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
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Australian Art
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
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Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
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Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
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.
2020, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$44.00 - In stock -
Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion. Herve Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French "autofiction" of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers. Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts-fragmented stories of queer desire-to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman. From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.
Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman
HERVÉ GUIBERT (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS.
2020, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$49.00 - In stock -
A novel that describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS.
First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, describing the progression of the disease and recording the reactions of his many friends.
The novel scandalized the French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As Edmund White observed, "[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque, this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his predicament." In his struggle to piece together a language suited to his suffering, Herve Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.
Translated by Linda Coverdale, Afterword by Edmund White, Introduction by Andrew Durbin
HERVÉ GUIBERT (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS.
2018, English
Softcover, 22 pages, 24.8 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$40.00 - In stock -
matt dillon, michael jackson's bedroom, various freeway killers, blueboy magazine, heartthrobs and Wm S Burroughs.... SECRET PASSAGE #2 by artist Richard Hawkins is "an assembly of found images d'loaded from alt.binaries.pictures.teenidols in 1998 & which incorporate all the artist's dreamy teenage pleasures, cringing inevitabilities & fore-doomed eventualities circa 1979"
Self-published 2018 richard hawkins & Galerie Buchholz
2019, English
Poster (double-sided, folded) in envelope, 59.5 x 63 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$30.00 - In stock -
Limited edition poster with the transcript of Rainald Goetz’s presentation of the English translation of his novel Insane, published on the occasion of the exhibition opening for the group exhibition Hölle in September 2018 at Galerie Buchholz New York, featuring new or selected works by Lutz Bacher, Caleb Considine, Vincent Fecteau, Rainald Goetz, Sergej Jensen, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Monica Majoli, Albert Oehlen, Henrik Olesen, and Heji Shin.
Rainald Maria Goetz (b. 1954) is a German author, playwright and essayist.
2021, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 42 pages, 30 x 20 cm
Published by
Daniel Buchholz Galerie / Köln
$38.00 - Out of stock
This publication edited by Michael Krebber features 22 photographs by Uwe Gabriel that were made in 1980 for the poster of the exhibition “Aktion Pisskrücke - Geheimdienst am Nächsten” that took place the same year in Hamburg. Accompanying the photographs is an introductory text by Michael Sanchez.
The exhibition, Aktion Pisskrücke, featured the work of Albert Oehlen, Brigitte Rohrbach, Erinna König, Georg Herold. HiIka Nordhausen, Ina Barra Klaus Hubner, Marcus Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Deistic, Michael Krebber, Thomas Wachweger, Uwe Gabriel, Werner Rattner.
2003, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Little Bear Press / US
$700.00 - Out of stock
As new, first edition sealed copy of extremely collectible monograph by pioneering male-figure photographer Jim French, of Man and Another Man fame, showcasing French's 1972 nude study collection of the popular Colt model, Erron, also known as David Scrivanek. A beautifully produced monograph designed by Dimitri Levas with an essay and interview with French by photographer and publisher Bruce Weber. As with all of Little Bear’s books, the quality of the design, paper and printing is impeccable. Now near impossible to find.
Jim French (1932 – 2017) was an American artist, illustrator, photographer, filmmaker, and publisher. He is best known for his association as co-founder of Colt Studio, using the pseudonym Rip Colt, created in late 1967, where French built what would become one of the most successful gay male erotica companies in the U.S. French began drawing and photographing male erotica in the mid-1960s while working as an illustrator and artist for Madison Avenue advertising agencies. His first published book, Man, was issued in 1972. Other books include Another Man, Jim French Men, Quorum, Opus Deorum, Masc., The Art of Jim French and The Art of the Male Nude. Publication of Colt magazines began in 1969 with the digest-size "Manpower!". During the 1970s, French began marketing his short films in 8mm format; they were soon collected on video-cassette format, which were remastered for DVD format in the 1990s. French's artwork and photography has been hailed as “iconic, groundbreaking, and singularly influential”, leaving a legacy of homoerotic images in artwork, illustrations, photo sets, slides, film, fine-art photographs, magazines, books and calendars that presented his work exclusively and set a new standard in photography of men.
As New copy.
2022, English
Softcover box folio + posters
Published by
Provence / Nice
$48.00 - Out of stock
This limited edition of PROVENCE comes in the form of box folio filled with posters by contributing artists, galleries, historians, fashion designers, critics, enterprises, etc. including: Marc Asekhame, Brigade, Merlin Carpenter, CFGNY, Contemporary Art Writing Daily, Rhea Dahl, Damien & The Love Guru, DAY6, Simon Denny, galeriepcp — Perks and Mini, Gessnerallee, Edgars Gluhovs, Samuel Haitz & Leda Bourgogne & Anne Fellner, Gloria Hasnay & Moritz NebenfuÌuehr, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff, Valeria Herklotz, Nina Hollensteiner & Albrecht Pischel, Karma International, Vera Kaspar, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Marie Karlberg, Milena Langer, Lulli 2020 — Jim C. Nedd — Nina Hollensteiner, Midway Contemporary Art, Olaf Nicolai, D’Ette Nogle, O-Town House, Walter Pfeiffer, Plymouth Rock, Sam Pulitzer, Ottolinger — Julien Ceccaldi, Marine Serre, Chen Shen featuring Gao Han, Wei Longwen & XYZ Lab, Kathrin Sonntag, suns.works, Swiss Art Awards, Una Szeemann, Galerie Tschudi, Hamish Fulton, Ilaria Vinci, Edition VFO, Nina Zimmer — Meret Oppenheim.
1983, French
Softcover (w. plastic dust-jacket), 126 pages, 24 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Temps Futurs / France
$200.00 - In stock -
First 1983 edition of the one-of-a-kind L’Art Medical, edited by French author, artist and core member of the "Bazooka" art collective and early Metal Hurlant magazine, Romain Slocombe. Published by Temps Futurs in France in 1983, this incredible book celebrates the phenomenon of "medical art", lavishly illustrated throughout with the incredible work of Slocombe, who brought us the provocative cult classic photobook, City of Broken Dolls. Anyone familiar with that book would know what to expect here. Photographs, paintings and illustrations, alongside Slocombe's study, with artworks throughout by fellow "Bazooka" art collective members, Kiki Picasso, Bernard Vidal, Natsuko, Yoshi Ichimura, Fred Chalmer, Loulou Picasso, plus Didier Eberoni, Kim Tchoun Kwang, Jena-Baptiste Mondino, Natsuko, Yoichi Nagata, Shigenari Onishi, and more. Full of paintings and photography of women in casts and slings, in hospitals and at accident scenes, medical erotica, body manipulation/mutilation, plus many visual historical references to violent fantasy, medical fetishism and bondage in film, illustration, erotic magazines, and other forms of popular culture from Japan and Europe. Nothing like it, and a long out-of-print collector's item.
Very Good copy still in original publisher's plastic dust jacket. Light wear and age.
1979, English
Softcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Avon Books / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible oversized cult classic ALIEN graphic novel by Richard J. Anobile, the first full-colour movie book specially designed to capture all the magnificence of the Film! A powerful story with overpowering visual effects, ALIEN comes to life as no movie ever has before in over 1,000 color photos that present the full range of the ingenious space vehicle, the Nostromo, the grotesque creature, and the utterly fantastic settings—conceived and created by such talents as Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger, Heavy Metal artist Moebius, and Ron Cobb, one of the designers of Star Wars. The result is was a new dimension in epic space adventure, a masterpiece in cinema history. This wonderful book is a cover-to-cover printed form of the film.
Richard J. Anobile (b. 19470 pioneered the use of the movie frame blow-up technique to recreate entire films in book form. His books were valuable resources especially in a time before VCR's and DVD's and the internet. While they might be viewed as simplistic picture books now, they were an attempt at curating film at a time when it was often still an after-thought. Anobile has spent much of the rest of his life in film production.
1981, German
Softcover, 32 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Institut Mathildenhöhe / Darmstadt
$140.00 - Out of stock
Very rare early Genzken catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Isa Genzken : Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Fotografien, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff-Stipendium, Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Jan.-Feb. 1981. Profusely illustrated throughout with Genzken's work in colour and b/w, with text (in German) by Bernhard Kerber and exhibition history.
Very Good copy with light bump to top of spine with small split, otherwise perfect.
2018, English
Softback (2 vol. in slipcase), 96 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$56.00 - In stock -
Normative Models is two books in a slipcase comprised of an identical sequence of images and are only differentiated by the printed texts.
Catalogue 01/2018 contains, The Trial of Lucullus by Bertolt Brecht (English translation from 1943): and Catalogue 02/2018 includes, Applied Fantastic: On the Polish Women’s Magazine Ty I Ja by David Crowley.
These variants serve to demonstrate the complex symbiosis between image, context, and meaning.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Christopher Williams: Normative Modes at kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (5 May – 29 July 2018).
Williams, who is originally from Los Angeles, is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The artist has presented a number of solo exhibitions under the title Christopher Williams. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle, versions of which have been shown in Germany at the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2005), the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2010), and the Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2011). Williams’s work was first presented in Hanover as part of group exhibitions at the Sprengel Museum in the early 1990s.
2010, English / Norwegian
Softcover, 80 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Bergen Kunsthall / Norway
$65.00 - Out of stock
For over 20 years Christopher Williams has worked in the field between photography as art and the application of the photographic medium to documentation, advertising, and journalism. The works involve volumes of such subtexts and themes, which are rarely fully apparent, but are concealed behind layer upon layer of circumstances and references, connotations, and background stories. Williams is a decided storyteller, and builds up his narratives by way of an almost essayistic juxtaposition of photographs that stand in relation – not directly obvious – with one another.
The exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall was the first solo presentation of Williams's work in Scandinavia and the title hints at a specific angle of approach to the complex network of connections. For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons Sur La Société Industrielle suggests a course of lessons that covers the industrial preconditions of the spread of photography, and which can in turn be applied to society in a larger perspective. The accumulation of loosely related events in European culture (decolonization, industrialization, the revolution of ‘68) is paralleled with inventions from the same era which have influenced photographic technology. The same title has been used for several exhibitions in recent years, but often with an addition that indicates that each new exhibition is a new experiment: a new revision. The way the titles begin with “For Example” also indicates the same experimental attitude.
The exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall was not a retrospective in the traditional sense, but brought out various aspects of the artistic oeuvre through a selection of both recent photographs and older works. The exhibition itself thus constituted a new revision of Williams’s ongoing project.
The exhibition catalogue collects, for the first time, a selection of Williams’s own writing in the form of press releases for recent exhibitions, each containing only minor changes from one exhibition to the next. The book also presents two new essays on the work of Christopher Williams by John Kelsey and Diedrich Diederichsen.
Designed by Christopher Williams and Petra Hollenbach.
In the 1970s, Christopher Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts under the first wave of West Coast conceptual artists, including John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, only to become one of his generation’s leading conceptualists. Williams’s work is a critical investigation of the medium of photography and more broadly the vicissitudes of industrial culture, in particular its structures of representation and classification. Using the process of reproduction as a point of entry, the artist manipulates the conventions of advertising, the superficiality of surface, and ultimately the history of Modernism. Deeply political, historical, and sometimes personal, the photographs are meant to evoke a subtle shift in our perception by questioning the communication mechanisms and aesthetic conventions that influence our understanding of reality.
Now out-of-print.
1990, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages, 25.7 x 18.4 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$70.00 - In stock -
Only in Japan c. 1990 would you be lucky enough to find a book entirely made up of photographs of Kyle MacLachlan, James Spader and Matthew Modine. The wonderful Japanese photo-book / "Cine Album" "Generation of McLachlan, Spader and Modine", captures three of Hollywoods greats at the height of their popularity at the break of the 90's, all in the one place. Profusely illustrated with film stills, press photos, behind the scenes shots, and movie posters to accompany filmographies for each actor, all reproduced in vivd colour and b/w gloss. Published by the great Haga Bookstore imprint.
Fine copy in dust jacket.
2021, English
Softcover, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Centre d'editions / Melbourne
Guzzler / Rosanna
$30.00 - In stock -
Very limited edition informal magazine/catalogue published on the occasion of ‘Sex is Gay: Part Deux’, a group exhibition presented by Zac Segbedzi at Guzzler, Rosanna, 20 Nov — 5 Dec, 2021. Features the work of Ramsay Alderson, Richard Hawkins, Paul Levack, Mathieu Malouf, Heji Shin, and Alex Vivian. Lavishly colour illustrated on glossy stock with work images, video stills and installation photography from the exhibition, followed by 20 pages of erotic photos shot by Ramsey Alderson and Richard Hawkins of famed pornstar Tom Faulk during Mathieu Malouf's 2016 show ‘Toilet’ at Jenny's in Los Angeles.
Very limited print run.
2002, English
Hardcover, 288 pages, 27 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arena Editions / New Mexico
$260.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of the beautiful Carlo Mollino Polaroids book, published in 2002 by Arena Editions. Now highly collectable, Carlo Mollino Polaroids is the first published book of the famed Italian designer's "decadent and hermetic" erotic photographs, selected from the roughly 1200 surviving Polaroids, never exhibited during his life, which were found following his death in 1973. This book represented the first comprehensive look at these polaroids, exquisitely reproducing over 250 examples collected within a lovely gilt, photo-inlayed cloth hardcover.
Carlo Mollino (1905–73) was an architect, designer, photographer, writer, skier, racing driver and stunt pilot. In a career that spanned more than four decades, Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars and aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women - mostly dancers - in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to attain his idealized vision of the female form. The pictures, which totalled around 1,200, remained a secret until after his death, in 1973. Only a few were ever publicly shown, until this acclaimed first edition was published by James Crump in 2002. Reviewing this book, The New Yorker declared, "This lavish selection of several hundred Polaroids preserves the essential mystery of a project both decadent and hermetic. Though clearly the product of a deep obsession, the photographs are deliberately impersonal, each baroque detail an invitation for the viewer to imagine Mollino's encounters with the women."
Very Good copy!
1971 / 1998, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$80.00 - In stock -
Lovely 1998 edition of the best Japanese photo-book / "Cine Album" dedicated entirely to French actress Brigitte Bardot (b. 1934), first published in 1971. Profusely illustrated with film stills from all of her film appearances up until the date of first publication, from Le Trou Normand (1952) through to Boulevard du Rhum (1971), inc. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard – 1963), Viva Maria! (Louis Malle – 1965), And God Created Women (Roger Vadim – 1956), Harley Davidson (François Reichenbach, Eddy Matalon – 1967), The Bear and the Doll (Michel Deville — 1970), and all else, along with press photos, behind the scenes shots, and full filmography and much more, all reproduced in vivid colour and b/w gloss. Small amount of text included is in Japanese. Published by the great Haga Bookstore imprint.
Fine copy in dust jacket.
1989, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 136 pages, 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1989 edition of one of Araki's finest, Tokyo Story is a beautiful collection of 120 photographs laid out in full-page, full-bleed contrasting monochrome in order of the seasons. "A daring and unexpected story of Tokyo, a dark and clear reverie, of naked skin, beggars, small streets, ruins and construction sites". A gorgeous and important volume suggesting a new direction in Araki's work and a precious insight into 1980s Tokyo through the lens of Araki.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with some edge wear.
1993, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 26 x 19.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Heibonsha / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first edition of this 1993 photobook of Nobuyoshi Araki's cat photographs, captured in black-and-white throughout the streets of Tokyo. Lovely design with mostly full-page reproductions throughout on various gloss and raw paper stocks.
Nobuyoshi Araki is a prolific Japanese photographer who has produced thousands of photographs over the course of his career. He became famous for “Un Voyage Sentimental” (1971), a series of photos depicting both banal and deeply intimate scenes of his wife and lifelong muse, essayist Aoki Yoko (whom the artist credits for making him a photographer), during their honeymoon. To date the 75 year old has produced 450 photo books and counting. With a repertoire that knows no boundaries, Araki's diaristic style of photography has captured the world around him (his cat Ciro, the people and landscapes of Japan and his travels, flowers, family), though it is Araki’s intensely sexual imagery that has elicited particular controversy and fascination throughout his career. Similarly to Helmut Newton, Araki has often addressed subversive themes — such as bondage in the Japanese style Kinbaku — in his provocative depictions of female nudes. He typically works in black-and-white photography, and his hallmark style is deliberately casual. “Rather than shooting something that looks like a professional photograph, I want my work to feel intimate, like someone in the subject’s inner circle shot them,” he says. Pushing against the world of commercialised photography, he is celebrated for his history of self-publishing and distributing his work, beginning with his Xerox Photo Albums of 1970. Amongst many others, Araki has collaborated with American photographer Nan Goldin and Icelandic musician Björk.
Very Good in peach gloss wraps with original illustrated dustjacket (light wear) and publisher's obi-strip.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket and obi-strip), 200 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fusosha / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
Scarce, first edition of this wonderful 1995 Araki photo album. From cover to cover this book is entirely comprised of Araki's date-stamped photographs taken in the year 1995, presented chronologically and in rich colour. Araki documents all his favourite subjects — women, nudes, flowers, still-lifes, Japanese city details and his beloved cat Chiro, all in amazing panoramic format. Robert Frank and Nan Goldin even make appearances. The landscape format of this hardcover book allows for the images to be grouped into selections of two per page (four per spread) or a glorious single shot spanning a spread, making a jam-packed collection of almost 400 photographs. A great collection.
Very Good copy with Good dust jacket and obi-strip.
2003, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jakcet and obi-strip), 400 pages, 18.3 x 25.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Wides Shuppan Co. / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Nobuyoshi Araki's "Tokyo Summer Story", published in 2003. Tokyo told as a story. Dedicated to Japanese film-maker Yasujirō Ozu. Unique among the many snaps of Araki, "Tokyo Summer Story" is entirely comprised of photographs of Tokyo streets taken by Araki whilst riding in a taxi. Accompanying text “The Running Atget” by Hitoshi Suzuki
“At first I thought, I will release my shutter when the cars have stopped. But step by step, I began to shoot while things were moving.” [...] “Photography is not about framing a space, no. It is an art about framing time. Before and after every single photography frame, there’s a past and a future. These deleted futures and pasts lurk in the space between the frames. So you see, the spaces between each shot are not evenly empty, they spread out, overlap, swing.” [...] “At first I used a wide lens to shoot, but in the latter half, I gradually switched to a normal lens. People and subjects come floating out of the city landscape. On an emotional level, this gets me closer.” — quotes by Nobuyoshi Araki taken from Hitoshi Suzuki’s “The Running Atget”
Very Good copy, with only light tanning, otherwise As New.
2013, English
Hardcover, 348 pages, 27.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$500.00 - Out of stock
Now exceptionally rare and collectible, Phenotype is the first comprehensive monograph on the biologist Jochen Lempert, who has worked as a photographer since the early 1990s.
Since the early 1990s, the German photographer and biologist Jochen Lempert (born 1958) has used analogue, black-and-white photography to convey his gently reverential vision of nature and sentience—whether that of animals, plants or humans. Often grainy, sometimes verging on abstraction, and sometimes focusing minutely on the activity of some tiny creature, his photographs exude a simple pleasure in fleeting tranquility. Lempert has also taken a quietly particular stance on the presentation of his work: in exhibitions, his images are presented unframed and tacked up on walls, and his books (among them Recent Field Work and Coevolution) are always immediately identifiable for their modest but exquisite design, printing and paper. Continuing this tradition of gorgeous bookmaking, Jochen Lempert: Phenotype reproduces 450 of his works, most of them arranged in groups and sequences, from more than 20 years of artistic production.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Hamburger Kunsthalle Gallery of Contemporary Art, 22 June – 29 September 2013.
Very Good copy, light tanning to spine.
2022, English / German
Hardcover, 120 pages, 20 x 26.5 cm
Published by
Weiss Berlin / Berlin
$82.00 - Out of stock
In 1984, the German photographer Helga Paris spent several weeks at a state-owned clothing factory, during which time she shot more than 1,500 photographs. From these she selected the 49 powerful images that make up the series Women at the Clothing Factory VEB Treff-Modelle Berlin. These photographs capture her subjects engaged in their work or taking cigarette breaks, conveying the serenity and beauty of the sitters in their brief moments of tranquility amid the factory environment.This title collects the entire series and gathers it in a format that is affordable to a wider audience. This beautifully designed volume features a linen-bound printed cover with embossed text.
2021, English
Hardcover, 152 pages, 18.5 x 24 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$82.00 - Out of stock
With an eye trained by modernist painting and early Soviet, Italian, and French cinema and influenced by theatre and poetry, self-taught photographer Helga Paris developed an extensive oeuvre of gently nuanced black-and-white images over a period of four and a half decades. The great trust and confidence that people had in her as an artist and as a person are a hallmark of all her portraits. Her subjects open themselves up to her and let her into their lives. The photographs show figures like Christa Wolf, Elke Erb, and Charlotte E. Pauly in private moments as well as the literary counter-public of Prenzlauer Berg and its protagonists. The book is accompanied by texts penned by publisher Gerhard Wolf and curator and art historian Eugen Blume. Paris’s portraits of artists and writers in the GDR are being published for the first time in book form in conjunction with an exhibition at the Leonhardi Museum in Dresden.
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Camden Art Centre / UK
$98.00 - Out of stock
Humanity’s place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, The Botanical Mind investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree was conceived as a trans-generational group exhibition by Gina Buenfeld and Matt Williams for the Camden Art Centre, bringing together surrealist, modernist, visionary, outsider, indigenous Amazonian, and contemporary works alongside historical and ethnographic artefacts, textiles and manuscripts spanning more than 500 years. Through the symbolism of diverse cultural artefacts and the works of mystics, artists and thinkers around the world, 'The Botanical Mind' reveals how the vegetal kingdom has metaphysical importance to the development of consciousness and spirituality.
This richly illustrated 224-page companion publication includes essays by the curators and contributions from scholars on the key themes of the exhibition – alchemy, art history, plant ontology, Gaian ecology, anthropology and ethnobotany – unifying philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic approaches to meditate on the cosmic significance of plants in different worldviews.
Edited by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark
Designed by Sara De Bondt studio.
Artists and Writers
Eileen Agar / Anni Albers / Josef Albers / Sarah Angliss / Consuelo "Chelo" González Amézcua / Gemma Anderson with Wakefield Lab and John Dupré / Anna Atkins / Kirk Barley / Jordan Belson / Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater / Karl Blossfeldt / Carol Bove / Jagadish Chandra Bose / Kerstin Brätsch / Bernd Brabec De Mori / Hildegarde von Bingen / Andrea Büttner / Adam Chodzko / Ithell Colquhoun / Bruce Conner / Brenda Danilowitz / Das Institut / Mirtha Dermisache / Minnie Evans / Cerith Wyn Evans / Charles Filiger / Robert Fludd / Monica Gagliano / Giorgio Griffa / Brion Gysin / Friedrich Wilhelm Heine / Ernst Haeckel / Dr Stephan Harding / Anna Haskel / Tamara Henderson / Channa Horwitz / Textiles from the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa) people / C.G. Jung / Joachim Koester / Rachid Koraïchi / Hilma af Klint / Emma Kunz / Yves Laloy / Ghislaine Leung / Linder / Simon Ling / Michael Marder / Agnes Martin / André Masson / John McCracken / Terence McKenna / Henri Michaux / Matt Mullican / Wolfgang Paalen / Paul Păun / Stefan A. Pedersen / Santiago Ramón y Cajal / Steve Reinke and James Richards / Edith Rimmington / Adele Röder / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Rupert Sheldrake / Textiles and ceramics from the Shipibo-Conibo people / Penny Slinger / F. Percy Smith / Janet Sobel / Philip Taaffe / Priscilla Telmon and Vincent Moon / Fred Tomaselli / Delfina Muñoz de Toro / Alexander Tovborg / David Tudor / Lee Ufan / Scottie Wilson / Terry Winters / Adolf Wölfli / Bryan Wynter / Henriette Zéphir / Anna Zemánková / Unica Zürn / artists from the Yawanawá community