World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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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.
1992, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 64 pages, 24.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$580.00 - In stock -
The true beginning of Purple — the very rare first issue of Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm's Purple Prose, published in 1992. Founded as a reaction against the superficial glamour of the 1980’s, Purple Prose embraced the immediate fanzine aesthetics of what became referred to as 1990's anti-fashion, a far cry from what we now identify with Purple Fashion with.
Purple Prose 1, Automne 1992, features contributions by Dike Blair, Andrea Zittel, Joshua Decter, Henry Bond, Daniel Lemer, Jutta Koether, Andrea Zittel, Roddy Bogawa, Jon Moritsugu, Jacques Boyreau, Jan Avgikos, Martin Kippenberger, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Robbins, Jean-Christophe Menu, Vitaly Glabel, Kitten (pre—Free Kitten: Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore's Julia Cafritz), Patrick Bouchitey, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, François Roche, and many more.
Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm created spin-off publications like Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction and what we now know and love, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Before entering the world of fashion, Zahm worked as an art critic with widespread recognition for his work as a curator as well as his participation in over 150 exhibitions featuring international contemporary art. In 1994, Zahm and Fleiss curated “The Winter of Love,” a hit show for the Museum of Modern Art in Paris that they later took to P.S.1 in New York. In responding to the superficial glamour of the 1980s, Zahm co-founded Purple Prose magazine. In the introduction of Purple Anthology, Zahm shares why he chose to create Purple Prose:
"We launched Purple Prose in the early 1990s without any means, and without any experience, because we wanted to make a magazine that was radically different. We wanted to support the artists around us that no one else supported, much less talked about. [..] It would be a form of opposition of our own".
Very Good—Near Fine copy, light wear.
2004, English / French
Softcover (staple-bound), 21 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of the first issue of The Purple Journal, featuring Elein Fleiss, Jeffrey Rian, Dorothée Perret, Mark Borthwick, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, Laetitia Benat, Marina Faust, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Cianciolo, Henry Roy, Lizzi Bougatsos, Anders Edström, Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Homma, Michel Zumpf, Chikashi Suzuki, Barbet Schroeder, Alain Lacroix, Jonathan Boulting, Maison Martin Margiela, Cora Maghnaoui, Claude Lévêque, Beth Yahp, Cosmic Wonder, Angela Hill, Ferdinand Gouzon, Comme des Garçons, Curtis Winter, Beth Yahp, Ferdinand Gouzon, Curtis Winter, Manon de Boer, Christophe Brunnquell, Sébastien Jamain, Tiphaine Samoyault, Helmut Lang, Veronique Branquinho, Sébastien Jamain, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Sharon Mesmer, Gérard Duguet-Grasser, and much more. Includes the special Paris supplement (16 pages).
"This is our first issue: joy, hope. Starting out or beginning again (the journal Hélène and the magazine Purple)-anyway, it's a first appearance. A path we'll travel together, we, the editors, and you, the readers. We will show reality as we see it through encounters with people, places, landscapes, artworks. Writing and photographs, original voices. The journey is not mapped out in advance, we'll discover it (as it reveals itself) with the changing seasons."—the editors
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy, light wear/age/rippling to page edges.
2025, English
Softcover, 640 pages, 24 x 16.99 cm
Published by
Intellect Ltd / US
$110.00 - In stock -
Industrial music has long been recognized for its sonic innovations, but the radical visual culture that accompanied this underground movement has remained largely unexplored. Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music presents the first comprehensive examination of how industrial artists created a coherent aesthetic language across multiple media—from xerox art and mail art to installation and performance—fundamentally challenging modernist utopias while prophetically anticipating contemporary discourse about media manipulation and technological control.
Emerging in mid-1970s Britain from the post-punk underground before expanding globally throughout the 1980s, artists like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Test Dept, Laibach, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, Coil, Psychic TV, Boyd Rice, Whitehouse, Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hunting Lodge, Controlled Bleeding, Hafler Trio, Z'EV, Nocturnal Emissions, 23 Skidoo, Clock DVA, Master/Slave Relationship, and Monte Cazazza developed sophisticated visual strategies that matched their abrasive soundscapes with equally confrontational imagery.
At 640 pages, this award-winning monograph reveals how industrial artists systematically appropriated reprographic techniques—particularly xerox art and photocollage—to create disturbing visual narratives investigating mind control, criminality, occultism, pornography, psychiatry, and totalitarianism. Through détournement strategies borrowed from Situationist theory, they exposed the coercive mechanisms of mass media and technological society, creating a visual vocabulary that challenged viewers to confront uncomfortable truths about modern power structures. What emerges is a movement that perceptively anticipated contemporary concerns about surveillance, media manipulation, and collective psychological control. Industrial artists' exploration of these themes through deliberately provocative imagery served not as mere provocation but as sophisticated critique of the very media systems they inhabited. Their radical aesthetic choices—degraded reproduction quality, found imagery manipulation, shock tactics—created hybrid forms that defied traditional categorization while establishing independent networks that bypassed conventional art world structures.
Shock Factory positions industrial music's visual culture within broader art historical narratives, revealing connections to Dada, Surrealism, and conceptual art while demonstrating the movement's unique contributions to contemporary visual culture. The book arrives at a moment when questions about technology, media manipulation, and social control have never been more urgent, demonstrating how these artists' radical visual strategies continue to offer valuable insights for our digital age.
For scholars of contemporary art, music history, and media studies, this book provides essential documentation of an overlooked movement that significantly influenced subsequent artistic developments. For readers interested in underground culture and avant-garde aesthetics, Shock Factory reveals the sophisticated visual thinking that accompanied one of the most innovative musical movements of the past half-century.
"A history of industrial music needed to be written. Nicolas Ballet has accomplished this. Thoroughly. This is the book's greatest strength. It explores the significance of noise as a reflection of a world in decay and screaming as a need. And doing it so it reveals a significant connection between industrial music and contemporary art. This is also what makes it an essential book: its contribution to dismantling categories and rethinking history from mixed creative territories."—David G. Torres
Nicolas Ballet is an art historian and assistant curator at the Centre Pompidou in the New Media Department. He is the author of books and articles exploring the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices.
1982, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$45.00 - In stock -
ART & TEXT 5
Autumn 1982
Edited by Paul Taylor
Contents:
"Self and Theatricality : Samuel Beckett and Vito Acconci" by Paul Taylor
"Beyond Beckett: Reckless Writing and the Concept of the Avant-Garde within Post-Modern Literature" by Nicholas Zurbrugg
"Dr. Spitzner’s Scrapbook" by Zerox Dreamflesh
"Literal Cloth: Elizabeth Paterson’s Masquerades" by Suzanne Spunner
"Musical Perception and Exploratory Music" by Warren Burt
"On Animism in Art" by Jenny Zimmer
"The 1979 Biennale ― ‘European Dialogue’" by Nick Waterlow
"Rebels and Precursors by Richard Haese and Murray/Murundi by Bonita Ely" by Jill Graham
"On Photo-Discourse" by George Alexander
Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
Good - general wea, some rippling to bottom corner.
2013, English / Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), various pagination, 28.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$45.00 - In stock -
Copies of the infamous printed collaboration between Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons and legendary manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo, best known as the creator of Akira, both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. Issued as mail-outs privately by Comme to announce the arrival of their 2013—14 Autumn—Winter collection, and not commercially available, these gorgeous, elaborate leaflets designed by CDG founder Rei Kawakubo, showcase Otomo’s Akira artwork in a series of collages put together and coloured by Kawakubo herself, with fold-outs, inserts and die-cut illustrations have become highly desirable, for obvious reasons. Surprisingly Otomo is the first Japanese artist to feature in Comme’s mail outs, so this collaboration was very special for fans of both.
Fine, preserved copy of no. 25 of 28 volumes (issued separately) and now becoming very scarce.
2007, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 25.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
$60.00 - In stock -
Text by David Bussel, Sven Lütticken, Beatrix Ruf, Jan Verwoert, Onno Ydema.
Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, collaborators since 1994, had just represented the Netherlands at the 2005 Venice Biennale and opened their first New York solo show at Friedrich Petzel Gallery when de Rijke died traveling in Africa. This representative sampling of films, photographs and bouquets documents their time together.
Jeroen de Rijke (1970-2006) and Willem de Rooij (b. 1969) have worked together since 1994. Their work revolves around representation problems relating to artistic and media images, cultural-historical artefacts and socio-political forms. The two artists produce films and photographs, using the "beauty" of familiar compositional and formal principles and the tempting projection surface this provides for us. de Rijke/de Rooij's images are always disturbing because they usually concentrate on a single take, action or object; reduced image distillations intensify doubts over "the image", initiating a discourse about our culturally driven readings of phenomena, about how we use images and how they affect us.
De Rijke/de Rooij mingle images and composition principles from painting history, and also from cinema and video, with pictorial worlds from the commercial image industry, and formal-aesthetic elements of contemporary art. Their films are shot using professional film industry resources. They are not shown in the cinema, but exclusively in art venues. Here the artists insist on the best possible cinema setting, controlling the way their works are perceived down to the last pictorial, sound or installative detail. The exhibition space is treated like a sculpture, defined by the technical apparatus and the seating, a hybrid space somewhere between a cinema and an exhibition; it is present as a minimal sculpture, even when the film is not being shown. The artists also structure the audience's experience of time, choosing to avoid the endless loops generally used for exhibitions, with their associated arbitrary availability of the images / films for the public: performances take place at precisely stated times, or by request. But de Rijke/de Rooij are not interested in the cinema's traditional narrative forms: in fact they make the qualities of cinema and film available as moving image aggregates: experience of space and time, dialogues, sound, light, focus are "performers" in their own right and develop their own qualities in parallel. Often slowness is a key feature of their films. It reinforces something that is essential to an artist's work, which would not be possible without it: slowly revealing the ambivalence of an image, a scene, of something presented. So their films often start as an abstract or darkened image, which gradually turns out in the film's own time to be an object, a condition.
The hybrid manifestations of our present are central to the artists' content, transforming their abstract, beautiful works into socio-political pieces, as they convey culturally different identities and realities. As residents in a former colonial state, de Rijke / de Rooij experience the cultural adaptation phenomena and problems as powerful identity generators; as cosmopolitan citizens they experience them as a globalized theme for living together in an age of migration and hybridized cultural identity. Here de Rijke / de Rooij address what is one's "own" and what is "alien" as a refinement of the differences that demand more intensive attention to difference as such. Thus for example an early work called "Of Three Men" (1998) shows the interior of a neo-romanesque church in Amsterdam that is now used as a mosque. Picture details and camera angles are reminiscent of church interiors by the painter Pieter Saenredam. Elements of the action include changing light, a low-hanging chandelier circling slowly and rare movements by three men sitting on the floor. Or "Bantar Gebang" (2000): a single long-shot take in the transfigured pictorial manner of Pieter Breughel the Elder shows daybreak in a slum outside Jakarta; the image becomes increasingly dubious. The familiarity of the pictorial and compositional references - and the beauty of the compositions - are always over-determined in the artists' work and tip representation into critical presence: flowers, ideal love, the cinema, the central-perspective long shot, the numinous quality of a landscape/of nature, the representation of non-commensurate social realities come into conflict with the images of their representation.
Near FIne copy.
1972 / 1974, English
Softcover, 198 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pelican / London
$15.00 - In stock -
1974 print of 1972 first edition.
"As late as 1947 the Observer's reviewer decided that films were nothing but 'bits of celluloid and wire', and thus felt 'ready to declare categorically that films are not an art'. Since then the cultural status of the cinema has been recognized and film criticism, so longer on the defensive, is now free to explore its particular possibilities.
In Film as Film V. F. Perkins, himself a film critic, sets out to define what makes a 'good' movie, and to posit some criteria for our judgement of film. He relates theoretical argument to detailed examples from films which achieved both popularity and excellence, including Hitchcock's Psycho, Preminger's Exodus and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and discusses, in each case, the aims and achievements of the director.
In this challenging and provocative study of an area frequently neglected by the critics, V. F.
Perkins shows how a synthetic theory can shape raw cinematic experience and create a framework for constructive criticism."
Victor Francis Perkins (b. 1936), usually cited as V. F. Perkins, was an English film critic, best known for his work on film aesthetics and interpretation. He was born in Devon.
Very Good copy, light general wear to covers/spine, toning to page.
1957 / ?, English
Softcover, 230 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
$35.00 - In stock -
In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book Film by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as Film as Art, a book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early no sound, no color, no three-dimensional depth.
"This is a book of standards, a theory of film. The greater part of it is an adaptation of Film als Kunst, first published in 1932 in the original German and in English by Faber and Faber in 1933—an edition long out of print but still in demand because it raises fundamental questions that the intervening years have by no means answered.
Arnheim's provocative thesis is that the peculiar virtues of film as art derive from an exploitation of limitations of the medium: the absence of sound, the absence of color, the lack of three-dimensional depth. Silent-film artists made virtues of these necessities and were on their way to developing a new and distinctive art form. Mechanical advancement has led to greater realism and a corresponding loss in artistry.
The four essays which make up the rest of the book are supplementary in nature. The final one discusses the general aesthetic rules for the combination of different media-word, image, and sound—and leads to an evaluation of the talking picture as a medium for artistic expression."
"More than half a century since its initial publication, this deceptively compact book remains among the most incisive analyses of the formal and perceptual dynamics of cinema. No one who cares about film can afford to remain ignorant of its insights and wisdom. As digital technology fundamentally alters motion pictures, the lessons of Film as Art commend themselves as excellent insurance against reinventing the wheel in the new media landscape and hailing it as progress."—Edward Dimendberg author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
"After more than eight decades, Rudolph Arnheim's small book of film theory remains one of the essential works in defining film art, understanding film less as reproducing the world than as opening up new possibilities for formal play and unexpected imagery. Anyone serious about film, whether scholar, filmmaker or simply a lover of cinema, must take Arnheim seriously."—Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang and D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film
Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. His magnum opus was his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America. Most notably, Arnheim taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.
Very Good copy of the 1957 edition in later paperback reprint (year unknown).
1974, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.8 x 12.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pelican / London
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1974 edition of Film And Reality: A Historical Survey by Roy Armes.
"Most contemporary film criticism does not take into account the relationship between artistic achievement and the historical context. Film and Reality sets out to redress the balance by offering both a broad outline of the cinema's development and a framework within which critical judgements can be made. Roy Armes explores in this book the varying relationships between image and reality in films from Lumière to the present.
The author first looks at film realism - from the early documentaries of Vertov and Flaherty to cinema-verité - and at the progress of fictional realism - from Stroheim's silent masterpiece, Greed, to the films of Renoir, Rossellini and the television work of Kenneth Loach. In the second part of his book he considers Hollywood and film illusion, showing how The work of Griffith and Chaplin finally gave place to a formalized system of studios, stars and genres. The book concludes with a discussion about the growth of film modernism and demonstrates how film, as a new and important twentieth-century art form closely related to such movements as Expressionism and Surrealism, has found its place as a genuinely new form of expression alongside the novel and the theatre."
The cover shows a still from Buñuel's 'Un Chien Andalou'
Roy Armes (b. 1937) is a British professor emeritus and film scholar who has written numerous books on the history of filmmaking and select filmmakers. He wrote a treatise on the film Omar Gatlato and books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais.
Good copy, average wear to covers and spine, toning to pages.
1981, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 40 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charles E. Tuttle / Tokyo
$150.00 - In stock -
Scarce first Japanese edition (entirely in English language), published in Tokyo by Charles Tuttle, of this beautifully produced over-sized 1981 book by H. R. Giger. Foreword by Timothy Leary.
In 1981, a year after being awarded the Oscar for Best Achievement for Visual Effects for Alien, the book H.R. GIGER N.Y. CITY was published. This series of post Alien works, the result of an intense period of non-stop painting, literally day and night, were inspired by Giger's trip to New York City and a template which his colleague Cornelius de Fries, brought back from one of his excursions into the electronic industry. The stencil was actually a sheet of scrap metal from which electrical components had been punched out. Alongside these incredible works are drawings, articles, press clippings, posters and polaroids from Giger's time in New York City.
Fantastic Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and set designer Hans Rudolf “Ruedi” Giger was born in 1940, the son of a chemist. He spoke of a father who viewed art as a "breadless profession", and strongly encouraged his son to enter into pharmaceutics. Despite this, in 1962, he moved to Zürich, where he studied Architecture and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts until 1970. Giger's style and thematic execution have been hugely influential. His design for the Alien was inspired by his painting Necronom IV and earned him an Oscar in 1980. His books of paintings, particularly Necronomicon and Necronomicon II (1985) and the frequent appearance of his art in Omni magazine continued his rise to international prominence. Giger is also well known for artwork on several music recording albums. His most distinctive stylistic innovation is that of a representation of human bodies and machines in a cold, interconnected relationship, he described as "biomechanical". His paintings often display fetishistic sexual imagery. His main influences were painters Ernst Fuchs and Salvador Dalí. He was also a personal friend of Timothy Leary. Giger suffered from night terrors and his paintings are all to some extent inspired by his experiences with that particular sleep disorder, making his first paintings as a means of art therapy. In 1998 Giger acquired the Château St. Germain in Gruyères, Switzerland, and it now houses the H. R. Giger Museum, a permanent repository of his work.
Good copy, tight binding with some corner cover wear, tanning to page edges and foxing to preliminary pages.
1987, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$190.00 - In stock -
First Japanese edition of H.R. Giger's Necronomicon II, the second oversized and visually overwhelming Giger-designed collection that takes us further through the incredible history of one of the most brilliant fantasy artists of the century. Reproducing Giger's award-winning work for the film ALIEN, his paintings, environments, sculptural works, his work for never shot film "The Tourist", collaborations with Blondie's Debbie Harry, his "New York City" series from the late 1970's and much more, all beautifully reproduced in full-colour and black and white, full-bleed spreads, including fold-out pages. Also includes interviews, texts, biography. These Giger folio books have become very desirable, collectable editions in their various printings around the world, the series encompassing the work of one of the world's most unique and influential visionaries of the macabre. This is volume 2 of 2 of "HR Giger's Necronomicon" where Al Azred's legendary magical book of the most wonderful abominations and perversions, "Necronomicon" (made infamous in the pages of HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythology), becomes a visual reality!
First Japanese edition, published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1987. Very good copy throughout with Very Good dust jacket. Some light wear to over-sized book.
2010, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$40.00 - Out of stock
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. "In Danger" is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and through the mid-'70s, Pasolini's writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and where journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at the age of fifty-three; "In Danger" includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death.
Jack Hirschman (1933 – 2021) was an American poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translated nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
1986 / 2005, English / Italian
Softcover, 96 pages, 12.2 x 16.1 cm
Published by
City Lights Books / San Francisco
$32.00 - Out of stock
The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno.
"From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against—political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class—both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities—whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death—but for just the opposite." —Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books
2014, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 20.32 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$34.00 - In stock -
Written between 1963 and 1967, The Divine Mimesis, Pasolini's imitation of the early cantos of the Inferno, offers a searing critique of Italian society and the intelligentsia of the 1960s. It is also a self-critique by the author of The Ashes of Gramsci (1957) who saw the civic world evoked by that book fading absolutely from view.
By the mid-1960s, Pasolini theorized, the Italian language had sacrificed its connotative expressiveness for the sake of a denuded technological language of pure communication. In this context, he projects a 'rewrite' of Dante's Commedia in which two historical embodiments of Pasolini himself occupy the roles of the pilgrim and guide in their underworld journey. Densely layered with poetic and philological allusions, and illuminated by a parallel text of photographs that juxtapose the world of the Italian literati to the simple reality of rural Italian life, this narrative was curtailed by Pasolini several years before he sent it to his publisher, a few months prior to his murder in 1975. Yet, many of Pasolini's projects took the provisional form of "Notes toward..." an eventual work, such as Sopralluoghi in Palestina (Location Scouting in Palestine), Appunti per una Oresteiade africana (Notes for an African Oresteia), and Appunti per un film sull'India (Notes for a Film on India). The Divine Mimesis has a kinship to these filmic works as Pasolini himself ruled it 'complete' though still in a partial form. Written at a turning point in his life when he was wrestling with his poetic 'demons, ' the true center of gravity of Pasolini's Dantean project is the potential of poetry to teach and probe, ethically and aesthetically, in reality. "I wanted to make something seething and magmatic," Pasolini declared, "even if in prose."
In this first English translation of Pasolini's La divina mimesis, Italianist Thomas E. Peterson offers historical, linguistic, and cultural analyses that aim to expand the discourse about an enigmatic author considered by many to be the greatest Italian poet after Montale. Published by Contra Mundum Press one year in advance of the 40th anniversary of Pasolini's death.
1994, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 24 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam
$45.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published on the occasion of Joan Jonas: Works 1968–1994, curated by Dorine Mignot, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, May 31–June 19, 1994. Joan Jonas’s 1994 retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, cemented her position as a key performance and video artist of her generation. As one her first retrospectives outside of the United States, the show highlighted the artist’s popularity in Europe in the 1990s—especially in the Netherlands and Italy—where she would continue to work late into her career. Jonas and Stedelijk curator Dorine Mignot worked in close curatorial collaboration to organize the retrospective around a selection of the artist’s pieces that most accurately represented her practice of drawing on various mediums. Aiming to translate a selection of her live performances into installations, she and Mignot chose appropriate video and audiotapes, as well as selections of props, drawings, costumes, and slides for each gallery.
Profusely illustrated throughout with accompanying texts.
Fine copy.
2019, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 13.9 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$39.00 - In stock -
If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in this collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous and digestive systems. Zett’s voice appears in several textual guises, addressing authority, resistance, trauma and the physicality of language. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. This book gathers together fists, guts and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.
Anna Zett (b. 1983, Leipzig) is an artist, writer and filmmaker. Her work combines historical analysis and poetic form with playful embodied practice. In 2014 she released two videos dealing with extinct animals as emblems of colonial capitalism in the West, which were screened widely in the context of contemporary art. In recent years, her research into the cosmology of scientific modernism has focused on post-communist trouble, industrialism and the German heritage of violence. Formally, her artistic emphasis moves towards listening, voice and the human body’s capacity to improvise verbal and non-verbal group communication. Zett has written and directed two experimental radio plays for German public radio and (co-)hosted participatory formats of storytelling, discourse and choreography. Artificial Gut Feeling is her first book. She lives in Berlin.
“This being is able to transform movement into speech. It winds itself about inside me like a thick snake and I have to use all my strength to let it spin and do what it does. When I wilfully try to stop it, it begins to whisper words to me and that is even more unpleasant. If I were to associate this gut feeling with an emotion, I would say disgust. But this disgust is not directly linked to your name...” — Anna Zett
1992, Japanese
Softcover, 176 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue No.43 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty shop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980-90s. Each issue covers different themes and features, heavy on fetishism.
Issue No.43, the "Sexploitation Films" issue features "Biker Films, Beach Party Films, LSD Films, Women in Prison Films, Mondo Films...", a filmography from "A Taste of Flesh" (1967) to "The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield" (1968), a long interview with cult director Herschell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, plus Carlo Mollino, Pierre Molinier, John Willie, Guido Crepax, Irving Claw, Betty Page, Gilles Berquet, and periodicals such as Sweet Gwen's, Bizarre, Gwendoline, Rigorosa Disciplina, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
1991 , English
Softcover, 366 pages, 21 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - In stock -
This book brings together the great majority of Roland Barthes's interviews, most of which originally appeared in France in Le Figaro Littéraire, Cahiers du Cinéma, France-Observateur, L'Express, and elsewhere. Barthes replied to questions on the cinema, on his own works, on fashion, writing, and criticism. Here we have Barthes in conversation, speaking directly, with all his individuality. His voice, transcribed here, illuminates the subject of his discourse with the brilliance of his vivid, speaking mina, addressing us directly from the page. These interviews provide an insight into the rich, probing intelligence of one of the great and influential minds of our time.
"As a first introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice could not be bettered. Stimulated by generally intelligent questioners, Barthes here talks about the development of his thought, explains why and how he wrote his many books, and pays tribute to philosophers, linguists, novelists, poets, painters, and film-makers who have interested and inspired him. ... What comes across most vividly is the sheer gusto of a man who never stopped developing and changing, never stopped interacting with contemporaries of all ages and all tastes, and never stopped enjoying his intellectual activities and spiritual explorations."—S. S. Prawer, Washington Post Book World
"Perhaps the best introduction to date on Barthes and his work."—Scott Montgomery, The Bloomsbury Review
Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Rumania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor of the Collège de France until his death in 1980.
VG copy. Remaindered line to base, otherwise NF.
1998, English
Softcover, 258 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$35.00 - In stock -
Phantom Communities reconsiders the status of the simulacrum—sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and authority of its model—in light of recent debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies.
The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level, he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean Genet, Pierre Klossowski, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, Balthus, and Raúl Ruiz. Through his readings of these works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum, showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the postmodern canon.
On another level, the author offers an account of the role played by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, Phantom Communities intervenes in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern context.
Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by its proliferating images.
VG copy.
1993, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1993 edition.
This ground-breaking work offers a challenging and positive view of postmodern culture. It draws on the author's extensive interviews with a number of leading postmodern artists, writers and performers, including: Jean Baudrillard Samuel Beckett John Cage Phillip Glass The Parameters of Postmodernism focuses on both the prevailing negative theories of postmodernism, and the more positive aspects of postmodern theory and practice. The negative aspect is exemplified by the work of writers like Brecht, Beckett, Barthes and Baudrillard, who emphasise the death of artistic innovation and the lack of a permanent reality. Zurbrugg highlights the contradictions in the arguments of these writers, and examines the later works in which they qualify their earlier, more infamous, statements. The positive aspect is characterised by artists such as Cage, Glass and Monk - who interweave the new postmodern media with confidence and invention, and Eco, Grass and Wolf - who revive mythological and folkloric traditions. The Parameters of Postmodernism argues that in each case - high-tech or revivalist - postmodern creativity culminates in a highly positive synthesis of past, present and futuristic materials.
VG copy.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$240.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 3, 1970, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With gorgeous graphic design and (Aleister Crowley) cover by graphic designer Heikichi Harata, this issue's special feature is ‘Eros and Theater’, edited by Shūji Terayama and Masahiko Akuta with contributions by Terayama, photographer Hajime Sawatari, writer Taruho Inagaki, director Takahiko Iimura, anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi, playwright Yasunari Takahashi, director and cinematographer Sakumi Hagiwara, film director Nobuhiro Kawanaka, playwright Rio Kishida, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 340 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$120.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 5, 1972, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘City Drama / Human-powered airplane Solomon’, with contributions by Terayama, artsit Jiro Takamatsu, butoh dancer and choreographer Akira Kasai, actress Eiko Kujo, photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, film director Nobuhiro Kawanaka, playwright Yutaka Higashi, film critic Shigechika Sato, musician J. A. Seazer, musician Shigeo Takenaga, musician Norihito Inaba, photographer Hiroshi Yamazaki, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
1973, Japanese
Softcover, 340 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$180.00 - In stock -
Very rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 6, 1973, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘New Trends in Overseas Theater’, with contributions by Terayama, musician J. A. Seazer, musician Norihito Inaba, photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, actor Hideaki Sasaki, producer and actress Eiko Kujo, artist Nobuo Sasaki, and many others. Includes in-depth features and interviews on the work of theatre directors Jérôme Savary, Robert Wilson, and Mario Ricci and photo-reports the activities of independent theatre companies around the world, including Teatro Abaco (Rome), Atelje 212 (Belgrade), Teatr Laboratorium (Wrocław), La Mamma Theatre (New York), Forum Theater (Berlin), Odin Teatret (Holstebro), Stichting Mickery Workshop (Antwerp), making it a very valuable resource on the subject. There are also photo reports and scripts on the performances of Tenjō Sajiki, including works performed overseas. Incredible rare performance documents. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.
1977, Japanese
Softcover, 64 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tenjō Sajiki / Tokyo
$100.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of Angura (Underground Theatre) issue 11, 1977, the "Dramatic Theory Magazine" published in Tokyo by Shūji Terayama's radical avant-garde theatre company Tenjō Sajiki. With iconic cover photography by Shūji Terayama, this issue's special feature is ‘Secret Drama (Absurd Ship)’, with contributions by Terayama, writer Taruho Inagaki, anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi, film director Nobuhiro Kawanaka, playwright Rio Kishida, and many others. A very unique periodical that not only discusses in-depth the works of Angura theatre, but also the international avant-garde, inviting diverse critical perspectives on performance and anti- and living-theatre, sharing ground with Gutai and Fluxus. Illustrated throughout with drawings, diagrams and photographs, mixing themes of pop, protest, surrealism, and eros, plus texts and scripts in Japanese. A rare printed embodiment of Tenjō Sajiki, Terayama, Tadanori Yokoo and the Japanese underground.
Tenjō Sajiki was a Japanese independent theater troupe co-founded by Shūji Terayama, Kujō Kyōko, Yutaka Higashi, Tadanori Yokoo, and Fumiko Takagi. Led by Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer Shūji Terayama, the prolific group was active between 1967 and 1983 (until Terayama's death). A major phenomenon on the Japanese Angura ("underground") theater scene, the group has produced a number of stage works marked by experimentalism, folklore influences, social provocation, grotesque eroticism and the flamboyant fantasy characteristic of Terayama's oeuvre. Tenjō Sajiki benefitted greatly from collaborations with a number of prominent artists, including musicians J. A. Seazer and Kan Mikami, and graphic designers Aquirax Uno and Tadanori Yokoo.
Shūji Terayama (1935 — 1983) was a Japanese avant-garde poet, dramatist, writer, film director, and photographer. His works range from radio drama, experimental television, underground (Angura) theatre, countercultural essays, to Japanese New Wave and "expanded" cinema. Terayama is considered one of the most productive and provocative creative artists to come out of Japan, with a wide-reaching influence on many artists from the 1970s onward.