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.
2017, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$24.00 - Out of stock
Odd Jobs by Tony Duvert is a series of 23 satirically scabrous short texts that introduce the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life. A catalogue of job descriptions that range from the disgusting functions of “The Snot-Remover” and “The Wiper” to the shockingly cruel dramas enacted by “The Skinner” and “The Snowman". Through these narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood and neighbourhood in this mock handbook to suburban living; Leave It to Beaver as written by William Burroughs.
Duvert (1945-2008) earned a reputation as the “enfant terrible” of the generation of French authors known for defining the post-war Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12 for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic “cure” for his condition), Duvert declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often led his publisher to sell his works by subscription only). He won the Prix Medicis in 1973 for his novel Strange Landscape. His reputation faded in the 1980s, however, and he withdrew from society. He died in 2008.
1996, English
Softcover, 285 pages, 22.5 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Amok Books / Los Angeles
$35.00 - Out of stock
Georges Bataille presents the case of the most infamous villain of the Middle Ages: Gilles de Rais. Fascinated with the depths of human experience—the meeting points of sexuality, violence, ritual, spirituality, and death—Bataille examines with dispassionate clarity the legendary crimes, trials and confessions of this grotesque and still-horrifying 15th-century child-murderer, sadist, alchemist, necrophile and practitioner of the Black Arts. Gilles de Rais began his remarkable career as lieutenant to the devout martyr and saint Joan of Arc; after her execution, he fled to his estates in the countryside of France, where he began to ritually slaughter hundreds of children. After his arrest and subsequent trials, he was hanged and burned at Nantes, France on October 25, 1440. The latter section of The Trial of Gilles de Rais consists of the actual ecclesiastical and secular trial transcripts, annotated by Bataille, and translated from the ecclesiastical Latin by Pierre Klossowski.
All editions now out-of-print.
1995, English
Offset Lithographic poster (87 x 67 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Unknown
$350.00 - In stock -
Stunning, rare 1995 colour offset lithographic poster of Sigmar Polke's "Modern Art (Moderne Kunst)" from 1968, printed on heavy stock in 1995. Unknown publisher, likely a German museum edition. A striking reproduction of this iconic Polke painting.
Dimensions : 87 x 67 cm
Fine condition, immaculately preserved, ready to frame.
Sigmar Polke (1941–2010)
Characterized by wit and endless inventiveness, German artist Sigmar Polke created an oeuvre that is wildly diverse in its exploration of mediums and materials. Inspired by his fascination with science and alchemy, Polke innovated techniques in painting and photography by manipulating chemical processes. Life in post-war Germany led the artist to establish Capitalist Realism, an ironic exploration of consumerism using the imagery of popular culture and advertising, evident in his 1976 collage on paper Supermarkets aus dem Zyklus, Wir Kleinbürger (translated as “Supermarkets from the Cycle, We Petty Bourgeoisie”), featuring iconic Superman figures shopping in a brand-laden supermarket.
2019, English / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Ed. of 600,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
LE BAL Books / Paris
$240.00 - Out of stock
"A picture is and is not a key, a key is chemistry, no key is chemistry, chemistry is poison, poison is risk, risk is poison, risk is painting, painting is hiding, in hiding new colors emerge, new colors are new dangers, dangers are desires, desires are keys"—Extract from Malva Alcea (Sigmar's Mallow) by Harald Szeemann
Published by LE BAL on the occasion of the exhibition and now out-of-print, this publication displays a collection of never-seen-before photographs which all belong to the artist's son, Georg Polke. Designed by Roger Willems, the book highlights the jubilant and almost cheeky relationship that the artist had with the photographic medium during a key creative period : 1970-1986. Page by page, the many photographic genres and experiments usual to Polke's practice reveal themselves, creating a body of work partly family album, partly road movie. The book also insists on the important place the chemical and photographic experiments held in the painter's practice.
Produced in a small edition of 600 copies, the book also contains a rare 1985 interview of the artist by Bice Curiger as well as texts by Bernard Marcadé, Bice Curiger, Fritz Emslander and Harald Szeemann. A key publication on the photographic practice of Polke and a treasure trove archive of rare images!
As New copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 74 pages, 14 x 18.8 cm
Published by
The Song Cave / New York
$42.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Arda Collins's second book of poems, STAR LAKE, is a deeply personal collection that explores the ways our notions of daily life touch the presence of the eternal. With memory as the backdrop of many poems, including the loss of the poet's parents and her experience growing up in a family of survivors from the Armenian genocide, Collins often overlays images of landscapes, weather, and domestic interiors with a tone of melancholy--Who is the water and who is the light? / A shiver, a love, one you miss, and a wish. But STAR LAKE is also a collection of love poems, poems about the creation of new memories with family, tracing out imaginative shapes for their futures. In this Yale Younger Poets award winner's second collection of poems, Collins returns with truly unforgettable poems that haunt and comfort.
In spare, riveting lines, Arda Collins's new poems enact a torque between immediacy and distance, between a visceral near--An orange in the dark / is like lake air at night, and a resplendent far--Down the boulevard ... Versailles is everywhere. Against the shadows of Armenian genocide and family deaths, the speaker's calls to come in the window or come to time are less commands than invocations and the ground for stunning evocations. This is a book of wonders.—Arthur Sze
More than just a book, STAR LAKE is a tactile experience. A touchable journey wherein each stanza, each image comes to life before a reader. When the wind is summoned in the poem, a breeze blows in through a window you didn't even know you had open. All to say that this is a book of immense brilliance and immense possibility. Beckoning with new revelations around each corner.—Hanif Abdurraqib
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 656 pages, 23 x 18 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$65.00 - In stock -
Kurt Schwitters was a major protagonist in the histories of modern art and literature, whose response to the contradictions of modern life rivals that of Marcel Duchamp in its importance for artists working today. His celebrated Merz pictures—collaged and assembled from the scrap materials of popular culture and the debris of the studio, such as newspaper clippings, wood, cardboard, fabric, and paint—reflect a lifelong interest in collection, fragmentation, and abstraction, techniques he also applied to language and graphic design.
As the first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of this influential artist, Myself and My Aims makes the case for Schwitters as one of the most creative thinkers of his generation. Including material that has never before been published, this volume presents the full range of his prolific writing on the art and attitudes of his time, joining existing translations of his children’s stories, poetry, and fiction to give new readers unprecedented access to his literary imagination. With an accessible introduction by Megan R. Luke and elegant English translations by Timothy Grundy, this book will prove an exceptional resource for artists, scholars, and enthusiasts of his art.
"This indispensable collection follows Schwitters' swiftly changing thought on a diverse range of subjects from architecture and painting to graphic art and poetry. In each case Schwitters delivers his canny diagnosis with rigor, humor, and unflinching belligerence. No figure was able to reconcile Dadaist nihilism with constructivist optimism quite like Schwitters, and his striking insights about the hollow metaphysics of consumer society will not fail to resonate with anyone torn between the positions of critique and complicity today."—Devin Fore, Princeton University
2021, English
Hardcover, 80 pages, 23.5 x 17.15 cm
Published by
Karma / New York
$39.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
An acidic portrait of the grifters and pretenders of the art world, from the celebrated author of The Mars Room
In Rachel Kushner's latest work of fiction, The Mayor of Leipzig, an unnamed artist recounts her travels from New York City to Cologne--where she contemplates German guilt and art-world grifters, and Leipzig--where she encounters live "adult entertainment" in a business hotel. The narrator gossips about everyone, including the author. "Taking a time out from what happened to me in Cologne and in Leipzig," Kushner writes, "I want to let you in on a secret: I personally know the author of this story you're reading. Because she fancies herself an art world type, a hanger-on. Who would do that voluntarily? I mean, it's not like someone held a gun to my head and said, Be an artist. I chose it, but I still can't imagine having anything to do with the art world if you don't have to. Also, people who don't make stuff, who instead try to catalogue, periodize, and understand art, they never understand the first thing. Art is about taste, a sense of humor, and most writers lack both."
Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is the author of The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018). Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. A collection of her early work, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2015. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and the Paris Review.
The Mayor of Leipzig, published by the Lower East Side gallery Karma, represents something of a departure. Or, maybe it's a vacation. Narrated by an unnamed American female visual artist, The Mayor of Leipzig is a tale of nonevents suspended in a sort of non-time that might or might not be the Euro-American art world of the late 2000s and mid-2010s. — Lucy Ives "4 Columns"
2021, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$58.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
What is the role of the curator when organising digital art exhibitions in offline and online spaces? Analysing the influence and impact of curating digital art, this book focuses on how the experiments of curators, artists, and designers opened the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods for presenting and accessing digital art. In the process, it addresses how web-based practices challenge certain established museological values and precipitate alternative ways of understanding art's stewardship, curatorial responsibility, public access, and art history. Edited by Annet Dekker.
Annet Dekker is a curator and researcher. She is Assistant Professor Media Studies: Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Professor and co-director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University. She has previously been Researcher Digital Preservation at Tate, London, core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and Fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. She has published in numerous collections and journals and is the editor of several volumes, including Lost and Living [in] Archives. Collectively Shaping New Memories (Valiz 2017)
2017, English
Softcover, 14 x 21.5 cm, 184 pages
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$39.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lütticken focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution, whose reshaping of art’s autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts. In a present moment teeming with erosions—where even history and the human are called into question—Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy reconsiders these changing values, for relegating such notions safely to the past betrays their possibilities for potential today.
Lütticken discusses practices that range from Black Mask to Subversive Aktion, from Krautonomy to Occupy, from the Wet Dream Film Festival in the early 1970s to Jonas Staal’s recently established New World Academy. Within these pages Scarlett Johansson meets Paul Chan, Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl, and Dr. Zira from Planet of the Apes mingles with the likes of Paul Lafargue and Alexandre Kojève.
Design by Surface
1969, French
Softcover w. card pages, unpaginated, 20 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Agentzia / Paris
$200.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare copy of Artificiata I, Manfred Mohr's first artist book, published in 1969 by Editions Agentzia, Paris. The drawings Mohr made for the book in 1968/1969 were his last drawings before he started using the computer in his work in 1969. With letterpress printed wrappers and beautiful thick card stock pages printed in black and white, Artificiata I features Mohr’s graphic visual poetry based on mathematical equations and algorithmic geometry. Includes an introduction by Algerian computer music composer Pierre Barbaud.
Published as no. 22 in the Editions Agentzia series, founded and directed by Jochen Gerz and Jean-François Bory, who also published individual artists’ books by Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Annalies Klophaus, Carlos A. Sitta, Sarenco, Jean-Claude Moineau, and Michele Perfetti among others.
Manfred Mohr (b. 1938) is considered a pioneer of digital art based on algorithms. Starting his career as an action painter and jazz musician, after discovering Prof. Max Bense's information aesthetics in the early 1960's Mohr's artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Further encouraged by discussions with the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Since then all his artwork is produced exclusively with the computer. Mohr develops and writes algorithms for his visual ideas. Since 1973, he generates 2-D semiotic graphic constructs using multidimensional hypercubes.
Very Good, tight copy, with some edge wear to the back cover.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 24 x 16 cm
Published by
Penguin Putnam / New York
$45.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
“Lapvona flips all the conventions of familial and parental relations, putting hatred where love should be or a negotiation where grief should be . . . Through a mix of witchery, deception, murder, abuse, grand delusion, ludicrous conversations, and cringeworthy moments of bodily disgust, Moshfegh creates a world that you definitely don’t want to live in, but from which you can’t look away.” —The Atlantic
In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh’s most exciting leap yet
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, will prove to be very thin indeed.
1997, English
Softcover, 318 pages, 22.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Melbourne / Parkville
$20.00 - In stock -
Special "Time and Memory" issue of Antithesis (Vol. 8 No. 2), a postgraduate journal of interdisciplinary studies, published in 1997 by Melbourne University. Edited by Karen Barker, Catherine Dale, Sophie Gebhardt, Graham Jones, Tania Lewis, Catherine Magree. Featuring: Constantin V. Boundas, Philip Goodchild & Keith Ansell-Pearson on Time & Memory; Catherine Driscoll — The Little Girl; Constantine Verevis — A Cinema of Seeing; Graham Jones — Deleuze, Proust and the Art of the Simulacrum; Catherine Dale — Falling From the Power to Die; Stephen O'Connell — DandGyism: Every Name in History is 'I'; Justin Clemens — A Thousand Tiny Stupidities: Why I Hate Deleuze (and Guattari); Paul Atkinson — The Morphology of Time: Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation; Greg Adamson — Seditious Duration: Bergson and Serres; Daniel Palmer — Memory, Desire & Photography; Andrew J Lewis — Logical Time in the Act of the Analyst, and more.
Very Good copy.
2007, English
Hardcover (w. audio cd), 48 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Thrill Jockey Record / Chicago
$10.00 $5.00 - Out of stock
First, out-of-print edition. Baltimore's Higgs is best known for his work as the lyricist and frontman of Lungfish, whose work on Dischord spans three decades. This release is a limited edition CD + full colour 48-page hardcover book of Daniels's paintings and writings and the second release in the Thrill Jockey book series (the first being "Hokane" by Aki Tsuyuko). The CD of guitar and piano drones, jew's harp, and banjo recorded by Daniel is inserted in the front cover of the book.
As New.
1999, English / German
Hardcover (w. audio cd), 144 pages, 16 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kehrer Verlag / Heidelberg
$25.00 - In stock -
First, out-of-print edition of this hardcover book and CD on the Canadian composer and sound artist Robin Minard, one of the most outstanding artists in his field. Having left the concert hall in the mid-1980's, Minard creates sound installations for public spaces. Working in the context of an environment increasingly polluted with noise, Minard aimes to stimulate the sense of hearing and to regain neglected synesthetic abilities. Including two compositions on CD, this book contains the most comprehensive documentation of Minard's sound installations and compositions since the 1980's.
Edited by Bernd Schulz; texts by Bernd Schulz, Barbara Barthelmes, Helga de la Motte-Haber. All texts in both English and German.
Fine copy.
1991, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Kathy Acker's Hannibal Lecter, My Father, published by Semiotext(e) in 1991 as part of the Lotringer edited Native Agents series.
You can say I write stories with sex and violence and therefore my writing isn't worth considering because it uses content much less lots of content. Well, I tell you this: 'Prickly race, who know nothing except how to eat out your hearts with envy, you don't eat cunt'...
Edited by Sylvere Lotringer and published in 1991, this handy, pocket-sized collection of some early and not-so-early work by the mistress of gut-level fiction-making, Hannibal Lecter, My Father gathers together Acker's raw, brilliant, emotional and cerebral texts from 1970s, including the self-published 'zines written under the nom-de-plume, The Black Tarantula. This volume features, among others, the full text of Acker's opera, The Birth of the Poet, produced at Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1985, Algeria, 1979 and fragments of Politics, written at the age of 21. Also included is the longest and definitive interview Acker ever gave over two years: a chatty, intriguing and delightfully self-deprecating conversation with Semiotext(e) editor Sylvere Lotringer—which is trippy enough in itself as Lotringer, besides being a real person, has appeared as a character in Acker's fiction. And last, but not least, is the full transcript of the decision reached by West Germany's Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in which Acker's work was judged to be "not only youth-threatening but also dangerous to adults," and subsequently banned.
Acker is the sort of the writer that should be read first at 16, so that you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure her out; she confuses, infuriates, perplexes and then all of a sudden the writing seems to be in your bloodstream, like some kind of benign virus. She's definitely not for the easily offended—but then, there are worse things in life than being offended. Such as the things that Acker writes about...
2008, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 12 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Continuum / London
$20.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Geeta Dayal's volume on Brian Eno's Another Green World from the 33 1/3 series, published by Continuum, London.
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Brian Eno album to be composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio, over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proof of concept for Eno's budding ideas of "the studio as musical instrument," and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking about music.
In this book, Geeta Dayal unravels Another Green World's abundant mysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was an album this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way? How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to create an album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cards figure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archival research, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green World formed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosis from unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.
Geeta Dayal's writing on music, visual art, and science has appeared in many major publications, including Bookforum, The Wire, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, and The Village Voice. She is currently at work on a second book on the history of electronic music. She lives in Boston.
Good—VG copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
First 1995 edition of Brian Eno — His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, published by De Capo, Eric Tamm's provocative and definitive biography, bibliography and discography of Eno, from Roxy Music to his pioneering ambient works, through to music for film and television and collaborations with Harold Budd, Cluster, David Bowie, Jos Hassell, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, and various other classical and experimental composers, drawing on Eno's own words to examine his influences and ideas. Heavily updated from the original 1990 Faber edition.
"One of the best appreciations of a modern popular musician that's ever been written. In sharp contrast to most of the literature on popular music, it is articulate, it is written by someone who actually knows what he is talking about (Tamm's knowledge of both the mechanics of a studio and a wide variety of music from classical through pop is awesome), it is amazingly free of the usual polemics, hysteria and rhetoric which characterize this kind of book, and it is carefully systematic in the way it deals with Eno and his work.... This book answers just about every question that any Eno fan could ever want to ask, and a few more just for luck."—Rolling Stone
"Intelligent, thorough, fair, factual and unpedantic... Tamm's musicological approach and Eno's sound philosophy can pay off in all sorts of rewarding ways."—James Hunter, LA Weekly
"I think it's a very good book. I heartily recommend it."—Brian Eno, Interview
Very Good copy, toned pages.
1995 / 1996, English
Softcover, 306 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Serpent's Tail / London
$140.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first edition of the classic account of ambient music by English musician, author, curator, and professor, David Toop. David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas, from David Lynch's house, high in the Hollywood Hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of (and interviews with) artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Aphex Twin, Lee Perry, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed, Ocean of Sound channels the competing instincts of 20th century music into an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound, from new rhythmic and tonal influences to the sounds of war, machines, and the new digital revolution.
"A meditation on the development of modern music, there's no single term that is adequate to describe what Toop has accomplished here ... mixing interviews, criticism, history, and memory, Toop moves seamlessly between sounds, styles, genres, and eras"—Pitchfork's '60 Favourite Music Books'
Very Good copy. First edition, second print run.
2012, English
Softcover, 192 pages 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$80.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of the first book by musician Joe Morris, published independently in 2012 by Riti and very quickly out-of-print.
Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music describes the way free music is constructed through the processes of synthesis, interpretation, and invention. With descriptive sections of four seminal methodologies: Unit Structures, Harmolodics, Tri-Axium Theory, and European Free Improvisation, as well as sections on how specific properties are consistently used and re-formulated in the construction of free music. This material, which the author developed through years of performing and teaching, is concise and coherent, making it clear for listeners and musicians alike, and thereby setting a new standard for the understanding and study of the most inherently forward-seeking musical form of our time.
"Free music is an art form that has been made by individuals who operate without regard for critical or institutional approval, who invented the way they play their instruments and invented platforms on which to play music, based on whatever aesthetic value they thought mattered to them."—Joe Morris
This extraordinary work also features contributions in the form of answers to a questionnaire by 15 renowned free music artists: Marilyn Crispell, Charles Downs, Joe McPhee, Alex Ward, Matthew Shipp, Ken Vandermark, Jack Wright, Simon H. Fell, Agusti Fernandez, Nate Wooley, William Parker, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Katt Hernandez, and Jamie Saft.
Very Good copy. Small moisture ripple patch to back page corners only.
1995, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Matchless / Essex
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare first (1995) edition of the documented history and underlying philosophy of AMM by its percussionist and founding member Eddie Prévost. Essential for anyone curious about the internal fabric and inspiration of AMMusic.
The improvising group AMM was born some 30 years ago [1965], at a time of extraordinary creative ferment and transformational social possibility. Though its history has not been completely smooth, it continues today to pursue a unique sonic course, unswayed either by academic orthodoxy or the conformist pressures of the market. In this book, Eddie Prevost, drummer and a founder member, explores the reasons it came to be, the influences and refusals that have shaped its history, and the potential and the failings not only of the meta-music AMM is committed to, but all music everywhere: classical, jazz, folk, pop and the experimental avant-garde. In a unique series of acute and often moving dissections and meditations, directly modelled on AMM’s attitudes and practices in performances, Prevost examines the meanings of sound itself, giving them aesthetic, social and political dimension. These, together with an outline of the events of the group’s three decades of existence, of alliances and conflicts within the collective, give voice to a radically contrarian but always thoughtful underground strand in present-day music-making, which adherents all over the world, among players and listeners. It will fascinate and perhaps trouble anyone with an interest in modern music’s deeper currents.
"The idea of the performer of a written work as technical executor,or as a kind of curator (as Brendel puts it), precludes the possibility of free dialogue. If musical works could be perceived less as marketable or sacred objects, and more as possible views of the world on which to reflect, greater freedom might develop. Eddie Prévost's book, with great skill and imagination, provokes the readers into contemplating such questions."
Piano Journal
"This is an inspiring, modest and (to use a word that Prévost is not ashamed to use) beautiful book. Nothing in it is more beautiful than his own cry of resistance: I am something other than what you tell me I am."—The Wire
"One of the most successful attempts to illuminate the aesthetic, social and political aspects of the modus vivendi of improvised music."—Dissonanz (Swiss)
VG—Fine copy.
2011, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 23 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Matchless / Essex
$45.00 - In stock -
Percussionist Eddie Prévost co-founded in the 1960s the seminal improvising music ensemble AMM. In this book he presents a very personal philosophy of music informed by his long working practice and inspired by the London weekly improvisation workshop he first convened in 1999. Perhaps controversially, this view is mediated through the developing critical discourse of adaptionism; a perspective grounded in Darwinian conceptions of human nature. Music herein is examined for its cognitive and generative qualities to see how our evolved biological and emergent cultural legacy reflects our needs and dreams. This survey visits ethnomusicology, folk music, jazz, contemporary music and 'world music' as well as focusing upon various forms of improvisation - observing their effect upon human relations and aspirations. However, there are also analytical and ultimately positive suggestions towards future 'metamusical' practices. These mirror and potentially meet the aspirations of a growing community who wish to engage with the world - with all its history and chance conditionals - by applying a free-will in making music that is creative and collegiate.
Published 2011 by Copula, an imprint of Matchless Recordings and Publishing
As New, sealed copy.
2004, English
Softcover, 177 pages, 15.2 x x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Matchless / Essex
$45.00 - In stock -
Eddie Prevost (AMM)'s 2nd book of writings to be published by Matchless. Subtitled: "Meanings in music-making in the wake of hierarchal realignments and other essays." In 177 pages Eddie Prévost includes twenty-nine thought-provoking essays on ideas, perceptions, reactions and the practices of improvised music, as well as a short index. Reactions to the real world - in particular, the political, corporate and commercial ones - are never far from the surface and the place of the individual is mirrored through that of the musician developing his or her own position, responsiveness and voice in a group context. Discourses include the questioning of terminology such as 'non-idiomatic' to describe improvised music, cover sonic extremes and racial focus in current and recent musical endeavours, and revisit an hilarious review of reviews of the Ganelan Trio's first London concert in 1984. The premise with which each essay begins is analysed, explored and intellectually wrestled with so that even if the reader doesn't concur with the conclusions, at least there is food for further thought. Occasionally there is the impression of a Candide innocently walking through an embattled and battered musical landscape wondering where it's all gone wrong. Not sufficiently to suggest that the author made the wrong decision in becoming a musician - if there was a choice - and, in any case, there is the occasional footnote to indicate that perhaps (some) things are now on the mend. A recommended read.
As New, sealed copy.
1993, English
Hardcover, 56 pages, 21.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Artspace Books / Sausalito
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1993 edition of this hardcover collaborative book between artist Nayland Blake and author Dennis Cooper.
Illustrated by the works of conceptual artist Nayland Blake, whose images of marionettes are used to explore issues of desire and mortality, this is an original story by Dennis Cooper based on the confessions of David Brooks, an accomplice to a convicted American serial killer.
Long out-of-print.
Fine copy.
2011, Japanese / English
Softcover, 240 pages, 30 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Days / Tokyo
$55.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Second issue of DUNE Libertin, Japanese fashion and culture magazine following DUNE Quarterly, edited by the legendary Fumihiro Hayashi, re-launched for the new millennium, and as much a time-capsule of the 00s as Quarterly was of the 90s. With cover artwork by Gus Van Sant, other features in this issue include Mark Gonzales, Barry Mcgee, Momoko Ando, 111 Boadrum (Boredoms), Jeffrey Deitch, Mario Sorrenti, Ari Marcopoulos, Spike Jonze, Shepard Fairey, Hiromix, Liz Goldwyn, Aaron Rose, Punk Is Still Alive (w. Mike Watt — SST, Minutemen, Firehose), Rodarte, Chikashi Suzuki, Oliver Zahm (Purple), Tomoo Gokita, and much much more.
Very Good copy with small scuff to spine edge.