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
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
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.
1987, Japanese
Softcover, 168 pages, 13 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fiction Inc. / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of 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.
1976, Japanese
Hardcover, 88 pages, 26 x 23.7 cm
Ed. of 600,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
TB Design Institute / Japan
$450.00 - In stock -
Rare, first, limited edition printing of Gashō Yamamura's 1976 masterpiece, "Plants", for which he won the 1st Ina Nobuo Award in the same year. After Yamamura (b. Osaka, 1939—1987) began photographing plants in 1974, he published two incredible, largely unknown collections of his otherworldly botanical photo-studies before his sudden death by suicide in 1987 — “Plants” (1976) and “Botanical Planetarium” (1988). Yamamura's plant photography is like no-other. "Caught in stroboscopic light, the plants stiffen momentarily; they emerge as strange shapes not seen in natural light, rising up and towering high as if by desire." [...] "The perspective is different to how we usually see flower beds and plants; there are no downwards, surveying gazes. Instead, many of Yamamura’s photographs employ an upwards angle, taken in close vicinity to the plants, the way a bug would see them. Here, even the tenderest of flowers appear as bold, towering structures. With this insectuous, un-human perspective, Yamamura carves out the strange and unfamiliar hiding in everyday reality and questions a way of looking that turns its subjects into mere trivialities." [...] "The sights that Yamamura captured expose plants as strange entities that exist in indifference towards human life. At the same time, they let us imagine a world before the presence of human life, or perhaps the world after our disappearance from this earth."—Mika Kobayashi, photography researcher
Includes poetry by Yasuo Fujitomi.
Highly recommended, an absolute favourite.
Yamamura began photographing in high school, focusing mainly on the children in his neighborhood. In 1959, he turned his attention to Americans living in Washington Heights, a residential area in central Tokyo that housed soldiers and their families. His images of American children, shot through fences or wearing masks, convey not only a sense of sinister strangeness and distance, but also the stark economic differences between American and Japanese children immediately after the war. He began photographing plants in the mid-1970s and continued to do so until his suicide at age 47 in 1987.
Very Good–Near Fine copy, light cover wear. Limited edition of 600.
2003, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Atelier Peyotl / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
"Gothic" Special Feature Issue of cult Japanese underground magazine Yaso, published in 2003, edited by Yuichi Konno and Atelier Peyotl (publishers of Night Vision/Yaso/Peyotl/Wave/Silvester Club...). Heavily illustrated with texts in Japanese with in-depth profiles, interviews with and essays on Trevor Brown, Gottfried Helnwein, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, ero-manga master Keizo Miyanishi, influential Gothic Lolita illustrator Mitsukazu Mihara, Floria Sigismondi, Marilyn Manson, Alice Auaa, loads of "Modern Primitive" material (piercing, body modification, body performance, etc.), and much more...
Near Fine copy.
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.
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.
1970, Czech
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Odeon / Prague
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this major, long out-of-print hardcover monograph on Czech photographer Jaromír Funke, published by the great Prague publishing house Odeon in 1970. Profusely illustrated with 132 beautiful photo-gravure reproductions, includes some of the best known photographs from this important Czech photographer, presented alongside a text by Ludvik Soucek.
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a Czech photographer. Funke was a leading figure in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Although his earliest imagery was influenced by Pictorialism, Funke quickly turned to a more sharp-focus, documentary style. Abstract images of shadows and organic forms made in the early twenties evolved into more objective representations of objects by the end of the decade. In 1924 he cofounded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger. Two years later he produced a series of Surrealist images of store windows originally titled Glass and Reflection, based on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Also influential as a teacher, Funke served for several years as editor of the journal Fotograficky obzor (Photographic Horizons).
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some wear.
1982, Czech / English / French / German
Hardcvoer (w. dust jacket), 182 pages, 28 x 24.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Panorama / Prague
$120.00 - In stock -
First 1982 hardcover edition of this beautifully produced retrospective survey of legendary Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896 – 1976), famous for his haunting images photographs of Prague, where this volume was published by Panorama. Comprising almost entirely full-page reproductions of Sudek's wonderful photographs, introduced by an opening essay by biographer Zdeněk Kirschner and chaptered expanded caption sections on the works throughout with summary and resume in Czech, English, French and German.
Dubbed the "Poet of Prague," Josef Sudek became well known around the streets and concert halls of his city. A poor student, Sudek decided to become a bookbinder, receiving his certificate at age seventeen, while his younger sister became a photographer. At the same time Sudek began to experiment with a box camera and was particularly fond of self-portraits. During active service in World War I, he brought his camera to the front and subsequently produced three albums of photographs.
After the war Sudek turned his attention more fully to photography and became friendly with photographer Jaromir Funke, who introduced him to artists and intellectuals in Prague. In 1921 Sudek applied to the State School of Graphic Arts and soon after was admitted to the Bohemian Amateur Photography Association. After graduating, Sudek and Funke cofounded the Czech Photographic Society in 1924. From the beginning, Sudek met with great commercial success; he leased a studio in 1927 and prospered there for more than thirty years.
Fine copy in Fine DJ preserved under archival mylar wrap.
1960, Czech
Softcover, 126 pages, 17.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
SNKLU / Prague
$120.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and long out-of-print Jaromír Funke monograph, published in Prague in 1960 as part of the distinctive series of Czech monographs on photographers published by SNKLU, a wing of the great Odeon publishing house. With introductory text by theorist Lubomír Linhart, this beautifully printed book presents a selection of 96 of Funke's photographs printed in gorgeous gravure.
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a Czech photographer. Funke was a leading figure in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Although his earliest imagery was influenced by Pictorialism, Funke quickly turned to a more sharp-focus, documentary style. Abstract images of shadows and organic forms made in the early twenties evolved into more objective representations of objects by the end of the decade. In 1924 he cofounded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger. Two years later he produced a series of Surrealist images of store windows originally titled Glass and Reflection, based on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Also influential as a teacher, Funke served for several years as editor of the journal Fotograficky obzor (Photographic Horizons).
Very Good copy. Light edge wear and tanning.
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.
1994, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 32 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / Japan
$90.00 - In stock -
Lovely rare 1994 Japanese erotic photo book by photographer Seiichi Nomura of Japanese singer, actress and AV idol Natsuki Ozawa (b. 1972). Colour and monochrome heavy gloss imagery throughout of Ozawa at the age of 22 in various erotic poses and scenarios.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket + obi), 192 pages, 15 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$130.00 - Out of stock
First edition of one of the finest of Araki's photo books, dedicated entirely to his incredible Erotos series. Published as part of the Complete Works collection, in this work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes. A collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the body as well as various objects—pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone and bound in the original jacket and publisher's obi-strip (not pictured). One our favourite bodies of work by Araki.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.
Very Good in VG dust jacket and obi. Sample image.
1971, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 38 x 26.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shashin Hyoron-Sha / Tokyo
$350.00 - In stock -
First 1971 edition of Eikoh Hosoe's celebrated work "Embrace", published by Shashin Hyoronsha Publishing House. 6 years later it would be republished in the collection of Japanese photographers by Asahi Sonorama. This beautiful oversized original hardcover edition by legendary Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe, builds upon the approach of his much celebrated earlier project, Man and Woman (1961). Featuring a preface by Yukio Mishima, "Embrace" is a wonderful collection of photographs of human bodies studio shot in abstract detail using high exposure, Hosoe creating dramatic contrasts that emphasise the dynamism and physicality of these bodies that have become some of his most iconic images. Rich black and white gravure printing, a gorgeous book.
VG—NF copy in VG—NF dust jacket. This copy lacks the publisher's shipping box.
1995, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 200 pages, 27 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Scarce, first hardcover edition of this wonderful 1995 Araki photo album. From cover to cover this book is entirely comprised of Araki's date-stamped photographs taken in the year 1995, presented chronologically and in rich colour. Araki documents all his favourite subjects — women, nudes, flowers, still-lifes, Japanese city details and his beloved cat Chiro, all in amazing panoramic format. Robert Frank and Nan Goldin even make appearances. The landscape format of this hardcover book allows for the images to be grouped into selections of two per page (four per spread) or a glorious single shot spanning a spread, making a jam-packed collection of almost 400 photographs. One of his best collections.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket and obi-strip.
1993, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 23 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd. / Tokyo
$220.00 - In stock -
Never to be missed, the first 1993 over-sized hardcover edition of Araki's incredible Erotos photo book, our favourite of his books. In this provocative work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes, zooming his lens in on his evocative subjects. An exquisitely printed collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the human body, as well as pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone full-page bleed, bound in heavy gloss red, foiled hardcovers. A stunning book! Araki at his most surrealist. Highest recommendation.
Nobuyoshi Araki is a prolific Japanese photographer who has produced thousands of photographs over the course of his career. He became famous for “Un Voyage Sentimental” (1971), a series of photos depicting both banal and deeply intimate scenes of his wife and lifelong muse, essayist Aoki Yoko (whom the artist credits for making him a photographer), during their honeymoon. To date the 75 year old has produced 450 photo books and counting. With a repertoire that knows no boundaries, Araki's diaristic style of photography has captured the world around him (his cat Chiro, the people and landscapes of Japan and his travels, flowers, family), though it is Araki’s intensely sexual imagery that has elicited particular controversy and fascination throughout his career. Similarly to Helmut Newton, Araki has often addressed subversive themes — such as bondage in the Japanese style Kinbaku — in his provocative depictions of female nudes. He typically works in black-and-white photography, and his hallmark style is deliberately casual. “Rather than shooting something that looks like a professional photograph, I want my work to feel intimate, like someone in the subject’s inner circle shot them,” he says. Pushing against the world of commercialised photography, he is celebrated for his history of self-publishing and distributing his work, beginning with his Xerox Photo Albums of 1970. Amongst many others, Araki has collaborated with American photographer Nan Goldin and Icelandic musician Björk.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket with small amount of wear and tear.
1982, French
Softcover, 28 pages, 37.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Créatis / Paris
$50.00 - In stock -
Issue no. 18 of Créatis, June 1982, the wonderful French photographic art magazine published in Paris, founded in 1979 by Albert Champeau and Jean-Pierre Renard. This issue features Christer Strömholm, Joel-Peter Witkin, Alain Bergala, Jeff Silverthorne, Pierre Boucher, William Klein, Roland Barthes, and more.
Average—Good copy due to gloss laminate covers peeling to edges, some pinching to spine, tanning to edges.
1982, French
Softcover, 50 pages, 37.5 x 28.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Créatis / Paris
$40.00 - In stock -
Special double issue (19 & 20) of Créatis, Autumn/Winter 1982, the wonderful French photographic art magazine published in Paris, founded in 1979 by Albert Champeau and Jean-Pierre Renard. This issue features Irina Ionesco, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Dieuzaide, Stefan de Jaeger, Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, Corinne Bronfman, Edgar Degas, Douglas Crimp, Raúl Beceyro, Charles Gatewood, Didier Gaillard, Lynn Davis, and more.
Average copy due to gloss laminate covers peeling to edges and resultant tanning, some pinching to spine, tanning to edges.
1994, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$35.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good—VG copy with common rippling of laminate separation to gloss boards, light handling wear. Sample image only.
1999, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 18.5 x 18.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charta / Milan
$100.00 - Out of stock
The great Propo artist's book by Paul McCarthy, published by Charta in 1999. Comprised entirely of photos of everyday objects, soiled, dirtied and ruined, shot against colourful backdrops that contrast with the mysterious nature of the decontextualized objects. Children's toys, condiment bottles, latex masks, dolls ... these objects are in fact props from McCarthy's legendary performances, and their visual inventory here reads like a book of modernity's detritus. A photo book document of residual sculptural objects of performance. One of his best books, like no other!
Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, Paul McCarthy has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area since 1970. Originally formally trained as a painter, McCarthy's main interest lies in everyday activities and the mess created by them. Much of his work in the late 1960s, such as Mountain Bowling (1969) and Hold an Apple in Your Armpit (1970), are similar to the work of Happenings founder Allan Kaprow, with whom McCarthy had a professional relationship. From 1982 to 2002 he taught performance, video, installation, and performance art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. McCarthy currently works mainly in video and sculpture. His work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe and the U.S. including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Very Good copy with only light wear.
1970/1971, French
Softcover, 2 volumes, unpaginated, 28.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Marie Concorde / Paris
$320.00 - In stock -
Both of the only volumes ever produced of this wonderful French avant-garde journal, published in Paris at the beginning of the 1970s. A visual manifesto against the prudishness of the times, KITSCH presented hundreds of illustrations of mostly erotic, fetish and fantastic/grotesque artwork by artists from all over the world, and spanning generations, with both issues wrapped in the most striking Tom Wesselmann covers. KITSCH 1 includes Toshio Saeki, Guido Crepax, Richard Linder, Robert Crumb, Guy Bourdin, Petr Herel, Hannes Jahn, Roman Cieślewicz, Ben Vautier, Christian Bour, Jacques Sternberg, Roland Topor, Jim, Allen Jones, Thomas Weir, alongside photo essays on upskirt polaroids, Satanik, Diabolik, fashion and more. KITSCH 2 includes Aslan, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Finlay, Jim Osborne, Ronald Lipking, Greg Irons, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Mel Ramos, alongside photo essays on subjects such as "Pop Art", "Human Concern" and Paris' "Pigalle" district, further featuring work by H.C.Westermann, Paul Thek, Edward Keinholz, William Tunberg, Christian Schad, William Weegee, James Rosenquist, Frank Gallo, Tom Wesselmann, and many more.
Very good copies both, light wear.
1972, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. french folds and fold-out spreads), 160 pages, 22.8 x 29.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ad Angen / Japan
$100.00 - Out of stock
First 1972 edition of this erotic anthology from three important and provocative Japanese photographers from the time they were creating their most inspired work. Tatsuki is famous for his books Eves, Private (Mariko Kaga) and Girl (from the famous Chuo Koronsha series). Kanoh is famous for his books Shunga and the banned Fuck. Ichimura is famous for Salome and Come Up. All of these seminal works in Japanese photography were published in 1970 or 1971, as was this book, a collection that includes moments from some of the aforementioned works. The title indicates the uniting theme of the book - couples (and groups) in erotic scenes. Experts of the nude, the invited photographers here express Ukiyo-e's spring paintings through their own photographic visions of sexuality. Saturated and hypnotic, these psychedelic and dreamlike collections are joyous and occasionally confronting, surrealistic and occasionally grotesque, all vividly reproduced throughout with many gate-fold spreads. A great book.
Very Good copy.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 27 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Beautiful Japanese photobook by famed Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama, published in 1995. This entire photographic collection is dedicated to Shinoyama's photographs of his friend, Japanese actress and model Aki Mizusawa (1954-) spanning 1975‐1995.
“It is extremely rare for a photographer to be able to shoot a single subject; one woman continuously for twenty years. Now, seeing all those images - as fleeting and instantaneous then as the magazines that carried them - revived and bound together gives that particular history a closure that weighs like marble. This book captures the twenty year photogenic evolution of a wonderful friend and subject, Aki Mizusawa."—Kishin Shinoyama
Kishin Shinoyama was born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan. He embarked on his career while studying in the Department of Photography at Nippon University, and was awarded the Advertising Photographer’s Association prize, among others. After being employed at the Light Publicity advertising company, he started to work as a freelance photographer in 1968. His work is acclaimed for the portraits of the most famous celebrities of our day and age, such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rie Miyazawa, and other major personalities. In his “Gekisha” and “Shinorama” series, he carries on capturing the times using new forms of expression and new technologies. He is also an exponent of solarization and has used it to challenge preconceived ideas of beauty and the nude.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket.
2002, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arena Editions / New Mexico
$280.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the beautiful Carlo Mollino Polaroids book, published in 2002 by Arena Editions. Now highly collectable, Carlo Mollino Polaroids is the first published book of the famed Italian designer's "decadent and hermetic" erotic photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. This book represented the first comprehensive look at these polaroids, exquisitely reproducing over 250 examples collected within a lovely gilt, photo-inlayed cloth hardcover.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy!