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
Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
Art
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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.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
2019, English
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
Broken Music is an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and originally published in 1989 by DAAD. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
1989, English / German / French
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daadgalerie / Berlin
Gelbe Musik / Berlin
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 edition of Broken Music, an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. Complete with original flexi-disc. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and published in 1989 by DAAD and Gelbe Musik, Berlin. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art. She was married to curator René Block.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
Very Good copy all-round, light cover/corner wear.
2007, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 18.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
"Jan Svankmajer" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 2007, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Profusely illustrated in colour with texts in Japanese that look at the genius of Jan Švankmajer, the Czech filmmaker, animator, writer, playwright and artist, a self-labeled surrealist celebrated for his innovative stop–motion animations and feature films, his extensive collaboration with wife painter and author Eva Švankmajerová, his collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. Packed with his drawings, film stills, artworks, photographs, interviews, articles on Svankmajer's motifs, artists inspired by Svankmajer and their works, a Svanmkajer filmography, and a section on Travel Tips to the Czech Republic. In typical Japanese magazine fashion, and Yaso in particular, this volume is incredibly comprehensive.
Good–VG copy. Some cover creasing. Sample image only.
1992, English
Softcover, 158 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
State University of New York Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Art Brut, also termed Outsider Art, has long been suppressed from most art historical writing. Why this rejection? The hyperbolic expressions of Romanticism and Symbolism nourished a desire for derangement and dissociation that inspired both Expressionism and Surrealism. Simulated delirium became the object of the new art - experimental, avant-garde, modernist - which arose from the fragmented codes, the shattered forms of everyday communication. But what of those artists whose works, and often whose deliria, are the manifestations of sheer eccentricity, of social isolation and marginalization, or of madness? In this book Weiss investigates the origins of the unrestricted contemporary artistic field, seeking its sources in those works hitherto absent from the official histories of art - works that constitute art's dark interior, its disturbing netherworld. Secluded, occluded, excluded, Art Brut nevertheless extends the limits of artistic creativity and aesthetic discourse, regardless of whatever anxieties such works may produce. Shattered Forms explores the relations between Art Brut, the psychopathology of expression, and avant-garde Modernism, attempting to show how the consideration of Art Brut should lead to a revision of our theoretical and museological paradigms.
Illustrated throughout with works by Rosemarie Koczy, Pascal Maisonneuve, Michel Nedjar, Vojislav Jakić, Oswald Tschirtner, Philipp Schöpke, "Max," Michel Nedjar, Katherina, Adolf Wölfli, August Neter, Comte de Tromelin.
Allen S. Weiss is a writer, translator, editor, and curator in the fields of Aesthetics, Art History, Cinema Studies, and Comparative Literature. He edited Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia (a special issue of Art & Text); co-edited Psychosis and Sexual Identity and Portraits from the Outside: Figurative Expression in Outsider Art; and wrote The Aesthetics of Excess, published by SUNY Press.
Very Good copy, light age.
2004, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slipcase), 48 pages, 27 x 19 cm
Signed and numbered edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$320.00 - In stock -
Very rare first Japanese edition of Picture Scroll of Pathos by ero-guro master Toshio Saeki (1945—2019), limited to only 1000 copies, numbered and this special copy signed by Saeki inside the cover! A gorgeous and rarely seen collection of Saeki's early manga works and picture stories that were originally published in the early 70's and thought to be lost, here reproduced impeccably in black and white with stunning multi-panel colour fold-out spreads. Hardcover bound in illustrated slipcase. Most complete.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Fine copy with Fine dj, slipcase. Signed in bold silver pen by Saeki.
2002, Japanese
Hardcover in slipcase w. illustrated paste-on, unpaginated, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seirin Kogeisha / Tokyo
$380.00 - In stock -
Signed copy of the first, limited, number-stamped edition of "The Earliest Works of Toshio Saeki" by the Japanese master of Ero guro, published by Seirin-Kogei-Sha in 2002 and long out-of-print. Before Saeki worked in his later palette of bright flat colours, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in stark black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary colour. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki's disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. The Earliest Works also shows the early inspirations of Toshio Saeki, Tomi Ungerer's effect being a most clear one. Broken into three chapters: Earliest Works, Uncollected Works, and Unpublished Studies from 1969, the book also includes a chronological record and notes by Yuji Yamashita. An incredible book! Signed by Saeki in metallic silver to inside cover.
Toshio Saeki (1945—2019) was an illusive Japanese illustrator and painter, and icon of 1970s Tokyo counterculture, known for combining Japanese folklore, Yōkai spirits and elements of Western art with his own sophisticated aesthetics to create a unique, sensational world of eros, dark humour, and horror. Given the title “Erotic Engineer” by Timothy Leary, Saeki's provocative art broke all sexual taboos, questioned Japanese ideology and traditional views on love, desire and gender roles. Saeki’s surgically-precise graphic work is closely related to the Japanese cultural phenomenon ‘Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense’ (ero, guro, nansensu).
“Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen”—Shūji Terayama, 1969.
Perfect fine hardcover copy housed in fine slipcase, beautifully preserved.
2018, English
Hardcover, 480 pages, 17.4 x 23.2 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$74.00 - In stock -
Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions.
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto "the mythological plane."
In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Acéphale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.
This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Acéphale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world."
Additional texts by Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, and by Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Andler, Michel Carrouges, Jacques Chavy, Jean Dautry, Henri Dobier, Henri Dussat, Imre Kelemen, Jean Rollin, Patrick Waldberg.
And with drawings by André Masson
Highest recommendation!
2009, English
Hardcover, 550 pages, 22 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$400.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the scarce, highly sought after, and most comprehensive book ever published on American artist Paul Thek, published in 2009 by MIT Press. Edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel, this enormous 550 page monograph contains more than 300 works by this groundbreaking artist, documenting his journey from legendary outsider to central figure in many contemporary art movements.
Paul Thek occupied a place between high art and low art, between the epic and the everyday. During his brief life (1933-1988), he went against the grain of art world trends, humanizing the institutional spaces of art with the force of his humor, spirituality, and character. Twenty years after Thek's death from AIDS, we can now recognize his influence on contemporary artists ranging from Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney, Mike Kelley, and Paul McCarthy, as well as Kai Althoff, Jonathan Meese, and Thomas Hirschhorn. This book brings together more than 300 of Thek's works—many of which are published here for the first time—to offer the most comprehensive display of his work yet seen. The book, which accompanies an exhibition at ZKM ? Museum of Contemporary Art presenting Thek's work in dialogue with contemporary art by young artists, includes painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation work, as well as photographs documenting the room-size environments into which Thek incorporated elements from art, literature, theater, and religion. These works chart Thek's journey from legendary outsider to foundational figure in contemporary art. In their antiheroic diversity, Thek's works embody the art revolution of the 1960s; indeed, Susan Sontag dedicated her classic Against Interpretation to him. Thek's treatment of the body in such works as “Technological Reliquaries,” with their castings and replicas of human body parts, tissue, and bones, both evoke the aura of Christian relics and anticipate the work of Damien Hirst. The book, with more than 500 images (300 in colour) and nineteen essays by art historians, curators, collectors, and artists, investigates Thek's work on its own terms, and as a starting point for understanding the work of the many younger artists Thek has influenced.
Essays by Jean-Christophe Ammann, Margrit Brehm, Bazon Brock, Suzanne Delehanty, Harald Falckenberg, Marietta Franke, Stefan Germer, Kim Gordon, Roland Groenenboom, Axel Heil, Gregor Jansen, Mike Kelley, John Miller, Susanne Neubauer, Kenny Schachter, Harald Szeemann, Annette Tietenberg, Peter Weibel, Ann Wilson.
Good copy with heavy tanning to spine and covers (esp. fluro spot colour), some bumping to cover corners, light page edge tanning. Internally Very Good, clean throughout.
2012, English / German
Softcover, 104 pages, 20.3 x 24.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Collection de l'Art Brut / Lausanne
$100.00 - In stock -
Scarce out-of-print monograph on the work of Morton Bartlett, one of only a couple of books on the artist, published by Collection de l'Art Brut Lausanne and Walther Koenig in 2012 and quickly sold out.
When the freelance photographer and graphic designer Morton Bartlett (1909–1992) died at the age of 83, his relatives found 15 chests among his possessions. Each chest contained a half-life-size doll and its accessories: 12 girls and three boys, a wardrobe of hand-sewn clothes, black-and-white photographs of each doll as well as countless studies and archival materials. Bartlett began designing these dolls in the mid-1930s, studying anatomy books and histories of costume, and learning to sew and mold with clay to make them as true to life as possible. Each doll entailed a huge amount of labor, taking up to a year to complete; Bartlett created costumes and wigs for each one and then staged them in lifelike scenarios and photographed them, documenting a family he had never had and creating a body of work that would remain unexhibited during his lifetime. The third installment in the Bahnhof Museum’s series on outsider artists, this volume examines Bartlett’s extraordinary lifelong obsession.
Edited and with foreword by Udo Kittelmann, Claudia Dichter. Text by Lee Kogan.
As New copy.
2010, Japanese
Softcover, 208 pages, 24 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$55.00 - In stock -
Incredible Hans Bellmer special feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 2010, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Being a magazine specialising in the doll arts it was only natural that they would dedicate an entire issue to the ground-breaking work of German Surrealist Hans Bellmer and the development of his dolls, and pay homage to his immense influence on Japanese doll artists by discussing his work with them. Heavily illustrated with reproductions of Bellmer's iconic doll photography and drawings, alongside reproduced and translated original texts, extensive chronology of Bellmer and Unica Zürn, the drawing and anagram work of his partner Zürn, an invaluable bibliography of publications related to Bellmer to date, and many portraits of the artist. There is an extensive chronicle of doll history and development stretching from 1902—2010 and a large part of the issue is made up of heavily illustrated exclusive interviews with Japanese artists influenced by the legacy of Bellmer, including Simon Yotsuya, Nori Doi, Ryo Yoshida, Tatsumi Hijikata, Makoto Onozuka, Kishin Shinoyama, Minori Nawata, and more, surveys contemporary doll artists Volks, PEACH-PIT, naruto, Hizuki, Tari Nakagawa, Minori Nawata, Os, Akihiko Aono, mican, Ayumi, Masanao, Katan Amano, Nishioka Bro. & Sis., and many more, and includes essays by Sue Taylor, Alice Mahon, Kumi Ogata... absolutely packed with content and a valuable Bellmer reference in the context of his Japanese influence on the arts.
Good copy woth knock/crease to top–right corner, light wear.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.8 x 20.4 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$32.00 - In stock -
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism’s most compelling figures
In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.
This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.
1982, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 23 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
Ambroise Paré, born in France around 1510, was chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III. In one of the first attempts to explain birth defects, Paré produced On Monsters and Marvels, an illustrated encyclopedia of curiosities, of monstrous human and animal births, bizarre beasts, and natural phenomena. Janis L. Pallister’s acclaimed English translation offers a glimpse of the natural world as seen by an extraordinary Renaissance natural philosopher.
Scarce 1982 edition. Good—VG copy, light wear and spotting to block edges.
1981, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 272 pages, 23.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Michael Joseph / London
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1981 hardcover edition of "The Real Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dream Child " by Anne Clark, published by Michael Joseph, London.
"Together Lewis Carroll and his Alice have been eulogised, criticised, psycho-analysed. Their phantasmagoric dreamworld has fired the imaginations and fed the minds of poets, philosophers, musicians and artists the world over - they have proved inspirational to creators as diverse as James Joyce, Lennon and McCartney, W.H. Auden, Walter de la Mare, Arthur Rackham and Salvador Dali. Now, for the first time, Alice Liddell is the subject of a major biography.
Daughter of the powerful Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, Alice met not only Carroll but the most brilliant personalities of her day in all walks of life. A celebrated beauty, she was painted by Richmond and photographed by J.M. Cameron. Hubert Parry dedicated music to her. Herself a gifted artist, Alice was taught to paint by Ruskin, whose flirtatious letters to her are quoted in the book. Her hopeless romance with Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's youngest son, is explored in depth with the help of the letters he wrote to her.
Alice's marriage to wealthy Reginald Hargreaves made her mistress of a splendid country mansion, but could not erase the trace of sorrow that was written permanently on her brow after the tragic early death of her younger sister Edith. That sorrow deepened when two of her three sons were killed in battle in the First World War. Widowhood left Alice impoverished, lonely and forgotten, but the sale of Carroll's manuscript and the centenary celebrations of his birth brought her again unexpectedly into the public eye.
Immaculately researched and enhanced by 150 fine illustrations, many of them previously unpublished or rare, The Real Alice sheds a fascinating new light on the person who was Lewis Carroll's dream-child and will give pleasure both as a biography and as an addition to the wealth of Carrolliana already in existence."
Near Fine copy in NF DJ, light foxing to block edge.
1999, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cityful Press / Seattle
$110.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of "Think of The Self Speaking : Harry Smith — Selected Interviews", published in 1998 by Cityful Press and long out-of-print. In this incredible collection you will find the flavour and texture of experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s conversation, his rambling, obscure, luminous, cantankerous genius. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smith's long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smith's activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "THINK OF THE SELF SPEAKING is the next best thing to being with Harry himself-perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear.
1997, English
Softcover, 306 pages, 28 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$160.00 - Out of stock
Long out–of–print.
"In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User’s Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the “formless” been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring the very field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content, whereas “formless” constitutes a third term that stands outside the opposition of form and content, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal. In Formless: A User’s Guide, Bois and Krauss, two of the most influential and respected art historians of our time, present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They map out its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a “job.” The job of Formless: A User’s Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this innovative reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Lucio Fontana, Lygia Clark, Cy Twombly, Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others."
Very Good copy. First 1997 Ed. 2nd 1999 print.
1944, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 32 pages, 21.5 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
J.M. Dent & Sons / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Lovely first edition 1944 children's book written and illustrated by Susan Gladstone and published in London by J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. "Susan Gladstone is not a grown-up artist, though you might think so from her drawings. She is thirteen now, the year this book is first published, and was twelve when she wrote and illustrated it. From the time she was a baby Susan has scribbled on paper the pictures that came into her head, and when she was five some of her drawings were sent up to the Children's Exhibition of the Royal Drawing Society in London and awarded a Gold Star. After that Susan belonged to the Children's Red Book Circle of the R.D.S., and had helpful criticisms from time to time, when the drawings were returned. Her father would read aloud to her what the critic wrote. She has been awarded the Bronze Star certificate since the war. Susan always draws with her left hand. She never copies anything, but when illustrating this story made the pictures up out of her head. For instance, in the picture of the old market place she did not even draw it in pencil first. As her father says—"It went slap down in Indian ink in no time!"
"Bruno lived in a cosy cottage with his father and mother. Anybody would have liked to live there too, when they see the picture of it. One day he followed his father out into the woods, strictly against orders, and this is the story of the adventures that befell him, and of how he met Chimp who became his friend. Then the lovely happy ending and joyful homecoming."
An animal self–liberation classic.
Very Good copy preserved in the seldom seen original dust jacket. DJ is Average with tanning, marking and chipping to edges.
2013, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 23 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
PictureBox / Brooklyn
Corbett vs. Dempsey / Chicago
$160.00 - In stock -
In 1972, the legendary musician, composer and mystic Sun Ra (1914-1993) was hard at work scripting and acting in the now classic documentary on his life and work, Space is the Place, as well as publishing his second book of poetry. The book of poems (now extremely rare) was designed and edited by Ra's manager, who asked one of Ra's band members in the Arkestra--the drummer and percussionist Ayé Aton--to contribute images to accompany Ra's poems. The final publication contained three photographs of Aton's indoor, space-themed murals. Published here for the first time, a once-lost trove of photographs dating from 1972, a pivotal year for Sun Ra. Half of the photos in this book are of the interior murals made by Ayé Aton — spectacularly beautiful in their 1970s supersaturated color. From the same period, a cache of never-published photographs taken on location in Oakland for the film Space is the Place, features Ra in full regalia, wearing beautiful Egyptian costumes borrowed from a local masonic temple. These spectacular photographs — unseen artifacts from a now remote time — offer us a special and often entertaining behind-the-scenes glimpse of a much-missed musical visionary.
Published by PictureBox, Inc. and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
Includes an introduction by Glenn Ligon and an essay by John Corbett
Edited by John Corbett
2010, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 328 pages, 33 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Steidl / Göttingen
$220.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful first edition of this long out-of-print over-sized hardcover catalogue on the work of Miroslav Tichý. Few stories in the history of photography are as astonishing and as compelling as that of the octogenarian Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. With crude homemade cameras fashioned out of cardboard and duct tape, Tichý took several thousand pictures of the women of his Moravian hometown of Kyjov throughout the 1960s and '70s. These pictures of women going about their daily business are at once banal and extraordinary, transforming the ordinary moments of work and leisure into small epiphanies. Blurred and off-kilter, his photographs have a striking contemporaneity, resembling the early paintings of Gerhard Richter or the photographs of Sigmar Polke. Printed imperfectly and deliberately battered, they evince a surprising retrograde or even anti-modernist feeling, which, in the context of the Cold War atmosphere of provincial Czechoslovakia, just before and after the liberalizing moment of the Prague Spring (1968), undoubtedly constituted a kind of oblique political provocation, a nose-thumbing response to the progressive realist perfectionism of official Soviet culture.
This major catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same title at the International Center of Photography organized by Chief Curator Brian Wallis. Critical evaluations by Brian Wallis, Roman Buxbaum, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Richard Prince introduce more than 250 plates and illustrations.
Very Good copy.
2011, English / French
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 248 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
Kant / Prague
$160.00 - In stock -
Like the Prague exhibition that provided the opportunity to publish it, this stunning, over-sized hardcover book is the 'explosive' result of the meeting between two personalities with a heretical reputation: the great photographer Miroslav Tichý and the former situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti. Both are better known internationally than they are in the Czech Republic. Their paths were destined to cross - simply for the originality and radical nature of their approach to life. Tichý's work inspired Sanguinetti to make critical and riveting insights into the art of our age. While his comments may fuel polemical debate, they cannot leave the reader indifferent. The photographs by Tichý that are being presented for the first time in this book and at the City Gallery Prague represent a strict selection that prioritises the eloquence of symbols that pervade Tichý's work and which are, according to Sanguinetti, the key to his art.
Lavishly illustrated in colour throughout with all texts in English and French.
Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011)
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague (1945-48), Miroslav Tichy withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches with pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result are works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
1968, French
Softcover, 162 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Planète / Paris
$50.00 - In stock -
Issue 17 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.
Plexus, issue 17, October 1968. Cover by Gilles Rimbault. Features a gallery of art by Gilles Rimbault, Didier Moreau, Georges Wolinski, photography by Emil Cadoo, actress Geneviève Grad, Anton LaVey, Emmanuelle Arsan, Yves de Saint-Agnes, Jacques Sternberg, and so much more.
VG copy, light wear/age, small sticker damage to lower cover (sample image only)
1969, French
Softcover, 144 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Planète / Paris
$45.00 - In stock -
Issue 26 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.
Plexus, issue 26, July 1969. Cover by Roman Cieślewicz. Features a gallery of art by Claudine Wick, Georges Wolinski, an "unprecedented document on homosexuality" an investigation by Pierre Hahn featuring contributions by Roger Peyrefitte and Michel Butor (writers), Claude Dumezil (psychoanalyst), Daniel Guérin (sociologist), Marc Oraison (priest), Roger Bastide (ethno-sociologist), André Baudry (director of "Arcadie"), Daniel Guérin, Jacques Sternberg, Hair, and so much more.
VG copy, light wear/age.
1969, French
Softcover, 130 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Planète / Paris
$40.00 - In stock -
Issue 30 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.
Plexus, issue 30, December 1969. Cover by Bonneville. Features a gallery of art by Max Savy, the first ever pornography fair in Copenhagen, Contemporary art and the sexual revolution (Niki de Saint Phalle, Mel Ramos, Alina Szapocznikow, Martial Raysse, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Tom Wesselmann, Yves Klein, David Hockney, Richard Lindner, Bernard Rancillac, James Rosenquist, Larry Rivers, etc. by Pierre Restany, French author Catherine de Prémonville, Edgar Morin, and so much more.
VG copy, light wear/age.
1969, French
Softcover, 162 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Planète / Paris
$55.00 - In stock -
Issue 25 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.
Plexus, issue 25, June 1969. Cover by Michel Plaisir. Features a gallery of art by Hans Bellmer, Yves Chaix, Jacques-Armand Cardon, Pierre Bonnard by Pierre Cabanne, erotic photography by Ica Vilander, manifestations of POSSESSION (from voodoo, Macumba, sorcery, to Surrealism, Happenings, Yoga and L.S.D.), Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jacques Sternberg, Michel Bernard, Henri Guillemin, and so much more.
VG copy, light wear/age.
1969, French
Softcover, 162 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Planète / Paris
$35.00 - In stock -
Issue 24 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.
Plexus, issue 24, May 1969. Cover by Pierre Le Colas. Features a gallery of art by Pierre Le Colas, Modesto Roldan, Ivan Steiger, photography by Jean Clemmer, Piero Fornasetti, Roger Caillois, Robert Sheckley,
and so much more.
VG copy, light wear/age.