World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
SAT 12—4 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
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PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
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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.
1975 / 1985, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Overlook Press / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1975 US edition (1985 print) of Stephen Dwoskin's important critical history of international independent and underground film-making, its pioneers and masters, and their creations, from the 1920s to the present (late 1970s), assessing the movements importance to the current status of film as art and entertainment. Published by Overlook Press.
Underground' film is finally emerging in terms of the public consciousness as an important and enduring contribution to the world of celluloid, both as entertainment and as an art form. The author, Stephen Dwoskin, is a young American independent filmmaker with personal experience in an expert knowledge of a creative area barely studied until this time. He has created in FILM IS an invaluable record of the pioneering cinematic statements that are at once peripheral and central to film today on an international scale. It is both culturally and sociologically true today that an increasing number of the painters and the poets have become filmmakers. Un-pressured by big business, free cinema has become a personal, creative expression for many men and women who often work in obscurity with small means indeed. Dwoskin's work presents the early history of the independent film from its beginning in the twenties to its phenomenal outburst in the sixties, written by an involved, perceptive critic. Through his own work and his contributions to the juries of international festivals, Dwoskin has a wide-ranging knowledge of the independent film from the U.S. to Britain, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Over 700 films are discussed, many for the first time. Van der Beek, Refenstahl, Brakhage, Emshwiller, Ray and Jack Smith are only some of the experimental filmmakers mentioned in FILM IS, but Dwoskin refers forwards and backwards to the works of others, often better known— Bunuel, Cocteau, Fassbinder, Truffaut, Warhol. There is also a comprehensive index. FILM IS provides a unique and invaluable reference work for all those interested in the frontiers of film consciousness.
Stephen Dwoskin (1939—2012) was a major avant-garde filmmaker whose work was closely connected to the 'gaze theory' associated with Laura Mulvey; a significant disabled filmmaker – though he rejected being framed as such – and an activist for an alternative film culture, through such organizations as the London Film-Makers' Co-op and The Other Cinema. His films are held by the BFI and distributed by LUX. His archive is held at The University of Reading.
Very Good copy, light wear, ex-owner's name in inside front cover.
2018, English
Softcover, 175 pages, 21 x 29.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Koenig Books / London
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$280.00 - In stock -
Nightmarish scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and perverse sexual abysses - the films of the Cinema of Transgression that were consciously aimed at shock, provocation, and confrontation, bear witness to an extraordinary radicality. In the 1980s a group of filmmakers from New York's Lower East Side went on a collision course with the conventions of American society. Transcending all moral or aesthetic boundaries, the low-profile films reveal social hardship with sociopolitical indifference. Sometimes shot with stolen camera equipment, the film contains Stride analysis of life in the Lower East Side defined by criminality, brutality, drugs, AIDS, sex, and excess.
This catalogue is published on the occasion of the worldwide first exhibition on the Cinema of Transgression, YOU KILLED ME FIRST at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. The catalogue includes contributions by Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Jonas Mekas, Susanne Pfeffer, Jack Sargeant and Nick Zedd.
Out-of-print.
1996, English
Softcover, 286 pages, 23.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Inanout Press / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
First, long-out-of-print 1996 edition of the first major in-depth and intimate book to explore the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s work and the people who knew him. Published by Inanout Press in New York, this wonderful, heavily illustrated, deeply researched volume includes interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas and many others, extensive collection Smith's catalogues, reproduced artworks and writings, photographs... A unique collage of materials and now very rare in this lovely original edition.
Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.
Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus — Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths.
Fine—As New copy of this collectible first edition.
1974, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Random House / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
The first edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art, one of the greatest books on cinema, published in 1974. Reprinted in 2005 by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, that edition also quickly went out of print and this landmark book has not been available since. According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored."
So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago for this classic volume are still relevant today. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.
Includes Luis Buñuel, Dusan Makavejev, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Roman Polanski, Vera Chytilova, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Watkins, Tony Conrad, Jonas Mekas, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Chris Marker, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kate Millett, John Cassavettes, Shuji Terayama, William Klein, Russ Meyers, Louis Malle, Woody Allen, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnes Varda, Walerian Borowczyk, Andy Warhol, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Lindsay Anderson, Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Morrissey, Joseph Losey, Otto Muehl, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Frans Zwartjes, Arrabal, Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Werner Herzog, Morgan Fisher, Jean Renior, Michael Snow, Robert Frank, Jan Svankmajer, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Sharits, Akira Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Frederick Wiseman, Ken Jacobs, Martin Scorcese, Jean Cocteau, Manuel Octavio Gomez, Stanley Kubrick, Norman McLaren, Albert Maysles and David Maysles, to name only a few of the hundreds of film-makers whose works are featured in this essential film book.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 452 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$90.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the legendary Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde by P. Adams Sitney, published by Oxford University Press in 1974.
Critics hailed Visionary Film as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling, and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in 1974. "Without question it is the first such book on the avant-garde film - the first one that probes this field in such depth, with such perspective and vision, with such insight and intelligence." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
From the book jacket:
The first book to provide a coherent view of the avant-garde film tradition in America, this is also the first book to assess in depth the work of the major film-makers in this tradition. Twenty-four film-makers are fully discussed and many films of each are analyzed, including Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Jonas Mekas's Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, and Michael Snow's Wavelength. Liberal use of original and previously unpublished documents and statements by the film-makers themselves shows the theoretical contributions of these film-makers to the general theory of film and adds richness and weight to the study. Sixty-six still photographs from films further enhance the value of the text.
P. Adams Sitney's approach is historical as well as analytical. He relates the avant~garde film tradition to a larger native American tradition encompassing all the arts: that of visionary romanticism. He also connects it to the European avant-garde film of the 1920s, seeing the origin and development of a subjective cinema (and the forms it generates) in the kind of responses that the independent film-makers of the late 1940s made to their Dadaist and Surrealist sources. Sitney shows that far from being a chaos of different styles, the American avant-garde film tradition consists of an ordered progression of types: the 'trance' film, the 'mythopoeic' film, the 'graphic' film, the 'lyrical' film, the 'diary' film, and the 'structural' film. With hundreds of independent films being made each year, with the increased acceptance of avant-garde films by the nation's film archives and the academic community, the need for this kind of study has long been felt. It is sure to be widely read and discussed.
About the author:
P. Adams Sitney is Co-Director of the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and teaches cinema at New York University. He has also lectured extensively on film at museums of modern art, universities, and cinematheques in Europe and in South America. An editor of Film Culture magazine, he is the editor of the Film Culture Reader.
Chapters: 1. Meshes of the Afternoon 2. Ritual and Nature 3. The Potted Psalm 4. The Magus 5. From Trance to Myth 6. The Lyrical Film 7. Major Mythopoeia 8. Absolute Animation 9. The Graphic Cinema: European Perspectives 10. Apocalypses and Picaresques 11. Recovered Innocence 12. Structural Film 13. Notes 14. Index
2018, English
Softcover, 268 pages, 23 x 31 cm
Published by
écal / Renens
$82.00 - Out of stock
Early Video Art and Experimental Films Networks traces the diffuse international networks through which video art and experimental films circulated during the late sixties and early seventies. It explores forgotten exhibitions both in Switzerland and France, the activities of public television channels and alternative art spaces in the US, a production art center dedicated to video in Italy and an Argentinian collective of conceptual artists, aiming to shed new light on the production and diffusion of moving images.
This volume is divided into two parts: the first part, which is longer and more extensively documented, explores the emergence and consolidation of video art networks at international level; the second focuses more specifically on two exhibitions of artists' films (New Forms in Film and Une histoire du cinéma) and one of the main instances of the museification of experimental cinema, Anthology Film Archives. Indeed, this particular story has wider currency insofar as several important works in recent years have focused on artists' films 23 and expanded cinema 24. We have adopted the principle, wherever possible, of providing rare and previously unpublished images and documents alongside the essays specifically commissioned for this volume, the choice of which has been left to the discretion of the author of each particular chapter.
Edited by François Bovier.
Texts by Kristen Alfaro, François Bovier, Enrico Camporesi, Katarzyna Cytlak, Larisa Dryansky, Tristan Lavoyer, Adeena Mey, Kris Paulsen, Cosetta G. Saba, Andrew V. Uroskie.
2004, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 21 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
$80.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of the first hardcover edition of "Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary", of which 10,000 copies were destroyed due to claims of plagiarism. Later re-printed in common soft cover in 2011.
Alice L. Hutchinson sets Kenneth Anger's work within the social and artistic context of the twentieth century - from the bohemian world of Cocteau in Paris in the 1940s and 50s to the psychedelic London in the late 60s to Anger's hometown of Hollywood, made infamous in his Hollywood Babylon books. With many new reproductions, this book provides an essential introduction to one of the pioneers of independent filmmaking. Alongside the text by Hutchinson, this publication consolidates English and French texts as well as interviews by Anger, alongside commentaries on his work by Stan Brakhage, Anais Nin, Samson De Brier, Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann. This highly-illustrated book joins insightful text and unseen film stills to tell the vivid story of this evocative director and remains the only comprehensive book ever published on the artist.
Good copy with general wear/light creasing to stiff covers (common with this style of cover).
2019, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Ed. of 150,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$14.00 - Out of stock
"a few pictures …" is a new publication by French fashion designer agnès b., published in 2019 by Innen Books, Zürich. Alongside selected images from agnès’ photographic archive is a text by Jonas Mekas.
First Edition of 150 copies.
agnès b. (born Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé, 1941 in Versailles) is a French fashion designer. She is known for her self-named brand, which includes fashion and film interests.
2018, English
Hardcover, 260 pages, 30.5 x 21.2 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$85.00 - Out of stock
Lithuanian-born Jonas Mekas migrated to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded his daily observations. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, from 1958 until 1977, he published his “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice, conducting numerous interviews with filmmakers from all over the world. Conversations is the first time that these interviews with his filmmaker friends and associates have been put together in a book. Mekas recorded the conversations with his camera. From the films he shot with his interlocutors, Mekas selected one photo or still to introduce each interview. The collection of texts is supplemented by letters and extracts from related scenarios/scripts and rounded out with an index of the people involved.
Features conversations with Storm de Hirsch and Louis Brigante, Andy Warhol, Nico Papatakis, Albert and David Maysles, Peter Kubelka, Agnes Varda, Harry Smith, John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and many more.
1978, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 22.6 x 15.2
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
New York University Press / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Incredible collection of film texts compiled in 1978 and published by the Anthology Film Archives Series. First edition.
Features the writings of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Hans Richter, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Antonin Artaud, Joseph Cornell, Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, James Broughton, John and James Whitney, P. Adams Sitney, Harry Smith, Carel Rowe, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Stephen Koch, Andy Warhol, Annette Michelson, Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Ernie Gehr, Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton.
"This anthology offers for the first time an extensive survey of the theoretical contributions of avant- garde film-makers and essays about their cinematic achievements. Several texts appear in print, or in English, for the first time here. Because of the diversity of the materials—manifestoes, letters, a scenario, program notes, lectures, interviews—and because of the stylistic peculiarities of some of the authors, no attempt has been made to standardize spellings, punctuation, or footnoting throughout the book. Each contribution conforms to its original manuscript or printed form..." - P. Adams Sitney
About the editor:
P. Adams Sitney is Co-Director of the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and teaches cinema at New York University. He has also lectured extensively on film at museums of modern art, universities, and cinematheques in Europe and in South America. An editor of Film Culture magazine, he is the editor of the Film Culture Reader.
2017, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 12.5 x 20.6 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$50.00 - Out of stock
"Jonas Mekas' diaries have an aching honesty, puckish humor and quiet nobility of character. Many readers curious about the early years of this seminal avant-garde filmmaker will discover here a much more universal story: that of the emigrant who can never go back, and whose solitariness in the New World is emblematic of the human condition." - Phillip Lopate
"I was enormously moved by it." - Allen Ginsberg
Legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas actually came to filmmaking relatively late in life, and his path to New York was a difficult one. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee Lithuania. They were interned for eight months in a labor camp in Elmshorn. Even after the war ended, Mekas was prevented from returning to his native Lithuania by the Soviet occupation. Classed as a "displaced person," he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel for years. It was only at the end of 1949 that Jonas and Aldolfas Mekas finally found their way to New York City.
A new edition of Mekas' acclaimed memoir, first published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, I Had Nowhere to Go tells the story of the artist's survival in the camps and his first years as a young Lithuanian immigrant in New York City. Mekas' memoir--the inspiration for a 2016 biopic by Douglas Gordon--tells the story of how an individual life can move through the larger 20th-century narratives of war and exile and tentatively put down new roots. In the words of Phillip Lopate, "This is a lyrical, essential spiritual anthropology."
Jonas Mekas (born 1922) lives and works in New York. Filmmaker, writer and poet, he is a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. An influential figure in New American Cinema and New York underground culture, he worked with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon and many others. Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.
2016, English
Softcover, 456 pages, 16 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$59.00 - Out of stock
Scrapbook of the Sixties is a collection of published and unpublished texts by Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, writer, poet, and cofounder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded moments of his daily life. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958, he published his legendary “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists like Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Erick Hawkins, and Nam June Paik. Some of these will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of the Sixties. Mekas’s writings reveal him as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the times—a practice that he has continued now for over fifty years.
Jonas Mekas (*1922, Semeniškiai / Lithuania), lives and works in New York. Film-maker, writer, poet and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Mekas’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.
1997, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
UNSW Press / Sydney
$80.00 - Out of stock
This book is a chronicle of the Ubu Films group. Formed by Albie Thoms, David Perry, Aggy Read and John Clark in Sydney 1965, it was Australia's first group devoted to making, exhibiting and distributing experimental films. Throughout the 1965-1970 period, Ubu produced Australia's first lightshows, published this country's first underground newspaper (Ubunews), and persistently advocated for the reform of censorship laws and the need for government support for the arts.
Flamboyant, controversial and resolutely independent, Ubu Films instigated an extensive network of Australia's underground activity at aa time when Australia's cultural and political landscape was in transition. For only a brief period, Ubu established a viable proposition that film, performance, painting and political action could coalesce into a vibrant interactive community. What follows is the story of its rise and fall.
Reproducing Ubu ephemera (posters, programmes, handbills, Ubunews articles and newspaper pages), countless newspaper and magazine articles, reviews and cartoons advocating and denouncing the many activities (film, performance, music, publishing, etc.) of Ubu, legal documents, behind the scenes photography, film-stills, biographies, film lists and intimate reflections - this amazing, visually-dense and informative chronological volume that is essential reading for anyone interested in Australia's history of underground film, but also for independent film-making in general.
Edited by Peter Mudie.
Peter Mudie is a Canadian born filmmaker, artist and academic. Previously a member of filmmaker cooperatives in London, Toronto and Vienna, he has exhibited his work in galleries and film festivals around the world since 1980. He has written a number of monographs on avant-garde and experimental film (including Dusting the Other; Albie Thoms and David Perry: Films/Dialogues; Below the Centre/ Unterhalb des Mittelpunkts; and Michael Snow: Filmworks). He has presented a number of international touring film exhibitions, in Australia and overseas ―― currently he lives in Perth and lectures in Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia.
2005, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 22.5 x 16 cm
2005 edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
$95.00 - Out of stock
The now scarce 2005 reprint edition of one of the greatest books on film. A classic returns! The original edition of Amos Vogel's seminal book, Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974, and has been out of print since 1987. According to Vogel--founder of Cinema 16, North America's legendary film society--the book details the "accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored."
So ahead of his time was Vogel that the ideas that he penned some 30 years ago are still relevant today, and readily accessible in this classic volume. Accompanied by over 300 rare film stills, Film as a Subversive Art analyzes how aesthetic, sexual and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our day to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions. This subversion of form, as well as of content, is placed within the context of the contemporary world view of science, philosophy, and modern art, and is illuminated by a detailed examination of over 500 films, including many banned, rarely seen, or never released works.
This 2005 edition, published by D.A.P./C.T. Editions, also quickly went out of print and it has not been available since.
Includes Luis Buñuel, Dusan Makavejev, Luis Buñuel, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Connor, Roman Polanski, Vera Chytilova, Alfred Hitchcock, Carolee Schneemann, Peter Watkins, Tony Conrad, Jonas Mekas, Andrei Tarkovsky, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Bresson, Luchino Visconti, Chris Marker, Federico Fellini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kate Millett, John Cassavettes, Shuji Terayama, William Klein, Russ Meyers, Louis Malle, Woody Allen, Yoko Ono, Michelangelo Antonioni, Agnes Varda, Walerian Borowczyk, Andy Warhol, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, Lindsay Anderson, Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Morrissey, Joseph Losey, Otto Muehl, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Jean-Luc Godard, Frans Zwartjes, Arrabal, Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Werner Herzog, Morgan Fisher, Jean Renior, Michael Snow, Robert Frank, Jan Svankmajer, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Sharits, Akira Kurosawa, Yoko Ono, Orson Welles, Frederick Wiseman, Ken Jacobs, Martin Scorcese, Jean Cocteau, Manuel Octavio Gomez, Stanley Kubrick, Norman McLaren, Albert Maysles and David Maysles, to name only a few of the hundreds of film-makers whose works are featured in this essential film book.
2016, English
Softcover (2 books), 560 pages, 215 x 155 cm
ed. of 1000,
Published by
Many of Them
$62.00 - Out of stock
MANY OF THEM – VOL. IV
A LIMITED EDITION OF 1000 COPIES
Cosmic Wonder, Louis Vuitton, Issey Miyake, Hermès, Saint Laurent, Loewe, Yohji Yamamoto, Irène Silvagni, Limi Feu, Undercover, Dries Van Noten, Lemaire, Chanel, Bernhard Willhelm, Junya Watanabe, Comme Des Garçons, Maurizio Amadei, Alaïa, Paz De La Huerta, Daniela Gregis, Sybilla, Geoffrey B. Small, Eatable Of Many Orders, Sacai, Ply,Ragne Kikas, Steve Mono, Jan-Jan Van Essche, Susan Cianciolo, Koché, Bless, Oriole Cullen, Kaat Debo, Akiko Fukai, Harold Koda, Olivier Saillard, Valerie Steele, Pedro Costa, Jia Zhang-Ke, Amat Escalante, Isaki Lacuesta, Lisandro Alonso, Nathalia Acevedo, Lav Diaz, Moira Lang, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mia Hansen-Løve, Jonas Mekas, Todd Haynes.
Many of Them is a limited edition publication. Its aim is to offer a space for discussion in which creators can share their perspective about their own field, their languages and the problems they face in their everyday practices. It originally started as a diary in 2008 and it keeps evolving into different formats.
1972, Japanese
Softcover (w. dustjacket), 340 pages, 15.5 x 22 cm
1st Japanese edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
? / Japan
$45.00 - In stock -
Japanese edition of this classic collection of writings from the great Jonas Mekas.
Please note, texts in this scarce edition are entirely in Japanese.
In his Village Voice Movie Journal columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking s next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash.
2012, English
Softcover, 526 pages (282 colour ill.), 210 x 277 mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$46.00 - Out of stock
"Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" is a reader that brings together essays, artists' writings and works, and countercultural publications to examine the juncture of the political and the erotic during the 1960s and 70s. Adopting as its starting point the postwar perception of Scandinavia as a socialist utopia of sexual freedom, it explores how the avant-garde artistic and cultural production of the time gravitated towards sexual and political liberation. "Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?" is the conclusion of a four-year research project, and includes many texts published in English here for the first time, by philosophers, artists, psychologists and theorists such as Knut Ove Arntzen, Stan Brakhage, Norman O. Brown, Valie Export, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Herbert Marcuse, Jonas Mekas, Henry Miller, Juliet Mitchell, Katti Anker Moller, Jorgen Nash, Havard Friis Nilsen, Claes Oldenburg, Elise Ottesen-Jensen, Wilhelm Reich, Yvonne Rainer, Jacqueline Rose, Barney Rosset, Barbara Rubin, Jens Jorgen Thorsen and Otto Weininger.