http://www.adultcontemporary.com.au/

Adult Contemporary, Perth (2026)

09/04/2026

Please join us at ’s Archive Book Sale this Saturday, where they’ll be selling several decades’ worth of art publications from $1 to $3 in an effort to downsize. Running as part of the Boorloo Heritage Festival, the sale will feature hundreds of publications from Australia and overseas, including zines, exhibition catalogues, magazines, and journals.

Coinciding with PICA’s sale, we’ll be going through our own inventory to present an assortment of items outside of our usual rotation—items that are rare, out-of-print, expensive, oversized, undersized, or otherwise don’t fit too nicely in our bookshelf located in PICA’s foyer. We’ll be selling a selection of publications, tote bags, and incense at RRP.

⏰ SAT 11 APR, 12:00 – 5:00 PM
🌏 PICA (51 JAMES STREET PERTH WA 6000)

14/12/2025

2025 is almost over, and there’s just one week left to visit our shop in ’s foyer before the end-of-year closure and exhibition changeovers. SUN 21 DEC is your last chance to see the current exhibitions and pick up gifts or Birak/summer reads before the galleries reopen on FRI 06 FEB. You can also find e-gift cards on our website, which can be used in-store and on our soon-to-be-launched online shop.

PICA
Perth Cultural Centre
51 James Street Boorloo/Perth
TUE – SUN, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

As always, thanks to PICA for their support. 💖

🎄

Paul McCarthy, ‘Tree’, 2014. Vinyl-coated nylon fabric, fans, and rigging; 960 × 540 × 540 in. Installation view: Place Vendôme, FIAC Hors les Murs, Paris, France, 2014.

06/12/2025

A selection of publications on writing currently for sale:

1️⃣ Amina Cain: A Horse at Night—$22.99 (inc. GST)—Essayistic inquiries come together into a sustained meditation on writers and their works, on the spaces of reading and writing fiction, and how these spaces take shape inside a life. In ‘A Horse at Night’, Amina Cain contemplates how to be honest, open and free, as a person and a writer, even (and perhaps especially) during a time of great change. She moves elegantly through a personal canon of authors—including Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux—and topics as timely and various as female friendships, neighbourhood coyotes, landscape painting and the politics of excess, to profound and joyous effect.

2️⃣ Brian Dillon: Essayism—$24.99 (inc. GST)—‘Essayism’ is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and contemporary possibilities. It’s an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive, exacting yet evasive, a form that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure. Among the essayists to whom he pays tribute—from Virginia Woolf to Georges Perec, Joan Didion to Sir Thomas Browne—Brian Dillon discovers a path back into his own life as a reader, and out of melancholia to a new sense of writing as adventure.

3️⃣ Ursula K. Le Guin: Steering the Craft—$35.00 (inc. GST)—‘Steering the Craft’ is Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag of the tools of a writer’s craft: how—and why—to write. From the sound of language to tenses to point of view, Le Guin offers a comprehensive and generous guide to the fundamental components of narrative, illustrating her incisive analysis with examples from some of her favourite writers. Revised and updated for the twenty-first century, this handbook includes exercises that the writer can do alone or in a group.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) in person, or via direct message and email. 🛍

04/12/2025

A selection of publications from currently for sale:

1️⃣ Jérémie Koering: Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images—$59.99 (inc. GST)—‘Iconophages’ aims to retrace, for the first time, the history of iconophagy. Jérémie Koering examines this unexplored facet of the history of images through an interdisciplinary approach that ranges across art history, cultural and material history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and the senses. He analyzes the human investment, in terms of culture and imagination, at stake in this seemingly paradoxical way of experiencing images. Beyond the hidden knowledge unearthed here, these pages bring to light a new way of understanding images, just as they illuminate the occasionally outlandish relations we maintain with them.

2️⃣ Hillel Schwartz: The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles—$52.99 (inc. GST)—‘The Culture of the Copy’ is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us.

3️⃣ Michael Warner: Publics and Counterpublics—$44.99 (inc. GST)—By combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extended case studies, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’ shows how the idea of a public works as a formal device in modern culture and traces its implications for contemporary life. Michael Warner offers a revisionist account at the junction of two intellectual traditions with which he has been associated: public-sphere theory and q***r theory. To public-sphere theory, this book brings a new emphasis on cultural forms, and a new focus on the dynamics of counterpublics. To q***r theory, it brings a new way of seeing how q***r culture (among other examples) is shaped by the counterpublic environment.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) in person, or via direct message and email. 🛍

04/12/2025

Find us selling a selection of books today and tomorrow at the Unruly Book Fair as part of ’s Unruly Objects conference.

⏰ WED 3 – FRI 5 DEC, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM
🌏 K COMMON, UNIVERSITY HALL, UWA

With , , , , , .press, and

14/12/2024

Please join us tomorrow at ’s Birak Market for a final chance to shop for gifts and summer reads before PICA’s end-of-year closure and exhibitions changeover (23 DEC to 6 FEB), during which our foyer pop-up shop will also be closed.

We’ll be selling a selection of books, tote bags, and incense alongside other stalls selling arts and crafts from the likes of , , , , , , , .k.r, , and amongst others.

⏰ SUN 15 DEC, 10:00 AM – 3:00 PM
🌏 PICA (51 JAMES STREET PERTH WA 6000)

21/11/2024

On the occasion of PrideFEST 2024, a selection of facsimile editions currently for sale:

1️⃣ Pippa Garner: Better Living Catalog—$44.00 (inc. GST)—Pippa Garner’s ‘Better Living Catalog’, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

2️⃣ Greer Lankton: Sketchbook, September 1977—$44.00 (inc. GST)—‘Sketchbook, September 1977’ is an early journal by Greer Lankton written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It offers key insights into the artist’s mind before her move to New York in 1978, where she would go on to have a prolific career making lifelike dolls, theatrical sets, photographs, drawings, and paintings.

3️⃣ Eileen Myles: Bread and Water—$33.00 (inc. GST)—First published by Hanuman Books in 1986, ‘Bread and Water’ is the debut short story collection by the renowned poet Eileen Myles, assembling six stories with an autobiographical flavor, of being a q***r, working-class poet with a penchant for mischief. Stories include: ‘Light Warrior’, ‘21, 22, 23…’, ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Title’, ‘Bath, Maine’, ‘Bread and Water’, and ‘Everybody Would Go Play Cards at Eddie and Nonie’s’.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) from AC’s shop in PICA’s foyer, or via direct message and email. 🛍

20/11/2024

On the occasion of PrideFEST 2024, a selection of (auto/)biographical texts portraying artists/authors living with HIV/AIDS currently for sale:

1️⃣ Gregg Bordowitz: Some Styles of Masculinity—$39.95 (inc. GST)—‘Some Styles of Masculinity’ is an intimate, urgent, and rollicking account of thinking and enduring through upheaval and plague. Prompted by the surge of white nationalism in the United States, Gregg Bordowitz reflects on his experience of assimilation and marginalization as a Yinglish-speaking child of outer-borough Jews and a q***r person who has been living with AIDS since his twenties. He tells his own story by considering three totems of masculinity that were formative to him as he came of age in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s: the rock star, the rabbi, and the comedian. These figures taught Bordowitz how to balance reinvention and tradition, and how to be different even as difference is under assault.

2️⃣ The Works of Guillaume Dustan, Volume 1—$32.99 (inc. GST)—This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator’s sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.

3️⃣ Chloé Griffin: Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller—$62.95 (inc. GST)—Cookie Mueller (1949–1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a q***r icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. ‘Edgewise’ tells the story of Cookie’s life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) from AC’s shop in PICA’s foyer, or via direct message and email. 🛍

19/11/2024

On the occasion of PrideFEST 2024, a selection of illustrated texts currently for sale:

1️⃣ Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings / Leo Bersani: Gay Betrayals (Two Works)—$39.95 (inc. GST)—Building on artistic research into the politics of q***r spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.

2️⃣ Evelyn Taocheng Wang: Unintended Experience (A Job In Amsterdam)—$37.95 (inc. GST)—This volume gathers a collection of diary-like texts, posted in 2015 by Rotterdam-based Chinese artist Evelyn Taocheng Wang (born 1981) on her page, recording the aesthetic, intellectual and sentimental experiences she had as an undercover transgender masseuse in a massage parlor in Amsterdam. The vignette-like chapters retrace the daily routine at the parlor, incidents with clients and conversations with fellow workers, as well as personal reflections that deftly mix bursts of humor with moments of tension, poetical notes and an acute sense of observation.

3️⃣ Martin Wong: Footprints, Poems, and Leaves—$44.00 (inc. GST)—Self-published in 1968, ‘Footprints, Poems, and Leaves’ collects dozens of poems written by Martin Wong between 1966 and 1968. Hand-written in a signature calligraphic style that he was just beginning to develop, the poems ebb and flow visually across the page, much like the fluctuating characters, scenes, and moods that inhabit them. This was Wong’s first book of poetry and it contains a double cover showcasing intricate drawings of skeletal angels and other tableaux, as well as a folded, looseleaf broadsheet containing two poems and a drawing of a boney leaf.

Available to purchase (while stocks last) from AC’s shop in PICA’s foyer, or via direct message and email. 🛍

19/08/2024

Following our one-week takeover of the PICA Shop at the end of June, Adult Contemporary is now back in PICA’s foyer for an extended time with an ever-evolving collection of publications, art editions, and objects.

You can find our setup through the western façade entrance, located amongst Agatha Gothe-Snape’s recently commissioned installation ‘IT IS THE COLOUR OF AN IDEA THAT WILL NOT COMPLETE ITSELF IN OUR LIFETIME’.

PICA
Perth Cultural Centre
51 James Street Boorloo/Perth
TUE – SUN, 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Thanks to PICA for having us. 💖

AC acknowledges the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation, the traditional and rightful custodians of the land on which we operate. We recognise their strength and resilience and pay respect to their Elders, past and present.

👉

Andrea Fraser, ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’, 1989. Single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), colour, sound, 30:00 min.

17/03/2024

Ahead of ACRG’s meeting for Carla Lonzi’s ‘Self-portrait’ this Sunday afternoon, we’ll be making coffee and selling books in the internal courtyard at 50 Pier Street Boorloo/Perth from 12:00 to 3:30 PM. Please come by, say hello, and have a browse.

☕️

The internal courtyard can be accessed from the rear car park via the laneway running from Dada Records on Pier Street to OMG Coffee & Toastie on Murray Street.

Please note that the rear car park is for tenants only. Free 3-hour weekend parking is available nearby in the CPP Pier Street car park.

Regrettably, accessibility to the (1899) building is limited for wheelchair users and others who need step-free access due to the presence of steps at both entrances.

✨

Joseph Beuys, ‘The Orwell Leg: Trousers for the 21st Century’, 1984. Denim jeans with holes cut in the knees, 41 × 15.75 in (104 × 40 cm). Edition of 35 unique variations.

Adult Contemporary

09/04/2026

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