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
Art
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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.
2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 pages, 16.5 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$120.00 - In stock -
ince the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term "heterosexual" and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.
‘Ladies and gents, welcome to the museum of the erotic doll. Step right up and feast your eyes on modern man’s curious contraptions. If the saucy blow-up doll makes you squeamish, brace yourself for the Dutch Wife (a sailor’s delight!), lubricating robot ladies, surrealist brides stripped bare, state-of-the-art RealDolls, and the iDollators who love them. Marquard Smith is the curator of this collection of men's dolls, rendered in a lavishly illustrated volume.’—Laura Frost, Times Higher Education
'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.'—Marina Warner, London Review of Books
“[An] intriguing book . . . Smith teases out the history of these sex objects to provide a thorough genealogy of today’s erotic mannequins.”—Shelly Ronen, Public Books
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Princeton Architectural Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass media
This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at visual representation.
Belting divides his book into three parts: faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of human expression, the face resists possession, and creative endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks—hollow signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody.
From creations by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and evaded artistic interpretation.
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
2023, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 110 pages, 25 x 17 cm
Published by
ACCA / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Produced in association with the upcoming ACCA exhibition of the same name, this publication casts a lens upon feminist, queer, and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.
From the other side features curatorial texts by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark, alongside writings from Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous Feminine; Canadian film writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the cult classic, House of Psychotic Women, 2012; Lisa Fuller, a Murri woman and author of the novel Ghost Bird, 2021; and a horror-themed screenplay by UK-based author and filmmaker Alison Peirse, editor of the Women Make Horror anthology, 2021.
Artists featured in the exhibition and book include Clare Milledge, Cybele Cox, Heather B Swann, Jemima Lucas, Julia Robinson, Karla Dickens, Kellie Wells, Lonnie Hutchinson, Louise Bourgeois, Maria Kozic, Marianna Simnett, Mia Boe, Minyoung Kim, Naomi Blacklock, Naomi Kantjuriny, SJ Norman, Suzan Pitt, Tracey Moffatt and Zamara Zamara.
The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side challenges the traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 368 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$60.00 - Out of stock
"Destined to become a new classic ... Elkin shatters the truisms that have evolved around feminist thought."—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
One of Lit Hub's most anticipated books of 2023
What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty.
In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flaneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
Encompassing with a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference—among them Julia Margaret Cameron's photography, Kara Walker's silhouettes, Vanessa Bell's portraits, Eva Hesse's rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann's body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Helene Cixous, and Maggie Nelson.
An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives.
1973, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket, gilt stamped linen binding), 120 pages, 32 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jose Domingo Elias / Barcelona
$800.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of the incredibly scarce and wonderful "Ibiza, A Dream…….?" photo book, published in Barcelona in 1973. This beautiful cloth-covered, oversized volume captures the quiet coastal landscapes, villages and inhabitants of the Balearic island of Ibiza in the early 1970s through Tony Keeler's warm, grainy photographs. Accompanied by introductory poetic text in English by David Walsh and gorgeously designed and produced, this book provides a rare and exquisite photographic document of a unique place and time, before house music ruined everything.
"During the 1970s, the traditional Ibicencan dress could be seen alongside the naked bodies and Indian veils of the new invaders who swarmed the island escaping bourgeois values. My camera explored the villages, fields and coves of Ibiza capturing these contrasts as well as the soft and aromatic nature of the island. I was fortunate to have free access to the hippie communes where the daily routines where seemingly unperturbed by my clicking camera. The Ibicencans were likewise welcoming and receptive, which made it possible for me to document the two juxtaposed cultures. I was also very privileged to make long lasting friendships amongst both “invaders” and Ibicencans." - Tony Keeler
A very good copy, preserved perfectly throughout, in a good dust jacket with light tanning to edges, and some small closed tears, light rubbing, preserved under mylar wrap. Scarcely found with surviving dust jacket.
1979, English
Softcover, 366 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Frauenliteratur Verlag Hermine Fees / Germany
$440.00 - In stock -
Very rare first 1979 English edition of one the finest artist's books and photographic projects of the 1970's, Let's Take Back Our Space (“Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures / with 2037 photographs / In the second part of the book: Man's stuggle against womanpower and the effects upon body language throughout the course of history.)
The German artist Marianne Wex started out as a painter before producing her encyclopaedic photographic project "Let’s Take Back Our Space", one of the great unsung works of 1970s feminist history and cultural analysis. Marianne Wex bases her work on the assumption that body language is a result of sex-based, patriarchal socialization, affecting all of our other "feminine" and "masculine" role behavior. Born in Hamburg in 1937, Wex studied at the city’s University of Fine Arts, where she later taught for seventeen years. In 1979, she published Let’s Take Back Our Space as a book in both a German and English edition, to accompany an exhibition in the Neue Gesellschaft fair Bildende Kiinste in Berlin, in connection with the show Women Artists International, 1877 to 1977. It is an in-depth visual survey comprised of 5,000 to 6,000 photographs of body postures, taken between 1974 and 1977, assembled into dozens of thematic grids: Seated persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; standing persons—leg and feet; arm and hand positions; people sitting and laying on the ground; arm and leg positions; and so on. The images were culled from a huge range of sources—re-photographed advertisements, reportage, fashion magazines, pornography, studio portraits, the history of art—and many were taken on the streets of Hamburg by Wex, who proposes that our smallest, most unconscious gestures speak volumes about the power relations of gender in daily life. The work was expanded to include an extensive historical section for the book, where Marianne Wex investigates the body language shown in sculptures of the last 3,000 to 4,000 years, and comes to the conclusion that the ideals of body language and body forms have never been so different between the sexes as they are today.
Very Good copy. General light wear/ageing, tanning to cover, but a most lovely copy of the rare first edition from 1979. A more common reprint edition was published in 1984.
1998, Japanese
Softcover, 126 pages, 28.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eichi Shuppan / Tokyo
$65.00 $35.00 - Out of stock
School Wear Collection File No. 1, published in Japan in 1998, a glossy colour photo-book/magazine (mook) and comprehensive record of female Japanese school wear (seifuku) and sailor fuku Summer and Winter uniform collections from 1996—1997, all modelled by Japanese school girls. A source of pride and tradition, the Japanese school uniform has become an international icon, referenced in popular culture and by designers and stylists all over the world. Profusely illustrated with all of the uniforms from the mid-1990s shot thoroughly, and rather provocatively, by Katsumi Yamaguchi, styled by Masahiko Terada, these books aren't without their kink undercurrent (Eichi publishes Beppin School, after all). Loads of data and information on the collecting of uniforms, school fashion trends (baggy socks in 1996!), challenges, histories, model profiles, and advertisements laced throughout the photoshoots. An amazing, comprehensive reference.
Very Good—Near Fine copy.
1991, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 123 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Touko Museum of Contemporary Art / Tokyo
Treville / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Fine copy of the long out-of-print hardcover Japanese monograph on the artwork of David Lynch : Paintings and Drawings, an intricately produced and appropriately disconcerting catalogue published to accompany a rare exhibition of David Lynch's artwork at Tokyo's Touko Museum of Art in 1991. Cinema's Master of the Weird displays his skewed genius in a different medium here, to an equally fascinating and unnerving end. Profusely illustrated with paintings, drawings, and photography in colour b/w, accompanied by texts from Christine McKenna, David Lynch, Takashi Nibutani, Noe Sawaragi, Yuji Konno, and Makoto Takimoto.
Fine copy in Fine DJ.
1978 / 1979, Japanese
Softcover, 127 pages + 144 pages, 22.5 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Visual Message / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
First (1978) and second (1979) issues of Visual Message, the "comprehensive magazine of the visual age", published in Japan for a short period at the end of the 1970s. This explosive inaugural issue, co-edited by graphic designers Ikko Tanaka and Kazuya Uegami, and copywriter Shinya Nishimura and themed "Visual Scandal" is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Masao Saito, Harumi Yamaguchi, Masamichi Oikawa, Eiko Ishioka, Shigeo Fukuda, Tomi Ungerer, Masayuki Kurokawa, SITE, Tsunehisa Kimura, Tenmei Kano, Raymond Savignac, Katsumi Asaba, Ken Mori, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Folon, Asai Shinpei, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Herb Lubalin, Osamu Nagahama, M.C. Escher, Shiro Tatsumi, Hiroki Hayashi, Masayoshi Nakajo, Hiroshi Yoda, Hipgnosis, and many more.
Second 1979 issue of Visual Message is structured around the themes "Before/After" and "Scale" and again is cover-to-cover packed with leading graphic artists, photographers, architects, textile designers, etc. from Japan and overseas including Tadanori Yokoo, Philip Johnson, Hideo Yamashita, Seiji Takada, Takahisa Kamijō, Haruo Takino, Takenobu Igarashi, Akira Yokoyama, Hisaki Hiramatsu, Takamichi Ito, Tomoya Nakano, Shōji Yamagishi, and many more.
V.M. 1. Good copy. Some cover/spine wear/creases/small closed tear to cover edge.
V.M. 2. Very Good copy. Light general wear, bumping.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$56.00 - In stock -
Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture.
Tricks of the Light brings together essays by critic and art historian Jonathan Crary, internationally known for his groundbreaking and widely admired studies of modern Western visual culture. This collection features a compelling selection of Crary's responses to modern and contemporary art and to the transformations of twentieth-century media systems and urban/technological environments. These wide-ranging and provocative texts explore the work of painters, performance artists, writers, architects, and photographers, including Allan Kaprow, Eleanor Antin, Ed Ruscha, John Berger, Bridget Riley, J.G. Ballard, Rem Koolhaas, Gretchen Bender, Dennis Oppenheim, Paul Virilio, Robert Irwin, and Uta Barth. There are also reflections on filmmakers Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc-Godard, David Cronenberg, and others. The book is enhanced by several expansive essays on the unstable status of television, both amid its beginnings in the 1930s and then during its assimilation into new assemblages and networks in the 1980s and 90s. These assess its many-sided role in the reshaping of subjectivity, temporality, and the operation of power. Like all of Crary's work, his writing here is grounded in the acuteness of his engagement with perceptual artifacts of many kinds and in his nuanced reading of historical processes and their cultural reverberations.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Eliza Hutchison 2002-2004 portraits from the series The Ancestors and The Entertainers were taken by hanging the subjects upside down.
“In this work, Hutchison explores the construction of the imagery solely through her subjects. Here we are confronted by the effect of a prop on a body. We do not see the prop in the portraits, but merely the uncanny effects on the subjects after they have been placed into this prop and then relocated in space. This is examined by Hutchison through the lens of a large format camera and recorded onto photographic plates, reminiscent of daguerreotype photography. Also evocative of this early photography is the stiff nature of Hutchinson’s portraiture (due in the early daguerreotype photography to the long exposures sitters had to endure).”
“…the theatricality is encapsulated in the forensic detail and through the performance undertaken in the production of each image. Once relocated in space, the staging of Hutchison’s sitters is further exaggerated, extending and relocating the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Ultimately, although the photographs are the product of careful, time-consuming staging, the experience of the sitter placed within the prop is fleeting and dangerous. Unlike early portraiture, the stakes are much higher and the effect more radical.”—Ruth Learner, The Ancestors, Un Magazine, 2005
Eliza Hutchison was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 1965 and currently lives and works in Naarm Naarm. Her interest is in exploring our complex and psychological relationship to the photographic image. Her image making practice has extend to use experimental in camera process to develop a biographical record of her life and creative practice. Hair in the Gate, a biograph, 2013 and Family Photos 2021, her first monograph where the biographical as point of departure was used to explore the broader social political context.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Stain Pictures features works from Jane Burton’s A Temptation to Ships, 2018, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1 and Devil’s Playground, 2015, hand printed, toned and painted gelatin silver photograph, unique 1/1
“But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”—H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an excerpt from The Outsider (1921)
Jane Burton is an artist working with photography, film, and more recently, painting. Her work explores mortality, desire, and isolation and is often darkly ambiguous, enigmatic and provocative. Burton’s work is held in the collections of prominent state and publicly funded galleries, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Australian Photography, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. She has been the recipient of artist residencies in Paris (School of Art, University of Tasmania; Art Gallery of New South Wales), London (Australia Council for the Arts), and Beijing (24HRArt). Two monographs of her photographs have been published by M.33, Melbourne: ‘It is Midnight, Dr. ’, in 2017, and ‘Other Stories’, in 2011.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
The paintings on interior design magazine photos developed after a hiatus from art making while immersed in family life and domesticity. Creative energies were subsumed into home living spaces, the inside and the garden. I looked at interior design magazines, photos of daydream spaces that were untroubled by the presence of humans; their/my containers of curated longings. Mise-en-sènes, often the realm of the English country house suffused with a collective and projected psychic energy. Rooms and furniture, dense with intangible latent energies that are now interacted with marks of paint, pen and pastel. Scribbling and smudging, tracing the imagined residue of projected desires while responding to the armature of the image in colour, shape and texture. These errant energies enlivened by paint make an intimate liminal interface between magazine and gaze. The emergent interactions are conversational, interventional and absurd. Aloof and amorphous, unconscious spaces become corporeal, thresholds are invaded with the scribbled and smudged paint, claiming a messy subjective presence of painterly process, interaction and decorative hijacking.
Amanda Florence is an artist born in Melbourne/Naarm. She studied BA Fine Arts Joint Hons at Camberwell College of Art, London, UK; Post grad at VCA, Melbourne and MA Creative Arts Therapy, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. She currently makes art at home, gardens and works as a Creative Arts Therapist.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
A collection of images I made on film, between 1999-2005, across Australia, Taiwan and Germany. In the photographs are: friends, animals, oceans, one Baxter Immigration Detention Centre protest image, one anti-Woolworths protest image, one lover, one river, one photographic experiment, some trees, and plants.
Katrin Koenning lives and works in Naarm, on unceded Wurundjeri Country.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Rose Nolan’s photographs taken in New York in 2010.
Rose Nolan is an artist based in Naarm / Melbourne working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, prints and book production.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
2023, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
Edition of 50,
Published by
Light of Day Books / Melbourne
$10.00 - In stock -
Taken in and around various locations on the Mornington Peninsula this zine of photographs by Emma Phillips reveals a curiosity of place, texture, light, and embodiment. The portraits were early forays into the domain of portraiture, and present as encounters in a skewed and slightly strange world. Just beyond the horizon lies a promise, if only we could reach out and touch it.
Emma Phillips b.1989 Sorrento, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia Represented by ReadingRoom.
@lightofdaybooks. Photography. Sometimes work that has never been shown or published before. Sometimes work that has not been seen for years. Sometimes work that may otherwise never be seen. Mainly just photographs but sometimes with text.
1974, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 112 pages, 26 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$550.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first 1974 edition of acclaimed female Japanese photographer Ruiko Yoshida's powerful ode to Harlem. Born in Hokkaido in 1938, Yoshida witnessed discrimination against the Ainu, an indigenous peoples native to northern Japan, and much of her work since has been focused on discrimination in society around the world. Harlem : Black Angels is a collection of Yoshida's breath-taking photographs of Harlem in the late 1960s, one of the largest black communities in the world, where she settled after majoring in photojournalism at Columbia University. She married an African American man with whom she had a child. Their daily lives, and the community of Harlemites in the midst of cultural revolution, became the subject of her photographs. The images seem to show a complete assimilation into black culture that had not been depicted by non-black artists at the time and rarely since. Yoshida captures both the time and place with uncanny virtuosity, blurring the frontiers between a personal and an objective documentary of a uniquely vibrant era Harlem. From her touching pictures of the children, to the Vietnam protests, Angela Davis, the funeral of Malcolm X, the Jazz musicians (Coltrane, Davis, Gillespie, Coleman...), the street festivals, the markets, The Black Panthers, Yoshida's gravure images are captioned in both Japanese and English, evoking the powerful sentiments of the time and the spirit of the people.
"Ruiko Yoshida's photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street."—photo-eye
Little known in the West until a reprint in 2010, Harlem : Black Angels has become a jewel of Japanese photo-journalism and a testament to the great breadth of postwar Japanese photobooks. Pictures included in this book were part of the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”
Includes text in both Japanese and English by poet Hajime Kijima.
Very Good copy in original publishers plastic dust jacket and original BLUE obi-strip. Dust jacket with the usual shrinkage and wear due to age. Otherwise cover, obi and interior pages VG—NF, preserved by dust jacket all these years. A most complete copy.
1985 / 1993, Japanese
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
First published in 1985 by the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Photographers' Association, Testament of The Atomic Bomb Survivor presents an unsettling and profound collection of photographs taken by the "hibakusha" (A-bomb survivors) to serve as a stark reminder of the devastation that befell the Japanese people when the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians. Richly illustrated glossy b/w photo book, accompanied by captions in Japanese, introduction in Japanese and English, and further historical and biographical information in Japanese.
"The thermal rays and the blast force from the atomic bomb took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed all the buildings in central Hiroshima in an instant, and turned most of them into ashes. In addition, those who were unharmed at the time of the explosion but exposed to the radiation suffered the symptoms of the A-bomb disease caused by the residual radioactivity, and died one after another. There are still many survivors all over Japan as well as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who are suffering the aftereffects of the bombing. That is something that should never happen again. But we are in danger of having new destruction be- fore the old wounds are healed, and we cannot simply disregard the threat of human extinction. We, the Association of the Photographers of the atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima, published a collection of photographs taken by us entitled, "The Time of the Destruction of Hiroshima," in August 1981. As hibakusha (A-bomb survivors) we cannot help but feel indignant at the present situation of the ever continuing production, testing, and de- ployment of nuclear weapons. The forty years following the destruction by the atomic bomb have seen seven of the twenty photographers who survived the bombing die. Those remaining are getting old and the average age of our group is above seventy years. We get impatient at the fact that the atomic bomb is the great enemy of humanity, but the people who can bear witness to what happened are fading out. Hundreds of thousands of people died in bitterness. I intend to offer my short remaining life to keep on telling the story as a witness, lest the death of those people be in vain, while I pray for the repose of their souls.—Yoshito Matsushige, Representative of the Association of the Photographers of the Atomic (Bomb) Destruction of Hiroshima
Very Good—NF copy of 1993 reprint of the 1985 edition. Only light wear.
2005, English / Japanese
Softcover (in printed envelope), 32 pages, 26 x 18 cm (book) / 30 x 22 cm (envelope)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
Issued in 2005 in conjunction with leading Japanese "Magazine for City Boys" Popeye, Comme des Garçons in Wonderland is a whimsical look-book of 2005 CdG menswear and accessories inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Young male models and headless mannequins roam the Tokyo streets, shot by Yasuo Kobayashi and Mark Segal. Concept and creation by Comme des Garçons. Comes in printed envelope (this copy unsealed, complete w. envelope).
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 170 pages, 24 x 18 cm
Published by
Gallows Fruit / Thailand
$70.00 - In stock -
Issue 1 of New Juche's journal HEAT DEATH, published by Gallows Fruit, Thailand. Text and image by New Juche; editorial assistance by Steve Finbow and Karolina Ursula Urbaniak; Design by Karolina Ursula Urbaniak and New Juche.
TOPOPHILIA; NOSTALGIA; ARCHITECTURE; LANDSCAPE; ZONE; RUIN; SEX; ENVIRONMENT; PHOTOGRAPHY; NON-AFFILIATED
"In a room on the top floor I closed the door behind me and took a photo album into the dusty bathtub and lent back with my knees up in front of me and my head on a greasy pillow. Light filtered very pleasantly down through the green vines that laced the unglazed window and the fulsome trees outside. A second shaft of light fell through a space in the torn ceiling. My body felt very still, apart from my heart which I could feel beating and also hear, and it was the only sound in the room apart from birdsong."
New Juche is a writer and artist based in Southeast Asia since 2003. Dennis Cooper has called him "one of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists working today". New Juche's published books include Mountainhead, Bosun, The Devils, and The Worm.
1997, English
Softcover, 223 pages, 18.5 x 13 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Purple Books / Paris
$300.00 - Out of stock
Very rare early Purple Fashion - the original run, original design, original format. Purple Fashion number 3 (1997), edited by Elein Fleiss, embodies the anti-Fashion attitude and aesthetic Purple were so much a crucial part of in the mid-late 1990s. Includes a fantastic Martin Margiela piece, Comme des Garçons by Mark Borthwick, Camille Vivier, Maurizio Cattelan, Elein Fleiss, Terry Richardson, Susan Ciancolo, Helmut Lang, Anders Edstrom, Kim Gordon by Mark Borthwick and much more. Really incredible and now so rare these early issues. And this one is in great condition!
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple Fashion.
Very Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 20.32 x 15.24 cm
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$68.00 - Out of stock
Examining this innovative collaboration as a turning point in the history of photography and in queer American culture.
Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). These enigmatic photographs—issuing from intimate private networks and queer sexualities—helped ground friendships and also found their way into the public worlds of fashion and fame.
Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private and public worlds, anticipating contemporary social media. For these audacious artists, the camera was used not to capture, but to actively perform. Renouncing photography's conventional role as mirror of the real, Lynes and PaJaMa energized forms of worldmaking via a new social framing of the self.
1986, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 22.9 x 25.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Aperture / New York
$550.00 - In stock -
First 1986 hardcover edition of Nan Goldin’s classic photo book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, published by Aperture, New York. A landmark work in the field of raw sociological reportage, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a visual diary chronicling the struggles for intimacy and understanding among the friends and lovers whom Goldin describes as her “tribe.” These photographs described a lifestyle that was visceral, charged and seething with a raw appetite for living, and the book soon became the swan song for an era that reached its peak in the early 1980s. Through an accurate and detailed record of Goldin’s life, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency records a personal odyssey as well as a more universal understanding of the different languages men and women speak. All these years later, Goldin’s lush color photography and candid style still demand that the viewer encounter their profound intensity head-on. The book’s influence on photography and other aesthetic realms continues to grow, making it a classic of contemporary photography.
From Goldin's introduction: "I sometimes don't know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture. I want the people in my pictures to stare back. I want to show exactly what my world looks like, without glamorization, without glorification."
"Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency is a beggar’s opera of recent times. Here were real thieves and unexpected heroes, and a sense that some things in life might still be worth a brawl."—Artforum
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, and grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her first solo show was held in Boston in 1973. She moved to New York in 1979, where she began documenting the city’s gay and transvestite scenes and developed the informal snapshot aesthetic for which she is celebrated today. Goldin was the 2007 recipient of the Hasselblad Award.
Very Good copy - fine copy with VG dust jacket. Definite 1986 first edition in the original unclipped ($39.95) dust jacket, designed by Keith Davis.
1996, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 23 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Power Plant / Canada
$240.00 - Out of stock
The rare, excellent and infamous catalogue documenting the 1996 Canadian exhibition entitled "The American Trip". Organized by curator Philip Monk, "The American Trip looks at the continuing fascination of artists with the margins of American society. The exhibition is devoted to the persistence of the “theme of the outlaw” in the works of the contemporary artists Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Cady Noland, and Richard Prince." This very substantial four person show was particularly notable as it represents one of Cady Noland's final authorized exhibitions before calculatedly withdrawing from the gallery and Museum system at the turn of the Century. Despite the fact that Cady Noland is increasingly seen as one of the most influential American artists of the period, there are no monographs on her work. This catalogue is one of the few books to include a critical text specific to Noland or to reproduce a significant number of works at the time, including her iconic contribution to the exhibition of nine free standing ink-on-aluminum pieces featuring imagery of Lee Harvey Oswald, Patty "Tanya" Hearst, and The Charles Manson Family. Additionally notable about the publication is that due to potential legal issues surrounding some of the Larry Clark photographs, the Power Plant was forced to obscure them by permanently glueing facing pages 20 and 21 together as an alternative to destroying the entire print run. A publisher's slip inserted declares: Due to legal issues, pages 20-21 have been permanently sealed. Profusely illustrated throughout with the works of all the artists (many unsealed, uncensored Clark photographs, Richard Prince's biker chicks series, Goldin's NY transgender photographs, et al) along with accompanying essay by Monk on American culture's fascination with the outlaw, outcasts, and margins of society. It recognizes the role artists have played in the dialogue between the mainstream and margins in normalizing the image of the outcast. The title refers to a constant theme in American cultural dynamics of the rejection of family and reformation of community, now expressed in the subcultures of the margins. What starts as a celebration by artists, is appropriated by the mainstream media and ends as a panic in the press. Nowhere is the fear greater than in the heart of the American family that the enemy is within and that the kids are not "alright." The images of individuals in the exhibition show them not to be traditional outlaws. They are, as the artists celebrate, the girl-or boy-next door.
Very Good copy.