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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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.
1986, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 22.9 x 25.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Aperture / New York
$550.00 - In stock -
First 1986 hardcover edition of Nan Goldin’s classic photo book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, published by Aperture, New York. A landmark work in the field of raw sociological reportage, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her “tribe.” These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin’s life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. All these years later, Goldin’s lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. The book’s influence on photography and other aesthetic realms continues to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography.
From Goldin's introduction: "I sometimes don't know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture. I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification."
"Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a beggar’s opera of recent times. Here were real thieves and unexpected heroes, and a sense that some things in life might still be worth a brawl."—Artforum
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, and grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her first solo show was held in Boston in 1973. She moved to New York in 1979, where she began documenting the city’s gay and transvestite scenes and developed the informal snapshot aesthetic for which she is celebrated today. Goldin was the 2007 recipient of the Hasselblad Award.
Very Good copy - fine copy with VG dust jacket. Definite 1986 first edition in the original unclipped ($39.95) dust jacket, designed by Keith Davis.
1997, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Out of print Routledge 1989 edition, 1997 printing of Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge.
"In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas."
Very Good copy.
1975, English
Softcover, 202 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
Image of the Beast (1968) is a horror erotic novel by American writer Philip José Farmer. Private dick Herald Childe is sent a snuff movie of his partner being brutally murdered. His pursuit of her killers leads him into a waking nightmare of sexual brutality and supernatural bestiality, as he becomes entangled with sex-starved she-ghosts, snake-women and a filthy human sow. Philip Jose Farmer conjures up a universe of unrelenting sexual degradation and horror populated by erogenous vampires, werewolves and other polymorphic creatures from the darkest recesses of the human imagination.
Philip José Farmer (1918—2009) is a three-time Hugo Award winner, and Nebula Grand Master. He has long been recognized as one of the foremost writers in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. He is best known for being the author who introduced sex into science fiction in 1952 with his groundbreaking novella "The Lovers"; his biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage; his fascination for and reworking of the lore of legendary pulp heroes; his Riverworld, World of Tiers, and Dayworld series; his Wold Newton Family concept; and his occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.
Very Good copy of the 1975 Quartet edition, light edge wear.
1966, English
Hardcover (Burlap covered boards), 342 pages, 32 x 31cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$400.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1966 burlap-bound edition of this seminal work by Allan Kaprow documenting the milieu of performance art and happenings in the early-mid 1960s. Published by H. N. Abrams, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is a legendary photo-artist-book by “one of the grand antiheroes of contemporary art”, produced in way we would never see today. Wrapped in a heavy, debossed and screen-printed raw burlap hardcover, this massive and visually stunning volume features incredible typography, commentary and lay-out by Kaprow himself, accompanying countless photogravures (photos taken by Oldenburg, Robert McElroy, Peter Moore and others) featuring the work of artists (and non-artists) such as Claes Oldenburg, Tetsumi Kudo, Jean Tinguely, Clarence Schmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, George Segal, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, together with images of works by the Japanese Gutai Group (Murakami Saburo, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, et al) and many more.
Allan Kaprow, “an artist who coined the term ‘happenings’ in the late 1950s and whose anti-art works contributed to radical changes in the course of late 20th-century art,” was a leading member-with artists George Segal, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg-of a group whose performance works were signally influenced by John Cage’s “reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing element in art. Like Cage, Kaprow used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants and no-clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual…” (New York Times).
"Step Right In"
Very Good copy, spotless with tight-As New binding, perfectly preserved.
2017, English
Softcover, 340 pages, 23 x 17.7 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Michael Lett / Auckland
Clouds / Auckland
$35.00 - In stock -
New Zealand artist and educator Jim Allen is both a formidable influence upon his followers and a prolific artist in his own right. A leader of post-object practices in the global south, Allen’s immersive installations and light touch share much with his self-proclaimed heroes, experimental filmmaker and sculptor Len Lye and Brazilian kineticist Hélio Oitica. This robust reader contains over 300 pages of interviews with Allen, conducted largely by art historian Tony Green and fellow artist Phil Dadson. Through these colourful and often humorous oral histories, one can trace the narrative of Allen’s life, including his participation in WWII and formation as an artist and teacher—and sailor!—from the 1950s until the present day. An important record of a woefully understudied figure of postwar art, The Skin of Years presents Allen’s dogged persistence to engage in what he has called “the art of the possible.”
Introductions by Wystan Curnow and Blair French.
Edited by Gwynneth Porter.
“…a new generation of artists has been discovering Allen, locating in his work a new genealogy for their for own endeavours. And so, as Allen�s installation, video, and performance work of the 1960s and 1970s has become more (and more widely) valued for its ground-breaking significance, it is also being recognised as the local precedent for present day art practices. Jim Allen is, we should now be saying, our first contemporary artist.”—Wystan Curnow
“Biography is so often looked to by its readers – perhaps also its authors and subjects – as a means to identify some essential truth or kernel of experience that might distill, account for or even reconcile the fundamental contradictions and complexities that underpin any individual life. This is most pronounced when encountering the first-person voice of the subject. In this instance, however, the complexities and even contradictions inherent in a figure so influential in multiple guises across two countries are allowed to emerge and linger.”—Blair French
2022, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Small Press / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
"In movies by Buñuel, Visconti, Bertolucci, and Pasolini, Pierre Clémenti was ravishing, a louche angel and devil, unreachable, unknowable, beautiful. In A Few Personal Messages, Clémenti claims your head and heart when he writes: "You think if you lock up your nightmares, you'll feel better." Imprisoned in Italy, his cri de cœur resonates with Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, both men inside for their "sins." Inside, Clémenti is ravaged and assaulted by jail's daily inhumanities and barbarisms. "In a society built on repression," he says, "who is innocent?" Here, Pierre Clémenti must be a modern-day secular saint, whose manifesto is profound, unforgettable, and like him, beautiful.—Lynne Tillman, American Genius, A Comedy and Men and Apparitions
Pierre Clémenti is one of my greatest heroes and role models. These legendary prison journals, in which he details his dedication to visionary, adventuring art and the fraught life his commitment induced, are a call to arms for daringly inclined artists of every stripe. Their long-awaited English birth is key and huge.—Dennis Cooper
Pierre André Clémenti (1942—1999) was a French actor. Born in Paris to an unknown father and Rose Clémenti, a Corsican concierge whose surname he took, Clémenti had a difficult childhood and took refuge in literature and the theatre. He studied drama and began his acting career in the theatre. Working as a telegraph operator and messenger to finance his acting studies at the Theatre National Populaire, Clémenti came to motion picture prominence as a seductive young criminal in Luis Bunuel's 'Belle de Jour' (1967). Thereafter, he was often employed by avant-garde film makers and typecast in intense roles, often as characters with a complex or dark past, working in some of the leading films of the era with directors such as Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Rivette, and many others. In 1972 his career was suddenly derailed when Clémenti was arrested in Rome for possession of LSD and cocaine. He spent 17 months in prison before being acquitted by an appeals court and released. He later authored a book about this chapter of his life. After his release he played the ever-optimistic sailor of the Potemkin in Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie (1974) and the role of Pablo, the seductive saxophone player, in Fred Haines's Steppenwolf (also 1974) adapted from the novel by Hermann Hesse. Pierre was married to actress Margareth Clémenti, mother of his son Balthazar, born in July 1965. Later he was married to Nadine, mother of his second child, Valentin Clémenti-Arnoult. Throughout his career he continued to be active in the theatre and with the French underground film movement, directing several of his own films which often featured fellow underground filmmakers and actors.
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 360 pages, 30.2 x 33 cm
Published by
Laurence King / London
$120.00 - In stock -
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston.
Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work.
With more than 850 images, the enormous book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions.
Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.
1991, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 29 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Feest Comics Verlag / Stuttgart
$140.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful oversized hardcover first German edition of this coffee table collection of artwork by Jean "Moebius" Giraud. Published in 1991 by Feest Comics Verlag in Stuttgart, simultaneously by Les Humanoïdes associés and Marvel, this lavishly illustrated, collectable book presents a wonderful selection of Moebius' work for books and magazines, personal work, sketches and more, with introduction by Moebius (in German) and work list. A lovely collection under the guidance of Moebius himself, with beautiful reproductions.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (1938 – 2012) was a master French artist, cartoonist, and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonym Mœbius, as well as Gir outside the English-speaking world, used for the Blueberry series, one of the first antiheroes in Western comics and his most successful creation in the non-English speaking parts of the world. Esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others, he has been described as the most influential bande dessinée artist after Hergé. As Mœbius, he created a wide range of science-fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style, including the legendary Arzach. In December 1974 he co-founded, Métal Hurlant, a magazine that revolutionized the Franco-Belgian comic world in the process. He collaborated with avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky on many books and projects, including an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the widely-acclaimed comic book series The Incal. Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science-fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element, and The Abyss.
Fine clean copy preserved in Very Good dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st UK Hardcover,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Gollancz / London
$100.00 - Out of stock
Rare first UK Hardcover edition of A Wizard of Earthsea, published by Gollancz, London in 1971. With illustrated dust jacket by David Smee and first appearance of the Earthsea map by John Bush.
A Wizard of Earthsea is a fantasy novel written by American author Ursula K. Le Guin and first published by the small press Parnassus in 1968. It is regarded as a classic of children's literature, and of fantasy, within which it was widely influential. The story is set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centres around a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont. He displays great power while still a boy and joins the school of wizardry, where his prickly nature drives him into conflict with one of his fellows. During a magical duel, Ged's spell goes awry and releases a shadow creature that attacks him. The novel follows his journey as he seeks to be free of the creature.
The book has often been described as a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, as it explores Ged's process of learning to cope with power and come to terms with death. The novel also carries Taoist themes about a fundamental balance in the universe of Earthsea, which wizards are supposed to maintain, closely tied to the idea that language and names have power to affect the material world and alter this balance. The structure of the story is similar to that of a traditional epic, although critics have also described it as subverting this genre in many ways, such as by making the protagonist dark-skinned in contrast to more typical white-skinned heroes.
A Wizard of Earthsea received highly positive reviews, initially as a work for children and later among a general audience, as well. It won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in 1969 and was one of the final recipients of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1979. Margaret Atwood called it one of the "wellsprings" of fantasy literature. Le Guin wrote five subsequent books that are collectively referred to as the Earthsea Cycle, together with A Wizard of Earthsea: The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990), The Other Wind (2001), and Tales from Earthsea (2001). George Slusser described the series as a "work of high style and imagination", while Amanda Craig said that A Wizard of Earthsea was "the most thrilling, wise, and beautiful children's novel ever".
Good ex-libris copy, with stamp to title page and small card pocket to front endpaper. Spotting to block edges, but interior very nice, so too a well preserved dust jacket (light wear, marking and some sunning to spine).
2021, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$89.00 - In stock -
The Shabbiness of Beauty is a visual dialogue that crosses generational divides with the easy intimacy of a late-night phone call. Multidisciplinary artist Moyra Davey delved into Peter Hujar’s archives and emerged mainly with little-known, scarcely seen images. In response to these, Davey created her own images that draw out an idiosyncratic selection of shared subjects. Side by side, the powerfully composed images admire, tease, and enhance one another in the manner of fierce friends, forming a visual exploration of physicality and sexuality that crackles with wit, tenderness, and perspicacity. Spiritually anchored in New York City – even as they range out to rural corners of Quebec and Pennsylvania – these images crystallise tensions between city and country, human and animal. Nudes pose with unruly chickens; human bodies are abstracted toward topography; seascapes and urban landscapes share the same tremulous plasticity. These continuities are punctuated by stark differences of approach: Davey’s self-aware postmodernism against Hujar’s humanism and embrace of darkroom manipulation. The rich dialogue between these photographs is personal and angular, ultimately offering an illuminating reintroduction to each celebrated artist through communion with the other’s work.
"Davey shows us how we all build a sense of who we are through adulation and imitation (through feeling in step with our heroes), and that our past selves can be found as much in the worlds of others (their pictures, writings, notes, songs) as among the memorabilia of our own acts of creation.” – Lou Stoppard, Aperture
”These photographs place the past in the present tense. By mingling her own work with Hujar’s, Davey creates a sense of time that is richer than could be offered by a single artist’s archive, unearthing a capacious continuum of resonance and resemblance.” – Frieze
“Their spheres do not so much collide as coalesce, giving rise to a constellation of shared subjects ... enigmatic yet easy harmonies ... are offset by tensions which run deeper than the tonal schisms between Hujar’s sumptuous blacks and Davey’s simmering greys.” – British Journal of Photography
2020, English
Hardcover (cloth), 264 pages, 29.2 x 25 cm
Published by
Museum of Fine Arts / Boston
$100.00 - Out of stock
Luscious reproductions of more than 50 of Twombly's paintings, drawings and little-known sculptures, along with classical works of art, tell the story of an American abstractionist’s poetical dialogue with antiquity.
Cy Twombly's first visit to Italy as a young man ignited a lifelong passion for classical culture that is everywhere present in his art. Painted canvases, works on paper and small-scale sculptures reveal the historical soul of Twombly's abstract compositions. Taking on myths and heroes as personal guides, he created a psychologically complex dialogue with the visual and literary art of antiquity.
This sumptuously illustrated publication reproduces a carefully chosen selection of the artist's paintings, drawings and sculptures alongside works of classical antiquity, including a number from his personal collection. Illuminating essays by leading scholars and writers, including Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes and Mary Jacobus, explore the often enigmatic engagement of Twombly's art with the world of the past.
Edited with text by Christine Kondoleon, Kate Nesin. Text by Anne Carson, Jennifer R. Gross, Brooke Holmes, Mary Jacobus.
Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia, and lived and worked in New York in the early 1950s and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After traveling around North Africa, Spain and Italy, he settled in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life.
2018, English
Hardcover, 210 pages, 17.6 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$55.00 - In stock -
This novel, much of it written amidst the horror of the trenches when Louis Aragon was a medical orderly during the First World War, demonstrates the chasm that separates the works of the artists and writers of what would become Dadaism and those, say, of the English war poets.
In a world of moral destitution beyond any rational forbearance, what can remain? How can one write at all, let alone something as absurd as a novel? Anicet or the Panorama is both a roman à clef (Aragon’s friends, including André Breton, are recognisable) and a novel of the total liquidation of a culture that had allowed this to come to pass: even literary heroes must be confronted and superseded. As fast-paced, funny and surprising as a Hollywood silent movie, its narrative of fabulous crimes and scandals sweeps through a panorama of Parisian society as its protagonist Anicet becomes subordinated to the mysterious Mire, a woman who is the incarnation of “modern beauty”. Anicet is seduced into a life of crime, which he accepts with nonchalance and an ironic integrity that he maintains to the bitter end of his journey of self-immolation.
Aragon’s precisely crafted and sardonic prose reveals a world that is no more than a tragic puppet show, with every scene self-evidently staged. This furious tempest of a book launched Aragon’s career and is one of the cornerstones of the Paris Dada movement. Despite the fact that he went on to become one of the most prolific and influential French writers of the twentieth century, it is not at all unreasonable to consider this book to be his greatest work.
Translated and introduced by Antony Melville, and the runner-up to the 2017 Scott-Moncrieff Translation Prize.
2020, English
Softcover, 44 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Sahara Books / France
$29.00 - Out of stock
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928. This is an unabridged reprint of this original 1928 version.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American writer, who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of horror and weird fiction.
Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Rats in the Walls", "The Call of Cthulhu", At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time, all canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died, at age 46.
In 1962 Colin Wilson, in his survey of anti-realist trends in fiction The Strength to Dream, cited Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the "assault on rationality" and included him with M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Tolkien and others as one of the builders of mythicised realities over against the failing project of literary realism. Subsequently, Lovecraft began to acquire the status of a cult writer in the counterculture of the 1960s, and reprints of his work proliferated. Philosopher Graham Harman, seeing Lovecraft as having a unique—though implicit—anti-reductionalist ontology, writes: "No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess." Harman said of leading figures at the initial speculative realism conference (which included philosophers Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant) that, though they shared no philosophical heroes, all were enthusiastic readers of Lovecraft. Speculative realists, Mark Fisher and other contemporary philosophers, took Lovecraft seriously, mainly because Lovecraft's weird reality as presented in his novels, had nothing to do with the Gothic's insistence in the supernatural, but presented another reality incomprehensible to the human mind, but nonetheless real. According to scholar S. T. Joshi: "There is never an entity in Lovecraft that is not in some fashion material".
1990, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 28 x 21 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Berkely Books / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
Super collectible 1990 edition of "The Art of Moebius", published by Berkely Books, New York. Edited by Byron Preiss with an introduction by George Lucas and afterword by Jean Giraud Mœbius, this is one of the first books in English showcasing the entire breadth of Jean Giraud Mœbius' extraordinary artistic work in rich colour and b/w, including his work for Arzach, Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, Starwatcher, The Incal, Little Nemo, Blueberry, and much more. Each illustration throughout the entire book is captioned by Moebius himself, giving an intimate introduction into his visionary universe.
Jean Henri Gaston Giraud (1938 – 2012) was a French artist, cartoonist and writer who worked in the Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées (BD) tradition. Giraud garnered worldwide acclaim under the pseudonym Moebius, esteemed by Federico Fellini, Stan Lee and Hayao Miyazaki among others, he has been described as the most influential bandes dessinées artist after Hergé. His most famous works include the series Blueberry, created with writer Jean-Michel Charlier, featuring one of the first anti-heroes in Western comics. As Mœbius he created a wide range of science fiction and fantasy comics in a highly imaginative, surreal, almost abstract style. These works include Arzach and the Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius. He also collaborated with avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for an unproduced adaptation of Dune and the comic book series The Incal. Mœbius also contributed storyboards and concept designs to numerous science fiction and fantasy films, such as Alien, Tron, The Fifth Element and The Abyss.
"In all his drawings, Moebius demonstrates a command of many disciplines in art. He is a master draftsman, a superb artist, and more: his vision is original and strong. Since first seeing the Moebius illustrations in "Heavy Metal" years ago, I have been impressed and affected by his keen and unusual sense of design, and the distinctive way in which he depicts the fantastic. Perhaps what strikes me most of all about his work is it's sheer beauty—a beauty that has always given me great pleasure." - George Lucas
Good copy, clean and tight throughout but with considerable shelf wear to cover and spine.
1989, English
Softcover (french-folds), 160 pages, 34 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Terrazzo / Milan
$100.00 - Out of stock
TERRAZZO was a very special biannual publication on architecture and design, edited and published between 1988–1995 by Barbara Radice, a prominent Italian author, design critic and member of the Memphis Milano design group. In conjunction with Ettore Sottsass, Christoph Radl, Anna Wagner and Santi Caleca, Radice created a unique and thoughtful periodical that focused on contemporary works of design and architecture, within Italy and abroad, touching on a vast array of disciplines in each issue, including photography, literature, poetry, history, science, philosophy, art and anthropology.
TERRAZZO 2
Spring 1989
ANDREA BRANZI
Architecture in shadow
FRANK GEHRY
Detailing by Frank Gehry
photographs by Santi Caleca
PAUL LUBOWICKI SUSAN LANIER projects
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE
on architecture
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
glass
DESIGN FOR HEROES
TRAVEL NOTES
by Ettore Sottsass
on light
photographs by Ettore Sottsass
GREEK TEMPLES: THE POLYCHROMY
by Joseph Rykwert
FRAN LEBOWITZ ON ARCHITECTS
interview
PLANS (No. 2)
Islamic, the Middle Ages
2018, English
Hardcover, 112 pages, 20 x 25.5 cm
Published by
MoMA / New York
$59.00 - Out of stock
Bogdan Bogdanović (1922-2010) was a Yugoslav architect, theorist, professor and a one-time mayor of Belgrade. His idiosyncratic memorials to the victims and heroes of World War II, scattered around the former Yugoslavia, continue to attract attention today, more than 25 years after the country's collapse. The monuments, cemeteries, mausoleums, memorial parks, necropolises, cenotaphs and other sites of memory Bogdanovic designed between the early 1950s and late 1970s occupy a unique place in the history of modern architecture, redrawing the boundaries between architecture, landscape and sculpture in varied and unexpected ways.
This book presents Bogdanovic's built oeuvre through his own eyes, in a selection of nearly 50 colour photographs of his memorials, which the architect took soon after the completion of each project. Carefully staged and taken with professional medium-format cameras, these photos, many of them previously unpublished, are in themselves works of art that bespeak their author's surrealist sensibility.
The publication includes an introduction by the architectural historian Vladimir Kulic, a preface by curator Martino Stierli and a selection of Bogdanovic's own thoughts on photography, excerpted from an unpublished interview that Kulic conducted in 2005.
1961 / 1973, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$35.00 - Out of stock
"This Book of Dreams is what Jack Kerouac saw in his sleep, not day-dreams or day reveries. It's his private dream-record, all his nights strung together. It's the poetic raw material of the Kerouac saga, the substrata of his novels and a commentary upon them. The characters who appear in the book are names who have appeared in "On the Road," "The Subterraneans," and "The Dharma Bums." From the Foreword by Kerouac: "The reader should know that this is just a collection of dreams that I scribbled after I woke up from my sleep - They were all written spontaneously, nonstop, just like dreams happen, sometimes written before I was even wide awake - The characters that I've written about in my novels reappear in these dreams in weird new dream situations and they continue the same story which is the one story that I always write about. The heroes of 'On the Road,' 'The Subterraneans,' etc. reappear here doing further strange things for no other particular reason than that the mind goes on, the brain ripples, the moon sinks, and everybody hides their heads under pillows with sleepingcaps."
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was a principal actor in the Beat Generation, a companion of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady in that great adventure. His books include On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Cody, Pomes All Sizes (City Lights), Scattered Poems (City Lights), and Scripture of the Golden Eternity (City Lights).
Very Good copy. 1973 print.
1973, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Panther / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
Panther's 1973 edition of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", an outstanding collection of Lovecraft's longer supernatural terror. Includes : At the Mountains of Madness, The Dreams in the Witch-House, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Silver Key, Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Cover art by the great Ian Miller.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American writer, who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of horror and weird fiction.
Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Rats in the Walls", "The Call of Cthulhu", At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time, all canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as an author and editor. He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively strained circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died, at age 46.
In 1962 Colin Wilson, in his survey of anti-realist trends in fiction The Strength to Dream, cited Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the "assault on rationality" and included him with M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Tolkien and others as one of the builders of mythicised realities over against the failing project of literary realism. Subsequently, Lovecraft began to acquire the status of a cult writer in the counterculture of the 1960s, and reprints of his work proliferated. Philosopher Graham Harman, seeing Lovecraft as having a unique—though implicit—anti-reductionalist ontology, writes: "No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess." Harman said of leading figures at the initial speculative realism conference (which included philosophers Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Iain Hamilton Grant) that, though they shared no philosophical heroes, all were enthusiastic readers of Lovecraft. Speculative realists, Mark Fisher and other contemporary philosophers, took Lovecraft seriously, mainly because Lovecraft's weird reality as presented in his novels, had nothing to do with the Gothic's insistence in the supernatural, but presented another reality incomprehensible to the human mind, but nonetheless real. According to scholar S. T. Joshi: "There is never an entity in Lovecraft that is not in some fashion material".
Good copy, light wear.
2007, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$36.00 - Out of stock
By Derek Schilling
Few filmmakers have taken the principle of the 'talking picture' so far as Eric Rohmer, the internationally reknowned director of the Moral Tales, Comedies and Proverbs, and Tales of the Four Seasons cycles. Occasionally dismissed as precious or overly literary, Rohmer's features may leave the impression that there is more to listen to than to look at. Yet as the secretive director (b. Maurice Schérer in 1920) points out, dialogue is no less engaging than the best gunfights, and if his characters prefer discussing love to making it, they are no less the 'heroes' of the stories they tell.
Charges of political conservatism aside, the author of My Night at Maud's, Summer and such period films as Perceval and the all-digital The Lady and the Duke emerges - like Hitchcock before him - as a singular inventor of cinematic forms. This critical overview, which contains an extensive bibliography and a filmography, will appeal to students of Film Studies, French Studies, and enthusiasts.
From Manchester University Press' French Film Directors series, edited by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram.
2016, English
Softcover, 68 pages, 23.5 x 30 cm
Published by
3-Ply / Victoria
Centre for Style / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Edited by Fayen d’Evie, Matthew Linde, Spencer Lai and Jake Swinson
Design by Toby Tam
Contents include a feature text “The Banquet” by Monicas’s Gallery with Jessie Kiely, and image contributions from: Adam Wood, Anna-Sophie Berger, Aurelia Guo, Brendan Morris, Bror August, Caley Feeney, Chloé Elizabeth Maratta, Claire Barrow, D&K, Dara Allen, Eric Mack, Galen Erickson thanks to Matthew Drury, Callum Hawke, Oscar Khan and Arthur Marie, George Egerton-Warbuton, Giovanna Flores, Grace Anderson, H.B. Peace, Hamishi Farah, Hana Earles, Harry Burke, Jake Levy, Jessie Kiely, Joseph Geagan, Josey Kidd-Crowe, Kate Meakin, Kulisek-Lieske, Laura Fanning, Matty Bovan, Mel Paget, Milo Conroy, Misty Pollen, Nora Slade and Peter Guffield Linden, Rafael Delacruz, Rare Candy, Richard Malone,Ruth O’Leary, Ryohei Kawanishi, Sasha Geyer, Shahan Assadourian, Sophie Hardeman, Spencer Lai, Stefan Schwartzman, and Wiley Guillot.
Initiated by 3-ply and Centre for Style, HEROES conflates the artist book and the fashion magazine. The ‘hero look’ is a term used to describe the penultimate outfit of a designer’s collection. Often the most conceptually-driven moment of the runway, the hero outfit serves as a signpost for a designer’s signature style, not quotidian wearability. For this inaugural issue of HEROES, contributors were invited to approach the act of fashion design as a narrative of fanfiction, identifying as readers and fans of their own canon to generate a character or caricature of their personal style. With timeframes restricted to a day, techniques of assemblage and improvisation were privileged, as contributors constructed visceral manifestations of subjectivity through self-fashioned hero looks.
HEROES/Fanfiction includes a feature text “The Banquet” written by Monica’s Gallery with Jessie Kiely, that opens: “ACT I. It was within the candle-lit caverns beneath the wondrous castle bestowed upon The Fat Baron Oörif that the banquet took place. The air thick with magic…” Appropriating the fanfiction trope as a codified lookbook, the text weaves elaborate descriptions of characters and fantastical sub-plots, over the course of a banquet hosted for fifteen guests by a former trade tycoon, within his castle of soft provincial feel. Spiralling through philosophical, intersubjective and social commentary, this parallel universe lookbook interlaces acute reflections on meta-trends, personal freedoms and nested human artefacts.
Edition of 1000
2016, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 22 x 29.3 cm
Published by
Kaleidoscope Press / Milan
$20.00 - Out of stock
Kaleidoscope #27 (Summer 2016) is issue is a key to enter the world of Los Angeles-based artist Sterling Ruby, exclusively playing the double role of subject and guest editor. Conceived as a viral, aggressive takeover of the magazine’s architecture, content and design, this hyper-vertical survey is the result of an intense dialogue with the artist and his studio, comprised of 160+ pages on his exuberant work and vision.
Ruby’s cover portrait is drawn from an extensive series shot by photographer Max Farago at the artist’s massive industrial studio space in LA. Inside, the Sterling Ruby Takeover decodes the artist's grammar through an intimate conversation with artist Piero Golia and newly commissioned writings by Alex Gartenfeld, Donatien Grau, Aram Moshayedi, Ross Simonini, Paul Schimmel and Catherine Taft; while his network of influences is explored through a series of guest features dedicated to his peers, heroes and collaborators, including Huma Bhabha (by Massimiliano Gioni), Cassils (by Francesca Gavin), Mike Davis (by Sterling Ruby), John Divola (by Alexander Shulan), Cyprien Gaillard (by Natalia Valencia Arango), Ron Nagle (by Sterling Ruby), Nancy Rubins (by Sterling Ruby), Raf Simons (by Alessio Ascari) and Melanie Schiff (by Sarah Workneh). All of this content is punctuated by stunning visual contributions especially created by Ruby for the magazine’s pages, comprising an unseen presentation of his Work Wear modeled by the entire studio team.
Born in 1972 on an American air force base in Germany, raised in rural Pennsylvania, trained in Chicago, Ruby moved to LA to finish his education, became Mike Kelley’s teaching assistant and quickly one of the city’s quintessential artists. Now 44, he runs a megastudio with a staff of over twenty under the big black sun. Complex to label in his unapologetic combination of compulsion and strategy, bigness and poetry, handcraft and seriality, darkness and psychedelia, hard and soft, Ruby is one of the most unique and controversial voices on the art scene, working incessantly across the most diverse media and platforms and stretching the limits of visual language. This hybrid editorial experiment coincides with the artist's major show at the Belvedere/Winterpalais in Vienna and participation in the “Made in LA“ biennial at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Running independent from the takeover, the opening section of HIGHLIGHTS and the closing section of REGULARS complete the issue with a rich and varied selection of the best of the summer season and insightful contributions from our columnists and correspondents around the globe.
HIGHLIGHTS features profiles on Sean Raspet (by Franklin Melendez), Kienholz (by Gianni Jetzer), Marguerite Humeau (by Nadim Samman), Eckhaus Latta (by Chloe Wilcox), Sol Calero (by George Vasey), Renaud Jerez (by Tina Kukielski), Christopher Y. Lew (by Julia Trotta), Yngve Holen (by Cristina Travaglini), Home Economics (by Attilia Fattori Franchini), Valerie Keane (by Allison Bulger), Cao Fei (by Xin Wang) and Megan Rooney (by Harry Burke).
In the REGULARS section, “Producers” features Carson Chan in conversation with New York-based collective DIS; in “Futura 89+,” Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets (with Katherine Dionysius) interview young Portuguese artist Bruno Zhu; Fiona Duncan reflects on the figure of the go-go dancer in contemporary art and culture as part of her “Pro/Creative” column; in “Renaissance Man,” Jeffrey Deitch discusses the collaboration between artist Alex Israel and writer Bret Easton Ellis; Maria Lind's “Centerstage” presents Danish artist Marie Kölbaek-Iversen; Gean Moreno unveils Cuba’s new normal for “Panorama”; in “Pioneers,” Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen talk to Heimo Zobernig; and lastly, as part of the “What's Next” series, we look forward to the season with collector and curator Tiffany Zabludowicz.
2010, English
Published by
Henie Onstad Art Centre / Høvikodden
$15.00 - Out of stock
Film as essayistic collage is central to Steyerl’s works. She combines own recordings with scenes from Hollywood movies and documentary material in various works, operating within different rhythms and time intervals. Her films criticize an understanding of the documentary image as a bearer of history and authenticity and as an object of empathy and identification. In a time where imagery travels, is being reinterpreted, used and distributed more quickly than ever before, the image as document has lost its apparent authority as a witness. Simultaneously the documentation and communication of moments and situations has become common activity due to advances in technology. The image has itself become a restless and transitory object, ready for downloading, ripping, copying and recycling. Steyerl’s works are based on experimenting with the documentary as form within specific geographical, political and thematic limitations. She turns the instability of the images into an advantage and makes reinterpretable objects of them, thus discussing the political dimension of the image in our surroundings. Steyerl does not hide the director’s presence, she frequently stages herself in her films as an object among objects.
The catalogue experiment with the catalogue essay as form. The texts are more or less linked to each other, the authors were asked to relate to the previous text; forming a chain reaction. Pablo Lafuente was invited to write the first text, entitled “Two Ways to Read Film (and its Politics): Hito Steyerl, Sigmund Freud and Aristotle”. Lafuente enters into the relationship between the heroes of theatre and film and the viewer, and examines the relationship between identification and theatre, between fiction and truth in Steyerl’s movies; where authenticity and biographical details interchange in a role play of sorts, between the one watching the movie and the spectator within the movie itself. His point is that while there is nothing real in Steyerl’s movies, the real is always present in any given practice and that this practice may influence reality. Steyerl has answered with the manifesto “A Thing Like You and Me”. Here all heroes are done away with and the emancipatory desire to become a subject is pushed aside to favour the embracing of the object. Why not contemplate becoming an object? To be free of subjectivity’s demand for heroics and the illusion of the possibility of freedom, and become a thing?
The third author, Maria Muhle, was given the task to hitch onto the two previous texts, enter into a critical dialogue and expand the perspective. Muhle answered with the text “Notes on Documentary Realism”. Here Muhle looks at the historical realism seen from a literary and art historical perspective, whilst positioning the present day’s critical treatment of realistic devices in art, as well as in popular culture, in relation to this.
The result of this dialogue between the texts can be seen as a subtle and not always direct exchange where the works and their meaning are discussed on various levels. The texts’ underlying dialogue creates the possibility of a discussion of Steyerl’s project within a wider context, thus expanding the format of the exhibition.
2011, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 240mm x 170mm
Edition of 1000.,
Published by
The Narrows / Melbourne
$35.00 - Out of stock
MIFF 60: The Graphic Art of The Melbourne International Film Festival
Complementing the MIFF 60 exhibition held at ACMI in July 2011, the book features full colour reproductions, with particular attention paid to the 'golden age' of Australian graphic design, when MIFF was famous for its distinctive artistic style.
With graphic design heroes such as Max Robinson (designer MIFF 1958) and Brian Sadgrove (MIFF 1974) offering insight into MIFF's visual language and discussing the design process of their MIFF commissions, this publication is sure to charm both MIFFsters and art lovers alike.
Text by Dylan Rainforth. Foreword by Michelle Carey. Design by Warren Taylor.