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
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1977, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dover / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1977 unabridged republication of the 1914 English translation originally published under the title The Art of Spiritual Harmony. Translated with an introduction by Michael T. H. Sadler, new preface by Richard Stratton, and 9 woodcuts by Kandinsky. Published by Dover.
A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own ground-breaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art.
Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting." Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings.
This English translation of Uber das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading ex perience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of twentieth-century painting.
Very Good copy.
2001, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 22 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marion Boyars / London
$30.00 - In stock -
'Bataille intellectualizes the erotic, as he eroticizes the intellect . . . reading him can be a disturbing kind of game'—The New York Times
'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of De Sade, Kafka, Blake, Genet, Michelet, Proust and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and powerful argument.
Translated by Alastair Hamilton.
'Bataille is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century'—Michel Foucault
VG copy.
1993, English / Japanese
Hardcover, 94 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1993 hardcover edition of Torture Garden: Vintage Erotica Archives, an anthology of vintage bondage and fetish photographs drawn from the private collection of noted erotic bookseller and collector, Alexandre Dupouy. Published by Treville Editions in Japan, compiled by Azzlo Discipline. English and Japanese texts. Introduction by Dupouy.
Alexandre Dupouy is a bookseller and collector who has been a leading authority on under-the-counter culture for almost 50 years, and has written and contributed to numerous books in his native France. He is the proud owner of the Parisian emporium Larmes d'Éros, named after a book by French author Georges Bataille.
Fine copy with all original catalogues inserted.
1990, English
Softcover (staple bound), 86 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Black Cat Books / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Seventh issue of the definitive guide to all things Bettie Page, The Betty Pages, published by Pure Imagination / Black Cat, New York, in 1992, with cover artwork by Olivia. Founded in 1987 during the huge 1980's resurgence in the popularity of the magnificent "Queen of Pinups", Bettie Page, "Miss January 1955". The Betty Pages was a digest-sized fanzine devoted entirely to stories, pictures, artwork, columns, collectibles, ads, and other items associated with American Pin-Up Icon Bettie Page, published and edited by Greg Theakston and co-edited by Joe Anderko, re-printed by Black Cat Books. Significant writing and illustrating contributors included: Glenn Barr, Dave Stevens, Chris Gore and Jim Steranko, amongst others. Profusely illustrated throughout in b/w and colour photographs of Page, including the excellent 1961 portfolio "Kitten With A Whip", an interview with pin-up Olivia, Olivia De Berardinis, and much more.
Bettie Mae Page (1923—2008) was an American model who gained notoriety in the 1950s for her pin-up photos. She was often referred to as the "Queen of Pinups": her long jet-black hair, blue eyes, and trademark bangs have influenced artists for generations. After her death, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner called her "a remarkable lady, an iconic figure in pop culture who influenced sexuality, taste in fashion, someone who had a tremendous impact on our society".
Very Good—NF copy.
1982, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 255.5 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$150.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of one of the remarkable special book issues of the original Semiotext(e) journal — the Semiotext(e) The German Issue, published in 1982, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, featuring the work of Joseph Beuys, Michel Foucault, Christo, Christa Wolf, Walter Abish, Alexander Kluge, Paul Virilio, Ulrilke Meinhof, William Burroughs, Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Heidegger, Félix Guattari, Fritz Teufel, André Gorz, Helke Sander...
First edition. Not the 2009 reprint.
The German Issue (1982) was originally conceived as a follow-up to Semiotext(e)’s Autonomia/Italy issue, published two years earlier. Although ideological terrorism was still a major issue in Germany, what ultimately emerged from these pages was an investigation of two outlaw cities, Berlin and New York, which embodied all the tensions and contradictions of the world at the time. The German Issue is the Tale of Two Cities, then, with each city separated from its own country by an invisible wall of suspicion or even hatred. It is also the complex evocation of the rebelling youth—squatters, punks, artists and radicals, theorists and ex-terrorists—who gathered all their energy and creativity in order to outlive a hostile environment.
Like a time capsule, The German Issue brings together all the major "issues" that were being debated on both sides of the Atlantic—which eventually found their abrupt resolution in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It involved the most important voices of the period—from writers and filmmakers to anthropologists, activists and poets, terrorists and philosophers. The book opens with Christo's “Wrapping Up of Germany” and the celebrated dialogue between East German dramaturge Heiner Müller and Sylvère Lotringer on the Wall (“Mauer”). Since it has been published in many languages, The German Issue offers a first-hand account of the Western world on the threshold of a major global mutation.
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Good—Very Good copy with general cover wear.
2003, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 19 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Currency Press / Melbourne
$30.00 - In stock -
"Max lovers, your definitive fix has arrived."—Empire
First 2003 edition of Martin's sparkling new appreciation of the movies that rudely shook up Australian cinema and made Mel Gibson and George Miller internationally famous. According to Martin, no other Australian films have influenced world cinema and popular culture as widely and lastingly as George Miller's Mad Max trilogy.
Leading Australian film writer Adrian Martin compares the three Mad Max movies—Mad Max, Mad Max 2 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome—sharing his views on which works best and why. In a chapter dedicated to each film, he looks at their critical reception and their themes, examines Miller's shooting techniques and provides a shot-by-shot analysis of integral scenes.
Since Mad Max roared onto cinema screens in 1979, the films have developed a worldwide cult following and provoked numerous debates as to their meaning: a study of masculinity in crisis, an investigation of good versus evil, a celebration of the Western (with wheels) or a frightening vision of the post-apocalypse. Martin explores these diverse interpretations in his fascinating account of three of Australia's most influential films.
Contains stills from all three films, complete notes and film credits.
ADRIAN MARTIN, born in Melbourne, is a film critic for the Age. He is the author of Phantasms and Once Upon a Time in America, and co-editor of Movie Mutations. He has won the Byron Kennedy Award (1993) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing (1993). He is co-editor of the Internet film journal Rouge (www.rouge.com.au).
Very Good copy.
1987, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
Autonomedia / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of one of the remarkable special book issues of the original Semiotext(e) journal — the notorious Semiotext(e) U.S.A., published in 1987, edited by Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), and designed by Sue Ann Harkley. Complete with the unprintable 4-pages, in still-sealed plastic pocket. ("Calling it "subversive" and "obscene," five book printers in the spring of 1987 refused to print Semiotext(e) USA. A sixth printer agreed to do all but four pages, which we have printed separately and included here.") Semiotext(e) U.S.A. is an absolute treasure and time-capsule of subcultural publishing in the 1980s—1990s, centering around Autonomedia and Semiotext(e). The original publisher's blurb says it all:
"THE JOURNAL DENOUNCED IN THE U.S. SENATE FOR ITS ADVOCACY OF "ANIMAL SEX" PRESENTS..."
"A huge compendium of works in AMERICAN PSYCHOTOPOGRAPHY Areas not found on the official map of consensus perception — Maps of energies, secret maps of the USA in the form of words and images.
We are amazed. We are NOT BORED. We have discarded the outworn charm of post-modern incommunicadismo. Passion and involvement, self-abandoned craziness, funny, sexy, dangerous, unabashedly precious, punk, loud and direct. SF, speculative fiction, weird fantasy — Pornography — Other mutated genres — Sermons, rants, broadsheets, crackpot pamphlets, manifestoes — Xerox and mimeo zines — Punkzines — Mail art — Kids' poetry — Subverted advertisements — American samizdat — Astounding rhetoric, elegant propaganda — Underground comix — Geographical documentation (maps, monuments, guides to weird places, photographs) — Stolen top secret documents — And a special feature: scores of personal and classified ads. each one with a box-number or address, to connect YOU with the edges of the USA — Anarchists, unidentified flying leftists, neo-pagans, secessionists, the lunatic fringe of survivalism, cults, foreign agents, mad bombers, ban-the-bombers, nudists, monarchists, children's liberation, tax resisters, zero-workers, mimeo poets, vampires, feuilletonistes, xerox pirates, prisoners, pataphysicians, unrepentant faggots, witches, hardcore youth, poetic terrorists...
For the realization of almost-unheard of desires"
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Good—VG copy with some wear and creasing to the covers and a couple of loose pages at the end. Complete with still-sealed additional censored pages.
1984, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 25.5 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$80.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of one of the remarkable special book issues of the original Semiotext(e) journal — Semiotext(e) Oasis, published in 1984, edited by Timothy Simone, Peter Caravetta, Frank Mecklenberg, Brigitte Ouvry-Vial and Gregory Whitehead. This issue from 1984, titled Oasis: Fourth World, was secretly produced and handed to Lotringer with an ultimatum: “Take it or leave it.”. Features texts by Joseph Saruva, Leslie Dick, Mustafa Isrui, Franco Beraldi, Theo Kneubuehler, Dambudzo Marechera, Chris Marker, Nuruddin Farrah, Gregory Whitehead, Unica Zürn, Françoise Gründ, Ariel Dorfman, Maurizio Torrealta, Paul Foss, Michel Serres, Wole Soyinka, Serge Galam. Marco J. Jacquemet, Ninotchka Rosca, Henri Pierre Jeudy. Timothy Simone, Lynne Tillman, Cornel West, Arnold Barkus, Peter Wortsman, Damona Wolff, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, Frank Ungemut, Alphonso Lingis, Bahadur Tejani, Bernhard Mueller and Karel Dudesek, Sun Ra.
"Human bodies consist primarily of water. Body chemistries perform best at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Human skin provides both vessel and thermometer for body water. If exposed to extended periods of heat or exertion, bodies dehydrate; skins dry out. Hard science tells us this is true for all skins, from the First through the Fourth world."
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Good copy with some wear and creasing to the covers, tanning and tape repair to top of spine.
1978, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 29 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$220.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 edition of Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, with wonderful cover artwork by Madelon Vriesendorp. Koolhaas's 'Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan' has attained mythic status. The posits New York as the arena for the terminal stage of Western civilisation. Through the simultaneous explosion of human density and invasion of new technologies, Manhattan became, from 1850 on, a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle: the Culture of Congestion. Delirious New York is a polemical investigation of that Manhattan; it documents the symbiotic relationship between its mutant metropolitan culture and the unique architecture to which it gave rise.
Delirious New York exposes the consistency and coherence of the seemingly unrelated episodes of Manhattan's urbanism; it is an interpretation that establishes Manhattan as the product of an unformulated movement, 'Manhattanism', whose true program was so outrageous that in order for it to be realized, it could never be openly declared. 'Delirious in New York' is the retroactive manifesto of Manhattan's architectural enterprise; it untangles the theories, tactics and dissimulations that allowed New York's architects to establish the desires of Manhattan's collective unconscious as realities in the Grid.
It proves above all, that Manhattan has been, from the beginning, devoted to the most rational, efficient and utilitarian pursuit of the irrational. In this vision Coney Island becomes an embryonic Manhattan, testbed of a Technology of the Fantastic, the Skyscraper a self-contained universe, Manhattan a man-made archipelago of architectural islands, Rockefeller Center the first and last fragment of a definitive Manhattan. The decline of this movement sets in with the European Modernist Blitzkrieg unleashed by Le Corbusier in the mid-thirties.
An appendix presents a series of projects that announce the 'second coming' of Manhattanism, this time as an explicit doctrine that can claim its place among contemporary urbanisms. An impressive documentation of original materials and unpublished projects provides the evidence for this architectural manifesto, which reads, in its insistent tracing of subconscious clues and themes, like a psychological thriller."
"Maddening and brilliant."—Robert A. M. Stern
Rem Koolhaas (b. Amsterdam 1944) is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. He first was a film-script writer, then studied architecture in London, and moved to New York in 1972. He is a partner in the OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), which is devoted to the further development of a Culture of Congestion.
Average—Good copy. Price-clipping to back cover corner (see image), gift dedication from 1981 to first blank page, moisture marking to tip of last few pages, spine with light tanning and bump to top tip. Otherwise Good—Very Good throughout, tightly bound copy.
1982, English
Softcover (staple bound), 46 pages, 28.5 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
TRANSITION / St. Kilda
$25.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of March 1982 issue (Vol. 3 No. 1) of TRANSITION magazine, a critical journal about architecture published quarterly out of St. Kilda and produced by the Department of Architecture at RMIT University. TRANSITION was devoted to discourse on contemporary architectural practice and theory, considering architecture's often difficult relationship with theory and how knowledge enters into the production of architecture. Articles focus on the predictive and speculative and encourage experimental design work, propositional writing and variations in between.
This issue edited by Ian McDougall and Richard Munday, designed by Michael Trudgeon.
Features: Fashion And Consumption: Notes On Aldo Rossi—Micha Bandini
Howard Raggatt - 1981 Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition—Ian Mcdougall
On Howard Raggatt's House - Writings Are Drawing On Building—Alex Selenitsch
Sherlock Holmes—Derham Groves
Unity And The Idea—Michael Tawa
Shades Of Bill Harney—Peter Myers
The Discreet Charm Of The Anti-Bourgeoise A Review Of From Bauhaus To Our House By Tom Wolfe—Paul Rankin
and more.
Very Good copy with storage rippling to printed wax paper covers. Light age/tanning to page edges.
2024, English
Softcover, 224 pages (500+ ills.), 22.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Geelong Art Gallery / Victoria
$60.00 - In stock -
Printmaking was a vital part of artist John Nixon’s celebrated oeuvre of abstract art. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition of the same name at Geelong Gallery and reveals Nixon's inventive use of varied techniques, which ranged from simple woodcuts and potato prints, to more complex screenprints, stone lithographs and etchings. It includes a curatorial essay by Sue Cramer, Emma Nixon, and Trent Walter. Additional contributions by Stephen Bram, Lizzie Boon, Roger Butler, Claus Carstensen, Sally Foster, James Gatt, Erik Jensen, Rebecca Mayo, Rose Nolan, Mike Parr, Victoria Perin, Jacqueline Stojanović, Jason Smith, and Warren Taylor.
2020, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust-jacket, poster, stickers), 108 pages, 26.5 x 36.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
Kaleidoscope Press / Milan
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition, now out-of-print.
With a first edition sold out in Japan in one week, this super book published by Italian art publisher KALEIDOSCOPE accompanies a two-artist exhibition co-curated by Alessio Ascari and Shinji Nanzuka, bringing together for the very first time the work of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and Swiss artist HR Giger. Touring from PARCO Museum in Tokyo to PARCO Event Hall in Osaka between December 2020 and February 2021, the exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of Giger’s birth and features over 50 works ranging from the late 1960s to the present day.
The catalogue, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger, features a foreword by co-curator Alessio Ascari, a critical essay by Venus Lau, an interview with the late HR Giger by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrick Frey, and a recent interview with Sorayama by Ascari.
Lavishly illustrated throughout, this beautiful edition also comes with a 50 x 70 cm two-sided poster, and two 20 cm die-cut stickers.
Born and trained at opposite ends of the world, Sorayama and Giger are apparently at odds—one’s bright colors are swallowed by the other’s dark chiaroscuro; one’s enthusiastic outlook on technology borders with the other’s nightmarish dystopia; one’s “super-realism” challenges the other’s surrealism—yet they share more than meets the eye. Both emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming acknowledged masters of airbrush painting and influential creators beyond the boundaries of the traditional art world, blurring the relationship between commercial and personal work. But more importantly, at the very core of their practice lies a similar concern: an obsessive investigation of AI, eternal life, and the fusion of organic and apparatus. Gynoids (female androids) are predominant subjects, conjuring the post-human and the apotheosis of the woman to reveal an underlying tension between life, death, power and desire.
Hajime Sorayama (b. 1947 in Imabari, Ehime prefecture) has established his position as a legendary artist, both within Japan and internationally, for his extensive oeuvre that centers upon an ongoing pursuit for beauty in the human body and the machine. Best known for his precisely detailed, hand-painted portrayals of voluptuous women, obtained through an astoundingly artful use of a wide array of realistic expressional techniques, most prominently airbrush painting, the artist’s international recognition is inextricably tied to his signature series titled “Sexy Robot” (1978-) featuring erotic android figures clad in shiny chrome metal, and to AIBO, the award-winning robotic pet he designed for SONY in 1999.
Hans Ruedi Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor, and set designer known for his biomechanical creatures, extraterrestrial landscapes, and disturbing sexual machines. In a career that spanned more than five decades, he employed a staggering variety of media, including furniture, movie props, prints, paintings and sculptures, often creating exhibition displays and total environments with the immersive quality of a wunderkammer—including, most notably, the HR Giger Museum in Gruyères. In 1979, his concept design for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) won an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects and catapulted to fame his daunting vision of death and futurism.
2022, English
Softcover, 142 pages, 24 x 33 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Tina Kim Gallery / New York
$200.00 - Out of stock
First edition, quickly out-of-print. Published to accompany an exhibition bringing together the worlds of the late Swiss visionary Hans Ruedi Giger (1940–2014) and South Korean artist Mire Lee, at The Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, September 18, 2021–January 2, 2022, this book beckons towards the darkest aisles of the human body and psyche. Both artists deal in biomechanical phantasmagorias of human and machine forms combining in an indissoluble whole, a constant metamorphosis between the stages of decline and resilience, hopelessness and power, lust and revulsion, male and female – thus emblematic of the polarities of our own existence. With texts by Agnes Gryczkowska, Charlie Fox, and McKenzie Wark and conversations between the artists and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
1980, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 28 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Xavier Moreau / New York
$300.00 - In stock -
Very rare first English hardcover edition of "Summer Camp", the first and finest book encompassing the mythical first work from French photographer Bernard Faucon (b. Provence, 1951), published by Xavier Moreau in 1980. This incredible book won him the Prix du Livre Photo.
"Bernard Faucon’s photographic 'mise-en-scene' of children's games and rituals (using mannequins and an occasional live model), like the salaciously naïve narrative that accompanies them, convincingly perverts the notion of reality. For the real in Faucon's art is both the subtly delirious content of unusually memorable images and the heightened awareness of the feelings they arouse in us . . . freakish pleasure, irrational fear, unbridled fantasies, forbidden yearnings associated with recollections of our own youth. "The wonderful memories I am preparing for myself!" Faucon says of his magical games with time.
Roland Barthes ascribed his own profound fascination for Faucon's enigmatic images to the "marriage of heterogeneous species of reality." He detected in them: artificial mannequins posed in a natural land-scape with an occasional live sitter in their midst, casual life-like gesturing of figures endowed with perpetually smiling lifeless expressions, all of this captured in true-to-life Kodacolor. By a brilliant construction/deconstruction of the means of illusionism, Faucon reveals that he is not only an extremely talented photographer but an artist at the leading edge today.
Bernard Faucon (b. 1950 in Provence) is a French photographer and writer. Faucon spent his childhood in the clear blue sky and the lavender field, before attending the University of Paris Sorbonne, where he majored in philosophy. After graduating, he worked as a painter, then turned to photography. Faucon was one of the first photographers in the second half of the 20th century to systematically create and master the constructed image, gaining fame worldwide in the late 1970s when he started a new trend of mise en scène photo. His photographic work has a love of youth and dreamy beauty, using saturated colour, natural settings, rooms and often tableaux of mannequins. For more than 20 years, his staged photographs have been exhibited in international galleries such as Leo Castelli in New York, and Agathe Gaillard and Yvon Lambert in Paris.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in VG—Near Fine dust jacket with tanning to spine.
1968, English
Softcover (staple bound), 32 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Federation of Australian Anarchists / Sydney
$70.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the wonderful 1968 pamphlet by Bill ‘Ubi’ Dwyer (1933—2001), an anarchist activist, squatter and Freedom Festival trail-blazer in New Zealand, Australia, England and his native Ireland, published by Federation of Australian Anarchists, Sydney. Anarchy now! is a great Anarchist primer that also outlined Dwyer particular style of heterodox anarchism. Heavily illustrated and citing all the important figures throughout the history of anarchist tradition and ideology, littered with quotes and heavy with information, especially for the Australian reader, on Anarchist groups and journals, recommended reading list, bios, questionnaire... Dwyer was involved with Freedom Press news group in Britain and its associated Anarchy magazine.
In the mid-1950s, Dwyer moved to Aotearoa (New Zealand) from Ireland. Whilst there he was introduced to anarchism by an English expat and became very active in politics. He lived in New Zealand until 1966, and was involved in a series of legendary events. Dwyer organised no-confidence motions in the leadership of the Wellington Watersiders Union and the Victoria University Students Union. After being convicted for calling the Queen a bludger whilst speaking in Auckland in 1966, Dwyer moved to Sydney and sold acid to finance his anarchist activities. He became an exponent of psychedelic anarchism, and engaged in soapbox oratory in the Sydney Domain and published this pamphlet (Anarchy now!) on his political philosophy of liberation. The same year he was sent to prison for selling LSD, and the Australian government deported him back to Ireland in 1969. In Dublin in 1970, Dwyer was a member of the Island Commune, a squatted house on Dublin's exclusive Merrion Road and between 1970 and 1972, a commune, organised by friend Sid Rawle, was established on Dorinish, an island then owned by John Lennon. Inspired by his experiences during the "liberation" of the Isle of Wight Festival 1970, Dwyer developed the idea of a truly "free" festival. An acid trip in Windsor Great Park led to the notion of squatting on the former common land that had been in Crown ownership since being reserved for royal hunting by William the Conqueror, and he began to organise what was to become the People's Free Festival. Windsor Free Festival was the forerunner of, and inspiration for, the Free Festival Movement, particularly the Stonehenge Free Festival and the later Glastonbury Festivals. Following the violent suppression of the 1974 event, he and Rawle were imprisoned to prevent the organising of a 1975 festival. Dwyer was imprisoned again attempting to organise another Windsor Free Festival in 1978, which did take place at Caesar's Camp nearby.
"This booklet is intended partly as an elementary introduction to anarchism, partly to show its relevance and immediacy to modern society and partly to demonstrate the unity of anarchist tradition and philosophy. Quotations are drawn from anarchists of widely differing backgrounds ranging from Max Stirner and Peter Kropotkin to a contemporary Sydney libertarian. Much of the criticism which different schools of anarchist thought have made of one another often shows a lack of understanding of their varying environments and needs. Anarchism is no dogma and its appeal, for example, to an artist will be quite different to its appeal for an industrial worker. I have divided the booklet into two parts — I. The Enemy and II. We, the People-to emphasise the principal aspects of anarchism, viz. rejection of authority and the concept that the individual and society can exist without authority and its attendant evils. The title ANARCHY NOW! indicates the need for an unceasing battle against authority and the possibility (sometimes a reality) of people organising co-operative, mutual aid enterprises ranging from the establishment of free schools to worker control of industry. Every individual must repudiate the claim of anyone else to rule and exploit him. In whatever occupation he is engaged he may fight by co-operating with his fellows to insist on a share in the making of decisions and on their fundamental equal ownership of society's wealth. The urgency of this fight is based on the realisation that the status of Mr Everyman today is that of a slave."—Bill Dwyer, Sydney, September 1968 (preface)
Good copy with some cover wear and general age.
1984, English
Softcover (staple bound), 50 pages, 27.5 x 20.5 cm
Signed copy.,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Denis Freney / Sydney
$80.00 - In stock -
Very rare and controversial publication self published in late 1984, Nazis Out Of Uniform, by Denis Freney, teacher, political activist, journalist, writer and editor of the Communist Party paper Tribune and author of The CIA's Australian Connection (1977). With cover illustration of National Action founder (and Australia First Party member) "Jim Saleam in full nazi regalia at a demonstration in Brisbane in mid-1970's. Behind him, largely obscured, is Ross "The ull" Skull" May, also in full nazi uniform". Illustrated throughout, with chapters "- Don't call us nazis: the early post-war groups"; "The fascist international"; "National Alliance: the great illusions"; "Strasserism and all that: the ideology of oz nazism"; "Bashers and bombers: National Action in Action"; "Terrorists worldwide: NA makes friends"; "The respectable racists: All the way with Joh and Flo"; "Conclusion: what can be done?"; "Appendix One: The League of Rights"; "Appendix Two: Graeme Royce/Maguire"; "Appendix Three: Geoff McDonald"; "Appendix Four: From White Power to Grey Power?", plus advertisements for Searchlight: The Anti-Fascist Monthly, Tribune, and Australian Left Review.
Signed by Denis, dedicated to Carmel, on the contents page in green ink.
Freney was a well known political activist in the 1970s. He helped organise demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the Springbok rugby tour (1971). This was followed by his involvement in the campaign for an independent East Timor and the independence struggles in Vanuatu and New Caledonia.
Very Good copy with only very light wear to edges and light age/tanning.
2013, English / Japanese
Softcover, 642 pages, 18.8 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Aomori Museum of Art / Aomori
$180.00 - In stock -
This enormous and exhaustive (now out of print) volume on the work and life of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo was produced to accompany the recent, most comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work, "Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective", that toured Japan throughout 2013-2014 (The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori).
Like the exhibition, this wonderfully designed and compiled book is the most comprehensive publication on Tetsumi Kudo ever published. The book breaks-down the periods of production, activity and major bodies of work/installations in Tetsumi Kudo's career alongside his ever-evolving philosophy of complex ideas thus: "1956-1962 "From Anti-art to the Philosophy of Impotence"; 1962-1969 "From Your Portrait to Cultivation by Radioactivity"; 1969-1970 "A Brief Return To Japan and The Making of Monument to Metamorphosis"; 1970-1975 "From Portrait of Ionesco to Pollution-Cultivation-New Ecology"; 1975-1979 "From Portrait of Artist in the Crisis to Waiting for the Revelation in the Rain of Heredity-Chromosome"; 1980-1990 "From Paradise and the Structure of the Emperor Systme to the Soul of the Avant-garde Artist".
Amongst an endless stream of visual documentation of Kudo's individual artworks, installations and performances, the book comprises of many republished texts by the artist himself throughout his career, as well as texts by Atsuhiko Shima, Yasuyuki Nakai, Takashi Fukumoto, Tomohiro Masuda, Takayo Lida, Toru Ikeda.
The book also includes a list of works for the exhibition, a thorough biography/exhibitions/bibliography section, Tetsumi Kudo's notes (including the many drawings and plans Kudo made for his installations, artworks and exhibition designs), and a photographic catalogue of works by Tetsumi Kudo, 1955-1988.
By far the most exhaustive document on the prolific work and unique vision of this important Japanese artist.
All texts are in both English and Japanese.
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935 Kudo first gained notoriety in the Tokyo art scene of the late 50s. He began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his painting participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. Immigrating to Paris, he immediately started working in a range of media--objects, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting--and presenting numerous Happenings and performances. Kudo's work and activities intersect with many important postwar artistic trends--including French Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, Pop art, 60s anti-art tendencies and 80s Postmodernism. Throughout his life and career, Kudo remained particularly Japanese while his art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, internationalist and cosmopolitan. His work made international appearances at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1972), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany, (1970), Venice Biennial (1976), and the Biennial São Paulo (1977, awarded a special mention) while also appearing frequently in museums and galleries throughout Japan and France, with a growing recognition in the Netherlands.
Near-Fine copy.
2013, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 15.2 x 10 cm
Published by
RE/SEARCH / San Francisco
$28.00 - Out of stock
In this book of witty, illuminating interviews with V. Vale, San Francisco Art Institute teacher, George Kuchar shares his secrets of how to make a film for close to zero-budget. PLUS interview with Kuchar star Marion Eaton, lists, and conversations.
Beloved by filmmakers such as John Waters and Todd Solondz, George Kuchar worked with the moving image for over half a century. In the 1950s, Kuchar and his twin brother Mike began producing ultra-low-budget underground versions of Hollywood genre films, with names like I Was a Teenage Rumpot and The Devil’s Cleavage. These 8mm kitchen-sink masterpieces bore the distinctive marks of what Susan Sontag called “camp,” and positioned the Kuchar brothers as the Bronx’s answer to the downtown underground filmmaking scene, which quickly adopted the Kuchars as their own — and in the work of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and others, showed their influence.
"INSPIRING, funny interviews with and about filmmaker George Kuchar. Lots of pictures, too! The most complete film/videoography to date for George Kuchar alone is worth the cover price. The best book you have ever published!”—M.B.
George Kuchar is an inventor of low-budget filmmaking, using thrift-store props, costumes and cheap make-up to transform non-professional actors into sex symbols and louche legends. In this book he reveals the secrets of LIGHTING: the key to making an ordinary human into a god or goddess. He does NOT reveal one of his major secret weapons: that he found countless lesser-known and just plain unknown vinyl records and plundered them to create spectacular, mood-enhancing soundtracks supplying drama, melancholy and passion where none hitherto existed. Buy this book and you may become a filmmaker yourself!—Jacob Cruikshank, Film Thread
1999, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
Male homosexual activity in public and semipublic locations is a central but seldom explored dimension of gay culture around the world. The majority of existing research emphasizes the impersonality of such erotic interaction and underscores the element of danger involved. While never denying the danger of anonymous public sex in the age of AIDS, the contributors to Public Sex/Gay Space go beyond narrow moralisms about the need to regulate unsafe sexual practices to discuss the significance of sex in public. William Leap has brought together contributions from such fields as anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and history to reinvigorate the discussion on this issue, with twelve essays providing a more nuanced portrait of why public sexual activity is such an integral part of gay culture. The authors present rich ethnographic snapshots of male sex in public places--many drawn from interviews with participants or, in some instances, the authors' personal experiences.Contributors investigate a broad cultural spectrum of gay sexual space and activity: in a public park in contemporary Hanoi, at the beachfront community of New York's Fire Island, and in nineteenth-century Amsterdam, for example. They explore issues such as visibility and secrecy, as well as economic status and social class, and interrogate the historical trajectories through which certain locations come to be favored sites for sexual encounters. Together, they offer insight into the ways in which public sex calls into question the very line that divides "public" from "private."
William L. Leap is professor of anthropology at The American University. He is the author of books including American Indian English and Word Is Out: Gay Men's English, and the editor of such works as Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Representation, and Imagination in Lesbian and Gay Discourse.
Very Good copy with only light wear.
1991, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. original silk-screened plastic sleeve), 36 pages, 39.5 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$300.00 - Out of stock
The seventh issue of Comme des Garçons 'Six' magazine (1991) featuring avant-garde photography exploring the idea of the 'Sixth Sense' while reflecting the Spring 1991 collection, including conceptual works by acclaimed photographers Christian Moser, David Seidner, Madame Yevonde, Brian Griffin, Jeurgen Teller, Javier Vallhonrat. Cover story and photo series featuring Comme des Garçons photographed by Christian Moser.
Between 1988 and 1991, Comme des Garçons explored the theme of the sixth sense via eight special biannual oversized, unstapled magazines titled 'Six'. These magazines were launched to coincide with Comme des Garçons fashion collections and were privately distributed at the time. The magazine visually represented the brand in a way that no other fashion company had before. Rei Kawakubo invited Tsuguya Inoue to art direct and Atsuko Kozasu to edit the issues, whilst contributions came from different designers and artists.
Issues of Comme des Garçons 'Six' have become very sought after collectors items.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in original silkscreened Comme des Garçons plastic sleeve (general wear to protective sleeve, magazine is bright and clean)
1969, French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 92 pages, 20 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jean-Jacques Pauvert / Paris
$69.00 - In stock -
Excellent copy of the first monograph ever published on the work of Pierre Molinier, published by the great Jean-Jacques Pauvert in Paris, 1969. The only book published on his work while Molinier was alive. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, drawings, and much more. Features texts by Andre Breton and Emmanuelle Arsan, also bibliography and biography. Texts in French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket, preserved under mylar wrap.
1979, English / French
Softcover (french folds), 78 pages, 27 x 21.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bernard Letu Editeur / Geneva
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1979 edition of this monograph on French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel), Pierre Molinier (1900—1976), published by Bernard Letu Editeur in Geneva. With accompanying text by Egyptian-French Surrealist author Joyce Mansour, this book is a retrospective survey of Molinier's provocative gender-bending paintings and drawings, illustrated throughout in colour and b/w. Texts in English and French.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy.
2024, English
Softcover (staple bound), 80 pages, 20 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Ex Film / Melbourne
$10.00 - Out of stock
A successful rally car driver with a penchant for gambling, his model wife and their friend from Tasmania, an eccentric inventor. A split second which changes their lives.
Another in this series of tracts from Ex Film documenting the public eye of tabloid news and the narrative they convey. Isolated from the surrounding visual noise of their original newspaper presentation, these publications offer a new perspective on strange tragedies often forgotten by the public media lens.
1968, Japanese
5 litho prints in letterpress envelope, 19 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$180.00 - In stock -
Complete 5 card set of litho prints by legendary Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo, issued in letterpress, marbled envelope in 1968 to commemorate the release of the complete 12 volume collected works of Japanese author and critic Edogawa Ranpo (1894—1965), who played a major role in the development of Japanese mystery and thriller fiction. Yokoo contributed many illustrations to the book collection, alongside fellow artists Iwami Furusawa and others. This rare folio of prints (roughly the size of post cards) collects five of the finest examples of Yokoo's instantly recognisable 1960's psychedelic work — erotic, grotesque, and esoteric themes rendered in vivid graphic collage and pop colour.
Tadanori Yokoo (b. 1936) is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists, who began working with painting in 1966. In parallel, Yokoo’s early screenprints experimented with collage and illustration, combining found photographs with the influence of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e and pop art’s flat vibrant colours and overtly sexual and grotesque content, often reflecting on the rapid changes and Westernisation of Japan post-war society. His interests in mysticism and esotericism, deepened by travels to India, influenced his iconic posters with eclectic psychedelic imagery sharing the aesthetics of the underground counterculture he was associated with. In Tokyo Yokoo worked as a stage designer for avant-garde theatre, collaborating extensively with Shūji Terayama and his experimental theater group Tenjō Sajiki. By the late 60s he had already achieved international recognition and in the early 1970s MoMA mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work. His famous designs for The Beatles, Miles Davis, Carlos Santana and collaborations with friend and iconic Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake are renowned the world over.
Very Good, perfectly preserved cards in aged envelope with some wear to edges and tanning.