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
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THU—FRI 12—6 PM
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World Food Books
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PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
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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.
1980, English
Softcover (staple + tape bound), 76 pages, 29 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Experimental Art Foundation / Adelaide
$380.00 - In stock -
Exceptionally rare private-issue publication documenting the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) Performance Week, March 1980. The festival, directed by Noel Sheridan, centred around Carclew House, Adelaide, and featured the work of Brian Abraham, Arch-y Brothers (Pram Factory), Art Circus, Chris Barnett, Richard Boulez, Ross Boyd, Peter Callas, Domenico de Clario, → ↑ → (Tsk Tsk Tsk), Graeme Davis, Ross Digby, Lionel Doolan, EG (Chris Mann, Paul Pendergast, Peter Munnie, Hugh McSpedden), F.A.C.K (F Martins, A. White, C. Brooks, K Turner, K. Flugelman), Dale Franks, Ann Fogarty, Sandra Greentree, Adrian Hall, Elizabeth Honeybun, Jan Hubrechsen, Kathy Marmour, Robert McDonald, Kevin Mortensen, Bruce Lamrock, Steve Turpie, Peter Hopcraft, Jill Orr, Mike Parr, Jackie Redgate, SALT workers (C. Brooks, P. Cheslyn, A. Davy, K Flugelman, F. Martins, B. Sachs, D. Watt, A. White, S. Wigg, D. Kreckler), SIDE F/X (G. Aldridge, J. Lawes, W. Hutchins, M. Shirley, R. Maude, M. Kolodrovic, T. Reid, K. Stanton, L. Lee), Strachan and Pearce, David Tolley and Bruce Tolley, Karen Tyler, Peter Tyndall, Donald Walters, Dave Watt, Arthur Wicks, Dave Young... no less!
Profusely illustrated with artist pages packed with photographic documentation, texts, drawings, and more. Two page introduction text by Noel Sheridan. Printed and published by EAF for the participants, this is an incredibly rare and important document of the history of radical performance art in Australia in the 1980's.
The EAF was founded in Adelaide in 1974 by a small group of artists, curators and theorists, with a mission to promote art that interrogated the status quo, was only incidentally aesthetic, and, by definition, was radical. This important national and international organisation promoted experimental art practices and became renowned for supporting early performance art in Australia.
Very Good copy with a small scuff/knick to the bottom of the front cover, light cover marking.
From the collection of Australian artist (and performer during the event) Bernhard Sachs (1954—2022), whose name is penned to the top of the first blank page, date "'80".
1978, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 64 pages, 29.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
ANU Arts Centre / Canberra
$250.00 - In stock -
Rare catalogue published on the occasion of Act 1: an exhibition of performance and participatory art, 4—12 November 1978, spanning the ANU Arts Centre, Commonwealth Gardens and Civic Centre, Canberra. Organised by the ANU Arts Centre, Act I drew Australian artists to Canberra for the "first of a series of exhibitions directed towards specific aspects of recent and experimental art". Profusely illustrated artist pages throughout with photo documentation, collage, drawings, and artist's texts. Artists include Mike Parr, Ian Hamilton, Terry Smith and Media Action Group (Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Terry Smith, Michael Dolk, Kieren Finnane, Mary Kinney, Ian Milliss, Anne Sutherland...), Leigh Hobba, Kevin Mortensen, John Nixon, John Davis, Marr Grounds, Ken Unsworth, John Fisher, Liz Honybun, David Kerr, Richard and Pat Larter, Tony Twigg, Lesley Savage, Terry Smith, Tony Twigg, Bob Ramsay, Noel Sheridan, Arthur Wicks, Jillian Orr, Richard Tipping, Jim Cowley, Donald Walters... Includes critical essays by Paul McGillick and Terry Smith on performance art and private and public work, plus further texts by organisers Ingo Kleinert, Diana Ashcroft Johnson, Mildred Kirk. The catalogue also operates in as a document of the exchanges between the organisers and the artists, laying bare the operations and budget, reproducing the open letter to the invited artists along with a selection of the signed responses outlining the artistic concepts, all reproduced in full facsimile. Signatures and transcribed concept responses of contributing artists also make up the wrap-around cover design. Also of particular interest for the contribution by Terry Smith and Media Action Group, who formed in 1977 at Sydney University around the Australian members of the Art & Language group, who had recently returned to Australia. The group produced slide shows on the ideological bias in media treatment of advertising, uranium mining, new technology and the history of May Day. This work is stamped "withdrawn because titled 'performance'" in the contents.
Very Good copy with light wear to cover extremities/light spine pinching. Toned pages from age.
2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 360 pages, 21 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Ediciones Polígrafa / Barcelona
$140.00 - In stock -
Since the mind-1960s, Dan Graham (Urbana, Illinois 1942) has produced an important body of art and theory that engages in a highly analytical discourse on the historial, social and ideological functions of contemporary cultural systems. He is a highly influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both as a practitioner of conceptual art and a well-versed art critic and theorist. Graham s work questions the relationship between people and architecture and the psychological effects it has on us. His work highlights the awkwardness that occurs when intimate moments or details are rudimentarily broadcast in an impersonal manner, as he continues to investigate the voyeuristic act of seening onself reflected, whilst at the same time watching others. This monograph analyzes his main works and collects some of seminal writings by the artist.
With a text by Alexander Alberro.
First English hardcover edition, now out-of-print.
2025, English
Hardcover, 368 pages, 28 x 28 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
Hauser & Wirth / Los Angeles
$160.00 - In stock -
Hammons' body prints, flags and found-object sculptures come together in this artist's book documenting his thought-provoking conceptual exhibition.
This post-exhibition catalog revisits David Hammons’ 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles. A singular book created entirely under the artist’s direction, this publication illustrates the most expansive exhibition of this legendary artist’s work to date.
Said critic Jonathan Griffin of the original exhibition, "Alongside finished artworks, including framed examples of Hammons’s sublime drawings made with bounced basketballs and powdered Kool-Aid, there are plenty of apparently ad hoc, readymade interventions, installations in which it is unclear where one ends and the next begins. … Hammons, it seems, wants his viewers to relax, historiography be damned."
Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. In Los Angeles, Hammons was a cofounder of Studio Z, a group which included Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Joe Ray and others. Hammons has lived in New York since 1978.
1993, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good copy due to contact laminating, otherwise VG.
2004, English
Hardcover, 176 pages, 19 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
Regen Projects / Los Angeles
$220.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of the collectable hardcover catalogue cum artist's book that is Richard Prince's pictorial homage to Women, published in conjunction with a 2004 Regen Projects exhibition in Los Angeles and long out-of-print.
"Perfectly beautiful yet strangely faceless, hundreds of interchangeable fashion models and bare-breasted biker chicks find themselves reincarnated in the artwork of Richard Prince. Prince recycles these American (male) pop culture fantasies from found materials, most often advertising images and magazine layouts which he rephotographs, repaints or overpaints, arranges in collages, or breaks down into fragments. Images of women representing various spheres of trivial culture, marketing iconography like the Marlboro Man, and figures borrowed from chauvinist cartoons are central motifs in his art. Without comment, Prince cites and duplicates them in supposedly defunct role clichés that remain stubbornly present even today. Women goes even further, presenting a diverse yet decidedly thematic selection of appropriations chosen by the artist himself and ranging across his body of work. From bad sexist jokes to the covers of books written by female authors, from rockin' out naked biker chicks to Kate Moss, from a rephotographed Untitled Film Still to penny-novel nurses--these are Richard Prince's Women."
Lavishly illustrated throughout. Text by Shaun Caley Regen. Designed by Lorraine Wild and Robert Ruehlmann. (Cat Entry 13 in "Bibliotheque d'un Amateur: Richard Prince's Publications 1981-2012")
Near Fine, As New copy.
1982, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 21.5 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Renaissance Society / Chicago
$20.00 - In stock -
"To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled." — Don DeLillo
These are the artists who put the load-bearing post in postmodern, making the visual politics of media, marketplace and patriarchy the crucial issues for the 1980s: Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Bogosian, Nancy Dwyer, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman. A Fatal Attraction brought these and other artists who share these concerns together at a seminal point in this movement. This exhibition catalogue is a valuable reference for scholarship of this period of contemporary art, not to mention a cultural relic from an important moment in recent art history. Tom Lawson's essay links the artists within a set of shared concerns-deconstruction of institutionalized pleasure, demystification of representation-that follow from the discourse of 1960s and 70s conceptual art, but takes this critique of ideology from the insulated art world out into the streets and living rooms of America.
2008, English
Softcover, 489 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$58.00 - Out of stock
Tony Conrad is exemplary of the 1960s artist who remains inassimilable to canonic histories. Creator of the “structural” film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt’s radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has significantly impacted cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, “concept art,” postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure.
Rather, by drawing on Deleuzian notions of the “minor” and the Foucauldian problematization of authorship found in Conrad’s own artistic/musical project, Early Minimalism, it disperses him into an “author function.” Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad’s collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections amongst the arts of the time.
“A tour de force of both interpretative and historiographic acuity.”—Art Bulletin
2000, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 178 x 229 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$30.00 - In stock -
Out of print first 2000 softcover edition of Rosalind E. Krauss' Bachelors, published by October / MIT Press.
Since the 1970s Rosalind Krauss has been exploring the art of painters, sculptors, and photographers, examining the intersection of these artists' concerns with the major currents of postwar visual culture. These essays on nine women artists are framed by the question, born of feminism, "What evaluative criteria can be applied to women's art?" In the case of surrealism, in particular, some have claimed that surrealist women artists must either redraw the lines of their practice or participate in the movement's misogyny. Krauss resists that claim, for these "bachelors" are artists whose expressive strategies challenge the very ideals of unity and mastery identified with masculinist aesthetics. Some of this work (such as that of Louise Bourgeois or Cindy Sherman) could be said to find its power in strategies associated with such concepts as écriture feminine. Bachelors attempts to do justice to these and other artists (Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Louise Lawler, Francesca Woodman) in the terms their works demand.
Rosalind E. Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University and an editor and cofounder of October magazine, is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), The Optical Unconscious (1993), The Picasso Papers (1999), and Bachelors (1999), all published by the MIT Press, and coauthor (with Yve-Alain Bois) of Formless: A User's Guide (Zone Books, 1997).
"[S]timulating, difficult, and often dazzling...Bachelors is a smart and often profound book that makes avaluable contribution to the gendered field it abhors." Carol Zemel, Women's Review of Books.
Contents: By way of introduction, Claude Cahun and Dora Maar; portrait of the artist as "fillette", Louise Bourgeois; the "cloud", Agnes Martin; contingent, Eva Hesse; untitled, Cindy Sherman; problem sets, Francesca Woodman; bachelors, Sherrie Levine; souvenir memories, Louise Lawler.
VG copy with only a corner bump/bend to the top-right.
1978, English
Softcover folder, fold-out loose leaf 1 x 1.5 metres + additional loose leaf piece, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Outback Press / Fitzroy
$200.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of late Australian artist/compositional linguist/raconteur Chris Mann's epic first published work, Words and Classes — On Having Words, published by Melbourne's Outbackl Press in 1978 in this elaborate artist's book/binder housing an enormous fold-out (approx 1 x 1.5 M unfurled) thick newsprint sheet printed both sides with Mann's experimental texts — poetry, stream-of-consciousness prose, commentaries, dialogues, even a small play — one of the finest examples of Mann's complex and witty exploration of linguistic composition. Includes an additional text work printed and folded inside along with the main work, possibly not originally included.
Chris Mann (1949—2018) was an Australian-American composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do". Mann was the son of German Jewish refugees, Ruth and Peter Mann, who settled in Melbourne and founded the Discurio music store Score record label in the 1960s, producing some of Australia's first recordings of Australian folk music as well as jazz, classical and Aboriginal music. Mann studied Chinese and linguistics at the University of Melbourne, and his interest in language, systems, and philosophy is evident in his work. Mann founded the New Music Centre in 1972 and taught at the State College of Victoria in the mid-1970s. He then left teaching to work on research projects involving cultural ideas of information theory and has been recognized by UNESCO for his work in that field. Mann moved to New York in the 1980s and was an associate of American composers John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo. He has performed text in collaboration with artists such as Thomas Buckner, David Dunn, Annea Lockwood, Larry Polansky, and Robert Rauschenberg. Mann has recorded with the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart and others, Chris Mann and the Impediments (with two backup singers and Mann reading a text simultaneously while only being able to hear one another), and Chris Mann and The Use. His piece The Plato Songs, a collaboration with Holland Hopson and R. Luke DuBois, features realtime spectral analysis and parsing of the voice into multiple channels based on phonemes. Mann has also participated in the 60x60 project. Mann taught in the Media Studies Graduate program at The New School. He died in September 2018, survived by his wife and two children.
Very Good copy with some rubbing to folder and tanning to all stocks. Fold-out work As New with age tanning, folded as issued. Edge wear and spine crease to folder.
1985, German
Original screen print on felt, 10.2 x 14.6 x 3.2 cm
Published by
Edition Staeck / Heidelberg
$90.00 - Out of stock
Joseph Beuys’s “Filzpostkarte,” reflects the artist’s esteem for the postcard because of its double function as a vehicle for communication and as a simple artistic medium. He, therefore transferred a multitude of materials, important to his work - like wood, copper and even sulphur - into the form of a postcard.
Filzpostkarte (by Joseph Beuys) is not just the title of the item, it is also a play with words: Filpostkarte – felt postcard, and Feldpostkarte – a postcard sent to and from soldiers on in the battlfield.
Reference: Joseph Beuys: The Multiples, Schellmann, 539.
2021, Japanese / English
Hardcover (with obi), 368 pages, 20 x 30 cm
Published by
Toyota Municipal Museum of Art / Aichi
$130.00 - In stock -
Beautiful hardcover catalogue published in Japan to the exhibition Beuys + Palermo touring three venues across Japan in 2021.
Joseph Beuys and Blinky Palermo were from different generations, but both experienced WWII and the postwar reconstruction, as teacher and pupil. One of the most important artists since World War II, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) asserted that true capital lies in the creativity of human beings, and viewing the whole of society as sculpture, set out to change it. Beuys is also known for his role in nurturing numerous artists in his capacity as an educator. One such pupil was Blinky Palermo (1943–1977). The modest abstract works that form the legacy of this painter active for just a short few years from the mid-1960s up to his early demise, were an attempt to quietly overturn our perceptions, and social systems, via the visceral experience of color and form, all the while reconstructing the compositional elements of painting. The works of these two superficially contrasting German artists were alike in that both Beuys and Palermo endeavored to restore art to the status of a raw, live endeavor, Beuys indeed later acknowledging his former student to be the artist closest to himself. Composed primarily of works from the 1960s and ‘70s, documentation from the period and detailed texts, “Beuys + Palermo” explores the features of each of these two artists, while simultaneously searching for the latent power of their praxis in their involvement and overlap with each other.
2019, English
2 softcover volumes in hard slipcase, 288 pages, 19.7 x 26 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$99.00 - In stock -
This two-volume publication highlights two key threads in the work of artist Piero Manzoni, a seminal figure of postwar Italian art and progenitor of Conceptualism. The first volume, ‘Materials,’ covers Manzoni’s years of prolific creation leading up to his untimely death in which he experimented with a wide variety of media in his paintings, including sewn cloth, cotton wool, fiberglass, synthetic and natural fur, straw, cobalt chloride, stones, fluorescent polystyrene, pellets, packaging, and more. The second volume, ‘Lines,’ delves into the eponymous body of work of fundamental importance to his well-known Achromes – paintings without color, which aimed to strip his work of expression. Extensively illustrated, both volumes feature art historical essays alongside a host of archival material, making this one of the most comprehensive sources on the artist to date.
Texts by Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, Luca Bochicchio, Chiara Cappelletto, Daniela Ferrari, Flaminio Gualdoni, Laura Hoptman, Gaspare Luigi Marcone, Jack McGrath, and Luisa Mensi.
Book design: Teo Schifferli
2019, English
Paperback (w. corrugated board wrap), 212 pages, 21.1 x 25.9 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$95.00 - Out of stock
Before or After, at the Same Time: Rome, Milan, and Fabio Mauri, 1948–1968 is a landmark publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers exploring post-war Italian art through the cultural lens of remarkable 20th-century thinkers and artists. Discover the fascinating narrative of Fabio Mauri, an artist, writer, producer and intellectual, alongside the history of his family, a publishing dynasty which thrived on close connections to radical Italian art, poetry, cinema, philosophy and literature. Mauri’s story becomes a starting point from which to explore Italian visual culture, its influences and the defining ideas behind it. The title refers to Mauri’s statement: "I can’t stay in step with my time. I am either before or after it, at the same time." (Fabio Mauri, Ideology and Memory).
The social and political aftermath of the Second World War engendered two highly energetic pockets of creativity in the cities of Rome and Milan. Uncover a tale of these two cities, with Mauri—a multi-disciplinary artist who resisted categorisation—acting as the point of introduction to the artistic practices that emerged from each of these distinct cultural, economic and political scenes. The book examines and, in cases, re-examines the artistic milieu surrounding Mauri which included Carla Accardi, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Alighiero Boetti, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Piero Dorazio, Tano Festa, Lucio Fontana, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni, Gastone Novelli, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano, Giulio Turcato and Cy Twombly.
Edited by Ben Eastham, the publication features essays and newly commissioned texts by Giorgio Agamben, Ilaria Bernardi, Barbara Casavecchia, Pierre Testard, Andrea Viliani and Laura Cherubini; an interview between Achille and Sebastiano Mauri discussing the enduring and near unbelievable family history; a historic article by Fabio Mauri "In 1960 the 1950s Were 10 Years Old," bringing his prescient character to life; never before published and translated letters between Silvana Mauri, Fabio’s eldest sister, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the filmmaker, writer and poet expressing a remarkable intimacy and honesty
1986—1994, English
Softcover (12 issues), approx 50-80 pages ea., 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
International Synergy Institute / Los Angeles
$600.00 - In stock -
"A thrice yearly exploration of ambiguous borders and dynamic (intellectual/artistic) frontiers."
Exceptionally rare lot of 12 issues (1986—1994) of the trail-blazing subscription-only one-of-a-kind journal published by the International Synergy Institute, a intermedia think-tank active in Hollywood between 1986—1987. IS was founded by American actress and philanthropist Andra Akers (Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard...), edited by experimental composer, researcher and Harry Partch Ensemble member David Dunn, with a cast of incredible contributors spanning these issues that includes media theorist Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema...), Australian composer, poet and performer Chris Mann, American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, American artist Bill Viola, American landscape architect Bonnie Sherk, parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, mathematician Ralph Abrahams, composer Kenneth Gaburo, Australian experimental composer Warren Burt, early media artist visionaries Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image, the Electronic Café...), Science Fiction theorist, philosopher and writer for Marvel comics Allyn B. Brodsky, American composer and writer Elaine Barkin, visionary Czech author Lukáš Tomin, aeronautical engineer and astronaut Russell Schweickart, mathematician and polymath Tim Poston, climate crisis artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, American composer John Bischoff, cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, ecological philosopher and author Boleslaw Rok, essayist and activist Tomaž Mastnak, Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, artist Michael Kalil, systems theorist Will McWhinney, percussionist and composer Stuart Saunders Smith, mathematician Gottfried Mayer-Kress, alternative broadcaster Jay Levin, British-American futurist Hazel Henderson, actress Debra Clinger (The Love Boat, The Krofft Supershow, Midnight Madness, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour...), musician Mark Trayle, artist Sheila Pinkel, VFX pioneer Mimi Gramatky (LOST, Miami Vice, Star Trek, Tron, Damnation Alley...), sonic healer Jill Purce, robot dance choreographer Margo K. Apostolos, American psychedelic artist Alex Grey, social critic and historian Morris Berman, futurist Riane Eisler, poet James Bertolino, British zoologist, anthropologist and author John Heathorn Huxley, multi-media artist Todd Siler, American philosopher of science Ervin László, Budapest dissident magazine Magyar Narancs, and more.
Issues present: #0, #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14 (12 issues total, not all pictured)
"INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY consists of a global network of vanguard artists, scientists, and meta-physicians who are united by a deep sense of commitment to crossing the boundaries of their individual disciplines. Integral to this awareness is a reconciliation between advanced technological resources and a sense of the planet's sanctity. INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY is dedicated to the premise that such an understanding can form the basis of a creative matrix for responsible action in the information age."
"At this hinge of history, it seems appropriate that we should publish a journal where the passion of the individual scientist/artist can meet in sovereign association with global concerns — spinning the wheel of knowledge so that each of us can create our own theoretical magic." [...] "I am deeply moved by the creative commonwealth in this community, filled with explorers of topology, morphology, chaos dynamics, cognition, mind video, the revisioning of nature and art, telecommunications, sonics, cybernetics, cultural history, fractal politics, and what it now means to be deeply human. The provocative interaction of these ideas cannot help but to create a new and uniquely meaningful story. Come with us."—Andra Akers
Most Good—Very Good, with a couple of issues Average (mostly due to cover rubbing or creasing), all with light wear/age.
1974?, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 72 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
Signed copy,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Noel Sheridan / Adelaide
$160.00 - In stock -
Very rare and terrific conceptual art/poetry book (c.1974) by performance artist, poet, actor, "amateur painter" and exceptionally valuable director of the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) in Adelaide from 1975—1980, Noel Sheridan (1936—2006). Founded by a small group of artists, curators and theorists, the EAF was heralded as the first alternative art space in Australia, with a mission to promote art that interrogated the status quo. Seemingly self-published in 1974 once Irish-born Sheridan had relocated to Adelaide, and the year before Sheridan's controversial "Everybody Should Get Stones" installation at the Art Gallery of South Australia, composed of 25 tonnes of river stones strewn across the gallery's floor, "Everybody Should Get Stones" is a remarkably witty, instructional language-performance piece around collecting stones on a beach, very much in the Oulipo spirit, or Fluxus.
"These procedures are intended to bring a greater precision to your quality ascriptions. Initial tests were carried out by J. Neuner and N. Sheridan on Coynes cross beach, due east of Newcastle, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, during the Summer months of 1971. It is not essential to use the above location to perform these exercises. Any stony beach will do. Select an area of beach and begin."
Broken into four parts, from selection methods that are irrational and unpredictable, to mathematically exhaustive, to literary (the selection of stones that are most apt to specific quotes from Beckett, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Galvani, Descartes, Hume, and Sheridan's beloved fellow-Irishman Joyce, amongst many others — all reproduced).
Only one copy located on WorldCat (in Dublin).
This copy signed by Noel on the title page with dedication to American-Australian experimental composer Warren Burt. "For Warren, may all your penguins be green. Noel". Irish-born Noel was fondly known for his wardrobe of green attire. Very Good copy with tanning/wear to cover extremities.
1978, English
Softcover (staple-bound), unpaginated, 20 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Monash University Exhibition Gallery / Victoria
$60.00 - In stock -
Rare catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition, The Work and its Context: Six Attitudes in Australian Art, 26 April – 24 May 1978, Monash University Exhibition Gallery. Curated by Grazia Gunn and featuring the work of artists Gunter Christmann, Richard Dunn, Marr Roy Grounds and Paul Pholeros, Kerrie Lester, Paul Partos, and Sam Schoenbaum. Illustrated throughout with artworks, accompanied by artists texts, biographies, texts by Sandra McGrath, Gary Catalano, and an introductory essay by Grazia Gunn.
Very Good copy, light general wear, tanning to pages.
1973, English
Softcover (denim-bound, stitched and silk-screened), 96 pages, 24 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$90.00 - In stock -
The art catalogue wearing denim! Fantastic, scarce exhibition catalogue from 1973 for "Some Recent American Art", a major contemporary survey exhibition that toured Australia and New Zealand, organised under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art New York with the assistance of Graeme Sturgeon, David Sampietro, and Peter Cripps. Wrapped in jeans denim covers (screen-printed and stitched), and profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with the work of exhibiting artists Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Mel Bochner, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Robery Irwin, Donald Judd, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dorothea Rockburne, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner. Each artist section includes a list of works, biographical information and text(s) from the artist. Opening text by curator Jennifer Licht, acknowledgments by NGV director Gordon Thomson, with further sections on exhibited Video Tapes, bibliography and artist index.
Good copy, with tanning/fading to spine and some light fraying to cover edges.
1986, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
International Synergy Institute / Los Angeles
$150.00 - Out of stock
"A thrice yearly exploration of ambiguous borders and dynamic (intellectual/artistic) frontiers."
Exceptionally rare, inaugural issue #0 of the trail-blazing subscription-only journal published by the International Synergy Institute, a intermedia think-tank active in Hollywood between 1986—1987. IS was founded by American actress and philanthropist Andra Akers (Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard...), edited by experimental composer, researcher and Harry Partch Ensemble member David Dunn, with a cast of contributors for this first issue including media theorist Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema...), parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, VFX pioneer Mimi Gramatky (LOST, Miami Vice, Star Trek, Tron, Damnation Alley...), mathematician Ralph Abrahams, composer Kenneth Gaburo, and poet Chris Mann, and more.
"INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY consists of a global network of vanguard artists, scientists, and meta-physicians who are united by a deep sense of commitment to crossing the boundaries of their individual disciplines. Integral to this awareness is a reconciliation between advanced technological resources and a sense of the planet's sanctity. INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY is dedicated to the premise that such an understanding can form the basis of a creative matrix for responsible action in the information age."
"At this hinge of history, it seems appropriate that we should publish a journal where the passion of the individual scientist/artist can meet in sovereign association with global concerns — spinning the wheel of knowledge so that each of us can create our own theoretical magic." [...] "I am deeply moved by the creative commonwealth in this community, filled with explorers of topology, morphology, chaos dynamics, cognition, mind video, the revisioning of nature and art, telecommunications, sonics, cybernetics, cultural history, fractal politics, and what it now means to be deeply human. The provocative interaction of these ideas cannot help but to create a new and uniquely meaningful story. Come with us."—Andra Akers
Very Good copy, light wear/age.
1986, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 52 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
International Synergy Institute / Los Angeles
$150.00 - In stock -
"A thrice yearly exploration of ambiguous borders and dynamic (intellectual/artistic) frontiers."
Exceptionally rare, issue #1 (after the inaugural #0) of the trail-blazing subscription-only journal published by the International Synergy Institute, a intermedia think-tank active in Hollywood between 1986—1987. IS was founded by American actress and philanthropist Andra Akers (Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard...), edited by experimental composer, researcher and Harry Partch Ensemble member David Dunn, with a cast of contributors for this issue including early media artist visionaries Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image, the Electronic Café...), media theorist Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema...), Science Fiction theorist, philosopher and writer for Marvel comics Allyn B. Brodsky, aeronautical engineer and astronaut Russell Schweickart, cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, systems theorist Will McWhinney, actress Debra Clinger (The Love Boat, The Krofft Supershow, Midnight Madness, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour...), VFX pioneer Mimi Gramatky (LOST, Miami Vice, Star Trek, Tron, Damnation Alley...), and more.
"INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY consists of a global network of vanguard artists, scientists, and meta-physicians who are united by a deep sense of commitment to crossing the boundaries of their individual disciplines. Integral to this awareness is a reconciliation between advanced technological resources and a sense of the planet's sanctity. INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY is dedicated to the premise that such an understanding can form the basis of a creative matrix for responsible action in the information age."
"At this hinge of history, it seems appropriate that we should publish a journal where the passion of the individual scientist/artist can meet in sovereign association with global concerns — spinning the wheel of knowledge so that each of us can create our own theoretical magic." [...] "I am deeply moved by the creative commonwealth in this community, filled with explorers of topology, morphology, chaos dynamics, cognition, mind video, the revisioning of nature and art, telecommunications, sonics, cybernetics, cultural history, fractal politics, and what it now means to be deeply human. The provocative interaction of these ideas cannot help but to create a new and uniquely meaningful story. Come with us."—Andra Akers
Very Good copy, light wear/age.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 304 pages, 29.2 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Phaidon / London
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition of Arte Povera, the most complete overview of this movement ever published, edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject.
Arte Povera is Italy's most important and influential post-war art movement. Originally championed by the leading art critic Germano Celant, it included internationally recognized artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this book is the most complete overview of the artworks and writings associated with Arte Povera, an art movement that explored the relation between art and life, made manifest through natural materials and human artifacts, and experienced through the body.
"This is now the definitive English-language sourcebook on Merz, Pistoletto, Paolini and company, thanks to its rich selection of images and texts."―Bookforum
"Get hold of Arte Povera... It is both compendium and critique, with artists' statements, a chronology and commentary. It contextualizes the work, and the pictures are great."―Adrian Searle, Guardian
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a writer and curator living in Rome, who has become an internationally recognized scholar of late twentieth-century Italian art. She has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement and published interviews and texts on artists such as Boetti, Pistoletto, Merz, Fabro and Kounellis. Bakargiev is also a noted curator of contemporary art internationally: her exhibitions include 'Molteplici Culture', Rome, 1992 and a homage to John Cage which she co-curated with Alanna Heiss for the 1993 Venice Biennale.
She was part of the curatorial team for the 'Antwerp 93 European Capital of Culture', devising the major international survey, 'On Taking a Normal Situation and Re-translating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present'. In 1996 Bakargiev curated a large-scale survey on Italian post-war artist Alberto Burri in Rome, Brussels and Munich. In 1997, she curated 'Citta-Natura': a city-wide exhibition of international artists including Anselmo, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pascali and Kounellis, held in Rome.
She is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and was formerly Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. She was co-curator, with Iwona Blazwick, of Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today , Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2004 5.
Good copy with some corner knocking, small tear to top of spine dust jacket, otherwise very good throughout.
1970, German / French
Softcover, 118 pages, 21 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft Helmhaus Zürich / Zürich
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare, important exhibition catalogue designed by Walter Diethelm, published on the occasion of the exceptional exhibition Text Buchstabe Bild (Text, Letter, Image), held at the Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft Helmhaus Zürich, July 11—August 23, 1970. Preface by Felix Andreas Baumann. "The point is to present this literature, which is located between writing and images, text and graphics and around the tertium comparationis of typography, to an audience that is probably not too familiar with the techniques and variants of “concrete literature”—from the preface. An incredible and varied anthology of the experimental, poetic, graphic interplay of text and image, profusely illustrated in b/w, accompanied by texts in German and French by Stéphane Mallarmé, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Oyvind Fahlström, El Lissitzky, André Breton, Eugen Gomringer, Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Jan Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Max Bense, Reinhard Döhl, Carlfriedrich Claus, Seiichi Niikuni, Henri Chopin, Franz Mon, Jiri Kolár, and Bob Cobbing.
Artists included: Stéphane Mallarmé, Arno Holz, Christian Morgenstern, F.T. Marinetti, Carlo Carrà, Lacerba, Ardengo Soffici, Hugo Ball, Georges Braque, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Amédée Ozenfant, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, Raoul Hausmann, Fernand Léger, Richard Hülsenbeck, Vincente Huidobro, Francis Picabia, Jean Pougny, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Bruno Adler, Jean Epstein, Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, Jozef Peeters, Sonja Delaunay-Terk, Iliazd, Friedrich Kiesler, Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Käthe Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Henryk Berlewi, Farkas Molnár, Zenit, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkmann, Walter Gropius, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp, Le Corbusier, and Georges Hugnet.
Very Good ex-NGV library copy, well preserved with only light wear and "National Gallery of Victoria" light stamp to block edge and lower back-cover. No internal stamping/marking.
1977, English
Softcover (staple/tape bound), 8 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Philip Martin Music Books / York
$140.00 - Out of stock
Exceptionally rare first 1977 edition of English musique concrète composer Trevor Wishart's illustrated score and performance instructions for the performance piece 'Fidelio: For Flute or Clarinet. Stranger and 6 Suitcases', published here by Philip Martin Music Books in Wishart's York, Great Britain, to accompany the first performance at the University of York in 1977. Designed, illustrated and typeset by Wishart himself and issued the same year he completed his seminal "Red Bird (A Political Prisoner's Dream)", an electroacoustic masterpiece that predates the use of computers but prefigures many of the techniques later used for making computer sound art.
No copies located on OCLC.
Trevor Wishart (b. 1946, Leeds, England, based in York) has been very active, since the early 1970s in the area of electro-acoustic music (first with tape manipulation, later with computer pieces) and music theatre pieces. Wishart's compositional interests deal mainly with the interpolation by technological means between the human voice and natural sounds. He pays special attention to the objectives of musical education, collaborative performance-projects and solo practice using original vocal techniques. He is widely acknowledged for his contributions to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. Not only has he composed many significant pieces, but he has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art,” and contributed to the design and implementation of many software tools used in the creation of digital music. He was educated at the University of Oxford (BA 1968), the University of Nottingham (MA 1969), and the University of York (PhD 1973).
VG copy with light wear and bump to bottom-right corner.
1975, English
Softcover (folder with 12 looseleaf sheets), 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Universal Edition / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1975 Universal Edition publication of Australian composer David Lumsdaine's Flights for 2 Pianos. An important work in Australian modernism. Printed folder with directions for performance on reverse of cover, housing entire score on 11 loose-leaf sheets with original belly-band to contain. Composed in Great Bookham, May-July 1967. First performed by Australian composer and pianist Roger Smalley and pianist Stephen Savage at a BBC Invitation Concert, London 1967. Recorded by Daniel Herscovitch and Erzsébet Marosszéky on Continuum.
David Lumsdaine (1931—2024) was an Australian composer central to both Australian and British modernism. Lumsdaine studied at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music before moving to England in 1952. He attended the Royal Academy of Music in London studying composition and subsequenetly lectured at Durham University (where he founded and directed the Electronic Music Studio) and Kings College London. In the 1960s he was immersed in English contemporary musical life and established his career with such works as Kelly Ground, Flights, and Mandalas 1 and 2. He spent his time between England and Australia, returning to Australia in 1973. He composed strikingly original music that embodies all that is important to him in the Australian landscape – its shapes and rhythms, its creatures, its sudden violence, its sense of unlimited space. His passion for the natural world is embodied in a developing passion for field recording – his archive of over three thousand recordings is held in the British Library’s National Sound Archive. In 1997 though still spending time in Australia, he moved to York where his wife Nicola Lefanu had been appointed Professor of Music at York University. David Lumsdaine passed away in 2024.
Good—VG copy with light handling wear, light tanning to cover folder, and signature to front cover by previous owner Australian composer of concert, jazz, and commercial music, Donald Banks (1923—1980). Banks studied composition privately with Mátyás Seiber in the UK, was associated with Gunther Schuller, Tubby Hayes, Milton Babbitt and Luigi Dallapiccola, scored Hammer horror films, and, back in Australia during the 1970s, was Head of Composition and Electronic Music Studies at the Canberra School of Music and Head of the School of Composition Studies at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music.