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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
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Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Furniture
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1970, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MoMA / New York
$600.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1970 edition of MoMA's landmark book on conceptual art, published to accompany this groundbreaking avant-garde show.
In the summer of 1970, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted the now legendary exhibition Information, one of the first surveys of conceptual art. Conceived by MoMA’s celebrated curator Kynaston McShine as an “international report” on contemporary trends, the show and attendant catalog together assembled the work of more than 150 artists from 15 countries to explore the parameters and possibilities of the emerging art practices of the era. Noting the participating artists’ attunement to the “mobility and change that pervades their time,” McShine underscored their interest in “ways of rapidly exchanging ideas, rather than embalming the idea in an ‘object.’” Indeed, much of the work in the exhibition engaged mass-communications systems, such as broadcast television and the postal service, and addressed viewers directly, often encouraging their participation in return.
The catalog, rather than merely document the show, functioned autonomously: it included a list of recommended reading, a chance-based index by critic Lucy Lippard, and individual artist contributions in the form of photographic documentation, textual description, drawings and diagrams—some relating to work in the exhibition and others to artworks as yet unrealized.
Artists include Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Keith Arnatt, Art & Language Press, Art & Project, Richard Artschwager, David Askevold, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Barrio, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, Bernhard & Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Bill Bollinger, George Brecht, Stig Broegger, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, James Lee Byars, Jorge Luis Carballa, Christopher Cook, Roger Cutforth, Carlos D'Alessio, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Group Frontera, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Giorno Poetry Systems, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ira Joel Haber, Randy Hardy, Michael Heizer, Hans Hollein, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Peter Hutchinson, Richards Jarden, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, Richard Long, Bruce McLean, Cildo Campos Meirelles, Marta Minujin, Robert Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, New York Graphic Workshop, Newspaper, Group Oho, Helio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Panamarenko, Giulio Paolini, Paul Pechter, Giuseppe Penone, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, Alejandro Puente, Markus Raetz, Yvonne Rainer, Klaus Rinke, Edward Ruscha, J.M. Sanejouand, Richard Sladden, Robert Smithson, Keith Sonnier, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Erik Thygesen, John Van Saun, Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz, Bernar Venet, Jeff Wall, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson.
Kynaston McShine was formerly Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Very Good copy. Light cover wear, single spine crack, all crisp, clean interior and tightly bound copy of a book that usually sees serious page detachments. Best copy we have seen.
2019, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - Out of stock
Eric Kroll's "Every Mother’s Nightmare" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2019. Second Extended Edition.
Eric David Kroll is an American photojournalist, fetish photographer, erotica historian, and book editor.
2021, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - In stock -
Nobuyoshi Araki's "Polanography" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2021. First Edition.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. Celebrated the world-over as one of Japan's leading, most original photographers, to date Araki has published over 400 books of his work.
2018, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Edition of 300,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - Out of stock
"Selected Drawings from 1950 to 1990" is a limited edition publication dedicated to the rarely seen drawings of the reclusive and mysterious Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Published in 2017 by Innen Books in Zürich in an edition of 300 copies only.
Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011)
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague (1945-48), Miroslav Tichy withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches with pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result are works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
2020, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 36 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 - Out of stock
Richard Kern's "Extra High" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2020. First Edition.
Richard Kern (b. 1954) is an American underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to prominence as part of the cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films like The Right Side of My Brain and Fingered, which featured personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins. Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence and perversion and was involved in the Cinema of Transgression movement, a term coined by Nick Zedd.
2021, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$18.00 $5.00 - In stock -
Brad Phillips' "Delete Instagram" zine, published by Innen Books, Zürich, in 2021. First Edition.
Brad Phillips is a contemporary Canadian artist and writer. He is best known for his work around subjects like mental illness, suicide, fakery, addiction and pop culture. His first book of short stories, Essays and Fictions, was published in 2019.
2021, English
Softcover, 140 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Edition of 185,
Published by
Sonntag Press / Narrm—Melbourne
$40.00 $20.00 - In stock -
First edition, limited to 185 copies, and now out-of-print.
This limited first print run of David Rosetzky: Composite Acts also contains a unique cover design and time stamp corresponding to the film component of the work.
David Rosetzky’s Composite Acts is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project that traverses the fields of video, speech, choreography, performance, set design, and photography. Through the artistic and personal contributions of diverse artists and practitioners, these composite parts are brought together in an intimate exploration of memory, identity, and the relative and fragmentary nature of the self.
This publication draws together critical reflections, visual material, and artist insights to form a catalogue, an archive, a composite picture of this major project.
Contributors: Sophie Knezic, David Rosetzky, Jo Lloyd, Shelley Lasica, Sean Meilak and Brigid Moriarty
Design: Alex Ward
Publication coordinator: Brigid Moriarty
Copy editor: Jessie Henley
Out of print. Very Good copy with some marking to covers. No. 163/185
2021, English
Cloth bound, resin coated silver gelatin paper, silver gelatin emulsion, ink on paper, and 12 pages, saddle stitched, ink on paper, 25.2 x 20 cm
Ed of 15 + 5APs,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$660.00 - In stock -
unfixed: σκιά σκιά σκιά ombra ombra ombra shadow shadow shadow is a self published artist book that was released to coincide with Rudi Williams' eponymous solo exhibition at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; 10 July — 10 September, 2021. The work is informed by Williams' view that each image is an artefact of experience, translated through photographic processes. This recent iteration of an ongoing work combines photographs from her archive with unfixed silver gelatin paper to create a book that responds to the environment it is viewed in as well as being a record of the works included in her 2021 exhibition.
unfixed: σκιά σκιά σκιά ombra ombra ombra shadow shadow shadow is a constantly changing object. The light sensitive cover and internal light sensitive pages will darken and absorb touch when viewed. After multiple viewings the pages will separate from the delicate cloth binding.
Signed edition
8/15
2016, English
Leporello folding postcard set
Edition of 100,
Published by
Self-Published / Melbourne
$20.00 - Out of stock
Rudi Williams’ work investigates liminal reflections and anomalies that challenge the viewer’s logic of memory and space through the installation of photographic objects, projections and analogue photographic techniques. Returning to negatives taken in cultural institutions at various stages during her life, she manipulates traditional processes to reveal the abnormalities, scars, and mysteries that unite incongruent interpretations of experience. — Michelle Mountain
On the 15th of November 2012, Rudi Williams visited the Vatican Museum in Rome for the first time where she encountered a room that contained a series of display cabinets. The objects in the cabinet had been removed but the traces of the objects remained, burned into the backing velvet of the display cabinet, like a liminal photograph.
Edition of 100.
This concertina postcard depicts the documents Williams made of the Vatican Museum display cabinets in 2012, with photographs taken in 2016 at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The publication was made to accompany her solo exhibition Echo held at Caves Gallery in 2016.
2019, English / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Ed. of 600,
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
LE BAL Books / Paris
$240.00 - Out of stock
"A picture is and is not a key, a key is chemistry, no key is chemistry, chemistry is poison, poison is risk, risk is poison, risk is painting, painting is hiding, in hiding new colors emerge, new colors are new dangers, dangers are desires, desires are keys"—Extract from Malva Alcea (Sigmar's Mallow) by Harald Szeemann
Published by LE BAL on the occasion of the exhibition and now out-of-print, this publication displays a collection of never-seen-before photographs which all belong to the artist's son, Georg Polke. Designed by Roger Willems, the book highlights the jubilant and almost cheeky relationship that the artist had with the photographic medium during a key creative period : 1970-1986. 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.
Produced in a small edition of 600 copies, the book also contains a rare 1985 interview of the artist by Bice Curiger as well as texts by Bernard Marcadé, Bice Curiger, Fritz Emslander and Harald Szeemann. A key publication on the photographic practice of Polke and a treasure trove archive of rare images!
As New copy.
2011, Japanese / English
Softcover, 240 pages, 30 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Days / Tokyo
$55.00 $25.00 - Out of stock
Second issue of DUNE Libertin, Japanese fashion and culture magazine following DUNE Quarterly, edited by the legendary Fumihiro Hayashi, re-launched for the new millennium, and as much a time-capsule of the 00s as Quarterly was of the 90s. With cover artwork by Gus Van Sant, other features in this issue include Mark Gonzales, Barry Mcgee, Momoko Ando, 111 Boadrum (Boredoms), Jeffrey Deitch, Mario Sorrenti, Ari Marcopoulos, Spike Jonze, Shepard Fairey, Hiromix, Liz Goldwyn, Aaron Rose, Punk Is Still Alive (w. Mike Watt — SST, Minutemen, Firehose), Rodarte, Chikashi Suzuki, Oliver Zahm (Purple), Tomoo Gokita, and much much more.
Very Good copy with small scuff to spine edge.
1996, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 22.5 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art Days / Tokyo
$200.00 - Out of stock
Special Summer 1996 10th issue of DUNE, featuring the iconic Chloë Sevigny cover styled by Andrew Richardson and shot by Terry Richardson. Rare and most sought-after issue of this Japanese fashion and culture magazine, edited by the legendary Fumihiro Hayashi, with the theme of "REALITY", encapsulating the "realism" of 1990's new fashion photography and anti-fashion aesthetic, including a huge photo feature of Chloë by Richardson, Hysteric Glamor shot by David Sorrenti, Prada does Palm Springs by Takashi Homma, Baby Generation by Takashi Homma, featuring Sofia Coppola, Kim Gordon, Ione Skye, Tamra Davis and Karen Klimnik, Walter Van Beirendonck, photography by Sofia Coppola, Shingo Wakagi, Katsumi Omori, Masashi Sanai, Fujio Saimon, Gregory Crewdson, Masashi Ohashi, plus Visionaire, Hiroshi Tanabe, Hunter S. Thompson, ads for X-Girl, Milk Fed, Paul Smith... a rare (even in Japan) time capsule and distant memory of the Genki days of the bookshop building.
Very Good copy.
2016, English
Softcover, 600 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) is best known for his decisive role in the emergence and establishment of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s.
This extensively researched publication documents the first exhibition about his life and work, which reassess his role as one of the distinctive characters in twentieth-century exhibition-making, while recognizing his atypical, inquisitive, and free-spirited genius.
Siegelaub was also a gallerist, independent curator, publisher, researcher, archivist, collector, and bibliographer. Often credited as the ‘Father of Conceptual Art’, he was (and remains) a seminal influence on curators, artists, and cultural thinkers, internationally and in Amsterdam, where he settled in the 1990s.
With revolutionary projects such as the Xerox Book, he set the blueprint for the presentation and dissemination of conceptual practices. In the process, he redefined the exhibition space, which could now be a book, a poster, an announcement, or reality at large.
Siegelaub’s radical reassessment of the conditions of art resonated deeply with the iconoclastic views of his contemporaries Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, among others, with whom he developed close working relationships.
Texts by Beatrix Ruf, Leontine Coelewij , Sara Martinetti and more.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 12 December 2015 – 17 April 2016.
2023, English
Hardcover, 112 pages, 22 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$66.00 - In stock -
One of the great experimental composers of our time, Phill Niblock has during his sixty-year career produced minimalist music, structural cinema, dance performance, improvised theatre, systematic art, and ethnographic photography. Since 1985, Niblock has served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. In 2014 the artist received the John Cage Award.
This hardbound catalogue is devoted to Niblock’s wide intermedia art, including his masterpieces the Six Films (1966-69), the Environments (1968-72) and The Movement of People Working (1973-91). A thorough publication that includes Charles Mingus, Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington, Elaine Summers, Yoko Ono, Sun Ra, The Open Theatre, Muna Tseng and Arthur Russell. Co-published with Copeland. Published on occasion of the exhibition ‘Nothin’ But Working, Phill Niblock, A Retrospective’, 30 Jan – 12 May 2013, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, in partnership with Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne).
1990, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Dalkey Archive Press / US
$40.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous first 1990 hardcover edition of Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, alongside the photographic work of Alix Cleo Roubaud, and published by Dalkey Archive Press.
In 1983 Jacques Roubaud’s wife Alix Cleo died at the age of 31 of a pulmonary embolism. The grief-stricken author responded with one brief poem (“Nothing”), then fell silent for thirty months. In subsequent years, Roubaud―poet, novelist, mathematician―composed a series of prose poems, a collection that is a profound mediation on the experience of death, the devastation it brings to the lover who goes on living, and the love that remains. Despite the universality of this experience, no other writer has so devoted himself to exploring and recording the many-edged forms of grief, mourning, bewilderment, emptiness, and loneliness that attend death. No other writer has provided a kind of solace while facing with honesty and hardness the intricate ways in which the living are affected by such a loss. Some Thing Black is an ongoing monologue from Roubaud to his wife, as death assaults the mind’s failure to comprehend absence. Roubaud both refuses to and cannot surrender his wife to the past (“I always wake up in your voice, your hand, your smell”). The death, having occurred in an instant of time, goes on in him (“But inside me your death proceeds slowly, incomprehensibly”). While acknowledging “death calls for a poetry of meditation,” Roubaud is enraged at the limitations of language and words to affect the biological reality. Rather, all that language can do is clarify the exactness of his grief and to recall precisely the image of her life and death. But such recollection―the sight of her dead body, her photographs, her things, the rooms they lived in―becomes a “memory infinitely torturous.” And his most anguished recollection is of their making love (“These memories are the darkest of all”), and a sense of guilt for somehow not having prevented her death (“I did not save you from that difficult night”). This is a brave and honest book that does not disguise that pain of loss. Its nobility, grace, and humanity rest in its refusal to falsify death’s harsh presence (“This dirty rotten life to be mixed up with death”) and in its acceptance of the mind’s limitations (“I do not understand”). This moving, compassionate, uncompromising book is one of the most significant works of our time. Included in this edition is a portfolio of photographs made by Roubaud’s wife in 1980 entitled “If Some Thing Black.”
Jacques Roubaud (b. 1932) is a French poet, writer and mathematician. A member of the Oulipo group, he has published poetry, plays, novels, and translated English poetry and books into French such as Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. French poet and novelist Raymond Queneau had Roubaud's first book, a collection of mathematically structured sonnets, published by Éditions Gallimard, and then invited Roubaud to join the Oulipo as the organization's first new member outside the founders.
Very Good in VG dust jacket.
2012, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 160 x 240 mm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the fast out-of-print "FESPA Digital - Fruit Logistica" photo book by Wolfgang Tillmans. In February 2011, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) decided to pay a visit to Fruit Logistica, the most important convention in the international fruit trade, held annually in Berlin. More than 2,400 fresh produce companies gather at the convention, presenting a dazzling panorama of commerce-and, of course, of texture and color. "I was left open-mouthed by the crazy displays and the variety and complexity of the international fruit trade and its processing machinery," he records. "I reacted with my camera straight away, but left the pictures for a while so I could look at them with a bit of distance, although I was immediately thinking of an artist's book in the format of "Concorde"" (Tillmans' 2008 book portrait of the eponymous aircraft). The resultant 66 color photographs are published here for the first time.
Very Good—Fine copy.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 15 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$140.00 - Out of stock
First edition of one of the finest of Araki's photo books, dedicated entirely to his incredible Erotos series. Published as part of the Complete Works collection, in this work, controversial and legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki makes a radical departure from his usual portraits and cityscapes. A collection of arrestingly primal close-ups of parts of the body as well as various objects—pipes, fruit, wet sidewalks, flowers, snails—Erotos delves deep into the erotic subconscious. Reproduced in gorgeous glossy duotone and bound in the original jacket and publisher's obi-strip (not pictured). One our favourite bodies of work by Araki.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.
Very Good in VG dust jacket and obi.
2023, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 31.2 x 25.4 cm
Published by
DelMonico Books / US
The Jay DeFeo Foundation / San Francisco
$145.00 - In stock -
A revelatory trove of innovative photo collages, photograms, photographs and photocopies--many never before published--most reproduced at the size DeFeo printed them
This monograph on the legendary and influential artist Jay DeFeo features over 150 photographic works--many never before published--most reproduced at the size the artist printed them. After the completion of her monumental masterpiece The Rose in 1966, DeFeo moved from the heart of artistic activity in San Francisco to a small house in Marin County, California. There she embarked on a focused and rigorous exploration with the camera. For much of the 1970s, she used the camera as a tool to look and think with, creating a wide range of black-and-white photographs she processed in her darkroom. The artist used experimental photographic techniques to produce extraordinary artworks, alongside documentary images of her studio and paintings in process. Her contact sheets, some of which are reproduced here, are often filled with multiple views of one object, revealing the way DeFeo looked and sketched with the lens. In 1972 she wrote: "My interest in photography has always paralleled my expression as a painter."
Essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner survey the rich materiality, sculptural layering and illusionistic devices of DeFeo's playful and enigmatic photographic works, illuminating her astonishing range and daring experimentation with the medium.
Jay DeFeo (1929-89) was a Bay Area artist who created an original and provocative body of work, including the iconic painting The Rose (1958-66). In the 1970s and 1980s, DeFeo continued her visionary work in a range of mediums, including works on paper, photography, collage and photocopies. Among many other exhibitions, a retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
2023, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 27.3 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$85.00 - In stock -
Curtis Cuffie (1955–2002) was an artist who lived and worked in and around the East Village from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in the early 2000s. He moved to New York from Hartsville, South Carolina, as a teenager and lived unhoused for long stretches of his adult life. Cuffie found local notoriety for the way he adorned the streets of downtown New York, collecting what the city provided, often sifting trash to stage on-the-spot sculptures along the Bowery and Cooper Square. His arrangements took the form of impossibly balanced towers, delicate shrines, and unwieldy processions up to thirty-feet in length installed along the walls, fences, and sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Nearly without fail they were removed by the police, inclement weather, the department of sanitation, or the grounds team at Cooper Union, which would later employ him.
An enduring presence in the East Village, Cuffie staged sprawling tableaux outside the Village Voice offices that were admired by students and venerable artists alike. He was profiled by scene reporters, political writers, and folk-art journalists, all the while exhibiting in the neighborhood’s famed alternative art spaces. While few of his sculptures remain today, a trove of photographs from the 1990s taken by Cuffie and his companion Katy Abel preserve the work he made in the city. This photobook, the first publication about Cuffie, seeks to honor the artist by collecting the efforts of two of his partners: Carol Thompson, who lived with Cuffie from 1996 to 2001 and archived a great number of his 35mm photographs, and Abel, a Cooper Square resident who took hundreds of snapshots of his art. Curtis Cuffie is designed by Julie Peeters, edited by Scott Portnoy and Robert Snowden with Ciarán Finlayson, and additionally includes writing by the artist, Finlayson, and critic Alan Moore, and images taken by Tom Warren and Margaret Morton.
1974, English / Italian
Softcover, 40 pages, 20.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Rivolta Femminile / Rome
$300.00 - In stock -
First, extremely rare, edition of Suzanne Santoro's artist's book "Per una espressione nuova / Towards a New Expression", published in a small edition in Rome 1974 by Santaro and The Rivolta Femminile ("Women's Revolt") publishing house, founded in 1970 by Carla Lonzi. In the 1960s, Suzanne Santoro (b. 1946, Brooklyn New York), after training at the School of Visual Arts in New York and NYU and being affiliated with the minimalist and conceptual New York context of the 1960s, moved to Rome where she studied classical sculpture. Here her artistic path crossed with the experience of feminist militancy, through her connection to Rivolta Femminile and Carla Lonzi and co-founded the Beato Angelico Cooperative (CBA) and exhibition space. Her research immediately focused on restoring those characteristics of the female image that had been intentionally hidden or transformed by the patriarchal tradition of visual arts, culminating in this artist’s libretto. Mysterious, beautiful and fiercely feminist, Towards a New Expression articulates, through a photographic collection of images, a critical stance towards the "subordinate and unclarified" portrayal of women's genitalia in art from classical to contemporary times. Santoro's book generated some controversy when it was censored by The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Very rare, especially in this first edition. Good copy, well preserved, only with notable but attractive ex-libris "Moon Books" rubber stamp mark on back cover and another to the front end page. The title is written on the blank spine for filing into the collection. It is believed this was from a community library in Berkley. General light wear/marking.
2013 , Dutch / French / English
Softcover, 624 pages, 23 x 24 cm
Published by
Voetnoot / Amsterdam
$55.00 - In stock -
As a frequent visitor to concerts at Paradiso, Amsterdam’s long-running music venue, in the early 1980s, Dutch photographer Max Natkiel encountered all manner of subcultures: punks, new-wavers, rockers, mods, Rastafarians, squatters, and metal and skinheads. Eventually he decided to bring along his camera and started making portraits of the fascinating people he found; a collection eventually numbering over 1000. A selection of about 600 of these black and white photographs appears here, reflecting the explosion of pure youth culture and fierce desire for individuality he experienced in the decade between 1980-1990. With an introduction by philosopher Dirk van Weelden.
Cover may differ due to 4 versions available.
1968, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 1 (1968) sets the scene perfectly, opening with Japanese author Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian by photographer Kishin Shinoyama in a pictorial feature "Les Morts Masculines", a photographic homage to Georges Bataille that also features the photography of Eikoh Hosoe, Ikkō Narahara, Masahisa Fukase, and Osamu Hayasaki, with models including Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, actor Akira Mita, author Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, actor Jin Nakayama, playwright Jūrō Kara, and others. Other features include " All Japanese are Perverse" — stories by Japanese writers including Yukio Mishima, Taruho Inagaki, Yutaka Haniya, Shinji Sōya; Henry Miller's letters to Anais Nin; a colour gallery of artwork by Belgian painter Paul Delvaux; articles on Vampire fantasy in the arts (including many original illustrations; Witches (illustrated by James Ensor); Oriental Eros, Ancient Indian poetry; Kama Sutra; female bi-sexuality; the history of gay (Danshoku) theatre in Japan; the full-colour art gallery "Masturbation Machine", featuring avant-garde artists Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Masuo Ikeda, Setsu Nagasawa, Carlos Marchioli, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Masakazu Horiuchi, Tadanori Yokoo, Koji Suzuki, Tommy Ungerer; the fully illustrated museum supplement "Pain and Pleasure : On Torture" by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history; pornographic stories by Guillaume Apollinaire and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (who coined the term "Pornographer"); fiction by Pierre Morion (pseudo. André Pieyre de Mandiargues); critic Jin'ichi Uekusa on the controversial writings of Roger Peyrefitte, illustrations by Ernst, Bellmer, Labisse, Fini, Lam, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Good copy with some spine damage and tanning/wear.
1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 2 includes photographic features by Yasuhiro Yoshioka and Yoshihiro Tatsuki, the artwork of French decorator of department store mannequins and surrealist Sunday painter Clovis Trouille, Venus in Furs erotic photo shoot by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Yokoo Tadanori, Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Alberto Martini, Félicien Rops, Rene Magritte, an incredible feature "Machine for Murder" with art by Hiroshi Nakamura, Tomi Ungerer, Koichi Tanigawa, Osamu Tsukasa, Tatsuo Ikeda, Marcel Duchamp, Seiichi Horiuchi, and others, an article on the erotica of Ukiyo-e with a fold-out colour three panel poster, the fully illustrated museum supplement on Demonology by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history, texts by Apollinaire, Burroughs, Mutsuo Takahashi, articles on laws pertaining to homosexuality, Kama Sutra, shoe fetishism, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear.
1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo
$110.00 - Out of stock
Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.
Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force.
Issue no. 3 (with cover by Bronzino, 1554) includes full-colour photographic feature by Kishin Shinoyama ("Virgin In Uniform" featuring models/artists Angela Asaoka, Akaji Maro, Yoko Ashikawa) and beautiful Shomei Tomatsu photo feature ("Scoptophilia"), the artwork of the great French cross-dressing painter-photographer Pierre Molinier, texts by Jirō Kawamura, Yumiko Kurahashi, Taruho Inagaki ("Memories of Hemorrhoids or "New Tsurezuregusa"), Akiyuki Nosaka ("Dear Penis, Goodbye"), Minoru Minamihara ("The Mystic Thought of Love in the Case of Jakob Böhme"), Takiji Kobayashi, The Fictitious Garden of Babylon by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Tsunekazu Murata ("Witch's Ax : Concerning Heresy in Medieval Europe"), translation of Franz Kafka "Metamorphosis" illustrated by Franco Gentilini, recent research on homosexuality by film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, Kama Sutra, more Gay (Danshoku) Japanese Theater history, Marquise de Blancvilliers by Koji Nakata, and much more.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.
Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear.