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:
THU—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
info@worldfoodbooks.com
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
2015, English / French
Softcover, 256 pages (b&w ill.), 240 x 175 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$29.00 - In stock -
Some Partial Views:
Sigmar Polke’s Reception in the United States and Germany in the 1980s
— MAGNUS SCHAEFER
Interview with Magnus Schaefer
— CATHERINE CHEVALIER
Interview with Guy Tosatto
On Some Models of Artist/Gallery Relations
— TABLE RONDE AVEC MARIE ANGELETTI, CAMILLE BLATRIX, HÉLÈNE FAUQUET, RENAUD JEREZ, MÉLANIE MATRANGA, MODÉRÉE PAR CATHERINE CHEVALIER & EDOUARD MONTASSUT
Visual Insert
— ELLIE DE VERDIER
REVIEWS
The Desaturation of Graffiti. On Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at Mathew, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Berlin and Dave Miko, Ned Vena and Antek Walczak at Algus Greenspon, New York
— TANJA WIDMANN
Paris de Noche. On “Paris Noche” at Night Gallery, Los Angeles
— JAY CHUNG
Dengled Up in Blue. On Verena Dengler at Meyer Kainer in Vienna
— LILI REYNAUD DEWAR
Eternal Return. On “Call and Response” at Gavin Brown and “Forever Now” at the MoMA, New York
— KARI RITTENBACH
Between the Archer and the Target. On Daniel Pommereulle at the musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes
— HÉLÈNE FAUQUET
Rain Over Water. On Hans Christian Lotz at David Lewis, New York
— SAM PULITZER
2015, English / Portuguese
Softcover (die-cut), 300 pages, 28.5 x 22.5 cm
Published by
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art / Porto
$58.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
Since the second half of the 20th century, we have lived under the shadow of two clouds: the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb, and the ‘cloud’ of distributed information networks. How did the central metaphor of cold war paranoia become the utopian metaphor of today? ‘Under the Clouds’ explores the contemporary sublime that has replaced the natural one, and the interrelated effects and affects of these two clouds on life and work, leisure and love, and on images, bodies, and minds.
The post-war technologies of the emergent third industrial revolution have now evolved to fit in the palm of our hand; we no longer merely look at images, we now touch, scroll, pinch, and drag them. Where is the border between the self and its data shadow, between information, matter, and affect? The biological, economic, aesthetic, and political effects of living under the clouds has taken the form of new relations between data and material, as well as increasing debt and abstract financialization; the changing nature of work and sex; and new relationships between screens, images, and things. As earlier forms of technologically inflected art sought to mitigate the effects of change — both on perception and society — many of today’s artistic practices confront the myriad interfaces and decentralized networks that continue to shape and transform daily life, forming new evolving connections between bits and atoms.
Texts by
Enrico Baj & Sergio Dangelo, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sean Landers, Metahaven, Seth Price, João Ribas, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, Stan VanDerBeek
Artists
Adel Abdessemed, Horst Ademeit, Cory Arcangel, Arte Nucleare, Darren Bader, Enrico Baj, Robert Barry, Eduardo Batarda, Thomas Bayrle, Neïl Beloufa, René Bertholo, Joseph Beuys, K.P. Brehmer, Bruce Conner, Kate Cooper, Gregory Corso, Guy Debord, Harun Farocki, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Carla Filipe, General Idea, Melanie Gilligan, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, Peter Halley, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Pedro Henriques, Thomas Hirschhorn, Yves Klein, Sean Landers, Elad Lassry, Mark Lombardi, Julie Mehretu, Katja Novitskova, Ken Okiishi, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Silvestre Pestana, Pratchaya Phinthong, Seth Price, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Jacolby Satterwhite, Ângelo de Sousa, Frances Stark, Haim Steinbach, Hito Steyerl, Jean Tinguely, Adelhyd van Bender, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, Christopher Williams, Christopher Wool, Anicka Yi
2016, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 26.7 cm x 20 cm
Published by
Serpentine Gallery / London
Walther König / Köln
$40.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
This is the first solo show in London for this artist, who works with sculptural installations that include print, graphics, moving images and texts. The exhibition will feature new installations that revolve around contemporary radical management practices and the historical hacker organisational forms that may have inspired them.
Simon Denny has risen to critical acclaim with his work, New Management (2014) and most recently with the installation Secret Power (2015), New Zealand’s pavilion for the 56th Venice Biennale.
Denny is one of the leading figures of a generation of artists who employ content from the tech industry, the language of advertising and the aesthetics and ideologies of corporations or governmental bodies to scrutinise technology’s role in shaping global culture.
With the precision of an investigative journalist, Denny’s complex and layered installations explore the commodification of information, branding and marketing strategies, as well as the relationship between private and public industries.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, The Serpentine, London (25 November 2015 – 14 February 2016).
2015, English / German
Softcover, 174 pages, 21 x 30 cm
Published by
Kunstverein München / Münich
Roma / Amsterdam
$38.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Since its establishment in 2006, the design and publishing collaborative Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey) has been busy working at the intersection of graphic design, publishing, and contemporary art. Through a workshop mentality, it combines the characteristically distinct identities of designer, producer, publisher, and distributor. This volume comprises a four-part collection of electronic works by Dexter Sinister, produced from 2008 to 2015, and mimics the memory stick released in parallel to an eponymous exhibition at Kunstverein München, complete with a speaking asterisk as guide. It is related to three previous engagements of the artists in 2015.
2015, English
Hardcover, 358 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Self Service / Paris
$43.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Self Service Fall / Winter 2015 Issue 43
Guest-edited by Melanie Ward.
Self Service Spring / Summer 2015 Issue 42, with Ezra Petronio and Wendy Rowe (Julia Van Os, Anja Rubik, Natalie Westling, Chloe Sevigny, Marjan Jonkman, Grace Hartzel, & Audrey Nurit), Harley Weir and Poppy Kain (Stella Lucia, Aneta Pajak, Erika Linder, Fernanda Ly, Sophia Ahrens, Damaris Goddrie, Grace Simmons, Aya Jones, Amalie Schmidt, Line Brems, Annika Krijt, Greta Varlese, Madison Stubbington, Roos Abels, Misha Hart, Jing Wen, Mia Gruenwald, & Amanda) and so much more.
Self Service magazine is a fashion and cultural biannual magazine. The magazine features the preeminent players in the fashion world, with innovative editorials photographed by the world’s best photographers and stylists.
Note: Due to the size/weight of this volume, your order will possibly incur additional postage costs. We will contact you with the best shipping advice upon your order, or alternatively, please email us in advance. Thank you for understanding.
2012, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 20 x 20.5 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Dallas Power Station / Dallas
$55.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Catalogue produced in an edition of 1000 copies to accompany the exhibition Virginia Overton "Deluxe" at The Power Station, Dallas, January 14 - March 30, 2012.
The Power Station is a not-for-profit contemporary art space in Exposition Park, Dallas, Texas, founded by Janelle and Alden Pinnell in 2011. It is housed in a former Dallas Power & Light building which was constructed in 1920, and hosts large scale exhibitions which compliment the building's raw architecture. For each of its international exhibitions, The Power Station works with the artists to produce a publication in conjunction with their project, limited to 1000 copies. Its programming also includes a summer exhibition and additional events each year. The building includes an apartment where artists can live as they create and build their installations. The first exhibitor was American artist Oscar Tuazon.
2009, English
Softcover, 30 pages, 17 x 20 cm
$10.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Catalogue produced on the occasion of the exhibition, "Primary Views" at MUMA, Monash University Museum of Art in 2008, curated by artists Stephen Bram, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and Juan Davila, with co-ordinating curator Kirrily Hammond.
Primary Views invited the insights of four artists represented in the Monash University collection. Each has been invited to curate a self-contained exhibition from the Monash University collection, according to their own areas of interest, expertise and aesthetic/discursive predilections. Alternative to classical or canonical art-historical readings, Primary Views considers the role of the artist as curator, encouraging new readings of the collection, and more partial, polemical and aberrant artistic historiographies.
Features texts by the curating artists and Max Delany.
Artists featured in the exhibition were: Howard Arkley, Paul Bai, Chris Barry, Charles Blackman, Peter Booth, Arthur Boyd, Stephen Bram, Horace Brodzky, Janet Burchill & Jennifer Mccamley, Ian Burn, Jane Burton, Domenico De Clario, Clyde Clinton, Noel Counihan, Mutlu Cerkez, Juan Davila, John Dunkley-Smith, Richard Dunn, Louise Forthun, John Heartfield, Bill Henson, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ronnie Van Hout, Raafat Ishak, Rosemary Laing, Robert Macpherson, Tracey Moffatt, John Nixon, Jacky Redgate, William Robins, Paul Saint, Dada Samson, Jan Senbergs, Wolfgang Sievers
2015, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 16.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Dexter Sinister / New York
Sternberg Press / Berlin
The Serving Library / New York
$25.00 $10.00 - In stock -
Issue number nine tackles all manner of sports and games, providing commentary on their language, politics, and philosophies. It kicks off with Rob Giampietro on New England Patriots controversial quarterback Tom Brady in view of ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with David Peace narrating seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 radio interview with UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Uncovering a fascination for what is still considered the most difficult game of cards, Vincenzo Latronico takes us through the complexities of bridge. Kathy Acker identifies the bodybuilder’s language as the simplest of language games, reduced to a minimal set of nouns and numerical repetition. Joe Scanlan presents “three object lessons” on advanced imaging technologies related to movement, while James Langdon follows the debates on the innovations to rock climbing. The issue slaloms through further contributions from Christoph Keller, Sarah Demeuse, Linus Elmes, Chris Evans, Junior Aspirin Records, Philip Ording, Leila Peacock, Justin Warsh & Miguel Abreu, and Carlin Wing.
2015, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 214 x 20 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$50.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Eva Grubinger, Jörg Heiser (Eds.)
Contributions by Aleksandra Domanović, Mark Fisher, Nathalie Heinich, Mark Leckey, Jean-François Lyotard and Bernard Blistène, Jussi Parikka, Christiane Sauer, Timotheus Vermeulen
While the first volume Sculpture Unlimited (2011) dealt with the question of how the contemporary field of sculpture can be defined in a useful and stimulating manner against its long history, the second volume looks at the present and future. Once again edited by Eva Grubinger and Jörg Heiser, with contributions by internationally reputed artists and scholars, this volume poses the following question: If we assume that computers and algorithms increasingly control our lives, that they not only regulate social and communicative traffic but also produce new materials and things, does this increase or decrease the space for artistic imagination and innovation? Where is the place of art and sculpture, provided we don’t want art to resort to merely maintaining aesthetic traditions?
With sculpture as a leading reference, the contributions address theory, aesthetics, and technology: Do current philosophical movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology affect our notion of the art object? Does so-called post-Internet art have a future? And how does the Internet of Things relate to objects and things in art?
Design by Surface
2015, English
Hardcover, 338 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Self Service / Paris
$38.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
Self Service Spring / Summer 2015 Issue 42
Guest-edited by Jane How.
Self Service Spring / Summer 2015 Issue 42, with Adrienne Jüliger photographed by Alasdair McLellan, includes editorials photographed by Mario Sorrenti, Craig McDean, Harley Weir, Alasdair McLellan, and Glen Luchford.
Self Service magazine is a fashion and cultural biannual magazine. The magazine features the preeminent players in the fashion world, with innovative editorials photographed by the world’s best photographers and stylists.
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2015, English
Softcover, 520 pages (b/w ill.), 20.5 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$83.00 $20.00 - In stock -
Symbols abound in Shannon Ebner’s work. She uses them as if they were words in a poem, emphasizing their polysemy and multiplying the number of potential meanings and interpretations. Like musical scores, her alphabets make intervals and suspensions literal and thus visible. They include the “other” (silence, non-verbal signs, misspellings, handwriting) as a presence whose meaning must be negotiated. They capitalize what is usually repressed in written language (or simply taken for granted), in order to reinstate another structure of understanding. Language is an expression of order and Ebner makes this very clear by giving each letter the weight of concrete. STRIKE slows down the pace of reading to its zero degree. One letter, one page. One letter, one page. A slash. An exercise in reading akin to our first decodings of the written word, when we started, as children, learning how to do things “by the book.”
2015, English / Italian
Softcover (newspaper), 302 pages, 37 x 26 cm
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$18.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
In this issue:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Art and Literature, Darja Bajagić, Walter Dahn, Fiction in Reality, Have We Become the Internet?, Lynn Hershman Leeson, The History of Exhibitions, Intimacy in Art, Nicholas Mangan, Park McArthur, The Multiplication of Moving Perspectives, Opening up to the Unexpected, Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, Systems Prosthetics, Time as Material, The Withdrawal of the Artist, Betty Woodman, Steina and Woody Vasulka.
Driven by the energy of art writing and artists' writing, contemporary literature seems to be consciously migrating into the art world. Some artists exist halfway between the two worlds and are evolving the most innovative characteristics of the literary canon. Brian Dillon attempts to analyze this type of writing, its practice and its potential.
Philippe Parreno and Paul B. Preciado, a philosopher, writer and activist at the helm of the Independent Studies Program of the MACBA, raise ground-breaking questions ranging from the coercion of the public by the institution to processes of disidentification from dominant sexual identities, in a conversation conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Starting in the 1990s, the history of exhibitions has taken on greater resonance in art writing. One precursor of this fundamental type of research was Bruce Altshuler, with his The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. Altshuler, Jens Hoffmann and Elena Filipovic engage in an extensive conversation on the history of exhibitions and the role artists have in organizing them.
Chus Martínez analyzes the beauty of an ecology of events of little interest for the market, but driven by an energy that might pressure the system to open to the unexpected, to balance out the impulse to guarantee results before any attempts have been made to break new ground.
The work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan reveals how the forensic linguistics applied to test the accents of political asylum applicants is often unreliable, on a par with the many audio charlatans hired to ascertain the origins of individuals. The artist discusses all this with Mihnea Mircan.
Youthful transgressions, previously fueled by romantic literature, have been transformed into desire for extreme self-assertion modeled on "first-person-shooter" video games and action movies. Ingo Niermann wonders about how it might be possible to reverse this trend, through the introduction of a positive kind of transgression.
What does it mean to be human in the light of increasingly pervasive technological developments? Omar Kholeif moderates a conversation between Constant Dullaart, Zach Blas and James Bridle, artists who have reflected at length on the impact of the integration of software and algorithms on everyday life.
Michael Wang explores the aesthetics of an art that actively engages with different systems, and the perspective of artists as they consider the objectives, limits and structure of a work that is no longer a matter of objects, but nimbly moves through the folds of these systems as energy.
A handful of artists over the last 50 years have "self-absconded" from the public eye and the social whirl of the system. Martin Herbert discreetly tracks several of them to formulate a hypothesis that reflects an increasing schism between the needs of artists and those of the art world.
Lynn Hershman Leeson's work is an incessant exploration of the nature of consciousness and its extension via technology. Kathy Noble gives an exhaustive overview of her versatile output, from the early pieces to films on identity, cloning and feminist politics featuring Tilda Swinton.
Confession in art can lead to works plagued by egocentric attitude or can bring results of genuine "alongsideness," where the social becomes visible without recourse to reconstruction. Lauren Cornell and Johanna Burton analyze works and artists that have been able to make critical use of intimacy.
Nice to Meet You:
The theme of access and the tensions involved in its possibility are the fulcrum of Park McArthur's production and the focus of this interview with Daniel S. Palmer.
Natalia Sielewicz talks to Darja Bajagić whose work recontextualizes saucy images seen as stereotypes by Western eyes, granting them a sort of liberating ambiguity.
Steina and Woody Vasulka are leading exponents of the video experimentation that began in the late 1960s. Elyse Mallouk analyzes their works from various decades in the light of our growing relationship with the inorganic systems that nurture our relationships of feedback.
Joan Jonas, Ken Okiishi, Jennifer West, and Lucy Raven meet on the common ground of work located at the intersection between visual arts, moving image and performance. In a conversation introduced and moderated by Filipa Ramos they share their ideas and discuss their practice and its relation to time, history, popular culture, theater and narrative.
Australian artist Nicholas Mangan talks to Mariana Cánepa Luna about his work that investigates the troubled relationship between man and the natural environment, and analyzes contexts and objects capable of freeing up narratives that take stock of reality.
Andrew Berardini visits the big clay-dusted studio-vase of Betty Woodman. Her chubby ceramic odalisques, with their alluring forms, covered with fragments of precious stones, embroideries and miniatures, tug him into a grand theater of forms and colors, wild things and aquatic creatures.
Walter Dahn indicated a path for art after conceptualism with his new way of thinking about painting. Daniel Schreiber met with the artist in his home in Cologne to talk about the artist's story and recent works, a series of silkscreens linked to the revolutionary power of music.
After the linear perspective of the Renaissance, new perspectives have been explored, starting with chronophotography and the overturning of vertical or bird's-eye perspective. Jennifer Allen investigates these various perspectives in relation to a number of contemporary artists who have reached multiple, mobile and fragmented visions.
The Artist as Curator
Issue #6 an insert in Mousse Magazine #47
Mel Bochner, Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art, 1966
Hank Bull, Shen Fan, Zhou Tiehai, Shi Yong, and Ding Yi, Let's Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition, 1966
2014, English / French
Softcover, 232 pages (b&w ill.), 240 x 175 mm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$29.00 $10.00 - In stock -
MAY #13 features:
Preface
καταστροφή: the end and the beginning
Man of the Anthropocene (as portrayed in the movie "Gravity")
What is "political" in the Anthropocene? A conversation between STEPHANIE WAKEFIELD and ANTEK WALCZAK
DIY or DIE: a pastoral Selfie
Two stories
Insert: Dustin
REPORTS
Mirror, mirror on the wall ... STEWART UOO at Buchholz Gallery, Berlin
Garden graft. On the exhibition "Your portrait": a retrospective on TETSUMI KUDO at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Kiss me, kiss me, love my body covers
True Romance. Camille Blatrix at Balice Hertling, Paris
The affect impersonal. Anne Imhof at Deborah Schamoni gallery, Munich
Dorothy Iannone This timeless sweetness at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Zürich
"Species of notes." On the book Dubuffet typographer Pierre Leguillon
Exposure Charles James: beyond fashion at the MET, New York
About MAY Revue:
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, quaterly, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisement typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.
2014, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Fillip / Vancouver
$20.00 $5.00 - In stock -
In this Issue:
Byron Peters and Jacob Wick, Christopher Regimbal, Bettina Funcke with Andrew Stefan Weiner, Nicholas Gottlund, Zarouhie Abdalian with Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im, Lene Berg with Jacob Wren, Sumi Ink Club, Matteo Pasquinelli and more...
2014, English
Softcover, 352 pages (60 b/w ill.), 11.5 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$64.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Petra Bauer & Sofia Wiberg, Barnabás Bencsik, Boris Buden, Maria Lind and Tensta konsthall, Jelena Vesić, What, How & for Whom/WHW
From 2012 to 2014 a series of contemporary art exhibitions, events, and participatory forums organized by Galerija Nova, Tensta konsthall, and Grazer Kunstverein comprised the project “Beginning as Well as We Can (How Do We Talk about Fascism?).” Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—the project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.
Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe, edited by curator Maria Lind and the collective What, How & for Whom/WHW, continues the debate with contributions by cultural critics, curators, and artists, which articulate resistant and constructive possibilities of social and artistic production—investigating the language of politics and philosophy and also popular vocabularies, social contexts, media, science, and aesthetics. The exhibitions featured here, which form an essential part of the overall project, test the potential of aesthetic experience to question reality and upset the ideological complacency and political resignation that lead to a loss of control over the direction of social transformation.
Copublished with Tensta konsthall and What, How & for Whom/WHW
Design by Metahaven
2006, English
Softcover (gatefold), 6 pages (colour ill.), 6 pages
Published by
David Pestorius / Brisbane
Ursula Werz / Tübingen
$8.00 $2.00 - In stock -
Paul Bai was born in Tianjin, China in 1968. He migrated to Australia in 1988 and graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) from the Queensland College of Art in 1992. Bai first came to artworld attention in 1998 when he collaborated on the infamous Alderton Gallery performance. He has since embraced a range of collaborative possibilities, including designing posters for the Austrian artist Josef Strau and participating in the projects of Melbourne duo Burchill/McCamley. Bai has also had several solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas, including at the Institute of Modern Art in 2002.
2003, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 21.3 cmx 28.4 cm
1st edition / out of print title,
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$70.00 $50.00 - In stock -
Artwork by Alex Katz, Martin Kippenberger.
Edited by Uwe Koch, Roberto Ohrt.
Text by Diedrich Diederichsen.
Roberta Smith called him the “madcap bad boy of contemporary German art” and also “one of the three or four best German artists of the postwar period.” Martin Kippenberger disrupted the status quo throughout his brief, excessive life, not just by making art of every variety and medium but also by conducting an extended performance in the vicinity of art that involved running galleries, organizing exhibitions, collecting the work of his contemporaries and overseeing assistants. He published books and catalogues, played in a rock-and-roll band and cut records, ran a performance-art space during his early years in Berlin, became part owner of a restaurant in Los Angeles during six months he spent there preparing for an exhibition, and collaborated extensively with other artists. This particular volume considers his output of artist's books, as well as his exhibition catalogues and all the publications whose content he either created or edited. More than just documentation, this publication makes accessible for a wider public the multiple aspects of Kippenberger's books, with all the complexity and consequence of his oeuvre intact.
2014, English
Softcover (with screen printed dust jacket), 54 pages (colour ill.), 14.5 x 21.5 cm
Edition of 200,
$20.00 $2.00 - In stock -
Catalogue for Non In Casa, an exhibition by Liang Luscombe, with collaborations and contributions by Angela Brennan.
Designed by James Oates & Liang Luscombe
2014, English
Softcover, 480 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 15 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$74.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Edited and with contributions by Carola Dertnig, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Holert, Johannes Porsch, Johanna Schaffer, Stefanie Seibold, and Axel Stockburger
In 2010/11, a group of Vienna-based art practitioners (artists, art historians, and cultural theorists) embarked on a journey of experimental research, exploring the genealogical and political implications of the ways in which research rhetorics and policies are currently incorporated into the fields of contemporary art and art education.
Troubling Research: Performing Knowledge in the Arts, a collection of “books” of essays and conversations, is the quirky and exhilarating outcome of this collaborative endeavor to render a “problematization” by interrogating the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation. Michel Foucault once introduced problematization as a “specific work of thought” that transforms “a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response.” For this project, the obstacles and difficulties in question were the terms “art” and “research” and their peculiar conjunction as “artistic” or “arts-based research.” As a result of this process, the understanding of individual artistic/theoretical practices was tested. Working both independently and as a collaborative entity, the group found itself negotiating and contesting each participant’s claim to knowledge in the context of art. The eventual responses to the problem of research proved to be both performative and troubling.
Design by Johannes Porsch
2013, English
Plastic embossed flexi-cover, 160 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Ed of 450 copies,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Daiwa Press Co. / Japan
Dent De Leone / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Take as long as you might take, you might take long by Ryan Gander
Photographs by Takashi Homma & Ryan Gander
Take as long as you might take, you might take long documents an installation by Ryan Gander, commissioned by and first exhibited at Daiwa Viewing Room, Hiroshima, Japan. A standard ceiling mounted sprinkler system in the otherwise empty gallery space is switched on for the duration of the show, the water being invisibly drained from the space and recycled back into the sprinkler system. During the exhibition Ryan Gander instigates and directs a photoshoot of three Japanese females modelling oversized Thom Browne men’s suits within the space. The images of the photoshoot are printed on the interior of the traditional Japanese binding method, meaning the reader must cut the publication to discover the hidden half of the book.
Designed by Åbäke
2014, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages (9 color and 6 b/w ills.), 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$44.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen
Featuring artwork by Metahaven
Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning utopias or war, they are also targets of urbicide. Repeatable spatial products quickly make new construction obsolete; the powerful bulldoze the disenfranchised; buildings can radiate negative real estate values and cause their surroundings to topple to the ground. Demolition has even become a spectacular entertainment.
Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets and exhausted special landscapes. However, in failure, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry.
These ebbs and flows—the appearance and disappearance of building—can be designed. Architects—trained to make the building machine lurch forward—may know something about how to put it into reverse.
Design by Zak Group
2014, English
Hardcover, 346 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Self Service / Paris
$41.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
‘Self Service’ celebrates 20 years in fashion in this monumental issue, with three visions outlined in essays by Harriet Quick, Sophie Fontanel and Loïc Prigent. The centrepiece, however, is 92 pages of ‘Obessions’: a multifaceted take on its title that presents 50 looks with four models, photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth and interspersed with 20 collages clipped from back issues of the magazine. Also featured is photography by Glen Luchford, Alasdair McLellan, Collier Schorr and Venetia Scott, an essay by Sarah Mower on Helmut Lang, and conversations with Simon Porte Jacquemus, Michel Gaubert, Marie-Amélie Sauve, Jean Touitou and Stella Tennant.
2002, English
Softcover (die cut), 96 pages (colour & b/w ill.), 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
UQ Art Museum / Brisbane
$25.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This publication features previous and new works produced during a residency at The University of Queensland and accompanied Heliocentricities, an exhibition held at The University Art Museum 28 June–3 August 2002.
2014, German
Softcover, 80 pages, 24 cm x 16.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$32.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Simon Denny, who was awarded the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel Statements in 2012, is interested in the development and contradictions of our thoroughly mediatised society.
His installations, objects, and projects focus on the connections between changes in media, commerce, aesthetics, and politics, with their ever repeated and always rapidly obsolete promise of the new.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Simon Denny: The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom at mumok, Vienna, 5 July – 13 October 2013.
Texts by Christian Höller, Jasmine McNealy, Matthias Michalka.