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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 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.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, 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.
2023, English
Softcover, 284 pages, 23.5 x 15.7 cm
Published by
Routledge / London
$90.00 - In stock -
This is a timely update of a seminal text which re-interprets key films of the horror genre, including Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood and Psycho.
In the first edition, Creed draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to challenge the popular view that women in horror are almost always victims, and argues that patriarchal ideology constructs women as monstrous in relation to her sexuality and reproductive body to justify her subjugation. Although a projection of male fears and paranoid fantasies, the monstrous-feminine is nonetheless a terrifying figure. Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror.
This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. Creed proposes a new concept of radical abjection to reinterpret the monstrous-feminine as a figure who embraces abjection by reclaiming her body and re-defining her otherness as nonhuman – while questioning patriarchy, anthropocentrism, misogyny and the meaning of the human. Films discussed include Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Atlantics, The Girl with All the Gifts, Border and Titane.
Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever and this edition will be of interest to academics and students of feminist theory, nonhuman theory, critical animal studies, race, and queer theory.
Barbara Creed is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of seven books, including Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema (2009); and Stray: Human- Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017). She is the director of the Human Rights and Animal Ethics Research Network (HRAE). She has been on the boards of Writers Week, the Melbourne International Film Festival and the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
2014, English / Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), various pagination, 28.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Lot of six copies of the amazing printed collaboration between Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons and Raw Vision, the world's foremost magazine on Outsider Art, Art Brut, and Contemporary Folk Art, founded by John Maizels in 1989. Issued as mail-outs privately by Comme to announce the arrival of their 2014 Spring—Summer and 2014—2015 Autumn—Winter collection, and not commercially available, these gorgeous, elaborate leaflets designed by CDG showcase the diverse array of artists featured in Raw Vision magazine alongside Comme photographs by Kosuke Okahara commissioned by Rei Kawakubo to document the 2013 Paris Fashion Week, Fall / Winter collection, photographs by Hiromi Nagakura, Daisuke ITO, and Andrew Houston in a series of graphic collages, with many fold-out spreads. Near Fine, preserved copies of six volumes (issued separately), now very scarce. Artists throughout include Pavel Leonov, Daniel Johnston, Maura Holden, Joe Gatta, Malcolm McKesson, William Hawkins, Joe Coleman, Renaldo Kuhler, Freddie Brice, Anne Grgich, Ken Grimes, and many more.
Near Fine all.
1991, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jakcet + obi-strip), 190 pages, 14.5 x 10.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Futami Shobo / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Amazing pocket art book of Bizarre Bondage Fashion, edited by Makoto Ohrui and Japanese novelist Mari Akasaka (both editors of SALE2/Fiction Inc.) and published in Tokyo Japan by Futami Shobo in 1991. Packed cover-to-cover with colour and b/w reproductions of classic artworks by John Willie, Irving Klaw, ENEG, Carlo, Jim, Eric Stanton, E.K., Ruis, Betty Page, and many more garnered from the underground bounty of European and American Fetish and Bizarre publications. Perfectly compiled in the way SALE2 did so well, with elegant scrapbook style, dense with imagery, blown-up, full-bleed reproductions from many publications. Includes a multi-panel double-sided pull-out by John Willie.
Makoto Ohrui founded the publishing house Fiction Inc. (later Radical Silence Production), the magazine SALE2, the gallery THE deep in Tokyo, and the magazine THE International. Ohrui was art director for SALE2, Purple, Rockin' On, and designed many books.
Mari Akasaka (b. 1964) is a Japanese novelist. In 1999 her novel Vibrator was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, which was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Ryūichi Hiroki. She was again nominated for the Akutagawa prize in 2000 for her novel, Muse, and won the Noma Literary Prize for New Writers for the same novel.
Very Good copy.
Makoto Ohrui founded the publishing house Fiction Inc. (later Radical Silence Production), the magazine SALE2, the gallery THE deep in Tokyo, and the magazine THE International. Ohrui was art director for SALE2, Purple, Rockin' On, and designed many books
Very Good copy.
1998, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Futami Shobo / Japan
$100.00 - Out of stock
Rare first hardcover edition of this book collection of artwork by legendary fetish artist and publisher John Willie, compiled by SALE2/Fiction Inc. editor Makoto Ohrui and Ayumu Funatsu and published in Tokyo Japan by Futami Shobo in 1998. Packed cover-to-cover with colour and b/w reproductions of classic artworks by Willie and his famed Bizarre publications, John Willie's bondage photography, Bizarre fetish fashion illustrations and paintings, alongside his letters and writings translated into Japanese.
John Alexander Scott Coutts (1902—1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was an artist, fetish photographer, editor and the publisher of the first 20 issues of the fetish magazine Bizarre, featuring his characters Sweet Gwendoline and Sir Dystic d'Arcy.
Makoto Ohrui founded the publishing house Fiction Inc. (later Radical Silence Production), the magazine SALE2, the gallery THE deep in Tokyo, and the magazine THE International. Ohrui was art director for SALE2, Purple, Rockin' On, and designed many books.
Very Good copy.
1992, Japanese
Softcover, 192 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.42 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.42, the "Transformation" issue features collected writings and images around the themes of body transformation, transsexuality, including Pierre Molinier, Mari Akasaka, Kyoko Okazaki, Toyen, Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, Henri Maccheroni, Robert Chouraqui, Greybuck's The Equestrians illustrations, Sophia Lamar, plus loads of other images/catalogues of bondage and fetish related arts, and much more...
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
Very Good copy with tanning to pages.
1986, Japanese
Softcover, 160 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.28 of the great SALE2 periodical from Tokyo Japan, founded in 1984 by Makoto Orui, who later became art director for Purple magazine in France, published regularly as a sort-of fanzine/journal/catalogue/pocket-book by Fiction, Inc., a specialty bookshop and publisher of fetish and erotica in Tokyo in the 1980—90s. Each issue covers different themes and features, heavy on fetishism.
Issue No.28, the "Fetishism" issue features collected writings and images around the theme of fetish by John Willie, Bizarre Magazine, Pierre Molinier, Irina Ionesco, Bernard Faucon (his incredible Summer Camp series), Irwing Klaw, Centurians Publishing Inc. bondage catalogues, Andy Warhol and much more... What's more, this issue comes complete with a green synthetic feather to kickstart your own sensual adventures.
Very heavily illustrated throughout with erotic photography and artwork, all texts in Japanese.
2010, English
Hardcover, 400 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Les Presses Du Reel / Paris
Mennour / Paris
$150.00 - In stock -
The Molinier bible! A mammoth, crucial 400 page book on the method and genesis of Pierre Molinier's provocative, gender-bending photos and artwork. Beautifully printed and prodigiously illustrated with over 800 pictures, mostly unpublished, numerous documents, manuscripts and letters, a complete (nearly 100-page) chronology, a critical biography, and a text by Jean-Luc Mercié.Molinier. Essential publication on Molinier, the most comprehensive to date, and a must for any fan.
Rare English edition translated from the French by Edward Penwarden.
Pierre Molinier is an unknown of worldwide renown. Every book and every exhibition on the body, gender confusion or sexual excess seems to feature at least one work by this artist whose “genius” was acclaimed by André Breton in a memorable text published in 1956. But the bulk of his work has remained inaccessible. A number of pictures have never been shown and a corpus of only 160 prints has been published. The ensemble revealed by the artist's archives is much more extensive. It includes numerous proofs made to prepare his photomontages and working prints given to friends, but also notebooks and personal letters. Here, precise links emerge between his paintings, photographs and scandalous life. The myth carefully constructed by the artist begins to crumble before the reality of the work.
An inveterate seducer, thoroughgoing fetishist, unrepentant transvestite and inadvertent bisexual, to the very last Molinier remained haunted by two obsessions: pleasure, meaning immediate access to la petite mort, and “leaving a trace in the infinity of time.” This book charts the aesthetic incarnation of his passions. Its 819 photographs, most of them never published before, reveal the method, shed light on the procedures and give details of the origin and alchemy of his latent or composed images. Finally, an exhaustive chronology offers a new biography of Molinier, based on his letters: for it is in the intimacy of these writings that the shaman's heart beats closest to the truth.
In a career shared between the university (fifteen years) and publishing (twenty) Jean-Luc Mercié has written widely on painting and photography. This monograph is his fourth book about Pierre Molinier, the master from Bordeaux.
Born 1900 in Agen (France), Pierre Molinier, surrealistic painter and photographer, a precursor to body art, died in 1976 after having thought out radical and pornographic artwork.
2023, English / Dutch
Softcover, 512 pages, 21 × 29.7 cm
Published by
Nai010 Publishers / Rotterdam
$160.00 - In stock -
A comprehensive volume on the influential Dutch gallery that united American and European conceptualism For more than 33 years, the Amsterdam gallery Art & Project (1968-2001) played a pivotal role in the development of contemporary art within the Netherlands and beyond. Founders Adriaan van Ravesteijn (1938-2015) and Geert van Beijeren (1933-2005) presented a pioneering program of work by both national and international artists, including Marinus Boezem, Stanley Brouwn, Jan Dibbets, Charlotte Posenenske, Gilbert & George, Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt, among many others. The cofounders published a total of 156 bulletins to draw attention to their exhibitions, and the bulletins quickly evolved into an experimental medium—from carriers of conceptual artists' ideas to conceptual artworks themselves.
Art & Project: A History examines the gallery's exhibitions, bulletins, social networks and international legacy. Replete with extensive research and previously unpublished visual material, this massive book provides an indispensable overview of the history of conceptual art in the Netherlands.
Text by Jip Hinten, Isabelle Bisseling, Ton Geerts, Regine Ehleither.
Already out-of-print at source.
1999, English / Japanese
Softcover, unpaginated, 11.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Little More / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful pocket journal photo book published in 1999 by Tokyo's Little More books, documenting the 1998 and 1999 Paris fashion weeks through the travels and relationships of Nakako Hayashi, artist and editor of the great Here and There journal and fashion and art contributor to Purple, Hanatsubaki, Ryu-ko-tsu-shin, and more. Naturally, this publication has all the feeling of Here and There and early issues of Purple, and includes many of the key contributors to those magazines — all friends of Hayashi's, plus documentation of the long lost galleries and hot-spots of Paris, London, and Japan — Colette, Purple Institute, The Pineal Eye, The Deep Gallery, Purple Cafe... An excellent time-capsule of 1990's anti-fashion world at its peak. Includes a sticker sheet of Susan Cianciolo's Run7 collection!
Contributions and documentation of work by Susan Cianciolo, Mark Borthwick, BLESS, Elein Fleiss, Comme des Garçons, Maison Martin Margiela, A.F. Vandevorst, Veronique Branquinho, Jerome Dreyfuss, Gaspard Yurkievich, Junya Watanabe, Martine Sitbon, Colette, Purple, Takashi Homma, Mike Mills, Olivier Theyskens, Andre Walker, Jeremy Scott, Niels Klavers, Dick Page, and more.
Texts in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy.
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and original plastic wrap), 80 pages, 22.8 x 16.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakutokan / Japan
$100.00 - In stock -
First edition of The World of Pierre Molinier, published in 1989 in Japan. An exquisite book of Molinier's fetishistic gender-bending paintings, photomontages, and drawings, fittingly wrapped in "stocking" dust jacket, with texts by André Breton, translated from French to Japanese by Kosaku Ikuta, imagery from "Molinier" (1966) film by Raymond Borde, beautifully designed and printed in Japan where Molinier's artworks had a particular resonance.
Pierre Molinier (1900—1976) was a French painter, photographer and a forerunner of gender performance art and Body Art (Art corporel). Molinier spent much of his artistic life working in isolation in Bordeaux, exiled from local and national art scenes. Born in Agen, nothing had predestined Molinier to a life as an artist. Self-taught, from a working-class background, he followed in his father’s footsteps and started out as a house painter. He got married and had two children. Tired of his infidelities and provocative behaviour, his wife left their marital home an in 1950 and Molinier begun photographing himself seriously, staging his own death and erecting a fake gravestone proudly declaring himself ‘a man without morals’. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants as early as 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, Le Grand Combat. Stirring up an obsessive correspondence with the anarchic poet-founder of Surrealism, André Breton, Molinier was soon integrated into the Surrealist group with a solo exhibition at Breton’s Paris gallery in 1956. Molinier’s anti-moral project appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In 1959, he exhibited at the Exposition International du Surrealism in Paris. From the mid-1960s Molinier chronicled the exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in "Cent Photographies Erotiques": graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. Cut-up, reassembled, and manipulated, Molinier painstakingly created elaborate and sensual photomontages in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings. Either alone with doll-like mannequins or with female models such as German sadomasochist Hanel Koeck, Molinier, who considered himself fundamentally androgynous, appears as a transvestite, employing his body and that of his acquaintances to create visions of hybrid identity, where stockinged multi-limbed, multi-sexed beings imitate pagan figures, Hindu gods, and Masonic symbols, in a rejection of a Christian tradition which he argued, had repressed androgyny. Designed to shock, Molinier’s artwork represented a very intimate disclosure about his own sexual ambiguity, inviting the viewer to bring to the images his or her own response of excitement or disgust. The degree of his artistic perversity and blasphemous tendencies was deemed too much for the French cultural elite, and the man Breton dubbed the “magician of erotic art” was shunned from the art world. Molinier did not participate in the 1965 International Surrealist Exhibition. For the last 11 years of his life Molinier played out his own most profound moments in the 'theatre' of his Bordeaux 'boudoir – atelier'. He committed suicide in 1976, shooting himself with a pistol, something he had foreshadowed in his artwork, time and again. Essentially a leg fetishist, but also considering himself as a shaman, facetious and provocative, anti-bourgeois and anti-religious, Molinier enjoyed transgressing gender identification : his outstanding photographs greatly influenced the European and North American Body Art in the 1970s and continue to fascinate artists today.
Very Good copy in original plastic jacket.
1990, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 29.7 x 24.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
$250.00 - Out of stock
Rare, first hardcover bi-lingual (English and German) edition of this long out-of-print, comprehensive book on Sigmar Polke's work with photography, published by Editions Cantz to accompany the exhibition at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 1990. This handsome book exhaustively compiles the jubilant and almost cheeky relationship that the German artist had with the photographic medium during his career. Photography is just a starting point for Polke. He alters his imagery—much of it derived from his travels in Asia and South America—in every way imaginable. He hand colours some of his photographs; others he mutilates. Some are the result of darkroom experimentation with light and\or chemistry. His work is wide ranging and often fascinating, and page by page the many photographic genres and experiments usual to Polke's practice reveal themselves, creating a body of work partly family album, partly road movie. The book also insists on the important place the chemical and photographic experiments held in the painter's practice. Includes stunning installation views, a major essay, printed in both English and German, by critic Bice Curiger. A key publication on the photographic practice of Polke and a treasure trove archive of rare images! Includes exhibition checklist, biography, and exhibition history.
VG—Near Fine copy in VG—NF dust jacket preserved under mylar wrap.
2012, English
Hardcvoer (clothbound), 72 pages, 27 x 21 cm
Published by
M.33 / Melbourne
$55.00 - In stock -
Leading Australian photo-artist Jane Burton's Other Stories captures her arcane sense of mood and atmosphere to stunning effect. Other Stories is a collection of photographs that are intended to be experienced as a series of loose associations rather than determined narratives. Structured with five chapters like a fairy-tale collection, each series is toned in a different colour – reminiscent of old photographic processes and hand-colouring techniques. The atmosphere common to all the stories is cinematic and dreamlike. Saturated with colour (peach-sepia, red, viridian green, lavender, and blue), each has its own emotional pitch and temperature; the ‘story’ is non-linear, non-literal, falling instead between remembrance, hallucination, and fantasy.
Whether depicting a figure, landscape, interior, or object, the photographs are imbued with a weight of meaning and emotional intensity. The landscapes are rendered as symbolic and psychological – places imagined, felt, remembered, rather than actual or specific. The female figure depicted, a character that moves through the stories, an animating presence, more ghost than definitive persona.
Text by Ingrid Perez.
2023, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 29.5 x 22 cm
Published by
Perimeter Editions / Melbourne
MUMA / Victoria
UNSW Press / Sydney
$55.00 - In stock -
Many species, besides us humans, have developed a notion of love; that absolute beast of biology – love – has filled our brains with delight and sorrow and it has become our most inspirational addition to the line of consciousness. Love is so diverse, complex and complicated to us that it functions more like the air in the array of a storm than a simplistic cause-and-effect response. – Paul Knight
Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre is the first monograph dedicated to Australian-born and Berlin-based artist Paul Knight, co-published by Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, and Perimeter Editions. The publication accompanies his first survey exhibition, co-commissioned by MUMA and UNSW Galleries.
For more than two decades, Knight has taken intimacy as his subject, considering its relationship to representation and the social designs that underpin its expression. This has led him, via an interest in science, to the potential role that intimacy plays in consciousness as an evolutionary line. Knight’s ongoing photographic project, Chamber Music, records the life he shares with his partner Peter. Since their meeting in 2009, the series has accumulated hundreds of glimpses into the domestic space of their relationship, with its images created through varying degrees of pre-meditation and chance; often the camera timer is set so that it simply captures what it sees. The photographs test the ability of this machine – the camera – and the prints it produces to capture and contain intimacy. The images hold human love, which Knight proposes might be our only positive legacy in a future in which machine intelligence carries on, bearing the mark of its creators, beyond humanity itself.
Paul Knight: L’ombre de ton ombre features an extensive selection of photographs from Chamber Music and details the algorithmic working methods of the textile and machine learning works that Knight has developed for the exhibition. It brings artistic and scientific perspectives into conversation with his evolving practice, inviting contributions from: Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Anthony Gardner, who situates Knight’s practice within histories of contemporary art and of queer visibility; theoretical astrophysicist and Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ontario, Dr Katie Mack, who responds with a poetic evocation of the cosmic timescales that underpin Knight’s thinking; and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva, who reflects on machine learning in the context of human consciousness. The publication will be launched at the exhibition opening at MUMA on 7 October 2023.
MUMA (Melbourne) x UNSW Galleries (Sydney) x Perimeter Editions (Melbourne).
2024, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 27.2 x 20 cm
Published by
Brooklyn Museum / Brooklyn
Phaidon / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
The first publication dedicated to artists' zines in North America, a revelatory exploration of an unexamined but thriving aesthetic practice
Copy Machine Manifestos captures the rich history of artists' zines as never before, placing them in the lineage of the visual arts and exploring their vibrant growth over the past five decades. Fully illustrated with hundreds of zine covers and interiors, alongside work in other media, such as painting, photography, film, video, and performance, the book also features brief biographies for more than 100 zine-makers including Beverly Buchanan, Mark Gonzales, G.B. Jones, Miranda July, Bruce LaBruce, Terence Koh, LTTR, Ari Marcopoulos, Mark Morrisroe, Raymond Pettibon, Brontez Purnell, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Kandis Williams. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, this expansive book, bound as a paperback with a separate jacket, focuses on zines from North America, celebrating how artists have harnessed the medium's essential role in community building and transforming material and conceptual approaches to making art across all media since 1970.
1984, Japanese / French / English
Softcover (w. exhibition ticket), 80 pages, 31 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PPS Telecommunications Company / Tokyo
$180.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful out-of-print over-sized Japanese Sarah Moon exhibition catalogue published in 1984 by Pacific Press Service, at the Photographic Society of Japan for an exhibition at Printemps Ginza in Tokyo. Profusely illustrated throughout in colour with the French photographer's works for fashion, editorial and advertising, as well her personal works, including her iconic work for Comme des Garçons, Cacharel, Vogue, Nova, Harper's Bazaar, Olympus and more. Includes texts by French critic Alain Jouffroy and Robert L. Kirschenbaum, and texts and interviews with the photographer herself, as well as an index of images, biography, and portraits of Moon.
This copy includes illustrated exhibition ticket stub, laid in.
Sarah Moon is a photographer born in 1941 in Vichy, France. Her Jewish family was forced to leave occupied France for England. As a teenager she studied drawing before working as a model in London and Paris (1960–1966) under the name Marielle Hadengue. She also became interested in photography, taking shots of her model colleagues. In 1970, she finally decided to spend all her time on photography rather than modelling, adopting Sarah Moon as her new name. In 1972, she shot the Pirelli calendar, the first woman to do so. After working for a long time with Cacharel, her reputation grew and she also received commissions from Chanel, Dior, Comme des Garçons and Vogue. In 1985, Moon moved into gallery and film work.
Very Good copy. Foxing stain to inside of front cover only.
1980, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 21.5 x 15.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daisan Shokan / Tokyo
$590.00 - In stock -
Incredibly rare and collectible 1980 first edition of the visually explosive cult photo book on the Japanese motorcycle gang phenomenon of the 1970s, "The Bosozoqu", designed by editor Hideki Kimura, with photography by Seiji Kurata ("Flash Up"), Muji Moriya, Ryosuke Kagiwada, Yuichi Nagata, and others. Published by Daisan Shokan, this has to be the most incredible book of this wild period of 1970's teenage biker gang subculture and runaway tribes. It's all packed in here — the gangs, the gatherings, the adrenaline, the drama, the style — right down to the gang insignia, flags, tattoos, jackets, graffiti, weapons, haircuts, fashions, altercations — compiled here in this maniac design of Kimura's that matches the violent nature of the culture. Cover-to-cover full-bleed, high contrast collage photo scrapbook style, with loads of airbrushed graphics and insane type-design. An art book as much as it is a photo book, and a book like no other. Much like Araki's Tokyo Lucky Hole, The Bosozoqu documents an incredible fleeting moment in Japanese street culture that has long disappeared to history. A must have classic of the Bōsōzoku photo book genre!
Very Good copy in Good original dust jacket. Some light wear, foxing and ripple to back few pages/back cover (hidden beneath dust jacket which is now preserved in mylar wrap). Otherwise a sharp, tight, internally clean copy. Includes all original publisher's inserts in place.
1979, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 124 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daisan Shokan / Tokyo
$290.00 - In stock -
Incredibly rare and collectible 1979 first edition of the amazing "One Night Carnival", one of the finest cult photo books of Japanese motorcycle gangs of the 1970s (Bōsōzoku). Published by Daisan Shokan, this stylishly designed book is packed cover—to—cover with 100s of immersive photographs by Fumiaki Fukada, Yuji Moriya, Kazutoshi Sumitomo, and Mutsuhito Fujio of this explosive period of teenage biker gang subculture and runaway tribes — the gatherings, the adrenaline, the drama, the style — right down to the gang insignia, flags, tattoos, jackets, weapons, haircuts... Especially great about the book is the heavy focus in the many biker girl gangs. All captured in high contrast, One Night Carnival, much like Araki's Tokyo Lucky Hole, documents an incredible fleeting moment in Japanese street culture that has long disappeared to history. A classic of the Bōsōzoku photo book genre that will appeal to any fan of Seiji Kurata.
Very Good copy in VG original dust jacket, light wear. Some old foxing to cover boards (hidden beneath dust jacket which is now preserved in mylar wrap). Light handling.
1983, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. original plastic cover and obi band), 138 pages, 22 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
$180.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of this compelling early 1980's photo book of violence and disaffection in American cities from Japanese photographer Shigemoto Nobi, printed by Asahi Shimbun in 1983.
Images of social unrest, gang warfare, prostitution, police precinct lockups, murder... the "poverty of the heart" real people must face behind the facade of America's boasted wealth of economic growth, something Japanese photographer Shigemoto Nobi (b. 1943) first encountered when he went to New York in his twenties to work as a freelance commercial photographer. Despite the implications of the title, Shigemoto Nobi visited and documented not only New York, but also Detroit, Chicago, Hawaii, the US/Mexican border and the Fort Apache Indian reservation, taking images primarily at night. Intense, lurid reportage on life in the United States of America in rich, saturated colour Kodochrome. File alongside Kiyotaka Tsurisaki, Seiji Kurata, or Bruce Davidson's "Subway".
First printing in original protective plastic sleeve with original obi band. Texts in Japanese and English.
Very Good copy with usual light damage/shrinkage to aged original plastic dust jacket cover/obi. Light edge wear.
1981, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), unpaginated, 25.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shinko Music Publishing / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
Rare original Japanese edition of the cult cat classic photo book and 1980's phenomenon, Namennayo Cats, published in 1981 by Shinko Music Publishing. The illustrated photo album of the delinquent Namennayo Cats in their youth, dressed up in leathers, smoking cigarettes, hanging at the catnip coffee shop and the pinball arcade, graffitiing the school, playing in a rock band, as members in bōsōzoku biker gangs, all photographed by Satoro Tsuda and styled by a host of collaborators, set in elaborate miniature scenes with kitten scale props and ever-changing costumes. Tsuda fell in love with cats when he took four abandoned kittens into his care in 1979. "One day, almost two months since they met, Tsuda noticed the kittens playing with costumes for dolls left behind by his girlfriend." The rest is history. Practically overnight the "obliged" Namennayo Cats became mega idols in Japan, and this book an international treasure of Cat Photo humour.
Very Good copy of the original Japanese edition in dust jacket with light wear, preserved under mylar wrap..
1981, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 25.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shinko Music Publishing / Tokyo
Jonathan Music / Sydney
$160.00 - In stock -
Super rare English edition of the cult cat classic photo book and 1980's phenomenon, Namennayo Cats, published in 1981 by Shinko Music Publishing, Tokyo, and this very rare English translation by Jonathan Music, North Sydney. The illustrated photo album of the delinquent Namennayo Cats in their youth, dressed up in leathers, smoking cigarettes, hanging at the catnip coffee shop and the pinball arcade, graffitiing the school, playing in a rock band, as members in bōsōzoku biker gangs, all photographed by Satoro Tsuda and styled by a host of collaborators, set in elaborate miniature scenes with kitten scale props and ever-changing costumes. Tsuda fell in love with cats when he took four abandoned kittens into his care in 1979. "One day, almost two months since they met, Tsuda noticed the kittens playing with costumes for dolls left behind by his girlfriend." The rest is history. Practically overnight the "obliged" Namennayo Cats became mega idols in Japan, and this book an international treasure of Cat Photo humour.
Very Good copy of the especially collectible English edition, with only light cover wear/tanning.
1986, German
Softcover, 360 pages, 27.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Edition Cantz / Stuttgart
Württenbergischer Kunstverein / Stuttgart
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1986 edition of this huge survey of German artists, Künstler in Deutschland 1900-1945. Individualismus und Tradition, published by Edition Cantz and Württenbergischer Kunstverein. Profusely illustrated with the work of Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Dexel, Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Belling, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Ludwig Meidner, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Franz Radziwill, Christian Schad, Josef Scharl, Otto Pankok, Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Hans Hartung, Emil Nolde, Hans Uhlmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Winter, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Otto Mueller, Willi Baumeister, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Hölzel, August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee. Texts in German by Tilman Osterwold, Jens Christian Jensen, Andreas Vowinckel, plus biographies and catalogue.
Good copy with wear to cover edges and spine.
1985, German
Softcover, 736 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Nationalgalerie / Berlin
$40.00 - In stock -
Enormous 700+ page volume about "Art in the Federal Republic of Germany 1945—1985", published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, September 27, 1985—January 21, 1986. Profusely illustrated in colour with many works by Vostell, Baselitz, Beuys, Polke, Richter, Palermo, Klapheck, Darboven, Schultze, Uecker, Horn, Lüpertz, Haacke, Ruthenbeck, Antes, the Bechers, Rinke, Gerz, Erhard Walther, Penck, Knowles, Higgins, June Paik, Maciunas, Christiansen, Filliou, Brecht, Kriwet, Roth, Ulrichs, and many more, accompanied by texts in German, bibliography and index.
Good copy, some rubbing to the cover boards, light wear, bumping with age/size.
2023, Japanese
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Ribonsha / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Photo book of works by Japanese avant-garde artist and writer, Genpei Akasegawa (1937—2014), refreshing his legacy as an artist who pioneered ways of thinking about art under capitalism that still feel like trenchant critiques decades later.
Genpei Akasegawa was not only an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the broader realm of popular culture but also an award-winning writer and photographer. He emerged in the Japanese art scene in the 1960s. Best known internationally as a member of the influential, anti-art collective Hi-Red Center (1963–64), Genpei Akasegawa is one of the all-time trickster figures of Japanese art history. The famous Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, solidified his reputation as an inspired conceptualist. In 1986, Akasegawa, and his collaborators, including the Japanese architect Terunobu Fujimori, formed a new group called the Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai (Street Observation Society). Within this group, Akasegawa showcased a series of photographs featuring Tokyo's bizarre and overlooked architectural features. These structures, referred to by Akasegawa as 'Thommasons', were often disregarded by society but were repurposed by Akasegawa as objects of artistic value.
Keiko Toyoda, of Shiseido Gallery, invited six midcareer artists to select photographs from 40,000 unexhibited 35mm reversal film prints, shot between 1985 and 2006, which Akasegawa kept carefully filed in his study. Shuta Hasunuma, Zon Ito, Sachiko Kazama, Yuko Mohri, Yuta Nakamura and Yasuhiro Suzuki each chose around 20 prints each, presented in this first survey book of Akasegawa's photography, from his ‘Hyperart Thomasson’ project of the 1970s onward: photographs of functionless objects embedded and preserved in everyday spaces despite their lack of utility, to capturing everything from odd lines scored into a patch of green asphalt to table settings and cat portraits (in pre-meme-era 1993).
In addition to his artistic work, Akasegawa was also a prolific writer and critic, having authored over 20 publications on art and culture.
1992, French / Italian
Softcover (staple bound), 12 pages, 28.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Charta / Milan
Mois de La Photo / Paris
$80.00 - In stock -
Very rare Luigi Ghirri French catalogue published in 1992 on the occasion of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri — Versailles, Institut Culturel Italien de Paris, 2 November—18 Decemeber, 1992. Illustrated in colour with Ghirri's photographs of Versailles from his visit in 1985, accompanied by text from Italian writer Beppe Sebaste in French and Italian. Printed in Milan.
Average copy due to light moisture shadow/light ripple to top of publication. Tanning and light wear.