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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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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.
1994 / 1995, Japanese / English
2 Vol. set, hardcovers (w. corflute envelope slipcases) in box, 196 + 182 pages, 32.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sequoia / Tokyo
$500.00 - Out of stock
"I dedicate this book to all lives"
Very rare, highly collectible cult classic two-volume death photo book series, SCENE Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, published in 1994 and 1995 in Japan only. A lavish production, with both heavy books printed in hardcover filled with high-quality reproductions of anonymous, uncredited corpse photography, seemingly sociopolitical photo-journalism of human massacre stripped of text/language as a confronting stream of graphic images in conceptual photo book form. SCENE presents an unwavering, unapologetic exploration of a world usually hidden from view — the dead and death. Not for the faint of heart. Compiled by Kunio Shimizu and Yoichi Shibata for publisher Hirofumi Nagashima, each book is housed in elaborate button-and-tie-bound corflute envelopes, Vol. 1 in black, Vol. 2 in silver. Select plates have been featured in the pages of Kotaro Kobayshi’s underground publications TOO NEGATIVE and ULTRA NEGATIVE from the same period.
This extra special copy was issued as both volumes together in publisher's printed box with seldom seen single promo sheet included for each book (inserted into each book). The ultimate complete edition of this underground photo classic. HEAVY in every sense.
Both books 1990's dead stock with only standard storage wear from button-bind pressure to envelopes/wear to button metal, box with yellowed tape seal (opened) and general storage wear/age.
2024, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 26.6 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$60.00 - Out of stock
“In early 2014, my father gave me a Polaroid camera that had been lying around his office unused for years and was set to be thrown out. The Polaroid Macro 5 was originally intended for dental and crime scene photography, but my own uses for the clunky device were unclear at first. Over the next few months, through experimentation and trial and error, a potential use gradually emerged. The camera quickly proved capable of capturing a feeling present in some of my (then) past images which I favoured most, but I was not able to readily recreate. The prior images captured ordinary materials or subjects, but resulted in images that appear elusive and abstract—transformed by the staging, the framing and the process of being photographed.”
Text and photographs by Yair Oelbaum.
Yair Oelbaum was born in 1988. He grew up in West Hempstead in Long Island and now lives in Milan, NY, where he works as a clinical social worker.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 28.6 x 19.1 cm
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin / Austin
$75.00 - Out of stock
This is the most comprehensive monograph to date on Los Angeles–based artist Lisa Lapinski (born 1967), celebrated for her formally complex sculpture in a variety of mediums—including wood, wire, cement and clay—in addition to painting, photography, drawing and found material, often containing philosophical and historical references.
Published on the occasion of Lisa Lapinski: Drunk Hawking, her 2020 midcareer survey at the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at the University of Texas at Austin, Lisa Lapinski: Miss Swiss includes previously unpublished images of Lapinski’s exhibitions and artworks from 2000 to the present. It also features contributions by Bruce Hainley, Graham Bader, Kyle Dancewicz, Sabrina Tarasoff and MacKenzie Stevens, as well as a conversation between the artist and linguist Viola Schmitt.
2024, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 216 pages, 27.94 x 27.94 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$85.00 $50.00 - In stock -
A 50th-anniversary tribute to one of America's first racially integrated exhibitions.
In August 1971 Peter Bradley mounted the landmark exhibition The De Luxe Show at the legendary DeLUXE theater in Houston's Fifth Ward. The De Luxe Show was a milestone in civil rights history, as one of the first racially integrated shows in the United States. Curated by Bradley with the backing of collector and philanthropist John de Menil, the exhibition featured emerging and established abstract modern painters and sculptors of the time, including Darby Bannard, Peter Bradley, Anthony Caro, Dan Christensen, Ed Clark, Frank Davis, Sam Gilliam, Robert Gordon, Richard Hunt, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel Johnson, Craig Kauffman, Alvin Loving, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Michael Steiner, William T. Williams and James Wolfe.
In August 2021, for its 50th anniversary, Karma and Parker Gallery staged a contemporary bicoastal tribute to The De Luxe Show. The tribute honors the long, pioneering legacies of the artists of The De Luxe Show, and continues the dialogue between these innovators in the field of abstraction that began 50 years ago. This fully illustrated catalog includes texts and installation images from the original 1971 catalog, as well as a newly commissioned text by Amber Jamilla Musser and a text by Bridget R. Cooks that expands upon her 2013 essay in Gulf Coast.
2006, English / French
Softcover (french folds), 208 pages, 24 x 20 cm
Published by
Halle Saint-Pierre / Paris
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful Unica Zürn monograph, published by Publisher Éditions du Panama to accompany a major survey exhibition in Paris in 2006—2007 at the Halle Saint Pierre, curated by Martine Lusardy and Sepp Hiekisch-Picard. Lavishly illustrated, this important catalogue, now long out-of-print, includes a large number of illuminating texts by scholars in bi-lingual English/French, including: "Unica Zürn: designs so dense" by Roger Cardinal; “Du wirst dein Geheimnis sagen (“You will tell your secret”). The anagram in the work of Unica Zürn" by Victoria Appelbe; "The magical encounter between writing and image" by Barbara Safarova; "The work of Unica Zürn, genesis and reception" by Sepp Hiekisch-Picard; "Read Unica Zürn: the contagion of the void" by Jean-Louis Lanoux; "Unica Zürn (July 6, 1916 – October 19, 1970): biographical references" by Rike Felka and Erich Brinkmann. An important, heavily illustrated reference of Zürn's life and work.
The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with fellow German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Already an accomplished author, Zürn was drawn to the Surrealist movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with her dense, otherworldly drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Also with her experimental anagrams, natural extensions of her established interest in hidden meanings and coincidences. Zürn produced most of her oeuvre during this intensive period in the 1950s and 60s, though one marked by her deteriorating mental health. Many of her works were made during periods of hospitalisation. In 1970, Zürn leapt to her death from the balcony of the Paris apartment she had shared with Bellmer. Upon his death in 1975, Bellmer was buried, at his request, next to Zürn in Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Their grave is marked with the words Bellmer wrote for Zürn’s funeral wreath nearly five years before: “My love will follow you into Eternity.”
Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another."
Very Good copy with small tears to spine tips and light waving to book block.
2024, English
Softcover, 384 pages, 20.32 x 13.34 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
The trailblazing book that influenced a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.
In the beginning when everything was very sexual we talked about our fantasies. She thought about having a guy for some of it. She thought about having a gun. I had gone through a lot to get away from guys so I admit that the thought of going back to them, even for a little adventure, was surprising and disconcerting ...
Ann Rower's first book, If You're a Girl, published by Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series in 1991 in tandem with Cookie Mueller's Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, cemented her reputation as the Eve Babitz of lower Manhattan.
Rower was fifty-three years old at the time. Her stories-urtexts of female autofiction-had long been circulating within the poetry and postpunk music scenes. They were unlike anyone else's- disarming, embarrassing, psuedoconfessional tales of everyday life dizzily told and laced with dry humor. In If You're a Girl, she recounts her adventures as Timothy Leary's babysitter, her artistic romance with actor Ron Vawter, and her attempts to evade a schizophrenic stalker.
Rower went on to publish two novels-Armed Response (1995) and Lee & Elaine (2002). After the 2002 suicide of her partner, the writer Heather Lewis, Rower stopped writing for almost two decades. And then she picked up where If You're a Girl left off. No longer a girl, she produced dozens of stories from her life in New York as an octogenarian.
This new, expanded edition includes most of the original book, together with selections from both her novels and her recent writings. If You're a Girl is a trailblazing book that manifests Rower's influence on a generation of writers, and proves that mature reflection needn't be lacking in attitude.
2024, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 20.32 x 13.97 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.
"The reason it's never just once is the same reason money's only a part of it. Most anyone can take or leave that, though they don't think they can. The cover story of all time, that's what money is. The excuse of excuses no one will question because they so much need to use it themselves."
Published by Doubleday in 1994, Heather Lewis's chilling debut novel took place on the northeastern equestrian show-riding circuit, to which Lewis herself belonged in her teens. Expelled from boarding school, its fifteen-year-old narrator moves numbly through a world of motel rooms, heroin, dyke love, and doped horses. Kirkus Reviews found it "brutal, sensual, honest, seductive ... a powerful debut," while the New York Times found the book "grating and troublesome ... it's difficult to imagine a more passive specimen."
Almost immediately, Lewis began writing Notice, a novel that moves even further into dark territory. The teenaged narrator Nina begins turning tricks in the parking lot of the train station near the Westchester County home of her absent parents. She soon falls into a sadomasochistic relationship with a couple. Arrested, she's saved by a counselor and admitted to a psychiatric facility. But these soft forms of control turn out to be even worse. Writing in the register of an emotional fugue state, Notice's helpless but all-knowing narrator is as smooth and sharp as a knife.
Rejected by every publisher who read it during Lewis's life, Notice was eventually published by Serpent's Tail in 2004, two years after her death. The book, long out of print, emerged as a classic queer text of trauma, written by one of the most talented novelists of her generation.
2024, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 20.07 x 13.46 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Holly James
The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré's transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.
I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many things that are possible.
First published in France in 2018, Playboy is the first volume of Constance Debré's renowned autobiographical trilogy that describes her decision, at age forty-three, to abandon her marriage, her legal career, and her bourgeois Parisian life to become a lesbian and a writer.
The novel unfolds in a series of short, sharp vignettes. The narrator's descriptions of her first female lovers—a married woman fifteen years older than her, a model ten years her junior—are punctuated by encounters with her ex-husband, her father, and her son.
As Debré recently told Granta: “It was a bit like Saint Augustine and his conversion. In the same week, I had sex with a girl and I had the feeling that I could write. I had this incredible feeling that I could catch things, that life was there to be caught.”
Looking at the world through fresh eyes, the narrator of Playboy questions everything that once lay beneath the surface of her well-managed life. Laconic, aggressive, and radically truthful, she examines gender and marriage, selfishness and sacrifice, money and family, even the privilege inherent in her downward mobility.
Writing her way toward her own liberation, Debré chronicles the process that made her one of the most brilliant, important French writers today.
2022, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 13.8 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition.
The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."
In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."
Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.
Translated by Holly James.
1978, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket) in slipcase, unpaginated, 22 x 16 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gentosha / Tokyo
$190.00 - Out of stock
1978 edition of Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama's masterpiece artbook, Beautiful Days, originally issued in this same hardcover, slipcased form in 1969 in a limited edition. Beautiful Days is the most crystallised embodiment of one of the most unique artistic visions of fantasy illustration one could ever find, and the first collection ever published by the artist, when, after discovering the erotic works on the fringe of Surrealism he gave up becoming a painter and gave himself over to the obscene impulses of drawing. "There, so to speak, masturbation became a picture. Until then, I never thought that masturbation could become a painting"—excerpt from Ken Katayama's postscript. Katayama's magnificently, obsessive graphite-rendered world-making is, like those of Lewis Carroll before him, made up almost entirely of children; children in states of blank-faced entrancement, possession and naked abandon; groping, lost and frozen in a psychosexual schoolhood theatre. Unlike anything else, aspects of Katayama's bewildering, often sadomasochistic, fairytale visions recall the tales of de Sade, Bataille, Klossowski, Carroll's Alice; the unconscious pictures of Balthus, Hans Bellmer, or Leonor Fini; the architectural dreamscapes of Delvaux or the Metaphysical painters; even the dark psychological renderings of fellow Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi — a haunted landscape of eroticised adolescent memories with recurring motifs of free flowing urination and defecation, violently strewn newspapers, urinals, and apparitions of cat-people. Nothing like it! The work even inspired an experimental film of boyhood memories directed by the provocative film-maker Nakamura Masanobu in 1970.
"If you
keep your hands in your pockets
in your pocket
what are you hiding
that's how I got it
darkness in my pocket, days of dust
I opened the old album and showed
beautiful days other days"
Virtually unknown outside his native Japan, Katayama (b. 1940, Tokyo) studied at the Musahino Art University and in the 1960s and 1970s begin contributing illustrations to underground art and literary magazines such as Black Notebook, Featured Story and fetish magazines such as SM Select, amongst many others. He published art books such as Angel Hour, Lost Child's Top, Match Taker, The Cat in Boots, and many more, and went on to become a successful children's story book illustrator, publishing many works throughout the 1980s—90s.
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved in Very Good slipcase.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 154 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$240.00 - In stock -
First 1997 edition collection of "The Early Works" by the Japanese master of Ero guro Toshio Saeki, published by Treville in 1997 and long out-of-print. An extensive collection of incredible works gathered from his first major book in 1970, his acclaimed 1971 Red Book, the panel-by-panel replication of an early Saeki manga story, and much more. Texts by Akira Uno, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Timothy Leary.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket and obi, light wear.
1994, Japanese
Softcover in die-cut, foiled slipcase, 162 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$180.00 - In stock -
First edition of the rare, long out-of-print first major monograph on Japanese artist Yoshifumi Hayashi, published only in Japan in this slipcased edition in 1994. Profusely illustrated throughout, chronologically surveying self-taught Hayashi's work from his mid-1970s De Chirico-inspired sci-fi-scapes quickly evolving into his life's-work of grotesque, disembodied eroticism rendered masterfully in graphite. All the artist’s deepest and darkest paranoias, fetishes, and obsessions are laid bare here, tracing the development of various themes and subjects throughout in a delirium of convulsing legs, breasts, vulvas, intestines, brains and modernist architectural interiors. This book is a must for anyone interested in Hayashi's work. Accompanying texts by Roger Borderie, Gilbert Bellquet, Issei Sagana, Hiroshi Fujita. Also includes a rare portrait of the reclusive Hayashi.
Contemporary Japanese erotic artist Yoshifumi Hayashi (b. 1948, Fukuoka, Japan) dropped out of Chuo University Department of Philosophy in 1972, moving to Paris in 1974, where he began to produce pencil drawings through self study. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy. Exhibiting and publishing his drawings in France in the late 1970's, Hayashi gained a cult following for his dark explorations of fetishized female physiology and mutating genitalia, rendered masterfully in pencil. Often mentioned in relation to the likes of Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger, and even David Cronenberg, Hayashi's drawings were featured in specialist fetish magazines, and director Walerian Borowczyk even made a film in 1980 of the artist at work, yet still little is known about Hayashi, who continues to work and exhibit internationally.
Very Good copy with Good slipcase with some general wear.
2014, Japanese / English
Hardcover, 96 pages, 15 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of 'Le Principe de la Constitution' by Yoshifumi Hayashi, published in 2014 and now out-of-print. ‘Eroticism is to establish order, or in other words the principle of constitution, and not to destroy’ Yoshifumi Hayashi says. This latest collection of self-taught Hayashi's masterfully rendered obsessive visions of grotesque, disembodied eroticism continue his unique and highly original exploration of graphic art. Profusely illustrated throughout, this book follows-on from the comprehensive "La Jeune Marieè d'un Materialiste Enceinte de Cerveaux" monograph (mid 1970s-mid 1990s) illustrating Hayashi's pencil work throughout the 2000s. Includes a very rare essay by Hayashi, who first studied philosophy, discussing his theories about science and eros, tracing his childhood interest in astronomy through to his understanding of eroticism through dynamics.
Contemporary Japanese erotic artist Yoshifumi Hayashi (b. 1948, Fukuoka, Japan) dropped out of Chuo University Department of Philosophy in 1972, moving to Paris in 1974, where he began to produce pencil drawings through self study. At first his main influence was the metaphysical world of De Chirico, but soon his focus shifted to the lower half of the female anatomy. Exhibiting and publishing his drawings in France in the late 1970's, Hayashi gained a cult following for his dark explorations of fetishized female physiology and mutating genitalia, rendered masterfully in pencil. Often mentioned in relation to the likes of Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger, and even David Cronenberg, Hayashi's drawings were featured in specialist fetish magazines, and director Walerian Borowczyk even made a film in 1980 of the artist at work, yet still little is known about Hayashi, who continues to work and exhibit internationally.
As New copy including Hayashi promotional postcard.
1989, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 19 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Arts Club of Chicago / Chicago
$150.00 - In stock -
Seldom seen, rare exhibition catalogue, Paintings, Works on Paper and Notebooks 1970—1988, published in conjunction with the exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, December 3 1998—January 23 1999. Illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with essays by Kathy Cottong and Michael Klein. Also contains extensive chronology of Thek's life. This archive copy includes an inserted multi-page, stapled gallery press-release, plus a review clipping from the Chicago Reader of the exhibition.
VG—Near Fine copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 184 pages 22 x 14 cm
Published by
Monkey / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Winner of the Yomiuri Prize and recipient of the 2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.
Introducing Tatsuhiko Shibusawa—Japan's Italo Calvino—in this fantastical tale of a Japanese prince who encounters both beauty and danger on a pilgrimage to India.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987) published only one novel, Takaoka's Travels, but it is considered a touchstone of Japanese counterculture. A specialist in medieval demonology, Shibusawa was a prolific, and controversial, Japanese translator of French literature, known for his translations of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Jean Cocteau, and the French surrealists. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defence, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa. In addition to Takaoka's Travels, he wrote several volumes of short fantasy fiction and numerous essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism, edited the ground-breaking Le Sang Et La Rose arts and literary journal (1968—1969), and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
A fantasy set in the ninth century, Takaoka's Travels recounts the adventures of a Japanese prince-turned-monk on a pilgrimage to India. As Prince Takaoka and his companions pass through faraway lands, the rules of the ordinary world are upended, and they find curiosities and miracles wherever they go. The travellers encounter strange creatures—a white ape who guards a harem of bird-women, beasts who feed on dreams, a dog-headed man who can see hundreds of years into the future. On the high seas, their ship is boarded by ghostly pirates and driven back by supernatural winds, and still they push on. At every turn, Prince Takaoka is drawn to the beauty around him, whether it takes the form of a perfectly shaped pearl or a giant blood-red flower, but such beauty proves to be extremely dangerous. Seductive and mysterious, offering high adventure yet deeply human, this is a novel that transcends all expectations.
With an afterword by translator David Boyd.
"In the ninth century, a Japanese prince-turned-monk sets off with companions on a journey to Hindustan (India), the center of Buddhism. . . . An arresting novel that readers will cherish."—David Keymer, Library Journal Starred Review
"A lush and fabulous journey into the unknown with impossible creatures, fantastic dream worlds, and things that seem to echo events long past."—Regina Schroder, Booklist
"Takaoka's Travels will somehow remind you, simultaneously and impossibly, of a hundred books you've loved and nothing you've ever read. The plot moves in eddies, playfully forgetting and then remembering itself. . . . It's rare to read a book and feel not only that you don't know where it's taking you but, over and over again, that you don't know where it took you, and I can't stop thinking about the experience."—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations
2024, English
Hardcover, 180 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Published by
No Place Press / US
$48.00 - In stock -
Two of the most important voices in art history discuss their intellectual foundations, the changing role of criticism, and the possibilities for artistic practice today.
In Exit Interview, the prominent art critics and historians Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh discuss their intellectual foundations and the projects they've worked on together, from October magazine to Art Since 1900. Through three engaging conversations, Foster engages Buchloh on his early influences and aspirations, his formative years in Berlin, London, and Dusseldorf, and his career in North America, while exploring the impact of other art historians and critics. Buchloh candidly addresses his successes, critical significance, and unexplored avenues in art history, providing a unique window into his motivations and experiences. With a powerful postface by Buchloh, Exit Interview builds from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one's critical life as a whole.
2024, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 21.0 x 14.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$52.00 - Out of stock
Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.
Ever since neofascist movements began to surge across the globe, liberal commentators have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal ideologies. The consensus is reason or rationality—after the Second World War, mainstream scholarship has supported the view that adherence to fascism is a thing of unreason. This distinction between reason and unreason, a tenet of Enlightenment thought, sustains the universal appeal of liberal democracy but leaves unexamined the paradoxes that haunt modernity, particularly its colonial foundation, thus obscuring the continuities between fascism and imperial policies.
The White West contends that, without confronting the structuring force of race in the production and reproduction of global wealth disparities, fighting for reason only leads to flawed utopias in which a critique or disruption of capitalism is easily inflected in the direction of neofascism. This collection of writing by leading historians, theorists, and scholars is an attempt to engage the overlaps between philosophical predicates and colonial legacies, as well as the undertheorized continuities between fascism and settler colonialism.
Contributors:
Larne Abse Gogarty, Norman Ajari, Ramon Amaro, Sladja Blazan, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Donna V. Jones, Nitzan Lebovic, Olivier Marboeuf, A. Dirk Moses, Rijin Sahakian, Nikhil Pal Singh, Kerstin Stakemeier, Felix Stalder
1983, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 20.96 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Grove Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamoured with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.
2024, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21.4 x 14.6 xcm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
An illuminating selection of writings on a wide variety of topics—everything from technique, music theory, and daily routine to spirituality and systemic racism—from the personal journals of Sonny Rollins, master of the tenor saxophone and "jazz's greatest living improviser" (The New York Times).
Sonny Rollins is one of the towering masters of American music, a virtuoso of the saxophone, and an unequaled improviser whose live performances are legendary and who has reshaped modern jazz time and time again over the course of a career lasting more than sixty years. A turning point in that legendary career came in 1959, when Rollins stepped back from performing and recording to begin a new regime of musical exploration, which saw him practicing for hours, sometimes all through the night, on the Williamsburg Bridge. This was also the moment when he started the notebook that would become a trusted companion in years to come-not a diary so much as a place to ponder art and life and his own search for meaning in words and in images.
At once quotidian and aphoristic, the notebooks mingle lists of chores and rehearsal routines with ruminations on nightclub culture, racism, and the conundrums of the inner life. And always there is the music-questions of embouchure, fingering, and technique; of harmony and dissonance; of his own and others' art and the art of jazz. "Any definition," Rollins insists, "which seeks to separate Johann Sebastian Bach from Miles Davis is defeating its own purpose of clarification. . . .The Musings of Miles is then the Bouncing of Bach both played against each other."
Edited and introduced by the critic and jazz scholar Sam V.H. Reese, The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins provides an unequaled glimpse into the mind and workshop of a musical titan, as well as a wealth of insight and inspiration to readers.
2024, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 20.2 x 12.7 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$39.00 - In stock -
Red Pyramid is a sort of "greatest hits" collection of short stories from across Vladimir Sorokin's career, beginning with juvenilia like "The Pink Tuber," composed with no expectation of either publication or readership; moving on to scatological conceptual texts like "An Obelisk"; then plunging into the more even-tempered, but still quite uncanny, delights of his post-Soviet work.
Stories like "A Month in Dachau" earn Sorokin his moniker as the "Russian De Sade," while others, like "Timka," are shockingly tender-despite their graphic depictions of mass shootings and anal sex.
This collection also contains the infamous "Nastya," a story about a family cannibalizing its daughter on the eve of the twentieth century, for which Sorokin was nearly put on trial; "Horse Soup," which was the first translation from the Russian to win an O'Henry Prize; as well as stories published in Anglophone magazines such as The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, and The Baffler to great acclaim.
Translated by Max Lawton with equal attention to chewiness and pop flair, Red Pyramid is introduced brilliantly, brutally, and as always, unexpectedly by Will Self. Red Pyramid is perhaps the best place to begin a dive into Sorokin's arch detonation of Russian violence.
Extended comic turns like The Queue and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like Ice Trilogy have established Vladimir Sorokin as a master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin's short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and Red Pyramid spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow's artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early "Obelisk," a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious "A Month in Dachau," which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like "Tiny Tim," where tenderness is inseparable from horror.
Sorokin's stories have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's Magazine, and The Baffler. This is the first time they have been collected in English.
2019, English / German
Softcover, 436 pages, 17 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Ludwig Forum / Aachen
$85.00 - Out of stock
The Invention of the Neue Wilde aims to put a new perspective on the phenomena of the so-called ‘Neue Wilde’ (new Fauves), which was a term used in Germany for neo-expressionism: a movement which saw the re-emergence of expressive painting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Its most famous protagonists include Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, Salome and Walter Dahn.
Instead of focusing on the production of paintings by those involved – and a corresponding catalogue of these paintings – it is much more interested in the emergence of the painting boom out of potent interplay between artists, gallerists, collectors and art historians. Here the focus is especially on personal backgrounds and the context in which painters worked.
The argument shows that the artistic practices of the ‘Neuen Wilden’ had little to do with a generalised ‘return’ to panel painting and thus to a traditional concept of art. Painting was in fact embedded in an extended network of artistic production, which was particularly characterised by a destabilisation in the division between high and popular culture as well as by various media, genres and collaborative forms of praxis.
Hitherto neglected photographic and documentary material as well as artists’ posters, records, newspapers, video works and artists’ books testify to the artists’ experimental bent on one hand, their proximity to self-organised, subcultural phenomenon, such as the punk or new wave scenes of the 1980s on the other. On this basis, the much-described ‘return’ to painting can be exposed as a hugely simplified narrative, while sketching out a complex image of the situation around 1980.
Artists: Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Werner Büttner, Luciano Castelli, Walter Dahn, Jiÿí Georg Dokoupil, Rainer Fetting, G. L. Gabriel-Thieler, Anne Jud, Martin Kippenberger, Helmut Middendorf, Christa Näher, Hilka Nordhausen, Markus Oehlen, Brigitta Rohrbach, Salomé, Bettina Semmer, Bettina Sefkow, Claudia Skoda, Rolf von Bergmann, Bernd Zimmer, and others.
Includes texts by Thomas Bayrle, Andreas Beitin, Werner Büttner, Diedrich Diederichsen, Catherine Dossin, Brigitte Franzen, Ramona Heinlein, Christian Höller, Katrin Köpper
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, The Invention of the Neue Wilde: Painting and Subculture around 1980 at Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (12 October 2018 –10 March 2019).
English and German text.
2024, English
Hardcover, 312 pages, 29 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$90.00 - In stock -
Under the name ‘Mülheimer Freiheit’ artist’s Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger exhibited together for the first time in November 1980 at the Paul Maenz Gallery in Cologne and soon thereafter internationally. The way they purposefully questioned the pseudo-individual “creative” artist ego in an unpathetic and humorous way ensures them a special status in the “Hunger nach Bildern” [hunger for images] to this day. Clearly more and different than just “Wilde Malerei” [wild painting] in their approach ‘Mülheimer Freiheit’ was an announcement that was to shape the art scene in Europe for an entire decade.
The book, with many illustrations of works, offers for the first time an overview of the group’s history, made vivid by numerous previously unpublished photographs by Benjamin Katz. Accompanying texts by Margrit Brehm, Wilfried Dickhoff, Axel Heil, Sophie Hirschmüller, Toby Kamps, and Paul Maenz.
Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Painting Tumult 1979-1988 / Made in Cologne’, 13 Nov 2022–16 Apr 2023, Center of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland.
Co-published with the Tumult Foundation.
English edition.
2024, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 64 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Secession / Vienna
$50.00 $25.00 - In stock -
Already out-of-print catalogue published to accompany Tishan Hsu’s exhibition recent work 2023 at Secession. The publication contains an essay by Laura Brown that reconstructs the creative techniques he has devised and honed over the past four decades and turns the spotlight on the early 2000s as a watershed moment when digital image editing programs suddenly produced within seconds many of the effects Hsu had anticipated. In a conversation with Martha Schwendener, Hsu dwells on the early years of his career and discusses his great theme: the fusion of body and technology in an increasingly virtual world.
When the artist learned that the new publication model introduced by the Secession in 2023 calls for freely accessible digital copies of all books complementing the printed version, he was inspired to toy with the relation between the analog book and its digital twin. To do so, he took process-oriented approaches that are integral to his creative practice such as the interpenetration of analog and digital techniques and adapted them to the book medium. Hsu’s art harnesses printing processes to translate digitally generated or edited forms into analog media, where they undergo further manipulation, sometimes iteratively, as in a feedback or echo.
In the book, the artist mirrors this process-based dimension of his work with a mutating series of eight pictures created for the downloadable version, whose title image changes over the course of the exhibition’s duration not unlike in the computer-generated special effect known as morphing. The intervals at which the cover changes are progressive rather than static. The final image is released on the exhibition’s closing day and remains in place as the “infinite” version. Meanwhile, the play with the cover image also turns collecting into a game—the printed dust cover, which exists only in the analog version, features all eight motifs, like a preprinted sleeve for collectible cards, complete with the exact period during which they can be downloaded from the web. An aficionado who wants the full set—almost like a collector buying up NFTs—will need to download the digital book on the specified dates.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (clothbound), 96 pages, 18 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Mole / Tokyo
$320.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of one of the greatest kinbaku photo books ever published, Bind by Akio Fuji. Published in 1992 by Mole Gallery, Tokyo, to accompany Fuji's exhibition of the same name, Bind is now a classic photo book of masterful aesthetic bondage photography, featuring the rope work of Chimo Nureki, gloriously reproduced in lush black and white plates bound in silver-foiled cloth hardcovers. Exquisite compositions capturing the two artists at the height of their powers, and an important book and exhibition for bringing the world of kinbaku to the recognition of the fine art world in Japan the 1990's.
Akio Fuji (b. 1959) is a pioneer of bondage photography in Japan, founding the legendary bondage enthusiast circle "Kinbiken" in Tokyo in 1985 with rope master Chimuo Nureki (who also produced the magazines Kitan Club and Uramado), developing into the cult kinbaku bulletin Kinbiken Communications, with core contributions by both Fuji and Nureki, Katsuya Kasui, Masami Akita (Merzbow), Yuri Sunohara, Asoji Muroi, Akira Minomura, and other members of the circle. The object of the group was to study the beauty of bondage, observing the techniques of master Nureki through a membership with one of the most distinctive facets of the club being that the bondage women participate as members themselves. Says Nureki, “One of the main reasons I started this circle was to provide a facility for masochistic women, who are often misunderstood and therefore despised.” Kinbiken Communications remain one of the most desirable kinbaku publications of this period, the photography from which is showcased here in Akio Fuji's debut collection, featured heavily in Masami Akita's compilation of the “History of Bondage Photography in Japan”.
Fine copy.