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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
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.
2024, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Published by
Scheidegger und Spiess / Zürich
$90.00 - In stock -
A groundbreaking, richly illustrated book on Hannah Höch’s montages in the context of film and the visual culture of Modernism. Sheds light for the first time on Hannah Höch’s significance as a pioneering artist to confront the industrial age’s flood of images.
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major Berlin-based magazine publisher, and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German capital's vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense consumer culture, and reassembled it in revolutionary, poetic, and often ironic ways. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of montage, of which she was a coinventor.
Cutting and montage also shaped film, still a new medium in the 1920s, which strongly influenced Höch's art: she understood her assembled pictures as static films. This richly illustrated and expertly annotated book explores comprehensively for the first time Höch's life-long fascination with film and the visual culture of the modern industrial age. Covering her entire career, It demonstrates how montage evolved in a field of tension between artistic experimentation, commercial exploitation, and political appropriation. A text on photomontage by Höch, written in 1948, and a text-collage on the history of montage, in which major protagonists of Modernism and Avant-garde have their say, round out this volume.
Contributors:
Martin Waldmeier is a curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
Nina Zimmer is director of the Kunstmuseum Bern and its affiliate Zentrum Paul Klee.
1990, Japanese / French / English
2 volumes in cardboard slipcase (w. exhibition flyer); volume 1 68 pages (colour ill.) volume 2 196 pages (b/w ill.), 22.5 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Sezon Museum of Art / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
Wonderful, visually exhaustive two-volume boxset catalogue for the traveling exhibition in Japan in 1990—1991, held on the centenary of Man Ray's birth.
Each volume of this Japanese publication on the American artist Man Ray serves as a wonderful index of his incredible lifetime of work. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Man Ray was a renowned representative of avant-garde photography in the 20th century and is considered as the pioneer of Surrealist photography. A major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media including drawings, objects and films, but considered himself a painter above all. Volume One compiles many examples of his diverse non-photographic works, reproducing his many paintings, drawings, objects, prints and book editions in full colour. Volume Two (the heavier of the two volumes) focuses on his prolific photographic work, copiously illustrated with a huge catalogue of beautifully reproduced monochromatic works throughout his entire career — Paris, America, Dada, Surrealism and beyond — showcasing his significant contribution to the evaluation of photography as a form of modern art.
Accompanying texts by Merry Foresta, Lucien Treillard, Toshiharu Ito in Japanese, French and English. Primarily in Japanese language. Includes full biography, bibliography and catalogue of all works.
Good—VG copy. Light wear/age/foxing to slipcase and covers otherwise Very Good in general.
1991 exhibition flyer at Seibu laid in.
1970, German / French
Softcover, 118 pages, 21 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft Helmhaus Zürich / Zürich
$200.00 - In stock -
Rare, important exhibition catalogue designed by Walter Diethelm, published on the occasion of the exceptional exhibition Text Buchstabe Bild (Text, Letter, Image), held at the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft Helmhaus Zürich, July 11—August 23, 1970. Preface by Felix Andreas Baumann. "The point is to present this literature, which is located between writing and images, text and graphics and around the tertium comparationis of typography, to an audience that is probably not too familiar with the techniques and variants of “concrete literature”—from the preface. An incredible and varied anthology of the experimental, poetic, graphic interplay of text and image, profusely illustrated in b/w, accompanied by texts in German and French by Stéphane Mallarmé, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Oyvind Fahlström, El Lissitzky, André Breton, Eugen Gomringer, Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Jan Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Max Bense, Reinhard Döhl, Carlfriedrich Claus, Seiichi Niikuni, Henri Chopin, Franz Mon, Jiri Kolár, and Bob Cobbing.
Artists included: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arno Holz, Christian Morgenstern, F.T. Marinetti, Carlo Carrà, Lacerba, Ardengo Soffici, Hugo Ball, Georges Braque, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Amédée Ozenfant, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, Fernand Léger, Richard Hülsenbeck, Vincente Huidobro, Francis Picabia, Jean Pougny, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Bruno Adler, Jean Epstein, Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, Jozef Peeters, Sonja Delaunay-Terk, Iliazd, Friedrich Kiesler, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Käthe Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Henryk Berlewi, Farkas Molnár, Zenit, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkmann, Walter Gropius, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Le Corbusier, and Georges Hugnet.
Very Good ex-NGV library copy, well preserved with only light wear and "National Gallery of Victoria" light stamp to block edge and lower back-cover. No internal stamping/marking.
1992, English
Softcover, 173 pages, 24 x 15 cm
Published by
Dalkey Archive Press / US
$32.00 - In stock -
English edition of this 1933 classic surrealist novel by René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist dadaist who suffered a traumatic religious upbringing and suffered from tuberculosis. Crevel is considered to be one of the most important writers of surrealist fiction, a true genius of the movement. Translated by Thomas Buckley, this edition includes Ezra Pound's well-known essay on Crevel as a foreword, and an introduction by Edouard Roditi.
Imagine, if you can, Freud and Proust sitting down for a chat with Zippy the Pinhead and the marquis de Sade. Then, just when things are starting to get a bit silly, in walks Karl Marx with a dead serious face to deliver a vitriolic diatribe. After he has finished his speech, Jacques Lacan enters and slips a couch under the narrator, who begins psychoanalyzing himself and his text. Zippy soon prevails, however, and the narrative has turned into a political allegory with characters out of Felix the Cat: a surrealist, graphic (historiographic, geographic, pornographic) version of The Romance of the Rose. Rene Crevel's 1933 novel Putting My Foot in It (Les Pieds dans le plat) has long been considered a classic of the surrealist period, but has never been translated into English until now. Loosely structured around a luncheon attended by thirteen guests, the novel is a surrealistic critique of the intellectual corruption of post-World War I France, especially the capitalist bourgeoisie and its supporter, the Catholic Church. The novel begins with an account of the family of the major character, known as the "Prince of Journalists." This bizarre family - the grandparents a soldier and a sodomized woman, the parents an orphaned epileptic and a hunchback - is matched by Crevel's bizarre syntax and vocabulary: nouns that initially appear legitimate, intact, and respectable, soon decompose into obscene epithets, making other nouns, both common and proper, suspect. The story continues in this way to deconstruct itself on many levels - literary, semantic, psychological, ideological - until the final chapter, when the luncheon degenerates in a way reminiscent of a Bunuel film and all of the novel'scharacters appear in a dirty movie entitled The Geography Lesson, a final metaphor for the corruption of European society between the world wars.
1977, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$200.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of this remarkable issue of the original Semiotext(e) journal, published and edited by Sylvère Lotringer between 1974—1985, with later book-length issues appearing in the 1990s. This key issue, Anti-Oedipus: From Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics, was published hot on the heels of the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's seminal "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia", published by Viking in 1977. This issue of the journal explores the issues raised by Deleuze and Guattari, whilst searching for their practical applications. Features major contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Guy Hocquenghem, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Donzelot, John Rajchman, et al.
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Very Good copy with some wear and usual tanning to the spine, raw paper stock edges. Spine and binding undamaged.
1989, English / German / French
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daadgalerie / Berlin
Gelbe Musik / Berlin
$350.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 edition of Broken Music, an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. Complete with original flexi-disc. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and published in 1989 by DAAD and Gelbe Musik, Berlin. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art. She was married to curator René Block.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
Very Good copy all-round, light cover/corner wear.
1972, German / English / French
Vinyl ring-binder (screen printed w. design by E. Ruscha), 650 pages +, 32 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
documenta / Kassel
$500.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of the only edition of the most elaborately designed, and lowest circulated Documenta catalogue, conceived by curator Harald Szeemann to accompany the fifth edition of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany.
Subtitled "100 Days of Inquiry into Reality -- Today's Imagery," curated by the team of Harald Szeemann, Jean-Christophe Ammann and Arnold Bode, Documenta 5 followed a lineage of comprehensive shows documenting conceptually and minimally charged artworks curated by Szeemann including Live in Your Head (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), and Happenings and Fluxus (Kunstverein, Köln), 1970. The largest, most expensive and most diverse of any exhibition anywhere, Documenta 5 was criticized in 1972 as being “bizarre…vulgar…sadistic” by art critic and essayist Hilton Kramer and “monstrous… overtly deranged” by art historian and art critic Barbara Rose, yet it still resonates today as one of the most important exhibitions in history. Featuring the works of over 170 artists and an equally expansive variety of materials and subjects drawn from popular cultural materials, architecture, science fiction, kitsch objects, film, advertising, children's art, etc. in addition to the more anticipated international survey of new painting and sculpture - Documenta 5 valiantly attempted to bridge the gap between art, culture, science and the broader society. This massive tome is housed in the iconic orange vinyl-covered, two-ring binder screen printed with the famous ant design by Edward Ruscha. The binder holds a tabbed index of illustrated artist's pages and associated texts and material, largely in German, but also many in English. All registers are present apart from the usual missing 19-25 which were not directly integrated into the catalogue and had to be ordered by the visitor separately to become their own contribution. This very complete copy also includes the additional 80 page, hole-punched Documenta 5 guide book, with floor plans, complete listing of exhibited artworks, list of exhibitions, bibliography, and many gallery, museum and other related advertisements. More than a catalogue, this publication is a piece of art history in itself.
Includes artists: Vito Acconci, Vincenzo Agnetti, Peter Alexander, John de Andrea, Giovanni Anselmo, Arbeitszeit, Archigram, Chuck Arnoldi, Art & Language, Richard Artschwager, Michael Ashkin, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Georg Baselitz, Lothar Baumgarten, Robert Bechtle, Gottfried Bechtold, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Karl Oskar Blase, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Claudio Bravo, George Brecht, K.P. Brehmer, Marcel Broodthaers, Stanley Brouwn, Günter Brus, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Michael Buthe, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Castelli, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, Tony Conrad, Ron Cooper, Bill Copley, Joseph Cornell, Robert Cottingham, Paul Cotton, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, David Deutsch, Jan Dibbets, Herbert Distel, Gino de Dominicis, Marcel Duchamp, John Dugger, Don Eddy, Franz Eggenschwiler, Ger van Elk, Richard Estes, Luciano Fabro, John C. Fernie, Robert Filliou, Jud Fine, Joel Fisher, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Hamish Fulton, Franz Gertsch, Gilbert & George, Ralph Goings, Hubert Gojowczyk, Dan Graham, Walter Grasskamp, Nancy Graves, Hans Haacke, Duane Hanson, Guy Harloff, Michael Harvey, Haus-Rucker-Co, Auguste Herbin, Eva Hesse, Rebecca Horn, Jean Olivier Hucleux, Douglas Huebler, Jörg Immendorff, Will Insley, Rolf Iseli, Ken Jacobs, Neil Jenney, Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Max G. Kaminski, Howard Kanovitz, Edward Kienholz, Imi Knoebel, Christof Kohlhofer, Jannis Kounellis, Tom Kovachevich, Piotr Kowalski, David Lamelas, Barry Le Va, Jean LeGac, Alfred Leslie, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Ingeborg Luscher, Inge Mahn, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Etienne Martin, Richard McLean, David Medalla, Fernando Melani, Jim Melchert, Mario Merz, Gustav Metzger, Bernd Minnich, Malcolm Morley, Ed Moses, Bruce Nauman, Hermann Nitsch, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Blinky Palermo, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, A.R. Penck, Giuseppe Penone, Vettor Pisani, Sigmar Polke, Stephen Posen, Markus Raetz, Arnulf Rainer, Gerhard Richter, Klaus Rinke, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Roehr, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Ulrich Ruckriem, Robert Ryman, John Salt, Salvo, Lucas Samaras, Paul Sarkisian, Jean-Frederic Schnyder, Ben Schonzeit, Werner Schroeter, HA Schult, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Fritz Schwegler, Richard Serra, Paul Sharits, Allan Shields, Katharina Sieverding, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Klaus Staeck, Paul Staiger, Jorge Stever, Robert Strubin, Paul Thek, Wayne Thiebaud, Andre Thomkins, David Tremlett, Richard Tuttle, Ben Vautier, W + B Hein, Franz Erhard Walther, Robert Watts, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, John Wesley, H.C. Westermann, William Wiley, Rolf Winnewisser, Tom Wudl, Klaus Wyborny, La Monte Young, Peter Young, Gilberto Zorio.
Catalogue also includes Bob Projansky and Seth Siegelaub's "The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement." This "Agreement form has been drafted by Bob Projansky, a New York lawyer, after my [Siegelaub] extensive discussions and correspondence with over 500 artists, dealers, lawyers, collectors, museum people, critics and other concerned people involved in the day-to-day workings of the international art world. The Agreement has been designed to remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists' lack of control over the use of their work and participation in its economics after they no longer own it. The Agreement for has been written with special awareness of the current ordinary practices and economic realitites of the art world, particularly its private, cash and informal nature, with careful regard for the interests and motives of all concerned. It is expected to be the standard form for the transfer and sale of all contemporary art, and has been made as fair, simple and useful as possible. It can be used either as presented here or slightly altered to fit your specific situation. If the following information does not answer all your questions consult your attorney." -- from Agreement's cover. Copies of the contract are individually included in English, Germany, and French editions.
Very Good, complete (as issued) copy. Very minor wear.
2023, English
Softcover, 198 pages, 20.4 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Snuggly Books / UK
$40.00 - In stock -
René Crevel (1900-1935), a bisexual communist who suffered from tuberculosis, was one of the most important surrealist authors, a true genius, and possibly the best writer of surrealist fiction, and no other of his works of fiction is more surreal than Are You All Crazy?-originally published in 1929 and here presented for the first time in English in a superb translation by Sue Boswell. In this feverish, full-speed-ahead novel of out-and-out madness, we meet a redhead who gives birth to a blue child, hear the naughty song of the pigtail-pullers, visit the Sexual Institute of Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer, attend an eonism séance, and witness a fifty-kilo rat disembowelling a fakir.
Are You All crazy? is a subversive masterpiece and a work of deep psychological interest, which, although puzzling in the utmost in its excesses of satirical bravado, certainly must be acknowledged to be one of the great European novels.
1974, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$30.00 - In stock -
Environments and Happenings by painter and poet Adrian Henri, published by Thames & Hudson in 1974, forms one of the first mainstream book surveys to trace the phenomenon of environmental/performative/total living artworks that became prevalent in the 1960s/70s. This historical study is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with many international works from Fluxus to Zero to Dolle Mina to Nouveau Réalisme to Provo to Gutai to The Situationists and much more. Includes the works of Joseph Beuys, Clarence Schmidt, Ray Johnson, Öyvind Fahlström, Paul Thek, Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Guerllia Art Action Group, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell, Gustav Metzger, Peter Kuttner, Jackson Pollock, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Situationist International, Ferdinand Kriwet, Klaus Rinke, Duane Hanson, A-Yo, Meret Oppenheim, Space Structure Workshop, Ferdinand Cheval, Dolle Mina (Mad Mina), Robert Smithson, Jeff Nuttall, Stefan Wewerka, Christo, Dennis Oppenheim, Vladimir Tatlin, Provo, Barry Flanagan, Andy Warhol, Meredith Monk, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Ed Keinholz, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Gilardi, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Les Levine, James Rosenquist, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Eduardo Paolozzi, and many many more. Includes reproductions of performance scripts, partial chronology, etc.
Very Good copy, previous owner name to front endpaper.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 22 x16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
MB, Negativland, SPK, Nocturnal Emissions, Werkbund, Asmus Tietchens, Monte Cazazza, Throbbing Gristle, William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, COME, Whitehouse, Esplendor Geometico, Lustmord, Ramleh, Club Moral, Mail Music, The Hafler Trio, Organum, The New Blockaders, Etant Donnes, Pirate Radios, P16.D4, S.B.O.T.H.I., Anti Records, Gum, Trax, MC5, Gordon Mumma, Boyd Rice / NON, Vagina Dentata Organ, The Haters, RRR Records, Schimpfluch, Entre Vifs, Moholy Nagy, Luigi Russolo, Carcass....
First (only) hardcover edition of the seldom seen and highly coveted "Noise War", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1992. Long out-of-print, "Noise War" surveys 10 years of noise, tracing developments and interests in the work of Burroughs and Crowley into the the birth of industrial music, power electronics, experimental noise and noise art/performance, bionic noise, metal alchemy, noise electronics, anti-information and avant-garde radio, mail art, noise collage/exchange music, media attack, record destruction, ambient noise, and much more, delving into the work of keys artists and record labels from all over the world within the survey period, but also influential historical figures. Heavily illustrated throughout in black and white with record sleeves, posters, photographs, and finishes with Akita's compiled noise record list.
Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Noise War" is the most sought after of these very books.
Japanese text, fine copy with fine metallic endpapers, metallic illustrated hardcovers, and illustrated dust jacket. Tight with little-to-no wear.
2023, Japanese
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Ribonsha / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Photo book of works by Japanese avant-garde artist and writer, Genpei Akasegawa (1937—2014), refreshing his legacy as an artist who pioneered ways of thinking about art under capitalism that still feel like trenchant critiques decades later.
Genpei Akasegawa was not only an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the broader realm of popular culture but also an award-winning writer and photographer. He emerged in the Japanese art scene in the 1960s. Best known internationally as a member of the influential, anti-art collective Hi-Red Center (1963–64), Genpei Akasegawa is one of the all-time trickster figures of Japanese art history. The famous Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, solidified his reputation as an inspired conceptualist. In 1986, Akasegawa, and his collaborators, including the Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori, formed a new group called the Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai (Street Observation Society). Within this group, Akasegawa showcased a series of photographs featuring Tokyo's bizarre and overlooked architectural features. These structures, referred to by Akasegawa as 'Thommasons', were often disregarded by society but were repurposed by Akasegawa as objects of artistic value.
Keiko Toyoda, of Shiseido Gallery, invited six midcareer artists to select photographs from 40,000 unexhibited 35mm reversal film prints, shot between 1985 and 2006, which Akasegawa kept carefully filed in his study. Shuta Hasunuma, Zon Ito, Sachiko Kazama, Yuko Mohri, Yuta Nakamura and Yasuhiro Suzuki each chose around 20 prints each, presented in this first survey book of Akasegawa's photography, from his ‘Hyperart Thomasson’ project of the 1970s onward: photographs of functionless objects embedded and preserved in everyday spaces despite their lack of utility, to capturing everything from odd lines scored into a patch of green asphalt to table settings and cat portraits (in pre-meme-era 1993).
In addition to his artistic work, Akasegawa was also a prolific writer and critic, having authored over 20 publications on art and culture.
1959, English
Softcover (staple bound), 20 pages, 19.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Matthiesen Gallery / London
$110.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous and very rare 1959 Francis Picabia exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the solo retrospective show at The Matthiesen Gallery, London, October—November 1959. A catalogue of 56 works, some illustrated with b/w plates, with accompanying text by André Breton. Includes biography.
Francis Picabia (1879—1953) was a Cuban-French avant-garde painter, writer, filmmaker, magazine publisher, poet, typographist and provocateur closely associated with Dada. A friend to fellow iconoclasts Duchamp, Breton, Tzara, and Man Ray, Picabia's discordant, self-contradicting art, in which wispy watercolours, pin-up girls and mechanical pistons could hang side by side, had a clear conviction: to crush distinctions between high and low, elegance and kitsch, and to force us all to the limits of taste. When considering the many styles that Picabia painted in, observers have described his career as "shape-shifting" or "kaleidoscopic". After experimenting with Impressionism and Pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. “The Cuban who out-cubed the Cubists”, his highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France, publishing his Dada periodical 391 with Duchamp before denouncing Dada in 1921 in favour of the development of Surrealism. "If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts."—Picabia. From 1922, Breton's relaunched Littérature magazine featured cover artwork every issue by Picabia that drew on religious imagery, erotic iconography, and the iconography of games of chance. In 1925, Picabia returned to figurative painting, his "Monster" period, followed by his "Transparencies" series (1927—1930) and his then abhorred pin-up girl/"Nazi porn" paintings, all highly influential on contemporary German painters such as Sigmar Polke. Picabia would soon turn his back on the art establishment altogether.
Very Good copy with light shadow from sticker to top-left of cover, two National Gallery of Victoria stamps.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 pages, 16.5 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$120.00 - In stock -
ince the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term "heterosexual" and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.
‘Ladies and gents, welcome to the museum of the erotic doll. Step right up and feast your eyes on modern man’s curious contraptions. If the saucy blow-up doll makes you squeamish, brace yourself for the Dutch Wife (a sailor’s delight!), lubricating robot ladies, surrealist brides stripped bare, state-of-the-art RealDolls, and the iDollators who love them. Marquard Smith is the curator of this collection of men's dolls, rendered in a lavishly illustrated volume.’—Laura Frost, Times Higher Education
'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.'—Marina Warner, London Review of Books
“[An] intriguing book . . . Smith teases out the history of these sex objects to provide a thorough genealogy of today’s erotic mannequins.”—Shelly Ronen, Public Books
2020, English
Hardcover, 440 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
October Books / New York
$89.00 - In stock -
How cubism and Dada radically reimagined the social nature of language, following the utopian poetic vision of Stéphane Mallarmé.
At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn,” centered on the radical doubt about the social function of language that defined the avant-garde movements. Major cubists and Dadaists—including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara—appropriated bureaucratic paperwork, newspapers, popular songs, and advertisements, only to render them dysfunctional and incommunicative. In doing so, Stark argues, these figures contended with the utopian vision of the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who promised a “total expansion of the letter.”
In his poems, Mallarmé claimed, “the act of writing was scrutinized down to its origins.” This scrutiny, however, delivered his work into an indeterminate zone between mediums, social practices, and temporalities—a paradox that reverberates through Stark's wide-ranging case studies in the history of the avant-garde. Stark examines Picasso's nearly abstract works of 1910, which promised to unite painting and writing at the brink of illegibility; the cubists' “hope of an anonymous art,” expressed in newspaper collages and industrial colors; the collaborative, cacophonous invention of “simultaneous poems” by the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I; and Duchamp's artistic exploration of chance in gambling and finance. Each of these cases reflected the avant-garde's transformative encounter with the premise of Mallarmé's poetics: that language—the very medium of human communication and community—is perpetually in flux and haunted by emptiness.
As certain artists experimenting in the postwar orbit of John Cage well knew, it was not he who introduced the conceptual scope of chance and musical metric into the language of art. In his brilliant book on Mallarmé's legacy—sure to correct the record—Trevor Stark positions the Coup de Dés as the first score of the twentieth century. Inhabiting industrialism's destruction of the subject, and an infinite abstraction—as chance gave way to indeterminism—Mallarmé encoded his best-known poem with score-like traits (time/realization) and ambiguity (language's readymade indeterminacy); thus he cast the death of the author like a bottle thrown at sea. Such stakes are clear because Stark makes them so. With not a word or a sentence wasted, he adroitly guides us through the Mallarméan dimensions of three pivotal experiments: Braque and Picasso's introduction of text into pictorial space (1910/1912); the temporal-auditory collage of Tzara's simultaneous poems honed in the collectivism of Zurich Dada; and Duchamp's ultimate transvaluation of art/work in Monte Carlo. The often-startling fruits of Stark's meticulous research are presented with a light touch, a space for realization; yet we sense the intellectual and “intermedial” virtuosity the author brings to the task—handling, deciphering, hearing, seeing, translating, across disciplines, languages, and time(s)—to convey his cases and insights to 21st-century readers with the force of contemporaneity. — Julia E. Robinson, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University; curator of the exhibition John Cage & Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence
1959, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 20.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Arts Council / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Lovely rare 1959 catalogue produced on the occasion of the Kurt Schwitters exhibition held by The Arts Council in London. It was in England that the modest and gentle Schwitters spent his last 7 years before he passed away in 1948. Illustrated with a selection of his constructions and collages, his MERZ works, accompanied by an introduction by art historian Alan Bowness, a full catalogue of works and a biographical note, all spread across multiple paper and tissue stocks, exquisitely letter-pressed and printed by Graphis Press in London.
Kurt (Hermann Eduard Karl Julius) Schwitters (1887—1948) was a German artist, one of the great masters of 20th century art. Associated with Der Sturm in Germany, the Dadaists, Constructivists, and Surrealists, Schwitters was a pioneer of abstract art. Working across the fields of poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art., he developed his own kind of Modern Art, called MERZ.
Near Fine copy.
1978, Italian / French
Softcover, 230 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Mazzotta / Milan
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 Mazzotta edition of this absolute classic of Surrealist collage by Max Ernst, first published in 1934. If the collage technique has become an art, it owes it to a work like this book and of course to Max Ernst, one of the masters of collage and incomparable Surrealist painter. Western art has always tried to tear apart the straitjackets of the imprisoned body with one hand: but no one has succeeded in this insurrection like Max Ernst in the novel-collages he invented and brought to climax between 1929 and 1934. These are images accompanied by rapturous captions and cropped from the illustrations of serial novels from the 19th and early 20th centuries, full of sensual and innocent girls undermined by dark pupils of Sade, and messieurs in black suits and spats who hide shameful foibles, while in the background "the city full of dreams" by Baudelaire trembles and again "the specter lures the passer-by in broad daylight". A dreamlike staging inherited from the feuilletons, therefore, but which Ernst, with his montage made up of mysterious juxtapositions and obscure cuts, the exaltation of chance and the thrill of analogy, with his slow-motion cinema and his comic strip for adults only, has been able to transform into the banner of the perennial revolt of desire.
Bi-lingual texts (French/Italian) by Jarry, Schwob, Breton, Eluard...
A masterpiece.
Very Good copy some edge wear, ageing.
1969, Japanese
Softcover, 128 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$360.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the first issue of Angura (Underground Theatre), the "Dramatic Theory Magazine", published in 1969 in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. Strikingly designed by the great Japanese art director Ryōichi Enomoto, this issue's special feature is ‘Anti-Theater’, with contributions by Shūji Terayama, photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki, artist Jiro Takamatsu, poet Tadaaki Mori, director and cinematographer Sakumi Hagiwara, critic Masaaki Hiraoka, critic Koichi Isoda, actor Shigeomi Satô, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
Very Good copy.
1969, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gaberbocchus Press / London
$200.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the first and only 1969 edition of Franciszka Themerson's artist book, Traces of Living: Drawings, self-published by her avant-garde London publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press, founded in 1948 by the artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, along with translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard. Traces of Living is a gorgeous over-sized album teeming with Themerson's remarkable line drawings. Her experimental drawings became synonymous with the radical originality of the presses book-design, which includes works by Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and many others. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi was its flagship publication, published in many editions and still in print. The Gaberbocchus edition is a most apposite evocation of the spirit of Jarry's grotesque fable. The text, which was hand-written directly onto lithographic plates by the translator, Barbara Wright - interspersed with Themerson's conte crayon illustrations - is printed on loud yellow pages. Themerson's contributions as illustrator contributed enormously to the autograph originality of design of Gaberbocchus books. The content of the Themersons' own books were often experiments with language and visual effects. The form was tailored for each publication to support and complement the content, using self-produced paper and other techniques. Apart from appearing in many journals worldwide, several collections of Franciszka Themerson's drawings have been published as books: Forty Drawings for Friends, London 1940-42 (1943), The Way It Walks (1954), Traces of Living (1969) and Music (1998). Themerson's theatre designs included marionette productions of Ubu Roi, Ubu Enchainé and the Threepenny Opera, mostly made for the Marionetteatern in Stockholm, in the 1960s, which toured worldwide for decades, and were rewarded with international acclaim. Many of these were exhibited at the National Theatre in 1993.
Good—Very Good copy with some light spine pinches, markings to covers.
1962, English
Softcover (staple-bound), unpaginated, 32 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gaberbocchus Press / London
$350.00 - In stock -
Exceptionally rare copy of the first and only 1962 edition of wife and husband Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson's experimental artist book, Semantic Divertissements, self-published by their avant-garde London publishing house, Gaberbocchus Press, founded in 1948 by the artist couple, along with translator Barbara Wright and the artist Gwen Barnard. Semantic Divertissements is a gorgeous over-sized album presenting ten collaborative artworks combining Stefan's amusing concrete poetry with Franciszka's whimsical drawings. Married in 1931, the couple begun collaborating together making experimental film, inventing the ‘moving photogram’ as its principal medium. As key catalysts behind a vital film-making avant-garde in 1930s Warsaw, they made five short, lyrical and technically inventive films. The Themerson's own books were often experiments with language and visual effects. The form was tailored for each publication to support and complement the content, using self-produced paper and other experimental techniques. Their radical approach was echoed in the presses original book-design and catalogue, which included works by Alfred Jarry, Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and many others.
Good—Very Good copy with some light corner bumping, light cover marks and light bug nibbles.
2023, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15 x 20 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$30.00 - Out of stock
Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play Ubu Roi, but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Written in 1898 and refused for publication in the author’s lifetime, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of ” ’Pataphysics… the science of imaginary solutions.” ’Pataphysics has since inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and the ’60s rock band Soft Machine, as well as the mythic literary organization, the Collège de ’Pataphysique. Simon Watson Taylor’s superb annotated translation (which in turn inspired a new French edition of the text) was first published by Grove Press in 1965 as part of their now out-of-print collection, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. As a result this most important novel by Jarry has never before been published under its own title in English.
“The complement to the Ubu plays… a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values… Jarry would have found an audience more readily had he written simply a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale, or a spiritual allegory. As it is, Faustroll is [all of these] at the same time”—Roger Shattuck, author of The Banquet Years
2023, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$29.00 - In stock -
Translated, with an introduction, by Justin Vicari.
Conceived in a hospital bed in 1917, then written a few months later after his first and fateful encounter with Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Philippe Soupault’s novella, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle, preceded the author’s involvement with the Parisian Dada movement and the adventure of surrealism he would later launch with his friends. Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, Soupault imagines his alter ego’s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.
Floating between the romantic legacy of Arthur Rimbaud’s abandonment of literature and the banality and loss of personality and morality in the adventurer’s abandonment of society, The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle charts out a troubled tribute to wanderlust and the acte gratuit.
After taking an active part in French Dada, Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) cofounded the surrealist movement with André Breton and Louis Aragon, and authored with Breton The Magnetic Fields, the first official surrealist work. After being expelled from the movement for the crime of being “too literary,” he devoted his life to writing, travel, journalism, and political activity (for which he was put in prison by the collaborationist Vichy government).
1968 / 1969, Japanese / French
4 Vols., softcover, approx. 1000 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$340.00 - Out of stock
Complete 4 issue run of Le Sang Et La Rose — a masterpiece of the Japanese underground! Opening with Kishin Shinoyama's photographic portraits of Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian and onward through one thousand pages exploring the outer limits of subversive human potential!
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose was a groundbreaking, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The fourth final issue, and rarest of the four, edited by critic Masaaki Hiraoka and designed by self-taught painter, graphic designer and political activist, Kiyoshi Awazu (!) The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
All Good—VG copies with general wear and age.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First English-language hardcover edition of this major monograph on Jean Arp (1886—1966) published in 1988 by Rizzoli, New York, authored by Serge Fauchereau. Traces the life and career of the Franco-Swiss artist, lavishly illustrated throughout with wonderful colour and b/w reproductions of his collage, graphics, stone and bronze sculptures, and wooden reliefs. Jean Arp, also called Hans Arp, French sculptor, painter, and poet was one of the leaders of the European avant-garde in the arts during the first half of the 20th century, heavily associated with Dada, Surrealism and Abstract art.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1999, English / French / Japanese
Two-volume softcover bookset in curregated cardboard slip-case, 120 pages & 220 pages (colour and b&w ill. throughout), 18 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
APT International / Tokyo
Isetan Museum of Art / Tokyo
$250.00 - In stock -
First Edition of this comprehensive, beautifully produced Japanese two-volume publication on the life and work of the great French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist, Francis Picabia.
Published by APT International in 1999 for a major Japanese travelling exhibition on Francis Picabia, starting at the Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo in 1999, then to Fukushima and Osaka throughout 1999-2000.
Two Volumes bound in french-fold wraps, beautifully kept fine volumes, both housed in protective corrugated cardboard slip-case with scarlet label wrapped around spine. Slipcase itself is now protected under plastic sleeve.
First volume (226 page) forms a comprehensive retrospective of Picabia's life and prolific and defying work across painting, drawing, printing, poetry and film. Extensive colour and b&w reproductions of a vast collection of his painting, illustration and publishing projects are presented alongside a folio of his poems and drawings, plus photo documentation of his studio and private/social life. Also includes a biography and bibliography, as well as an insightful conversation between Olga Picabia (Francis Picabia's widow), Pierre Calté (director of Comité Picabia), Hans Ulrich Obrist (independent curator) and Stefan Banz (independent curator), about Picabia's life (text in English and Japanese). Introductory essays in Japanese and French by Beverley Calte and Arnauld Pierre.
Second volume (120 pages) "391" is a very special book made up of collated facsimiles of the 19 issues of Picabia's famous Dada periodical, "391", dating 1917-1924.
391 first appeared in January 1917 in Barcelona, published and edited by Picabia, assisted in assembling by Olga Sacharoff, a Georgian emigre residing in Barcelona. The title of the magazine derives from Alfred Stieglitz's New York periodical 291 (to which Picabia had contributed), and bore no relation to its contents. Despite Picabia's renown as an artist, it was mostly literary in content, with a wide-ranging aggressive tone, possibly influenced by Alfred Jarry and Apollinaire. There were contributions by two men new to Dada: Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. However 391 remained essentially the expression of the inventive, energetic and wealthy Picabia, who stated of it: "Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify."
Francis Picabia (22 January 1879 – 30 November 1953) was a French avant-garde painter, poet and typographist. After experimenting with Impressionism and pointillism, Picabia became associated with Cubism. His highly abstract planar compositions were colourful and rich in contrasts. He was one of the early major figures of the Dada movement in the United States and in France. His was later briefly associated with Surrealism, but would soon turn his back on the art establishment.
Very Good copy.