World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Crime / Violence
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Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
1993, English
Softcover, 346 pages 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$50.00 - In stock -
In her seminal study, first published in 1981, Marjorie Perloff argues that the map of Modernist poetry needs to be redrawn to include a central tradition which cannot properly be situated within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition dominating the early twentieth century. She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.
Very Good copy of 1993 second edition.
1991, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Collier Books / New York
$20.00 - In stock -
Since its publication in 1931, Axel's Castle has become a classic text, offering insights still important today. Beginning with the end of the Romantic era, Wilson traces the origin of the Symbolist movement and its development in six writers who "represent the culmination of a self-conscious and very important literary movement." The six writers are William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and Paul Valéry. By tracing the Symbolist movement Wilson explains its central role in modern literature.
Edmund Wilson was one of the twentieth century's most important and industrious critics of drama, fiction, nonfiction, and even of criticism itself. He was known for his contributions to The New Republic, Dial, The New Yorker, and other magazines. Husband of the highly acclaimed novelist Mary McCarthy, friend and mentor to Vladimir Nabokov, Wilson was also a poet and a playwright. Wilson was the managing editor of Vanity Fair and edited The New Republic from 1926 to 1931.
Hugh Kenner is a professor of English literature at the University of Georgia. He is well known for his literary criticism and his work on William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.
"Edmund Wilson is a writer who possesses in a high degree the qualities that justify writing-a will to find the truth and a brain that is an efficient instrument for the search....In his patient search into original sources and his loyalty to logic, to name only two of his qualities, Edmund Wilson shows a high standard of dialectical conduct."—Rebecca West
"Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist ... He could turn any literary subject back into the personal drama it had been for the writer."—Alfred Kazin
Near Fine copy, light tan to spine edge.
2022, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 15 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$66.00 - Out of stock
A Something Else Reader is a previously-unpublished anthology edited by Dick Higgins in 1972 to celebrate Something Else Press, the publishing house he founded in 1963 to showcase Fluxus and other experimental artistic and literary forms. The publication features selections from Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, John Cage’s Notations, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, Breakthrough Fictioneers, Jackson Mac Low’s Stanzas for Iris Lezak, Gertrude Stein’s Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Bern Porter’s I’ve Left, Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age Happenings, Al Hansen’s A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, and other projects for the page by Robert Filliou, Alison Knowles, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Daniel Spoerri, André Thomkins, and Richard Meltzer, among others. An annotated checklist assembled by Hugh Fox and Higgins’s unpublished introduction are also included.
Perhaps no other publisher in the 60s influenced artists’ books more than Something Else Press. Higgins had a firm vision that radical art could be housed in book form and distributed throughout the world and he worked endlessly to cultivate new works that challenged conventional notions of both contemporary art and books. While other presses created extraordinary publications, none were able to achieve the breadth of titles and artists like Higgins, who successfully ran Something Else Press until 1974 in a manner that resembled a more traditional paperback publisher. Oddly, Higgins hadn’t intended to publish A Something Else Reader himself. Instead, in 1972, he assembled the table of contents and an introduction into a proposal that he then pitched to Random House. They eventually rejected the title and encouraged Higgins to publish it, but before he could do that, Something Else Press went out of business, and the dreams of the anthology evaporated. From there, the proposal went into Higgins’s archive, where it was found by scholar and curator Alice Centamore, who compiled the works and assembled A Something Else Reader.
Eleanor Antin, George Brecht, Pol Bury, Augusto de Campos, Clark Coolidge, Philip Corner, William Brisbane Dick, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hugh Fox, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Brion Gysin, Richard Hamilton, Al Hansen, Jan J. Herman, Dick Higgins, Åke Hodell, Ray Johnson, Allan Kaprow, Kitasono Katue, Bengt af Klintberg, Alison Knowles, Richard Kostelanetz, Ruth Krauss, Jackson Mac Low, Robert K. Macadam, Toby MacLennan, Hansjörg Mayer, Charles McIlvaine, Richard Meltzer, Manfred Mohr, Claes Oldenburg, Pauline Oliveros, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Charles Platt, Bern Porter, Dieter Roth, Aram Saroyan, Tomas Schmit, Carolee Schneemann, Mary Ellen Solt, Daniel Spoerri, Gertrude Stein, André Thomkins, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams are all included in A Something Else Reader.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, theorist, poet, and publisher, as well as a co-founder of Fluxus. After attending Yale and Columbia Universities and receiving a BA in English, he graduated from the Manhattan School of Printing. He studied music composition with Henry Cowell, attended John Cage’s course in experimental music at The New School, and participated in the inaugural Fluxus activities in Europe from Fall 1962 to Summer 1963. He founded Something Else Press in 1963 and in 1972, he founded Unpublished Editions (later renamed Published Editions). Over the course of his life, Higgins wrote and edited forty-seven books.
2022, English
Softcover, 340 pages, 17.8 x 24.1 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$46.00 - Out of stock
Back in print! And in a more affordable softcover edition.
Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and the zine, DIY, and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue-or even medium-for art. Art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the culture's "linguistic turn." Today, art publishing confronts the internet and the avalanche of language and images that it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. Publishing Manifestos gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.
The book begins in the last century, with texts by Gertrude Stein, El Lissitsky, Oswald de Andrade, and Jorge-Luis Borges. But the bulk of the contributions are from the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on diversity, including contributions from Tauba Auerbach, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ntone Edjabe, Girls Like Us, Karl Holmqvist, Temporary Services, and zubaan. Some contributors take on new forms of production and distribution; others examine the political potential of publishing and the power of collectivity inherent in bookmaking. They explore among other topics, artists' books, appropriation, conceptual writing, non-Western communities, queer identities, and post-digital publishing. Many texts are reproduced in facsimile-including a handwritten "speculative, future-forward newspaper" from South Africa. Some are proclamatory mission statements, others are polemical self-positioning; some are playful, others explicitly push the boundaries. All help lay the conceptual foundations of a growing field of practice and theory.
Contributors
AND Publishing, Oswald de Andrade, Archive Books, Art-Rite, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Michael Baers, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Ricardo Basbaum, Derek Beaulieu, Bernadette Corporation, Riccardo Boglione, Bombay Underground, Jorge Luis Borges, bpNichol, Kate Briggs, Broken Dimanche Press, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Urvashi Butalia, Ulises Carrion, Mariana Castillo Deball, Paul Chan, Chimurenga, Arpita Das, Anita Di Bianco, Guy Debord, Constant Dullaart, Craig Dworkin, Ntone Edjabe, Zenon Fajfer, Marina Fokidis, General Idea, Annette Gilbert, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, Marianne Groulez, Alex Hamburger, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Mahmood Jamal, Tom Jennings, Ray Johnson, David Jourdan, Sharon Kivland, Kione Kochi, Kwani?, Bruce LaBruce, Tan Lin, El Lissitzky, Alessandro Ludovico, Sara MacKillop, Steve McCaffery, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Mosireen, Leon Munoz Santini, Takashi Murakami, Deke Nihilson, Aurelie Noury, Johnny Noxzema, Clive Phillpot, Michalis Pichler, Seth Price, Riot Grrrl, Carlos Soto Roman, Allen Ruppersberg, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Paul Soulellis, Matthew Stadler, Gertrude Stein, Paul Stephens, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic, Katja Stuke, Temporary Services, Nick Thurston, TIQQUN, Elisabeth Tonnard, V. Vale, Eric Watier, Erik van der Weijde, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Weinmayr, Jan Wenzel, Stephen Willats, Gil J Wolman, zubaan
Copublished with Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair
2022, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 18 x 11 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
Originally published in 1930 in an edition of one hundred copies, Gertrude Stein's Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein's circle to create an exceptional artist book exploring written and visual portraiture.
Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist book unites Stein's ten portraits in prose with sketches by five artists: Pablo Picasso, Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Kristians Tonny. Utilizing the interplay between word and image, Stein's writing and the artists' images provide nuance and depth, balancing humor and sincerity.
With a new introduction by the writer Lynne Tillman, Dix Portraits is an unforgettable artistic collaboration. The subjects represented include Guillaume Apollinaire, Christian Berman, Eugene Berman, Bernard Fay, Georges Hugnet, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, Pavel Tchelitchew, Virgil Thomson, and Kristians Tonny. Originally printed in an edition of one hundred copies with the lithography, and now widely accessible for the first time, Dix Portraits captures Stein's legacy as a champion of artists and a pioneer of creativity.
About the Authors
The American writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was a major figure in the avant-garde visual arts and literary spheres in the period between World Wars I and II. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she met Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for 40 years. Their home in Paris functioned as a salon for many now-celebrated writers and artists, who became close acquaintances. Stein is recognized for coining the term the "Lost Generation" to describe American authors living abroad, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. She and her brother Leo were among the first collectors, patrons, and supporters of many modern and cubist artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. Her own work shares the goals of that of her contemporaries-for example, similar to cubist works, her writing shows a proclivity for simplification, repetition, and fragmentation. Revered and feared for both her literary and artistic expertise, Stein has, in no small part, shaped how we understand and appreciate modernism today. Stein's best-known books include The Making of Americans (1925), How to Write(1931), and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), as well as her poetry collection Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933] (1956).
Lynne Tillman writes novels, including, most recently, Men and Apparitions (2018); short stories, including the collection The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories (2016); and essays and art and cultural criticism, including contributions to the catalogues Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (2018) and Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work (2017) and publications such as Aperture magazine. Her book-length autobiographical essay, Mothercare , is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing. Tillman is a professor and writer in residence in the English department of The University at Albany. She lives in New York with the bass player David Hofstra.
2021, English
Softcover, 155 pages, 22.1 x 15 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$34.00 - Out of stock
This international anthology takes us to the seldom discussed and anthologized beginnings of the prose poem. It gathers the foundational writings of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire and Max Jacob alongside lesser-known practitioners such as Judith Gautier, Elena Guro, Renée Vivien, Mizuno Yōshū, Dino Campana, Liu Bannong and Marcel Lecomte. The writers presented here celebrate the diversity of a genre that, perhaps more than any other poetic form, has cultivated hybridity and in-betweenness at many levels, be they aesthetic, cultural or political. This volume should be indispensable to anyone interested in modern and contemporary poetics as well as, more generally, the permutations of literary tradition and innovation.
Edited and with an introduction by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville. With over 20 translators from around the world.
Mary Ann Caws (born 1933) is an American author, art historian and literary critic. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English, French and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell. She has also written on André Breton, Robert Desnos, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Motherwell, and Edmond Jabès. She served as the senior editor for the HarperCollins World Reader, and edited anthologies on Manifestos - Isms, Surrealism, Twentieth Century French Literature. Among others, she has translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Tzara, Pierre Reverdy, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and René Char.
Michel Delville is a Belgian musician, writer and critic. Delville teaches literature at the University of Liège. He is the author of books about comparative poetics and interdisciplinary studies.He was awarded the 1998 SAMLA Book Award, the Choice Outstanding Book Award, the Léon Guérin Prize, the 2001 Alumni Award of the Belgian American Educational Foundation, the rank of Officer of the Order of Leopold (2009), and the 2009 Prix Wernaers pour la recherche et la diffusion des connaissances. Besides his extensive discography, he has over 30 books published to date.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 340 pages, 17.8 x 24 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$76.00 $69.00 - Out of stock
Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and the zine, DIY, and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue-or even medium-for art. Art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the culture's "linguistic turn." Today, art publishing confronts the internet and the avalanche of language and images that it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. Publishing Manifestos gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.
The book begins in the last century, with texts by Gertrude Stein, El Lissitsky, Oswald de Andrade, and Jorge-Luis Borges. But the bulk of the contributions are from the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on diversity, including contributions from Tauba Auerbach, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ntone Edjabe, Girls Like Us, Karl Holmqvist, Temporary Services, and zubaan. Some contributors take on new forms of production and distribution; others examine the political potential of publishing and the power of collectivity inherent in bookmaking. They explore among other topics, artists' books, appropriation, conceptual writing, non-Western communities, queer identities, and post-digital publishing. Many texts are reproduced in facsimile-including a handwritten "speculative, future-forward newspaper" from South Africa. Some are proclamatory mission statements, others are polemical self-positioning; some are playful, others explicitly push the boundaries. All help lay the conceptual foundations of a growing field of practice and theory.
Contributors
AND Publishing, Oswald de Andrade, Archive Books, Art-Rite, Rasheed Araeen, Tauba Auerbach, Michael Baers, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, Ricardo Basbaum, Derek Beaulieu, Bernadette Corporation, Riccardo Boglione, Bombay Underground, Jorge Luis Borges, bpNichol, Kate Briggs, Broken Dimanche Press, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Urvashi Butalia, Ulises Carrion, Mariana Castillo Deball, Paul Chan, Chimurenga, Arpita Das, Anita Di Bianco, Guy Debord, Constant Dullaart, Craig Dworkin, Ntone Edjabe, Zenon Fajfer, Marina Fokidis, General Idea, Annette Gilbert, Girls Like Us, Gloria Glitzer, Marianne Groulez, Alex Hamburger, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Holzer, Mahmood Jamal, Tom Jennings, Ray Johnson, David Jourdan, Sharon Kivland, Kione Kochi, Kwani?, Bruce LaBruce, Tan Lin, El Lissitzky, Alessandro Ludovico, Sara MacKillop, Steve McCaffery, Jonathan Monk, Simon Morris, Mosireen, Leon Munoz Santini, Takashi Murakami, Deke Nihilson, Aurelie Noury, Johnny Noxzema, Clive Phillpot, Michalis Pichler, Seth Price, Riot Grrrl, Carlos Soto Roman, Allen Ruppersberg, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Paul Soulellis, Matthew Stadler, Gertrude Stein, Paul Stephens, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovic, Katja Stuke, Temporary Services, Nick Thurston, TIQQUN, Elisabeth Tonnard, V. Vale, Eric Watier, Erik van der Weijde, Lawrence Weiner, Eva Weinmayr, Jan Wenzel, Stephen Willats, Gil J Wolman, zubaan
Copublished with Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair
2012, English
Softcover w/ red dust jacket, 176 pages, 21 x 27 cm
Ed. of 1000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$140.00 - Out of stock
First long out-of-print edition of Matt Connors "A Bell is a Cup", in red cover.
A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"
As New with light shelf wear and tanning to spine.
2012, English
Softcover w/ red dust jacket, 176 pages, 210 x 270 mm
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"
2012, English
Softcover w/ blue dust jacket, 176 pages, 210 x 270 mm
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"
2012, English
Softcover w/ green dust jacket, 176 pages, 210 x 270 mm
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"
2012, English
Softcover w/ purple dust jacket, 176 pages, 210 x 270 mm
Published by
Rainoff / Sydney / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A Bell is a Cup has been published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism by Matt Connors, held at MoMA PS1. Alongside texts by Peter Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the publication presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors' work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors' paintings "bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. 'There is really no single poem,' Spicer came to believe; he argued that 'poems should echo and re-echo against each other.'"