson's monograph is an exemplary examination of a body of graphic design. This book matches the spirit of the work it describes: active, passionate, aesthetically refined, and committed to getting things right. As in Hollis's work, 'design' here is a verb as much as a noun. This will be the last title published by Hyphen Press.
2018, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 21.5 x 29 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$69.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
This publication emerges from Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum (2015–18), a multi-faceted project encompassing film, sound, photography, and installation, which looks to the botanical world as a stage for politics. Working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses to, and dynamic agents in, history. It links nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity across different geographies, histories, and systems of knowledge—exploring the variety of curative, spiritual, and economic powers of plants. The project addresses “botanical nationalism” and “flower diplomacy” during apartheid; plant migration; the role and legacies of the imperial classification and naming of plants; bioprospecting and biopiracy; and the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates at Robben Island prison.
This publication is made up of two intertwining books: one documents the works of Theatrum Botanicum, including the scripts for two films; the second is a compendium of brief, commissioned essays that aims to offer an accessible snapshot of the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the artworks. The independent but interrelated essays, which either speak directly to the artworks or follow lines of inquiry alongside them, cover perspectives from postcolonial cultural studies; art criticism and art history; natural history, botany (including ethnobotany and economic botany), and conservation; jurisprudence and critical legal studies; and critical race studies.
Design by In the shade of a tree (Sophie Demay and Maël Fournier-Comte)
Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow
Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonnet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
2011, English
Hardcover, 92 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
In 1668, Queen Christina of Sweden was greeted in Rome with three spectacular banquets that surpass all historical precedents and successors in the register of extravagant gastronomy. As the first publication of her series, On the Table, Charlotte Birnbaum presents Antonio degli Effetti’s newly translated seventeenth-century text, which elaborately describes the three feasts in all their sumptuous and performative glory. The original text, dotted with quotations from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Aeneid, outlines the lavish preparations for the celebrations, the dining experience—designed by Bernini, no less—and the delectably boundless menus themselves. The text is contextualized by two essays and a foreword by Charlotte Birnbaum.
2013, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 24.1 x 27.9 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$130.00 - Out of stock
In 1964, Eva Hesse and her husband Tom Doyle were invited by the industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt to a residency in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Germany. ‘Eva Hesse. 1965’ brings together key drawings, paintings and reliefs from this short, yet pivotal, period where the artist was able to rethink her approach to colour, materials and her two-dimensional practice and begin preparing herself for the momentous strides she would take upon her return to New York.
Edited by Barry Rosen. Texts by Todd Alden, Jo Applin, Susan Fisher Sterling, Kirsten Swenson
2018, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
What Is Different? is the title of this year’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 2000s Tillmans has been working on truth study centre, a cycle of works concerned with absolute claims of truth in social and political contexts.
Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and psychological findings such as the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?
Tillmans interviewed scientists, politicians, journalists, and social workers, highlighting the issues at stake from various angles. The publication also contains analytic texts and studies that shed further light on what happens in our brain, ethics, and online behavior when we are confronted with statements that oppose our political beliefs. Tillmans associated these texts with his own images as well as visual material found in print and online. While designing this year’s Jahresring, he has created photocopy works using the four-color scan process on a machine from the 1990s—an early digital collage technique that resonates with the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in today.
The 64th Jahresring includes texts by Philipp Hübl, Jonas Kaplan, Joe Keohane, and Michael Seemann, and interviews with Lionel Barber, Carolin Emcke, Sigmar Gabriel, Bianca Klose, Stephan Lewandowsky, Brendan Nyhan, and Wolfgang Schäuble.
Design by Wolfgang Tillmans
1983, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 27.5 x 20.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Papunya Tula Artists' Company / Australia
The Aboriginal Artists Agency / Australia
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Warning: Viewers should be aware that this post may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people now deceased.
First edition of "Papunya: Aboriginal Paintings from the Central Australian Desert" published in 1983 by The Aboriginal Artists Agency and Papunya Tula Artists' Company.
Texts by Andrew Crocker (editor), Clifton Pugh, and R. Kimber.
The chapters are; "The Recent Anthropology of the Western Desert"; "Central Australian & Western Desert Art"; "Contemporary Art of the Western Desert".
features the works of: Harper Morris Tjungurrayi, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Dick Pantimatju Tjupurrula, Paddy Carroll Tjungurrayi, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, George Bush Tjangala, Jack Wayuta Tjupurrula, Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri, Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka, Uta Uta Tjangala, Charlie Tjapangati, Charlie Taruru Tjungurrayi, Willie Tjungurrayi, Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula
Illustrated in full-colour throughout with the works of artists from the Northern Territory settlement of Papunya, often heralded as the birthplace of contemporary Aboriginal art. Papunya’s residents were mainly of the Luritja and Pintupi language groups, but its residents also included people from the Anmatyerr, Warlpiri and Kukatja groups. Their traditional country lay hundreds of kilometres west of Papunya in the Gibson Desert, where they had lived as hunter-gatherers until the 1960s. For many Pintupi, Papunya was their first experience of life in a European settlement, established by successive Australian governments under the controversial policy of assimilation, aimed to socialise Aboriginal people into a European way of life. This combination of different language groups, with varying degrees of contact with Western influences and poisons, made Papunya a place often rife with sadness and strife. Yet it also gave rise to a revolution in Australian art in the early 1970s when a group of artists began painting the designs and stories that represent their particular Dreaming places. The land in and around Papunya is Tjala country, and includes many sites associated with the Honey Ant Dreaming stories. Papunya artists assert their rights and obligations as Central and Western Desert landowners, entrusted with the ritual re-enactment of the events that occurred at these sites. The symbols they use are part of a unique visual language which is also used in designs painted on the skin and in elaborate ceremonial ground paintings.
In 1972 the artists successfully established their own cooperative, Papunya Tula Artists. The Aboriginal Arts Board was created in 1973, with members who were all Indigenous Australians. Papunya was represented by artists Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri..
Very Good copy.