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:
CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
(ORDER SHIPPING RESUMES NOV 10)
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 Fiction
Australian Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction
Australian Poetry
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
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Anthropology
Anarchism
Socialism / Anarchism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism / Women's Studies
Gender Studies / Sexuality
Anthropology
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.
2025, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 19.5 x 11 cm
Published by
At Last Books / Copenhagen
$64.00 - In stock -
Published as appendix to the Yvonne Rainer Retrospective (November 6-28 2024), organised by Terrassen at Palads Cinema, Copenhagen.
Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) needs no introduction. One of the great American artists of her generation, she revolutionised dance and choreography in the 1960s. Yet over the course of two decades - from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s - Rainer also directed seven feature films, each intensely discursive and consistently inviting critical reflection. Radically diverse and impossible to categorise, her films carve out their own space between documentary, fiction, performance, and the avant-garde. For decades, these films have been difficult to access, and when shown, they were often confined to small monitors in large museum settings. Now, newly restored in 4K, they were presented in a retrospective by Terrassen in 2024 - the first of its kind in Denmark. The retrospective culminated in the publication of a new Yvonne Rainer filmography, with contributions from Babette Mangolte, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Mira Adoumier, Emily Wardill, Emily LaBarge, Amelia Groom, Valérie Massadian, Iman Mohammed, Frida Sandström and Yvonne Rainer herself.
1969, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
$300.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1969 printing of the seminal "Art Povera", the phenomenal and now legendary critical/photographic book by the great Italian art historian, critic and curator Germano Celant (1940—2020) that internationally established the so-called Art Povera / Arte Povera movement (meaning "poor art", coined by Celant in 1967) and published by Studio Vista, London and printed in Italy.
Includes profiles of major artists of the movement, including a short text followed by pages of full-page photographs for each artist. Artists featured: Walter de Maria, Michelangelo Pisteletto, Stephen Kaltenbach, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Lawrence Weiner, Luciano Fabro, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets, Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Barry, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Dennis Oppenheim, Barry Flanagan, Robert Smithson, Giulio Paolini, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Franz Erhard Walther, Hans Haacke, Gilberto Zorio, Robert Morris, Marinus Boezem, Carl Andre, Emilio Prini, Richard Serra.
"This book does not aim at being an objective and general analysis of the phenomenon of art or life, but is rather an attempt to flank (both art and life) as accomplices of the changes and attitudes in the development of their daily becoming. This book does not attempt to be objective since the awareness of objectivity is false consciousness. The book, made up of photographs and written documents, bases its critical and editorial assumptions on the knowledge that criticism and iconographic documents give limited vision and partial perception of artistic work. The book, when it reproduces the documents of artistic work, refutes the linguistic mediation of photography. The book, even though it wants to avoid the logic of consumption, is a consumer's item. ... This book produces a collection of already old material. ... In this book there is no need to reflect in order to seek a unitary and reassuring value, immediately refuted by the the authors themselves, rather there is the necessity to look into it for the changes, limits, precariousness and instability of artistic work." — text from Celant's introduction "Stating That."
A must.
Very Good copy, usual tanning.
1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 304 pages, 29.2 x 25.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Phaidon / London
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition of Arte Povera, the most complete overview of this movement ever published, edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject.
Arte Povera is Italy's most important and influential post-war art movement. Originally championed by the leading art critic Germano Celant, it included internationally recognized artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, Mario and Marisa Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Edited by one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, this book is the most complete overview of the artworks and writings associated with Arte Povera, an art movement that explored the relation between art and life, made manifest through natural materials and human artifacts, and experienced through the body.
"This is now the definitive English-language sourcebook on Merz, Pistoletto, Paolini and company, thanks to its rich selection of images and texts."―Bookforum
"Get hold of Arte Povera... It is both compendium and critique, with artists' statements, a chronology and commentary. It contextualizes the work, and the pictures are great."―Adrian Searle, Guardian
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a writer and curator living in Rome, who has become an internationally recognized scholar of late twentieth-century Italian art. She has written extensively on the Arte Povera movement and published interviews and texts on artists such as Boetti, Pistoletto, Merz, Fabro and Kounellis. Bakargiev is also a noted curator of contemporary art internationally: her exhibitions include 'Molteplici Culture', Rome, 1992 and a homage to John Cage which she co-curated with Alanna Heiss for the 1993 Venice Biennale.
She was part of the curatorial team for the 'Antwerp 93 European Capital of Culture', devising the major international survey, 'On Taking a Normal Situation and Re-translating it into Overlapping and Multiple Readings of Conditions Past and Present'. In 1996 Bakargiev curated a large-scale survey on Italian post-war artist Alberto Burri in Rome, Brussels and Munich. In 1997, she curated 'Citta-Natura': a city-wide exhibition of international artists including Anselmo, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pascali and Kounellis, held in Rome.
She is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and was formerly Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. She was co-curator, with Iwona Blazwick, of Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today , Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2004 5.
Good copy with some corner knocking, small tear to top of spine dust jacket, otherwise very good throughout.
1974, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 216 pages, 21 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First HC Edition.
Environments and Happenings by painter and poet Adrian Henri, published by Thames & Hudson in 1974, forms one of the first mainstream book surveys to trace the phenomenon of environmental/performative/total living artworks that became prevalent in the 1960s/70s. This historical study is profusely illustrated in colour and b/w with many international works from Fluxus to Zero to Dolle Mina to Nouveau Réalisme to Provo to Gutai to The Situationists and much more. Includes the works of Joseph Beuys, Clarence Schmidt, Ray Johnson, Öyvind Fahlström, Paul Thek, Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow, Hans Haacke, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, Guerllia Art Action Group, Daniel Spoerri, Wolf Vostell, Gustav Metzger, Peter Kuttner, Jackson Pollock, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Situationist International, Ferdinand Kriwet, Klaus Rinke, Duane Hanson, A-Yo, Meret Oppenheim, Space Structure Workshop, Ferdinand Cheval, Dolle Mina (Mad Mina), Robert Smithson, Jeff Nuttall, Stefan Wewerka, Christo, Dennis Oppenheim, Vladimir Tatlin, Provo, Barry Flanagan, Andy Warhol, Meredith Monk, Atsuko Tanaka, Kazuo Shiraga, Ed Keinholz, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Gilardi, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Claes Oldenburg, Les Levine, James Rosenquist, Red Grooms, Tom Wesselmann, George Segal, Eduardo Paolozzi, and many many more. Includes reproductions of performance scripts, partial chronology, etc.
Very Good copy in Good DJ some light wear, price-clipping to inner.
1975, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$15.00 - In stock -
1975, profusely illustrated pocket-book survey of the many strands of contemporary art which have emerged since the appearance of Pop culture.
"Art after Pop, if not exactly uncharted territory, is only now beginning to turn into art history. This book sets out to disentangle the many strands which have appeared since Pop started the cult of cool in art. The Pop artists proved that figuration was not dead; and their Photo-Realist successors have carried the icy gloss finish to its limits. The Abstract Expressionists, too, have had successors, who proved that abstraction was not dead either; these were the Hard Edge artists, whose rejection of illusion was part of the trend towards the reduction of form and content to a minimum. With Minimal Art many people expected painting and sculpture to disappear altogether; this has not happened, but they have been joined by a number of would-be successors: Environments, Actions, Land art, photographic records, printed definitions, Conceptual art. The contact with popular culture, with the Rock underground, even with cybernetics and academic philosophy, has changed the physical appearance of art without changing the art world - and without diminishing the resources of creativity which mankind still puts into art."
John A. Walker is a critic of contemporary art and the author of a glossary of twentieth-century art terms.
Good—VG copy, general light wear/tanning/marking, previous owner's name to title page.
2021, Japanese / English
Hardcover (with obi), 368 pages, 20 x 30 cm
Published by
Toyota Municipal Museum of Art / Aichi
$130.00 - In stock -
Beautiful hardcover catalogue published in Japan to the exhibition Beuys + Palermo touring three venues across Japan in 2021.
Joseph Beuys and Blinky Palermo were from different generations, but both experienced WWII and the postwar reconstruction, as teacher and pupil. One of the most important artists since World War II, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) asserted that true capital lies in the creativity of human beings, and viewing the whole of society as sculpture, set out to change it. Beuys is also known for his role in nurturing numerous artists in his capacity as an educator. One such pupil was Blinky Palermo (1943–1977). The modest abstract works that form the legacy of this painter active for just a short few years from the mid-1960s up to his early demise, were an attempt to quietly overturn our perceptions, and social systems, via the visceral experience of color and form, all the while reconstructing the compositional elements of painting. The works of these two superficially contrasting German artists were alike in that both Beuys and Palermo endeavored to restore art to the status of a raw, live endeavor, Beuys indeed later acknowledging his former student to be the artist closest to himself. Composed primarily of works from the 1960s and ‘70s, documentation from the period and detailed texts, “Beuys + Palermo” explores the features of each of these two artists, while simultaneously searching for the latent power of their praxis in their involvement and overlap with each other.
1994, English
Hardcover, 294 pages, 23 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dia Art Foundation / New York
$90.00 - In stock -
First 1994 hardcover edition, long out-of-print.
Edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly.
Arena is a major but rarely exhibited Beuys work that consists of 100 framed aluminum and glass panels each approximately 55 x 32 inches, spanning the artist's career from the late 40s to 1972. This vast work is among the most ambitious of Beuys' career and is in many ways autobiographical. An assembly of 264 photographs, the panels in part document Beuys' life including key "actions," concerts, sculptures, objects, and more personal events. Realized in 1973, "Arena" attains a monumental scale and the sort of grand design appropriate to an artistic summa; as such, the project amounts to a broad portrait of Beuys' artistic persona. It is documented in this book for the first time.
Features a preface by Charles Wright, essays by Lynne Cooke, Pamela Kort, and Christopher Phillips. Includes numerous illustrations, a glossary, biography, and bibliography.
Good—Very Good copy with light wear to hardcover edges and some board scratching.
1982, English / Japanese / Italian / French
Softcover (w. wax dust jacket), 128 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Japan Foundation / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this wonderful Japanese catalogue published in 1982 to accompany an exhibition that brought together the work of 5 Western artists (Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Bruce Mclean, and Giulio Paolini) for a major group show held at the Laforet Museum, Tokyo and The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Each artist has many pages of work reproduced in black and white, accompanied by artists' statements, essays on each artist, and artists' biographies, in English, Japanese, Italian and French. Bound in various raw paper stocks and wrapped in printed wax paper dust-jacket.
Good-Very Good copy. Perfectly preserved with small chips and wear to dust jacket edges.
1984, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket) in slipcase (w. obi), 110 pages, 31cm x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$180.00 - In stock -
First 1984 edition of Kuniyoshi Kaneko's Theatre of Eros, one of the finest monographic volumes on Japanese painter, illustrator and photographer Kuniyoshi Kaneko (1936—2015), this copy with signed dedication by the artist (dated "1984.1.2") to the first blank page. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and b/w with Kaneko's figurative paintings and drawings of young men and women in enigmatic, metaphysical scenes of surreal, stylised erotic beauty, channeling the spirits of Cocteau and Balthus, including his famous illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, his illustrations for Orpheus, an array of his beloved oil on canvas and pastel and paper works, plus much more. Free of convention, Kaneko's dreamlike scenarios were very often of same-sex, homo-erotic, even fetishistic nature, and his artwork, encouraged by editor and writer Shibusawa Tatsuhiko (1928—1987), became a staple in the underground publishing scene of 1970's Tokyo. Theatre of Eros includes an extensive, illustrated biography, many photographic portraits, and a conversation with Japanese essayist and poet Mutsuo Takahashi (b. 1937). Takahashi was one of the most prominent poets of postwar Japan, known for his bold poetic work of male-male eroticism.
A beautifully preserved complete copy with original publisher's obi, and inserted with a file of various Kaneko Japanese media press clippings, 1984 Seibu gallery Theatre of Eros exhibition flyer, and the complete pages of an amazing photographic feature on Japanese pop star (and YMO-founder Haruomi Hosono collaborator) Miharu Koshi art directed and designed by Kaneko himself.
F copy in NF slipcase and obi.
1997, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Midnight Media / UK
$50.00 - In stock -
Rare English film digest / filmography by Lucas Balbo and Laurent Aknin on one of cinema's most fascinating and complicated human beings, Klaus Kinski. Kinski was a German actor. Equally renowned for his intense performance style and notorious for his volatile personality, he appeared in over 130 film roles in a career that spanned 40 years, from 1948 to 1988. Published in this one edition in 1997 by Published by Midnight Media, Disorder & Genius is an excellent introduction and concise synopsis of Kinski's acting career, and an indispensable reference tracing his complete filmography chronologically, each listing with film details and short overview, profusely illustrated with film stills, poster artwork, vhs covers, and publicity images in colour and b/w.
"Klaus Kinski died in 1991 amid almost general indifference. Nikolaus Gunther Nakszynski—his real name—was born in Zoppot, Poland on 18 October 1926; in his autobiography, "Dying to Live" (released in the USA as "All I Need Is Love" and subsequently withdrawn and banned — then in 1996 was re- issued, in both the UK and USA, as “Kinski Uncut", with extra text but with 'minor' alterations to avoid possible lawsuits!), he went into great detail about his childhood, a nightmare of poverty, promiscuity and incest... After the war, he went on the German stage where he came in contact with some of the greatest directors of the period. He achieved a certain notoriety with his recitals of poems by Rimbaud and above all the Medieval French bawdy poet Villon. Later he appeared in some of Cocteau's plays such as "The Typewriter" and "The Human Voice", this last being a long monologue by a woman on a telephone. Kinski played the woman and provoked a scandal. But, he earned Cocteau's admiration. He ended his theatrical career with an "adaptation" of the New Testament which provoked a riot.
From the end of the 1940s, Kinski was offered many parts in films which he took up sporadically, believing, as he said himself, that all that was merely shit..."—from the introduction
Near Fine copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 426 pages, 23 x 18 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$90.00 - In stock -
This long-awaited biography of Alfred Jarry reconstructs a life both "ubuesque" and pataphysical.
When Alfred Jarry died in 1907 at the age of thirty-four, he was a legendary figure in Paris-but this had more to do with his bohemian lifestyle and scandalous behavior than his literary achievements. A century later, Jarry is firmly established as one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde.
Even so, most people today tend to think of Alfred Jarry only as the author of the play Ubu Roi, and of his life as a string of outlandish "ubuesque" anecdotes, often recounted with wild inaccuracy. In this first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English, Alastair Brotchie reconstructs the life of a man intent on inventing (and destroying) himself, not to mention his world, and the "philosophy" that defined their relation.
Brotchie alternates chapters of biographical narrative with chapters that connect themes, obsessions, and undercurrents that relate to the life. The anecdotes remain, and are even augmented- Jarry's assumption of the "ubuesque," his inversions of everyday behavior (such as eating backward, from cheese to soup), his exploits with gun and bicycle, and his herculean feats of drinking. But Brotchie distinguishes between Jarry's purposely playing the fool and deeper nonconformities that appear essential to his writing and his thought, both of which remain a vital subterranean influence to this day.
"Alastair Brotchie brilliantly evokes the avant-garde artistic movements of fin-de-siecle Paris in all their glittering grubbiness."—Charlotte Keith, Varsity
"An enthralling, scrupulously researched, and elegantly written biography."—Mark Ford, The New York Review of Books
"[Brotchie] gives us an unmatched and vivid picture of the belle epoque's avant-garde, of which Jarry was an important, original part."—Michael Moorcock, The Guardian
"[Brotchie] skilfully moves between providing a relatively straightforward and sympathetic account of the writer's life and critically sorting through the narratives that have sustained and shaped the long-standing image of Jarry... Brotchie's refusal to mythologise stands as the book's greatest strength, and as a fitting testament to the manifold complexity of Alfred Jarry."—Karl Whitney, 3:AM Magazine
"How a schoolboy caricature evolved into Jarry's best-known creation, his monstrous 'every-man', Pere Ubu, is a fascinating story which Brotchie tells with impressive scholarship, sympathy and wit."—Peter Blegvad, The Spectator
"Brotchie's painstaking and drily funny biography is now the most ample account of Jarry and his importance that is available in our language; it is unlikely ever to be bettered."—Kevin Jackson, The Literary Review
2025, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
A masterful study of the elusive French composer, on the centenary of his death.
Composer, pianist, and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit, and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before surrealism and a conceptual artist before conceptual art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demimonde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.
2000, English
Softcover, 205 pages, 17.8 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$32.00 - In stock -
Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three.
Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences. He combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal but universal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality. The Pain Journal, Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three.
2025, Englush
Softcover, 96 pages, 7.6 x 10.5 cm
Published by
Hanuman Editions / US
$36.00 - In stock -
I LOVE THE PAIN. I TELL HER HOW WONDERFUL PAIN CAN BE. HOW SHE SHOULD USE IT ON ME. I'M RAVING. I'M TRIPPING. I'M COMING.
Since his on-screen 'death' by erogenous torture device in Nine Inch Nails’ notorious 'Happiness in Slavery' music video, writer and artist Bob Flanagan has been a looming legend in domains of art, pain and sex. First published by Hanuman Books in 1987, Fuck Journal chronicles Flanagan’s liaisons with his beloved romantic and artistic partner Sheree Rose over the course of a year. Composed at Rose’s prompting and anticipating Flanagan’s extraordinary Pain Journal, the volume is so direct in its account of the couple’s conjugal life that the Indian authorities tossed its original print run into the ocean before the books could ship from Chennai to New York. By luck, 300 copies which had traveled with the editors to the US remained in circulation: an origin story that chimes with Flanagan’s aura of irreverence. Fuck Journal is characterised by a transfixing rhythm of total divulsion, a document of union amid, and through, pain with resonances in current discourses around sadomasochistic desire, crip experience, gender politics and beyond.
With a foreword by Sheree Rose
Introduction by Johanna Hedva
Based in Southern California, Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) was an provocateur of the highest order, known for poems and performances centreing on BDSM activity and living with cystic fibrosis. Famously featured in censored videos for Danzig and Nine Inch Nails, Flanagan achieved a unique pitch of sexual spectacle and tender expression through visceral collaborations with the photographer, artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. Flanagan’s published writings include Pain Journal (1996) and the anthology Fun to be dead: The Poems of Bob Flanagan (2024), edited by Sabrina Tarasoff.
The steward of Flanagan’s legacy and an icon in her own right, the photographer and performance artist Sheree Rose has been a leading figure in Los Angeles underground culture since the 1980s. Through her partnership with Flanagan and ongoing projects, Rose has brought to the fore a new form of heterosexual politics, an erotics of intimacy as it intersects with the personal and social.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician from Los Angeles. Their most recent essay collection is How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom. They are also the author of the novels Your Love Is Not Good and On Hell. Their art has been exhibited internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and the Moon.
2025, English
Softcover, 460 pages, 26 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$85.00 - In stock -
Started in 1989 by designer and writer Robert Ford, THING magazine was the voice of the Queer Black music and art scene in the early 1990s. Ford and his editors were part of the burgeoning House music scene, which originated in Chicago’s Queer underground, and some of the top DJs and musicians from that time were featured in the magazine, including Frankie Knuckles, Gemini, Larry Heard, Rupaul, and Deee-Lite. THING published ten issues from 1989-1993, before it was cut short by Ford’s death from AIDS-related illness. All ten issues of THING are collected and published here for the first time.
As House music thrived, THING captured the multidisciplinary nature of the scene, opening its pages to a wide range of subjects: poetry and gossip, fiction and art, interviews and polemics. The HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large in its contents, particularly in the personal reflections and vital treatment resources that it published. An essay by poet Essex Hemphill was published alongside the gossip columnist Michael Musto and Rupaul dished wisdom alongside a diary from the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Joan Jett Blakk’s revolutionary presidential campaign is contained in these pages, as are some of the most underground, influential literary voices of the time, such as Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Gary Indiana, Marlon Riggs, David Wojnarowicz, and even David Sedaris.
THING was very much in dialogue with the club kids in New York and other Queer publishing ventures, but in many ways, it fostered an entirely unique perspective—one with more serious ambitions. In a moment when the gay community was besieged by the HIV/AIDS crisis and a wantonly cruel government, the influence and significance of this cheaply-produced newsprint magazine vastly exceeded its humble means, presenting a beautiful portrait of the ball and club culture that existed in Chicago with deep intellectual reflections. THING was a publication by and for its community and understood the fleetingness of its moment. To reencounter this work today, is to reinstate the Black voices who were so central to the history of HIV/AIDS activism and Queer and club culture, but which were often sidelined by white Queer discourse. In many ways, THING offered a blueprint for the fundamental role a magazine plays in bringing together a community, its tagline summing up the bold stakes of this important venture: “She Knows Who She Is.”
The magazine included contributions from Trent D. Adkins, Joey Arias, Aaron Avant Garde, Ed Bailey, Freddie Bain, Basscut, Belasco, Joan Jett Blakk, Simone Bouyer, Lady Bunny, Bunny & Pussy, Derrick Carter, Fire Chick, Chicklet, Stephanie Coleman, Bill Coleman, Lee Collins, Gregory Conerly, Mark Contratto, Dennis Cooper, Dorian Corey, Ed Crosby, The Darva, Vaginal Davis, Deee-Lite, Tor Dettwiler, Riley Evans, Evil, The Fabulous Pop Tarts, Mark Farina, Larry Flick, Robert Ford, Scott Free, David Gandy, Gemini, Gabriel Gomez, Roy Gonsalves, Chuck Gonzales, Tony Greene, André Halmon, Lyle Ashton Harris, Larry Heard, Essex Hemphill, Kathryn Hixson, Sterling Houston, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Candy J, Jamoo, Jazzmun, Gant Johnson, Owen Keehnen, Lady Miss Kier, Spencer Kincy, Iris Kit, Erin Krystle, Steve LaFreniere, Larvetta Larvon, Marc Loveless, Lypsinka, Malone, Marjorie Marginal, Terry A. Martin, Rodney McCoy Jr., Alan Miller, Bobby Miller, Michael Musto, Ultra Naté, Willi Ninja, Scott “Spunk” O’Hara, DeAundra Peek, Earl Pleasure, Marlon Riggs, Robert Rodi, Todd Roulette, RuPaul, Chantay Savage, David Sedaris, Rosser Shymanski, Larry Tee, Voice Farm, Lawrence D. Warren, Martha Wash, LeRoy Whitfield, Stephen Winter, David Wojnarowicz, and Hector Xtravaganza.
Managing Editors: James Hoff and Sam Korman
Designer: Rick Myers
Copy Editor: Allison Dubinsky
2013, Japanese
Softcover, 212 pages, 28.2 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Amana / Japan
$160.00 - In stock -
First edition of this wonderful collection of Japanese photographers that captured 1970s Tokyo, now out-of-print. In the world of fine art photography, post-war Japanese photography is continuing to gather attention. Many Japanese photographers were active specifically during the large cultural and political development of the 70s as the country experienced rapid economic growth. At the time, new styles of expression with a strong focus on the individual viewpoint were beginning to develop, which were distinct to the social documentary photography prior to that. This also coincided with the development of photography within the fashion and advertising field, reflecting a period where the works of many unique photographers and styles began to grow. A careful selection of 160 bodies of works by 9 prominent photographers of the time, each individually portraying the excitement and rapid growth which symbolised the era. Taiji Arita, Eikoh Hosie, Daido Moriyama, Masatoshi Naito, Hajime Sawatari, Issei Suda, Yoshihiro Tatsuki, Shuji Terayama, Katsumi Watanabe.
Very Good copy with good dust jacket.
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.
1992, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 22 x16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
MB, Negativland, SPK, Nocturnal Emissions, Werkbund, Asmus Tietchens, Monte Cazazza, Throbbing Gristle, William S. Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, COME, Whitehouse, Esplendor Geometico, Lustmord, Ramleh, Club Moral, Mail Music, The Hafler Trio, Organum, The New Blockaders, Etant Donnes, Pirate Radios, P16.D4, S.B.O.T.H.I., Anti Records, Gum, Trax, MC5, Gordon Mumma, Boyd Rice / NON, Vagina Dentata Organ, The Haters, RRR Records, Schimpfluch, Entre Vifs, Moholy Nagy, Luigi Russolo, Carcass....
First (only) hardcover edition of the seldom seen and highly coveted "Noise War", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1992. Long out-of-print, "Noise War" surveys 10 years of noise, tracing developments and interests in the work of Burroughs and Crowley into the the birth of industrial music, power electronics, experimental noise and noise art/performance, bionic noise, metal alchemy, noise electronics, anti-information and avant-garde radio, mail art, noise collage/exchange music, media attack, record destruction, ambient noise, and much more, delving into the work of keys artists and record labels from all over the world within the survey period, but also influential historical figures. Heavily illustrated throughout in black and white with record sleeves, posters, photographs, and finishes with Akita's compiled noise record list.
Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Noise War" is the most sought after of these very books.
Japanese text, fine copy with fine metallic endpapers, metallic illustrated hardcovers, and illustrated dust jacket. Tight with little-to-no wear.
1990, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 206 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$80.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of "Fetish Fashion", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1990, an in-depth exploration of the eroticisation and transformation of the body through fetish fashion that revolutionised the world of sexuality, from SM Bizarre, Transvestism, Rubber/latex, mistresses and dominatrixes, bondage clubs, male and female castration, restraints, piercing, the fascist artificial body, medical fetish/medical art (including Romain Slocombe), and much more, all subjects illustrated in b/w. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Fetish Fashion" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine illustrated dust jacket.
1992, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 140 pages, 26 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MIMA / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue edited by Adrian Martin and published in 1990 to accompany experimenta — A Major Survey of Film and Video Art, Melbourne, November 20—December 4, 1990, presented by Modern Image Makers Association Inc. (MIMA) and founded in 1988. Showcasing Australian video art, media art, installation and performance works.
Contents include: An introduction to Experimenta 1992 by Lizzette Atkins, Of Prisms and Tools: The Possibility of an Avant Garde by Vikki Riley, Australian Screenings, Introduction by Steven Ball, Opening Night, Signposts To The Imagination Re-animated; (re)constructing an art, Techknowledge, Dusan Marek's Cobweb On A Parachute — Essay by Arthur Cantrill, David Perry's The Refracting Glasses, Interview with David Perry, Passionate Uncertainty, Text and Textures, Engineering Memory: Views of History, Politics, Culture and Geography, Helical Scans: Diverse Ways of Seeing (Video) Programme 1 and 2, One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin, Sound and Image, Experience and The Other, The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, The Open 'Iron Curtain' and Post-Socialist Drama, Artists seen by artists, Die Mauer—The negative horizon, The Czech Avant Garde 1911-1941 essay by Jaroslav Andel, Programme 1, Programme 2, Video Programmes From 'New Europe' curated by Heiko DaxI, U.K., Intimate Imaginaries, Artist Screening: Michael Maziere, Slow Glass, U.S.A., Shalom Gorewitz-Experimental Television Center, New York, WAX, or the discovery of television among the bees, Flesh Histories, Programme 1, Programme 2, Japan, Emotional Wave: Image Network Japan, V.I.E.W., Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Interview with Shinya Tsukamoto, Performance: Introduction by Jeffrey Fereday, Artist statements, Installation: Introduction by Jennifer Phipps, Artist statements, Medienkunst—A survey of German, installation art— introduction by Heiko Daxl, Medienkunst-Artist statements, Special Events, Noisefest 2, Techno Garden, Century Endings - An Afternoon of Performance in the Great Hall, Seminars and Talks, Essays: Video As Art: Personal Observations From New York by Shalom Gorewitz, Some Thoughts on the German State of Things: Teaching Video by Ingo Petzke, An Attempt Toward The Anti-Oedipus-Japanese Video Art After The '80s by Junji Ito, Schedule of events, Artist index, Title index...
Includes the work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Arf Arf, Ian Haig, GANG, Jun Kurosawa, Warren Burt, Chris Mann, Anne Ferran, Sadie Benning, Michelle Handelman, Monte Cazazza, Pete Spence, Fiona MacDonald, Cyber Dada Manifesto, Dale Nason, Troy Innocent, Dusan Marek, Critical Art Ensemble, John Maybury, David Perrt, Steven Ball, Karel Hašler, Otakar Vávra, Jiří Lehovec, Michael Maziere, David Blair, Danny Fass, Joe Kelly, Shelly Silver, Laurens Tan, John Gillies, and many more.
VG copy light wear to extremities/DJ.
1991—1997, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 70 pages ea. approx x 9 issues, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Musicworks / Toronto
$80.00 - In stock -
Lot of 9 issues (1991—1997) of Musicworks, The Journal of Sound Exploration, published out of Toronto. Launched in January 1978 by Andrew Timar and John Oswald, best known for his plunderphonics, Musicworks was a long-running Canadian avant-garde music magazine devoted to experimental, improvised and Electroacoustic music. These issues together feature an abundance of exclusive interviews, essays, reviews, theoretical texts, scores, colloquies, artworks, features on and by Stan Brakhage, Chris Cutler, John Cage, Tibor Szemző, Pauline Oliveros, Trevor Wishart, Carolee Schneemann, Josef Režný, Jerry Hunt, Kazue Sawai, Glenn Branca, Yūji Takahashi, Tim Hodgkinson, Louis Andriessen, Glenn Gould, Harry Partch, Akio Suzuki, Fergus Kelly, Petr Kotik, Nicholas Gebhardt, Barbara Benary, Andrew Culver, Udo Kasemets, Franz Van Rossum, R.I.P. Hayman, Iva Bittová, Nobuo Kubota, David Rokeby, François Girard, J.S. Bach, Jocelyn Robert, Don Ritter, Glenn Gould, Paul Rapoport, and many more. Scarce and incredible resource for improvised and avant-garde compositional music/performance/video histories from this publisher and cassette label.
Good copy with with general light magazine wear.
1990, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 54 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MIMA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Scarce catalogue edited by Adrian Martin and published in 1990 to accompany experimenta — A Major Survey of Film and Video Art, Melbourne, November 20—December 4, 1990, presented by Modern Image Makers Association Inc. (MIMA) and founded in 1988. Showcasing Australian video art, media art, installation and performance works, this iteration also included programs of Lettrist Cinema and French Avant-Garde film from the 1980s. Illustrated throughout with information on all of the works, accompanied by essays: Adrian Martin – "The Adventures of Form", John Conomos – "Video as Moonlighting", Christian Lebrat – "The Lettrist Cinema of the 1950s", Vikki Riley – "The Picture Can't Get Any Louder", John Flaus – "In the Eye's Mind - Paul Winkler Retrospective.
Includes the work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Maria Kozic and Ian Haig, Peter Callas, Josko Petkovic, Edward Colless, Tona Keane, Arf Arf, Shelley Lasica, Peter Tyndall, Gerald Murnane, William Yang, John Nixon, Primary Source, Warren Burt, Chris Mann, Stelarc, Pete Spence, Philip Brophy, David Cox, Maurice Lemaitre, Frederique Devaux, Cyber Dada Manifesto, Dale Nason, Troy Innocent, Lydia Lunch, Foil, Swans, Einsturzende Neubauten, Butthole Surfers, Violinda, Steven Ball, and so many more...
VG copy light wear to extremities.
1987, Japanese
Softcover, 168 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.30 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France and Rockin’on magazine in Japan. SALE2 was active for about 14 years during the 1980s—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. With Orui's distinct design SALE2 developed an exclusive curated editorial set on ‘erotisism and its spiritual philosophy’, with each issue exploring different themes and features, heavy on fetishism and erotic art.
Issue No.30, the "Special Issue" features Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Richard Cerf, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Paul Wunderlich, Robert Maplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Man Ray, Lewis Carroll, John Willie, Bernard Montorgueil, Guido Crepax, Van Rod, Carlo, Betty Page, Tealdo, clippings from periodicals such as Amateur Bondage, Bondage Life, Bondage Fantasies, Bizarre Comix, Bizarre Classix, Bizarre Fotos, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy with tanning to pages.
1987, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 205 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
Dedicated to Samuel Beckett in honor of his eightieth birthday, the present book provides a focus on Beckett's later fiction and drama-his fiction since How It Is (1961) and his drama since Endgame (1957). Published here for the first time, the thirteen essays are characterized by originality of material and freshness of view-point. They will be especially helpful to the reader who is drawn to the recent work of one of the twentieth century's most important authors, but who feels the need of some help in coming to terms with it.
As testimony to Beckett's international reputation, the contributors are drawn from various parts of the English-speaking world, and include many of the leading Beckett scholars of the day.
VG—VG.