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—SAT 12—6 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
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.
2014, English
Hardcover, 330 pages, 26.2 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Ediciones Poligrafa S. A. / Barcelona
$120.00 - In stock -
Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and FilmsThis beautifully produced volume is the updated and revised edition of Polígrafa's 2005 publication of the same name, which was designed and conceived in collaboration with the artist and includes documentation from his private archives. Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films is also the only publication to include a critical overview of the artist's films, and to examine the abiding import of Goya's painting, "El tiempo de las Viejas" ("The Time of the Old Women"), to Polke's oeuvre in general. (The new cover shows Polke photographing this painting in The Beaux Arts Museum in Lille, France.) Throughout, the volume demonstrates how Polke interpreted images of reality rather than reality itself, while also satirizing tendencies in contemporary painting, interrogating the role of the artist as author, dismantling the visual rhetoric of media photography and always embarking upon the most magnificent flights of imagination. Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films affirms the artist's oft-quoted observation that "there has to be an element of risk-taking for me, in my work."
Sigmar Polke was born is East Germany in 1941 and studied at the State Academy of Art in Dusseldorf. He first achieved recognition in 1963 when he began working in a witty and irreverent style he termed Capitalist Realism - often considered a more complex and political cousin to Anglo-American Pop Art.
1977, French
Hardcover (gilt-blocked, decorated clothbound w. gold dust jacket), 294 pages, 22 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Draeger / Paris
$220.00 $160.00 - In stock -
First French edition of this extravagant, lavishly illustrated book of wines and famous vineyards, created by Dalí in honor of his wife Gala and published in 1977 by Draeger, Paris. The perfect, equally surreal and sensual viticulture follow-up companion to Dalí's best-selling cookbook, Les dîners de Gala. A Dalínian take on pleasures of the grape and a coveted collectible, the book sets out to organize wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” Through eclectic metrics like production method, weight, and color, the book presents wines of the world in such innovative, Dalíesque groupings as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.”
Bursting with imagery, the book features more than 140 illustrations by Dalí. Many of these are appropriated artworks, including various classical nudes, all of them reconstructed with suitably Surrealist, provocative touches, like Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, one of Dalí’s favorite points of reference over the decades. Dalí also included what is now considered one of the greatest works from his late “Nuclear Mystic” phase, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which sets the iconic biblical scene in a translucent dodecahedron-shaped space before a Catalonian coastal landscape. Dalí was by this stage a devout Catholic, simultaneously captivated by science, optical illusion, and the atomic age.
The first section is dedicated to “Ten Divine Dalí Wines,” an overview of 10 important wine-growing regions, while the second develops Dalí’s revolutionary ordering of wine by emotional experience, instead of by geography or variety. Rather than any prescriptive classification, it’s a flamboyant, free-flowing manifesto in favor of taste and feeling, as much a multisensory treat as a full-bodied document of Dalí’s late-stage oeuvre, in which the artist both reflected on formative influences and refined his own cultural legacy. Texts in French by Dalí, Max Gerard, Louis Orizet.
Very Good copy in beautiful gold dust jacket in Good condition, light wear to extremities, now preserved under mylar wrap.
1991, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and slipcase), 168 pages, 26 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$160.00 - In stock -
The incredible and rarely seen 1991 Japanese slipcased, hardcover edition of Jacques Henric's monographic volume on the great Pierre Klossowski. One of the most comprehensive books ever published on the artist, with beautiful large reproductions of artworks in colour and b/w heavily featured throughout, alongside Henric's text (here translated into Japanese from the original French) with a full catalogue of works and bibliography. First printing in original dust jacket, illustrated slipcase, beautifully printed in Italy and bound in Japan.
Jacques Henric (b. 1938) is a French literary critic, essayist and novelist.
Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was a significant and influential philosopher, writer, translator and artist who befriended Georges Bataille and formulated an original stance on many theological issues, as well as the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. His first novel, Roberte, ce soir, appeared in 1954 as a limited edition containing six of his own erotic illustrations, after he rejected drawings by his younger brother, the painter Balthus. Following the encouragement of Robert Lebel, Andre Masson and Alberto Giacometti, Klossowski held his first exhibition in Paris in 1956, and subsequently produced numerous life-size drawings of erotic scenes imbued with mythological, allegorical and philosophical connotations. By the 1970s, he had won the acclaim of such eminent thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari. Of Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze once said, "That bodies speak has been known for a long time."
Fine As New copy of book and dj, preserved in Good slipcase with some wear and bumps.
1992, English
Softcover, 390 pages, 28 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
First 1992 softcover edition of this pioneering work, the first history of the art of the insane, in which the author scrutinizes changes in attitudes toward the art of the mentally ill from a time when it was either ignored or ridiculed, through the era when Paul Klee, along with other major figures in the art world, discovered the extraordinary power of visual statements by psychotic artists such as Adolf Wölfli and Richard Dadd.
John MacGregor draws on his dual training in art history and in psychiatry and psychoanalysis to describe not only this evolution in attitudes, but also the significant influence of the art of the mentally ill on the development of modern art as a whole. His detailed narrative, with its strangely beautiful illustrations, introduces us to a fascinating group of people that includes the psychotic artists, both trained and untrained, and the psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, critics, and art historians who encountered their work.
"The psychotics who haunt Mr. MacGregor's pages desperately fling images at us from the midst of their manias, suicidal depressions or paranoid reconstructions of the cosmos. ... All these painters were lost souls, curved in on themselves. Yet despite their isolation, Mr. MacGregor is able to show that their work is by no means sealed off from culture. However private their visions, the ways they represent them in art are shaped to a surprising degree by the styles and taste that dominate their respective times. Mr. MacGregor has written a valuable, at times even a daring book."—Michael Vincent Miller, The New York Times Book Review
"A delightful surprise, a scholarly but warm, lucid, lucent, nondogmatic work.... Valuable reading for anyone interested in the creative process."—Joanne Greenberg
"This fascinating story, which has never been told before, is told beautifully, and with extraordinary scholarship, in [this] richly illustrated new book."—Oliver Sacks
"[MacGregor] is a dedicated scholar who has spared no effort and has written what must be the first and only account of a very interesting and varied subject."—E. H. Gombrich
John M. MacGregor lives in San Francisco. Since 1985 he has devoted himself to research and writing in psychiatric art.
Very Good copy, light wear. First softcover edition (1992), first hardcover edition issued in 1989.
1992, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$50.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition, long out-of-print.
In 1846, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world'. The conjuction of death, art and femininity forms a rich and disturbing strata of Western culture, explored here in fascinating detail by Elisabeth Bronfen. Her examples range from Carmen to Little Nell, from Wuthering Heights to Vertigo, from Snow White to Frankenstein. The text is richly illustrated throughout with thirty-seven paintings and photographs.
The argument that this book presents is that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of our culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me", culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.
'Aside from the originality-or fearful finality -of its arguments, the book will be invaluable as an introduction to the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of cultural texts'—New Statesman & Society
'[Death] faces a similar taboo in our century to the one that sex suffered in the last... [Bronfen] addresses an important silence in contemporary culture'—The Times
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich
Good copy with some creasing (spine, corners).
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misaki Shobo / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Erotica July 1970, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. Each issue densely packed with illustrations, articles, news, and feature stories around the universe of Eros from around the world during a time of great sexual revolution. Covering all manner of sexual customs and subject matter from the arts and literature, film and manga, philosophy and radical politics, Erotica was Japan's leading erotic academic journal, featuring, amongst it's heavy historical and contemporary papers, the cutting-edge of Japanese and international erotic artists, from Hans Bellmer to Toshio Saeki.
Erotica July 1970 features the artwork of Toshio Saeki, Haruo Shinozaki, Masayuki Kitamura, Tomoe Shibaoka, "Pornology" by Japanese photographer Toyohiko Yasui, Swedish erotica, European erotic cinema, Pleasure Machines/Mechanical Sex featuring artworks by Tomi Ungerer and science fiction with illustrations by Yasutaka Tsutsui, the psychology of premajure ejaculation, and much more.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1970, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Misaki Shobo / Tokyo
$50.00 - In stock -
Erotica February 1970, Japan's erotic magazine for bibliophiles, published in the 1960s—1970s by Misaki Bookstore. Each issue densely packed with illustrations, articles, news, and feature stories around the universe of Eros from around the world during a time of great sexual revolution. Covering all manner of sexual customs and subject matter from the arts and literature, film and manga, philosophy and radical politics, Erotica was Japan's leading erotic academic journal, featuring, amongst it's heavy historical and contemporary papers, the cutting-edge of Japanese and international erotic artists, from Hans Bellmer to Toshio Saeki.
Erotica February 1970 features the artwork of Hans Bellmer, Aoi Fujimoto, George Grosz, and Haruo Shinozaki, amongst many others, a "blue film encyclopedia", European erotic film, the Temptation of Saint Anthony in the visual arts, and much more.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2024, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 19.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$49.00 - In stock -
Mike Kelley is best known as one of the most influential visual artists of his generation. But he was also an insightful theorist who wrote profusely about his work as well as on aesthetics in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, an epoch marked, in his view, by victim culture and the pop psychology phenomenon known as repressed memory syndrome.
Mike Kelley: Materialist Aesthetics and Memory Illusions presents the artist in a new light, almost as an empirical philosopher delivering his position through art as well as writing. In a meticulous and transdisciplinary approach, Laura López Paniagua presents Kelley’s oeuvre as a stance in materialist aesthetics and weaves thoughtful relations between the artist’s critique, statements, and comments and the theories of thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. López Paniagua focuses on Kelley’s artistic production between 1995 and his death in 2012, analyzing these works vis-à-vis the concept of memory, one of the artist’s obsessions and leitmotivs throughout his career.
An essay by Laura López Paniagua, with an introduction by John Miller.
2024, Second edition
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.
1971, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 26 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$25.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917" at Hayward Galllery, London 26 February — 18 April 1971. Designed by Brian Dunce, it includes a series of articles and statements reproduced, texts by Anatoly Lunacharsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, plus illustrated essays spanning Constructivism, poster design, architecture, film, theatre, etc. by Camilla Gray-Prokofieva, O A Shvidkovsky, Kenneth Frampton, OSA Group, Edward Wright, Edward Braun, Lutz Becker and others.
VG copy with tanned covers light general wear/age.
1976, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 30.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
NAL / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
First US edition of this lovely volume of artworks from "The Golden Age of Fantastic Illustration" edited by Brigid Peppin and published in 1976. Profusely illustrated throughout with many stunning full-colour and b/w examples of all the artists featured: Alastair, John D. Batten, Aubrey Beardsley, Francis Donkin Bedford, Robert Anning Bell, Jean de Bosschère, Arthur Gaskin, Vernon Hill, William Thomas Horton, Laurence Housman, Arthur Boyd Houghton, Arthur Hughes, Eleanor Vere Boyle, René Bull, Edward Julius Detmold, Edward Burne-Jones, Harry Clarke, Walter Crane, Gustave Doré, Richard Doyle, Edmund Dulac, Henry Justice Ford, William Holman Hunt, Alfred Garth Jones, Jessie M. King, Rudyard Kipling, Reginald Knowles, Edward Lear, John Everett Millais, H. R. Millar, Louis Fairfax Muckley, Harold E. H. Nelson, Kay Nielsen, Joseph Noel Paton, Arthur Rackham, Charles Ricketts, Charles Robinson, Thomas Robinson, W. Heath Robinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frederick Sandys, Byam Shaw, Sidney Sime, William Strang, E. J. Sullivan, John Tenniel.
"Late Victorian and early 20th century England saw a unique flowering of book illustration as an art form. Such illustrators as Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen are now recognised as remarkable artists. But perhaps their return to fashion stems less from their consummate skill than from a new, possibly more sophisticated appreciation of the fantasy elements in their work. It was in the realms of fantasy that illustration reached its highest levels, through a happy interaction of opportunity and inspiration: developments in printing and reproduction combined with the growth of the middle class audience for books and magazines to offer a perfect medium for expressing the cultural preoccupations of the era."—from the introduction
Very Good copy.
1998, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 204 pages, 22 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Isshusha / Japan
$45.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue and historical study by renowned Japanese fairy scholar Kimie Imura, published in Japan to accompany a travelling Japanese exhibition in 1998. Profusely illustrated throughout in full-colour, the book traces the history of the fairy in folk-lore and the arts, from Celtic mythology and Arthurian legend, to the danger of their depiction being rejected by Christianity as the descendants of pagan gods, through the Elizabethan era in the 16th century, where they regained their place in the world of literature and theatre, through the adoration of the 19th century Victorian period and future generations of artists in Japan all weaving the fairy legend into works of painting, music, ballet, literature, book illustration, costume, applied arts, sculpture, and much more. Features the work of George Cruickshank, Honor Charlotte Appleton, Arthur Rackham, Amelia Murray, Edmund Dulac, Joseph Payton, John Simmons, Joseph Zevan, The Doyle brothers, C. Wilhelm, Shigeru Mizuki, Yoshitaka Amano, Itsuko Azuma, Suzuko Makino, Akira Uno, Yukio Satsukime, Yuki Yuuki, Akiko Iwakiri, and many more.
Very Good—Near Fine copy in VG dust jacket with a few ballpoint marks to lower back.
2010, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 136 pages, 19 x 14.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Published in 2010 and long out-of-print, this book collects the rare artworks of Japanese artists Ran Akiyoshi and Aya Shijo explores a world of erotic fantasies ranging from surrealism to magic, S&M to spanking, and much more. Two prolific artists whose work proliferated throughout the bountiful pages of Tokyo's underground SM / fetish publishing scene in the 1960s—1970s, but are virtually unknown and undocumented outside of Japan.
Legendary self-taught underground Japanese artist Ran Ran Akiyoshi (1922—1982), virtually unknown and undocumented outside of Japan, Akiyoshi never held an exhibition nor sold any of his drawings in his lifetime. Much like the work of Toshio Saeki or Namio Harukawa, Akiyoshi's creations proliferated throughout the bountiful pages of Tokyo's underground SM / fetish publishing scene in the 1960s—1970s. Yet Akiyoshi's phantasmagoric world of erotic fantasy is like no other, building sado-masochistic themes within unique, somewhat Lovecraftian and Bosch-esque dreamscapes populated by mythological goddesses and grotesque creatures. His peculiar fantasy drawings were highly praised by Japanese novelist and art critic, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, an instrumental figure in the Japanese avant-garde who translated de Sade and Bataille to Japanese, and specialised in the study of medieval demonology.
Shijo Aya is a legendary underground Japanese artist little-known inside or outside Japan who specialised in fetish/punishment/humiliation imagery. He illustrated for magazines such as Kitan Club, SM King, SM Fan, and SM Play.
As New in dust jacket w. obi.
2024, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 176 pages, 19 x 15 cm
Published by
Atelier Third / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Brand new book collecting 200 rare and phenomenal illustrations of the legendary underground Japanese artist Ran Akiyoshi (1922—1982), many never seen before in print. Virtually unknown and undocumented outside of Japan, Akiyoshi never held an exhibition nor sold any of his drawings in his lifetime. Much like the work of Toshio Saeki or Namio Harukawa, Akiyoshi's creations proliferated throughout the bountiful pages of Tokyo's underground SM / fetish publishing scene in the 1960s—1970s. Yet Akiyoshi's phantasmagoric world of erotic fantasy is like no other, building sado-masochistic themes within unique, somewhat Lovecraftian and Bosch-esque dreamscapes populated by mythological goddesses and grotesque creatures. His peculiar fantasy drawings were highly praised by Japanese novelist and art critic, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, an instrumental figure in the Japanese avant-garde who translated de Sade and Bataille to Japanese, and specialised in the study of medieval demonology.
Born in Kyongsong (present Seoul), Korea in 1922, Akiyoshi was publicly schooled and self-taught in drawing. After WWII, he moved to Japan, traveled around Kyushu area and finally settled in Tokyo in 1946. Akiyoshi started working for adult entertainment magazines such as "Decameron","Fuzoku Soushi", and "Uramado" in 1950. Around 1958, he began focusing on original drawings while continuing to draw illustrations for various magazines. In the 1970s, Akiyoshi provided iconic cover and insert illustrations to a number of prominent SM magazines, including "SM King", "SM Kitan", and "SM Club". A prolific and private artists, he never held an exhibition nor sold any of his drawings in his lifetime. Akiyoshi died from heart failure in 1982 at the age of 58.
1985, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 27.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$130.00 - Out of stock
Now rare, first 1985 edition of the first fundamental and comprehensive English-language study of Hans Bellmer (1902—1975), the most provocative representative of Surrealism, authored by Peter Webb with Robert Short and published by Quartet in London. Heavily illustrated throughout with many rare images, in colour and b/w, many photographs and artworks, with bibliography, catalogue and references. An essential, illuminating book for anyone interested in Bellmer's work and life and the development of his historical Doll project, playing close attention to the often neglected but integral visionary texts by Bellmer that accompanied his artworks, with an abundance of written works translated throughout in English for the first time.
"Surrealism was one of the most exciting and influential of twentieth century art movements and much has been written about it since its great flowering in the 1930s. The lives and work of its leading figures (Ernst, Magritte, Dali and Miró) have been extensively researched, but Hans Bellmer, perhaps the most controversial and misunderstood of all the surrealists, has until now remained a mystery. Peter Webb, who interviewed Bellmer shortly before his death, has spent two years unravelling the story of this photographer, sculptor, painter, engraver and writer, and his book provides the first opportunity to evaluate Bellmer's considerable artistic achievement."—book jacket blurb
Very Good copy, mild wear.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover, 98 pages (w. fold-outs), 42 x 30 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Treville / Tokyo
$140.00 $100.00 - In stock -
First special Japanese hardcover 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, lavish reproductions of his major paintings, environments, sculptural works, his work for never-shot film "The Tourist", his early grotesque ink illustrations, collaborations with Blondie's Debbie Harry, his "New York City" series from the late 1970's and so 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 hardcover Japanese edition, published by Hardcover edition published by Treville, Tokyo, in 1992. Light foxing/splitting/bumping to spine top and bottom, one semi-detaching from binding on endpaper, otherwise internally VG well preserved throughout.
2025, English / Dutch
Softcover, 464 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
WIELS / Brussels
$110.00 - In stock -
The first total survey of Jef Geys' work. Art critics commonly describe the work of Belgian artist Jef Geys (1934-2018) as "unruly, and impossible to categorize in conventional art-historical categories." Despite Geys' subversive and critical attitude towards the art world, this ambitious publication shows that his work is not only deeply engaged and socially critical but also funny and sensory.
Since the early 1960s Geys had compiled an archive of everything he considered part of his artistic practice in to form of his "List of Works" serving as his oeuvre's index. With a total of 844 entries, Catalogue Raisonnable, is the first total survey of Jef Geys' work.
Through access to the artist's archive, close collaboration with Geys' next of kin, and thorough art-historical research, this publication offers a rare opportunity for understanding and appreciating the fascinating practice of one of Belgium's greatest artistic figures.
Jef Geys (1934-2018) was a prominent Belgian conceptual artist known for his multifaceted and often provocative work that intersected art with everyday life. Born in Leopoldsburg, Belgium, Geys was a teacher by profession, a role that deeply influenced his artistic practice. His work is characterized by its exploration of social, political, and cultural themes, often challenging the boundaries between art and daily experience.
Geys gained recognition for his innovative approach to art, which included photography, installation, sculpture, and publications. One of his notable projects was the "Kempens Informatieblad," a self-published newspaper that combined local news with critical commentary on contemporary art and society. This project exemplified his commitment to making art accessible and relevant to the broader public. Throughout his career, Geys exhibited internationally, including notable appearances at Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale. His work remains influential, celebrated for its critical engagement with the world and its capacity to blur the lines between art, education, and activism.
Texts by Dirk Snauwaert and Charlotte Friling.
1992, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 24 x 17.25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Godine / New England
$40.00 - In stock -
An anthology of writing on modernism edited by Brian Wallis and foreword by Marcia Tucker. Includes essays by Kathy Acker, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Jonathan Crary, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, J. Hoberman, Robert Hughes, Fredric Jameson, Mary Kelly, Rosalind Krauss, Donald Kuspit, Thomas Lawson, Kate Linker, Lucy R. Lippard, Laura Mulvey, Craig Owens, Constance Penley, Martha Rosler, Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Photographs selected and arranged by Louise Lawler in collaboration with Wallis. Includes short biography for each contributor.
"The waning of the century-old modernist movement in the arts has called forth an astonishing array of artistic and critical responses. The twenty-five essays in Art After Modernism provide a comprehensive survey of the most provocative directions taken by recent art and criticism, exploring such topics as the decline of the ideology of modernism in the arts and the emergence of a wide range of postmodern practices; recent directions in painting, film, video and photography; visual artists' investigations of mass-media systems and imagery; and the dynamics of the social network in which art is produced and disseminated. This major collection is an indispensable guide to the ideas and issues animating this decade's art the far-reaching cultural reorientation known as postmodernism."
Good copy with general handling wear/cover creasing.
1984, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
“The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers’s study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a ’textual culture,’ this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to ’read’ a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly ’visual culture.’ It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not ’read’ but ’seen,’ in which new knowledge is visually recorded.”—George Steiner, Sunday Times
”There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers’s highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light.”—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books
Average-Good copy with wear and light eraser-able pencil notation.
1990, French
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 24 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Centre National Des Arts Plastiques / Paris
$200.00 - In stock -
First edition of the comprehensive Pierre Klossowski catalogue raisonné published on the occasion of the major retrospective exhibition of his work held in Paris in 1990-1991 at CNAP. Profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with Klossowski's wonderful works, texts throughout by Catherine Grenier, Bernard Blistene, Claude Ritschard, Pascal Bonitzer, Marie-Dominique Wicker, Franco Cagnetta, André Masson, and Pierre Zucca (in French), a densely illustrated catalogue raisonné spanning his work dated 1952/53 through to 1990 (many not seen elsewhere), biography, exhibition history, and much more. Still the most in-depth book on Klossowski's oeuvre to date.
Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was a significant and influential philosopher, writer, translator and artist who befriended Georges Bataille and formulated an original stance on many theological issues, as well as the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. His first novel, Roberte, ce soir, appeared in 1954 as a limited edition containing six of his own erotic illustrations, after he rejected drawings by his younger brother, the painter Balthus. Following the encouragement of Robert Lebel, Andre Masson and Alberto Giacometti, Klossowski held his first exhibition in Paris in 1956, and subsequently produced numerous life-size drawings of erotic scenes imbued with mythological, allegorical and philosophical connotations. By the 1970s, he had won the acclaim of such eminent thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Butor, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Felix Guattari. Of Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze once said, "That bodies speak has been known for a long time."
Very Good in Very Good dust jacket.
2006, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 27.1 x 21.4 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$75.00 - In stock -
An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others against the canvas of their renegade times.
In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Miro, Dali, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.
Profusely illustrated (featuring 180 colour images) and filled with valuable English translations of original French texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.
2024, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 334 pages, 32 x 22 cm
Published by
Centre Pompidou / Paris
$110.00 - In stock -
The defining book for the centenary of Surrealism. From September 2024 to January 2025, the Centre Pompidou will celebrate the 100th anniversary of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. For the next two years, their unprecedented Surrealist exhibition will tour the art galleries of the world, accompanied by this special catalogue.
Perhaps more than any other artistic movement, Surrealism had a cataclysmic effect on the modern mind, changing forever the way we think about experiencing the world. By rejecting the gross linearity that typified several centuries of preceding artworks, the legendary Surrealists Magritte, Ernst, Carrington, Dali, Tanning and so many others reached beyond the facade of that which is patently visible and found something more. Featuring original essays from leading academics and excerpts from the Surrealist Manifesto itself, this stands among the most essential Surrealist catalogues ever published.
2020, English
Hardcover, 200 pages, 26.7 x 33 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$120.00 - In stock -
Featuring paintings from series that span from 1994 through 2009, this volume traces Mike Kelley's (1954–2012) engagement with the medium through bodies of work including The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter), a series of oval-shaped paintings on wood; Timeless Painting, which marked Kelley's distinct return to painting in colour, and which he described as "mannerist take-offs on Hans Hofmann's compositional theory of ‘push and pull'"; and the Horizontal Tracking Shots series.
2024, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 21 x 28 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$110.00 - In stock -
The book Archive of Dreams is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name that will open the Archiv der Avantgarden. Marking the hundredth anniversary of the first surrealist manifesto and the founding of the Bureau of Surrealist Research in Paris in 1924, the volume is dedicated to the surrealist movement as well as the networks it engendered and the artistic stimuli it provided in the twentieth century. The idea was for the Bureau to collect dream testimonies in whatever form, not only to preserve and analyse them but also to give active expression to them in artistic processes. The publication shows how the practices of the avantgardes blurred the boundaries between dream and reality, between the traditional, passive notion of the archive and the idea of active, innovative artistic experiment — and thus ultimately also between the past, the present, and possible futures.
Works and documents from the period before, during, and after the Second World War shed light on the working methods of international artists and the global network they were involved in. They are complemented by diverse reflections on global protest movements and the traumas of war, thus connecting, too, to everyday experiences in a Europe beset by warfare.