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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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.
1989, English
Softcover w. insert, 64 pages (approx), 29.9 x 21 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Het Apollohuis / Eindhoven
$80.00 - Out of stock
Lovely original edition of Terry Fox's TEXTUM (WEB) artist book, published in 1989 in co-operation with Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven. Designed by Fox and beautifully constructed with paste-on label cardboard cover, this red and black offset-printed book is a mixture of textual communication systems that overlap one another, including Morse code, Braille (printed, not embossed), an 11 by 11 character word grid, and several less conventional (and presumably more personal to the artist) visual codes. The result is an ultra-complex text which, after exacting and time-consuming deciphering, reveals a disturbing, evocative tale of trauma. Readers unversed in the conventional message systems are only partially aided by an insert containing Morse code on one side (with an unconventional "d" presenting credulous readers with a further challenge), and an incomplete Braille alphabet on the other. Additionally, the insert shows two other "written" code systems which are enigmatic and unclear in their meaning. When partially deciphered, if the intentional misspellings are disregarded, a somewhat frightening, somewhat humorous disjointed fable is uncovered that includes many preposterous (and often tragic) headlines from supermarket tabloids (e.g., "granny dumps her hubby because he was no don Juan," "man cuts off head with a chainsaw and lives," "bill collector threatens to dig up dead hubby and repossess his suit").
Terry Fox (1943—2008) was an American Conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and he was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
As New copy, only light storage wear.
2003, English / German
Hardcover (w. CD), 120 pages, 24.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Kehrer Verlag / Heidelberg
$50.00 - Out of stock
"Works with Sound" presents a complex body of work, comprising thirty years of sculptures, drawings, environments, and performances. Fox, who since the 1960s radically rejected traditional art forms and sought new ways of artistic expression, has been increasingly concerned with investigating the seldom-observed energetic aspects of materials. Hence, sound gained a central significance in his works. The artist is dedicated to finding sounds that make energies palpable and connect the listener and his physical surroundings. Profusely illustrated rich chronology of all works with sound, including extensive biography and accompanying texts by Terry Fox and contributions by Matthias Osterwold and Eva Schmidt. Edited by Bernd Schulz. Bi-lingual English and German texts.
Accompanied by an audio CD with excerpts from six sound performances since 1975.
Fine—As New copy with unplayed CD.
1982, English / French
Offset printed, 60 x 40 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Z-Films / US
$60.00 - In stock -
Original 1982 vintage film poster produced to promote the gender-bending NYC cult science fiction film Liquid Sky, directed by Slava Tsukerman and starring Anne Carlisle and Paula E. Sheppard, featuring the wonderful artwork of costume and production designer Marina Levikova. Offset printed French cinema version.
Dimensions : 60 x 40 cm
(Not a reproduction, original issue for theatre release)
Good copy, with some wear, standard folds and light marks to verso not affecting the art.
1974, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 17.8 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$280.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 US edition of this historical publication by Cornelius Cardew, a key collection/collaborative manifesto of texts and scores by a group of British avant-garde musicians compiled and edited by the legendary experimental composer.
"Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre."
This is Morton Feldman's assessment of Cardew's importance, an assessment that took on prophetic status when Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. This orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own music in the 1960s when, working in almost total isolation from the musical establishment, he patiently drew together a large group of composers and performers into experimental music through his own compositional activities and through teaching. This group became the nucleus of the orchestra.
The draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra opens as follows: "Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).
"Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.
"The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of—for lack of a better word—concerts."
This lively book on the repertory the orchestra created is as much graphic and visual as it is verbal and about aural events and happenings. After all, scratch music itself is meant to be perceived by the eye and all the senses—not just by ear—so the notation used in preparing the scores for performance might be graphic, collage, verbal, or musical. The scores in Scratch Music are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and other devices. Contemporary musicians, artists, and critics have long recognized both Cardew's music and this text as hugely influential and significant. Scratch Music demonstrates the extraordinary richness of this particular compositional matrix, giving the reader some idea of what it is like to put on a scratch music event.
Contents: Introduction; Scratch Music—Early Outlines and Later Notes; Scratch Music; Key to Scratch Music; Scratch Music Catalogue; 1001 Activities; Appendix: Four Compositions (David Ahern, Greg Bright, Michael Chant, Roger Frampton).
Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981) was an English experimental music composer. A student at the recently established the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. Cardew was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American experimental composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards. In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group AMM as cellist and pianist, alongside Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores. Cardew's most important scores from his experimental period are Treatise (1963–67), a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books in London. While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra, a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. He later rejected experimental music, his creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment as a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1970s, and in 1979 as co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Very Good copy with some tanning and general wear.
1999, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cityful Press / Seattle
$200.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of "Think of The Self Speaking : Harry Smith — Selected Interviews", published in 1998 by Cityful Press and long out-of-print. In this incredible collection you will find the flavour and texture of experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s conversation, his rambling, obscure, luminous, cantankerous genius. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smith's long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smith's activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "THINK OF THE SELF SPEAKING is the next best thing to being with Harry himself-perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - Out of stock
A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.
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. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.
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.
1957 / 1984, Polish / English / French / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and slipcase), 319 pages, 25 x 34 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PAX / Warsaw
$120.00 - In stock -
Stunning 1984 hardcover, slip-cased re-print of 1957's Dni Powstania, a gripping pictorial account of the 1944 Warsaw Insurrection, profusely illustrated with b/w reproductions of photographs taken by Polish soldiers. "This album illustrates the struggle waged during those sixty three days. Unfortunately, the picture is incomplete. Difficult fighting conditions often made it impossible to photograph some of the most important scenes and actions, in spite of the heroic efforts of the photographers. A number of pictures were destroyed when their authors met their death or were taken prisoners. But even those photographs that survived destruction and are now being shown in this collection serve as evidence of what the Warsaw Insurrection stood for, and record the heroism of its soldiers. This album is being published so that their memory may live forever."
The Warsaw Uprising was a major World War II operation by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. It occurred in the summer of 1944, and it was led by the Polish resistance Home Army. The uprising was timed to coincide with the retreat of the German forces from Poland ahead of the Soviet advance. While approaching the eastern suburbs of the city, the Red Army temporarily halted combat operations, enabling the Germans to regroup and defeat the Polish resistance and to destroy the city in retaliation. The Uprising was fought for 63 days with little outside support. It was the single largest military effort taken by any European resistance movement during World War II.
Incredible book, seldom seen outside Poland.
Text in Polish. Summary in English, French and German.
Very Good copy book in heavy black debossed and red ink stamped boards, Good—VG dust jacket with edge scuff wear, particularly to the spine edges, Good—VG slipcase with printed paste-on, light edge tanning/wear.
1989, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in slipcase), 302 pages, 31 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$85.00 - In stock -
First hardcover, slipcased edition of this major catalogue published in Germany on the occasion of the Morandi survey exhibition that toured Tampere, Leningrad, Moscow, London, Locarno, Tubingen and Dusseldorf between 1988—1990. Profusely illustrated throughout with a catalogue of Morandi's paintings and drawings, and documentation of a critical anthology, biography, bibliography and more. Edited by Marilena Pasquali with essays Werner Haftmann, Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, Marilena Pasquali, Flaminio Gualdoni, Giuliano Briganti, Michael Semff and Fabrizio D`Amico. German langauge.
Very Good, almost As New, preserved with VG dust jacket in original box slipcase. Scarce in the hardcover edition.
2022, English / German
Softcover, 480 pages, 17 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Edition Skylight / Switzerland
$85.00 - Out of stock
At last, a new and considerably expanded edition of Sorayama’s acclaimed COMPLETE MASTERWORKS in enhanced print quality for this special enlarged edition.
A Grandmaster of technical and erotic phantasy without limits, Japanese artist, global phenomenon and enfant terrible, Hajime Sorayama's erotic, futuristic, hyper-realistic illustrations create a visual landscape that would be impossible to achieve in photography alone. Only Sorayama, equipped with boundless imagination, is able to achieve this, using pencil and brush, acrylic paint, and his airbrush. This thick tome of over 1000 illustrations is a comprehensive reference catalogue to Sorayama's rich and iconic work, including new, unpublished works. His Complete Masterworks speak of extraordinary talent, wondrous imagination, and impeccable skill.
“Sorayama’s surreal and futuristic dadaist images not only produce incredible sensations in the observer, but also blend into a unique homage to life. With joyful freedom he combines and morphs fear with happiness, pain with pleasure, repulsion with attraction, past with future, flesh with metal, the organic with ethereal. Stronger than any constraint, the energy of life and love that goes through his work is what I admire most in his amazingly perfect technique.”—Thierry Mugler
Hajime Sorayama (b. 1947) is a Japanese illustrator known for his precisely detailed, erotic portrayals of feminine robots, along with his design work on the original Sony AIBO. He describes his highly detailed style as "superrealism", which he says "deals with the technical issue of how close one can get to one's object."
1982, Japanese / English
Softcover, 204 pages, 29 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$3400.00 - Out of stock
The almost mythological, rarest of the extremely rare, Comme des Garçons 1975-1982.
Self-published by Comme des Garçons in 1982, this absolutely stunning softcover volume assembles the most comprehensive collection from the seminal Japanese fashion label's earliest campaigns. It has all the pre Paris collections, from the first campaign in 1975 running through to the first years in Paris (1981/1982), featuring the photography of Deborah Turbeville, early Peter Lindbergh, Sarah Moon, early Bruce Weber, Kazumi Kurigami, Sachiko Kuru, Hajime Sawatari (!), Daiho Yoshida, Arthur Elgort, and other photographers. So many seldom seen early Japanese shoots of the earliest of Rei's collections! Over 200 pages of black and white (and some select colour) photography, printed in Japan on gorgeous, warm, uncoated paper stock.
One of the most sought after fashion photography/reference books ever produced. A magical, ephemeral object, and a must for any devoted fan or fashion collection.
Very Good copy. Beautifully preserved with tanning to pages/old yellow marking from old tape on inside of covers (not outer). No spine creasing. Preserved in plastic sleeve.
1986, Japanese
Hardcover (cloth-bound in slip-case), 152 pages, 36.5 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Chikuma Shobo / Tokyo
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$900.00 - In stock -
"Comme des Garçons 1981—1986" is one of the most beautiful and sought after fashion photo-books ever published.
Since the inception of Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons in 1969, founder Rei Kawakubo applied a particular aesthetic to every aspect of Comme des Garçons, extending her vision to the company's packaging, furniture, interior design, graphic design, and publishing, including a selection of some of the fashion world's most visually compelling and challenging books and printed materials.
This wonderful and very iconic collection of photographs presents Rei Kawakubo's groundbreaking, innovative designs from an exciting period of Comme des Garçons history, between 1981 and 1986, as photographed by some of the most important fashion photographers of our time, including Arthur Elgort, Hans Feurer, Eddy Kohli, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Paolo Roversi, Oliviero Toscani, and Bruce Weber, among others.
This gorgeous and incredibly rare clothbound volume, housed in original printed cardboard slip-case, perfectly captures a very important and exciting moment in the history of fashion, and is considered one of the most-collectable and prized fashion photo-books to come out of the 1980s.
Very Good-Fine copy preserved in Very Good cardboard slipcase with only light tanning / light wear.
1971, English
Offset printed poster, 71.5 x 49 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Biba / London
$200.00 - In stock -
Beautiful original genuine vintage Biba poster with photographic image of the model/actress/ballerina Ingrid Boulting, shot veiled and in soft focus by the legendary Sarah Moon in 1971 for the London fashion store, Biba. Gorgeous matte finish, offset printing with fabulous colours and metallic silver stamped in corner with Biba logo. A rare item, this iconic vintage poster was originally used to promote the Biba cosmetics and originally acquired by a staff member from the Biba High Street, Kensington shop in London, around 50 years ago, possibly never available for sale. Copy in the V&A collection, London.
Dimensions : 71.5 x 49 cm
Good condition overall but with one heavy fold to left end, light water marking to same left end, some general light wear to soft paper corners, edges. All wear blends well with the overall feel of the poster, with no marking or wear to the focal areas of the image, still bright and clean without tanning.
Good copy, with some wear.
2019, English / German
Softcover, 384 pages, 20 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Ludwig Museum / Cologne
$85.00 - Out of stock
Family, clan, clan, gang, clique, clique, fandum, elective kinship, alliance, collaboration, network.
In the 1990s a new art scene began to form in Cologne. New galleries, magazines such as Texte zur Kunst, and the alternative exhibition space Friesenwall 120 were started. Alexander Schröder followed these developments from Berlin. Already as an art student at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, he founded his own gallery along with Thilo Wermke. At the same time, he began collecting art from the 1990s and 2000s with his special eye.
Today his collection exemplifies the idiosyncratic and sensual side of this era, which was shaped by Conceptual Art. It demonstrates the significance of artist groups and collaborations in changing constellations at the time. Proximity and distance, connections and competition, inclusion and exclusion existed in productive friction with each other. Now the Schröder family has donated twenty-nine works from their collection, including large-scale installations, to the Museum Ludwig by artists such as Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Lukas Duwenhögger, Isa Genzken, and Danh Võ. The exhibition Family Ties: The Schröder Donation presents these works to the public along with a selection from the Museum Ludwig collection. It focuses on art at the turn of the twenty-first century and examines the special conditions that existed in Cologne, also in relationship to New York.
The chronological documents (the works of art themselves, the invitations, flyers, fanzines, journals and texts from the 1990s to the 2000s) arranged on a timeline in this catalogue provide an insight into the development of art at that time in Cologne and New York. Selected essays and reviews reflect the at that time virulent theoretical debates; selective metadata point to drastic socio-political events and influential exhibitions. The catalog accompanies the exhibition Schroeder with works by Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, KP Brehmer, Tom Burr, Luke Duwenhögger, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Renee Green, Ull Hohn, Hilary Lloyd, Lucy McKenzie, Christian Philip Muller, Nils Norman, Stephen Prina and Danh Vo.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 148 pages, 24.6 x 32.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - In stock -
In Die Bücher, the Berlin-based artist Annette Kelm explores books that fell victim to defamation campaigns, persecution and bans imposed by the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945.
With her precise, simple photographic presentation, Kelm creates a new or ongoing public platform for the works of once ostracised writers, illustrators, and publishers, and of the extraordinary artistic and literary diversity of the Weimar Republic and the period before it. At the same time, Kelm transfers this subject matter into the current time.
Her work touches on pressing issues about the value and fragility of democratic models of society, the need to protect freedom of expression and intellectual and artistic diversity, and the potential threats posed to these values by right-wing forces.
Edited by Udo Kittelmann, Mirjam Zadoff, Nicolaus Schafhausen.
2022, English
Softcover, 102 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
Walther König / Köln
$36.00 - Out of stock
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”
Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.
Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books Is the Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Receptive Bodies. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.
1988, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 21.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Exit Art / New York
$220.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful, extremely rare 1988 catalogue published to accompany the important solo exhibition of US-Chinese artist Martin Wong (b. 1946, Portland, US, d. 1999, San Francisco) at Exit Art, New York, November 5—December 23, 1988, curated by Jeanette Ingberman. Illustrated throughout with Wong's paintings accompanied by text by John Yau. Includes gorgeous portrait and biography.
Martin Wong is recognized for his depictions of social, sexual, and political scenographies from the US in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Poetically weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. Heavily influenced by his immediate surroundings, the artist’s practice merges the visual languages of Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti, carceral aesthetics, and sign language. His work offers rare insight into decisive periods of recent US American history as told through its changing urban landscapes, unfolding hidden desires, and complexities.
Very good copy with only light creasing and tanning.
2022, English
Hardcover, 262 pages, 22 x 28.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Zeno X Gallery / Antwerp
$120.00 - Out of stock
Mark Manders – Zeno X Gallery, 28 Years of Collaboration offers an overview of the long-standing collaboration between the artist Mark Manders (b. 1968) and Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp. The review has been published to accompany his most recent solo exhibition in the gallery and highlights a number of important exhibitions and special projects in Belgium and abroad in which Manders was invited to take part from the 1990s to the present day.
Mark Manders has been working since 1986 on what he calls his ‘self-portrait as a building’. His oeuvre – consisting of installations, sculptures, works on paper and drawings – is ascribed the metaphor of a fictional building, divided into separate rooms whose precise shape and size is undefined. There is no beginning and no end. Manders strives for timelessness and universality using archetypal forms and familiar-looking materials such as clay, bronze and wood. His bronze sculptures and installations consequently appear more vulnerable than they are in reality.
With text contributions from Mark Manders, Frank Demaegd (Zeno X Gallery) and Marjolein Sponselee.
Publication accompanying the exhibition in Zeno X Gallery, which takes place from 3 September to 15 October 2022.
2014 / 2022, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Bbooks Verlag / Germany
$60.00 - Out of stock
Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York's downtown art world. Edgewise, by Berlin-based actress and writer Chloé Griffin, tells the story of Cookie's life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye. The contributors take us from the late-1960s artist communes of Baltimore to 1970s Provincetown and New York, through 1980s Berlin and Positano. Along with the text, Edgewise includes artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material and photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Peter Hujar.
2022, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 13.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller's stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.
Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller's first calling was to the written word: I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely, she once confessed. Muellerís 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller's prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller's stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller's art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still new stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing's new introduction situates Mueller's writing within the context of her life--and our times.
Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley's A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin's oral biography Edgewise, Mueller's life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller's writing itself. Mueller's many mise en scènes--the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS--patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails . . . a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 26.3 x 18.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$56.00 - Out of stock
The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur, in a new, updated, and expanded edition.
Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed.
The revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the book’s first publication, including details about the restoration of Halsted’s films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.
2019, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 21cm x 19cm
Published by
Yale University Press
$43.00 - Out of stock
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was a Russian pioneer of abstract painting whose work has influenced generations of artists. His Sounds (Klänge) of 1912 is one of the earliest, most beautiful examples of a 20th-century artist’s book. Its “sound poems” are alternately narrative and expressive, witty and simple in form. They treat questions of space, color, physical design, and the act of seeing in a world that offers multiple and often contradictory possibilities. The woodcut illustrations that accompany the poems range from representational designs to abstract vignettes. In its fusion of image and word, Sounds epitomizes the artist’s move toward abstraction and his aspiration to a synthesis of the arts.
This updated edition of Sounds includes all of the book’s poems in English and German and its woodcuts, twelve of which appear in color for greater fidelity to the original. The translator’s introduction offers close formal examination of the poems and situates Sounds in the context of Kandinsky’s oeuvre. Although it was prized by prominent 20th-century artists, Sounds is one of the least known of Kandinsky’s major writings, and this remains the most authoritative English version.
2018, English
Softcover, 220 pages
Published by
Amphetamine Sulphate / Austin
$34.00 - In stock -
In psychological warfare, a rigorous thirst for perversion is a definite advantage.
Welcome to the last crusade. Imagine GG Allin teaming up with Louis-Ferdinand Celine to right all the wrongs of this fallen, corrupted world. Join a merry band of chronic degenerates as they fuck and slaughter their way across the ruins of revolutionary France.
That's 21st century revolutionary France. Islamist terror attacks, rustic rebellions, blatant atrocities, scatological derangement and host of other comic misadventures worthy of Rabelais at his most splenetic. And disgusting.
Amphetamine Sulphate is proud to present this provocative and astonishing French mock-literary punk epic, appearing in English translation for the very first time.
Jean-Louis Costes is a French noise musician, performance artist and film actor.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 616 pages, 23.6 x 16.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$62.00 - In stock -
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film.
"Serge Daney was the end of criticism as I understood it."—Jean-Luc Godard
One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture.
Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
"Serge Daney was the key French film critic of his era. His untimely death in 1992 at 48, from AIDS, robbed international cinema of its most important critical voice. Despite his achievements as a writer and editor, little of Daney's work has been published in English. The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962–1981 covers Daney's years as a contributor and editor at the magazine that launched the French New Wave. It is about time English-language readers had access to the full range of Daney's thought and his unparalleled work on cinema. His prose, with its keen insights into individual films and the cinema as concept and practice, is original and transformative, a must-read for serious cinephiles and anyone else who believes in the ongoing tale of cinema."—A. S. Hamrah
"Thirty years after his death, Daney's revenant presence offers a most welcome disquietude."—Nick Pinkerton
Serge Daney became the editor of Cahiers du Cinema in 1974. In 1981, he left Cahiers and wrote about visual culture for Libération, turning his attention to television and coverage of the Gulf War. He collaborated with Claire Denis on a documentary film, Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990). He died of AIDS-related causes in 1992.
A. S. Hamrah is a writer living in Brooklyn. He contributed a column on film to n+1 from 2008 to 2019, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Harper's, Bookforum, Cineaste, and other publications. Heis the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018.