World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2014, English
Die-cut softcover, 368 pages, (1,000 color ill.), 20 x 29.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$130.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk
Since his arrival in New York in 1969, the French artist Michel Auder (b. 1945, Soissons, France) has authored more than five hundred video works that chart five decades of the medium’s history. Employing new video formats as they become available, many of which have quickly fallen into obsolescence, Auder has prolifically produced short and feature films as well as video installations and photography that transgress genres, gleaning the fields of art history, literature, commercial television, and experimental cinema. At once poetic and critical, cruel and confessional, Auder’s casually virtuosic oeuvre continues to disrupt traditional perceptual habits of moviegoers and art audiences alike, subverting notions of filmic narrative and process.
This new monograph includes “Twenty Film-Poems for M. Auder,” a series of mini-essays on selected videos by Quinn Latimer, an American poet and critic based in Basel, as well as “Portrait of the Marauder,” an extensive interview with the artist by Adam Szymczyk, director of Kunsthalle Basel. The book which also includes a catalogue raisonné of Auder’s video works, was designed by Julia Born, a Swiss graphic designer who lives and works in Berlin.
This book was conceived on the occasion of the exhibitions “Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder,” on view at Kunsthalle Basel, June 9–August 25, 2013, and curated by Adam Szymczyk; and “Michel Auder: Selected Works,” on view at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, October 31–November 17, 2013, and curated by Sophie von Olfers.
Design by Julia Born
2001, English
Softcover (w. French flaps), 256 pages, 21.2 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Holzwarth / Berlin
$350.00 $150.00 - Out of stock
First, collectible edition. The result of a collaboration between the filmmaker Harmony Korine and the painter Christopher Wool, this series of experimental images tests the limits of the pictorial and the abstract, pushing the boundaries of visual and textual narrative to extremes. Korine’s photographs form the basis of an intense process of layering, drawing, overprinting and photocopying as each image is passed back and forth between the artists until the images are reduced to ghostly shadows beneath a barrage of scumbled dot-screens, random patterning and symbolic blurs and drips. Gradually the fragmented, distorted images serially mutate, attacked by a combination of mechanical and human processes, yet despite the violence exerted upon it, a vestige of narrative always survives.
Harmony Korine was born in Bolinas, California in 1974. At 19, he wrote the screenplay for Kids, directed by Larry Clark, and later wrote and directed Gummo, which won awards at the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, and Julian Donkey-Boy, which won an award for best art direction at the Gijon International Film Festival in Spain. He is the author of the novel A Crack Up at the Race Riots.
Christopher Wool was born and brought up in Chicago. In the early 1970s he moved to New York, where he studied painting intermittently and worked as an assistant to the artist Joel Shapiro. His first show was at the Cable Gallery, New York, in 1984. Since then he has exhibited internationally, including the 1989 Whitney Biennial, Documenta9, Birth of the Cool, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Basel and the Secession Gallery in Vienna.
Very Good - Fine.
2017, English
Softcover, 614 pages, 14 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Un / Melbourne
$40.00 - In stock -
A new book celebrating ten years of un Magazine.
A compendium of articles, essays, reviews and artist pages selected from a decade of publishing, un Anthology offers a unique take on Australia's independent contemporary art scene. Featuring hundreds of artists and writers from un Magazine's archive plus new commissions from Lily Hibberd and Kelly Fliedner, Anthony Gardner, Justin Clemens, Bianca Hester, and Lisa Radford, the book is co-edited by Ulanda Blair, Rosemary Forde and Phip Murray.
2018, English
Embossed hardcover (in slipcase), 504 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Published by
MACK / London
$149.00 $90.00 - Out of stock
The Complete Papers is an extensive catalogue raisonné volume encompassing all of Thomas Demand’s work over the past 28 years, together with the primary texts written about his practice. The book includes previously unseen early works from 1990, together with reference reproductions on every one of his pieces. A newly commissioned interview with Russell Ferguson, new texts by Jeff Wall and Alexander Kluge, contributions by Parveen Adams, Francesco Bonami, Teju Cole, Beatriz Colomina, Jeffrey Eugenides, Julia Franck, Hal Foster, Rachel Kushner, Ben Lerner, Jacques Rancière, Gary Shteyngart, Neville Wakefield, to name a few, is concluded by a complete exhibition listing and bibliography.
This hardback volume, housed in a printed and embossed slipcase, which also includes a Demand work printed on the interior lining, is the primary authority on the work of one of the most important artists of the 21st century.
2014, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$65.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
This book offers the first career retrospective of Brian Weil (1954--1996), an artist whose photographs pushed viewers into a deeply unsteadying engagement with insular communities and subcultures. A younger contemporary of such participant-observer photographers as Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, Weil took photographs that foreground the complex relationships between photographer and subject, and between photograph and viewer.
Weil was a member of ACT UP and the founder of New York City's first needle exchange, and his photographs became inextricably tied to his activist practice. His late work, an extensive series of portraits whose subjects bear witness to the emerging AIDS pandemic, is included here, along with selections from several earlier and concurrent projects: Sex (underground sex and bondage participants), Miami Crime(homicide scenes investigated by the Miami Police Department), Hasidim(populations of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and the Catskills), and an extensive video project with members of nascent transgender support groups.
This book commemorates a 2013 exhibition of Brian Weil's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and includes in-depth essays on Weil by Stamatina Gregory and Jennifer Burris, an interiew with the artist by Claudia Gould, and reprints of archival edited notes discussing crimeand photographic evidence based on a series of interviews conducted by Sylvère Lotringer with filmmaker George Diaz in the 1980s.
Stamatina Gregory is an independent curator and scholar currently based in New York, where sheis completing a PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
2013, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
In Sanja Iveković’s Triangle (Trokut, 1979), four black-and-white photographs and written text capture an eighteen-minute performance from May 10, 1979. On that date, a motorcade carrying Josip Broz Tito, then president of Yugoslavia, drove through the streets of downtown Zagreb. As the President’s limousine passed beneath her apartment, Ivokevic began simulating masturbation on her balcony. Although she could not be seen from the street, she knew that the surveillance teams on the roofs of neighboring buildings would detect her presence. Within minutes, a policeman appeared at her door ordered her inside. Not only did Ivekovic's action expose government repression and call attention to the rights of women, it also called attention to the relationship of gender to power, and to the particular experience of political dissidence under communist rule in Eastern Europe. Triangle is considered one of Iveković’s key works and yet, despite Iveković’s stature as one of the leading artists of the former Yugoslavia, it has received little direct attention. With this book, Ruth Noack offers the first sustained examination of Iveković’s widely exhibited, now canonical artwork.
After a detailed analysis of the work's formal qualities, Noack considers its position in the context of artistic production and political history in socialist Yugoslavia. She looks closely at the genesis of the performance and its documentation as a work of art, and relates the making of the work and the politics of canon-making to issues pertaining to the former East-West divide. She discusses the artistic language and meaning-making in relation to conceptualism and performance and to the position of women in Tito’s Yugoslavia and in society at large, and investigates the notion that Iveković’s work of this period is participating in citizenship, shifting the focus from the artist’s subversive act to her capacity to shape the terms through which we order our world.
About the Author
Ruth Noack, an art historian, critic, and curator, has taught at art schools and universities in Vienna, Lüneburg, and Kassel. She co-curated Documenta 12 (2007).
2016, English
Softcover, 730 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Karlsruhe University of Art and Design and the Geneva School of Art and Design / Genève
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$60.00 - Out of stock
Markus Miessen, Yann Chateigné (Eds.)
Contributions by Stuart Bailey, Bassam El Baroni, Thomas Bayrle, Jeremy Beaudry, Beatrice von Bismarck, Beatriz Colomina, Céline Condorelli, Mathieu Copeland, Dexter Sinister, Joseph Grima, Nav Haq, Sandi Hilal, Nikolaus Hirsch, Thomas Jefferson, Christoph Keller, Alexander Kluge, Joachim Koester, Armin Linke, Julia Moritz, Rabih Mroué, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Seth Price, Walid Raad, Alice Rawsthorn, Patricia Reed, David Reinfurt, Claire de Ribaupierre, Eyal Weizman, et al.
What are the processes that enable archives to become productive? Conventional archives tend to be defined through the content-specific accumulation of material, which conforms to an existing order or narrative. They rarely transform their structure. In contrast to this model of archival practice and preservation, the conflictual archive has an open framework in which it actively transforms itself, allowing for the creation of new and surprising relationships. Illustrating how spaces of knowledge can be devised, developed, and designed, this archive reveals itself as a space in which documents and testimonies open up a stage for productive dispute and struggle.
Exploring nontraditional archives, such as those of Harald Szeemann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sitterwerk, and the publishing house Merve, The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict offers new perspectives on archival practice, interrogating whether archives need spatial permanence, and, if so, which design framework should be applied for the archive to take on more than a singular form of existence. The research project is a collaboration between the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design and the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève).
Copublished with Karlsruhe University of Art and Design and the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève)
Design by Jonas Fechner and Lisa Naujack
2002, English
Softcover, 27 × 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used*,
Published by
Purple Institute / Paris
$90.00 - Out of stock
PURPLE Number 11, Spring 2002.
A rare early issue of the iconic Purple magazine, edited by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm, this wonderful early edition features work by: Jeff Rain, Bruce Benderson, Nick Tosches, Jens Hoffman, Claude Closky, Elein Fleiss, Maurizio Cattelan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Pierre Leguillon, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Lutz Huelle, Miltos Manetas, Ola Rindal, Terry Richardson, Mark Borthwick, Giasco Bertoli, Laetitia Benat, Masafumi Sanai, Richard Prince, Helmut Lang, Marc Jacobs, Ann-Sofie Back, Louis Vuitton, A.F. Vandevorst, Jil Sander, and many many more.
In 1992 Olivier Zahm and his partner Elein Fleiss printed the first issue of Purple Prose, a Parisian literary art zine that over the years has evolved into Purple Fashion Magazine and Purple. Soon after the birth of Purple Prose, Zahm and Fleiss created spin-off publications like les cahiers purple, Purple Sexe, Purple Fiction, and of course, Purple Fashion. Zahm aimed at fusing together his two worlds, fashion and art, in creating Purple.
2018, English
Softcover, 496 pages, 22 x 28 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$89.00 - Out of stock
'Archive Species' is an inquiry into the representation of clothed bodies in print media since the 1970s. Artist Joke Robaard and writer Camiel van Winkel have been re-assembling and re-reading the vast archive of fashion and newspaper images that Robaard has collected since 1979. Together, they selected images from the archive and arranged them into dynamic series or cycles, generating new narratives and unexpected pathways of signification. Using an artistic strategy of appropriation and alienation, the authors identify crucial connections between body, object, and behaviour, in an elaborate attempt to expose the hidden cultural and political layers of fashion photography.
The essays in this book—on topics such as the assembled self, the construction and deconstruction of garments, and the metaphorical potential of textile and fabric—should be read in close connection to the prolific visual material. Fashion photography adopts behavioural patterns from everyday life, and prints or stamps them, in the form of graphic patterns and textile arrangements, onto the bodies of men and women and the clothes that they wear. This is what Archive Species wants to demonstrate. It is an inquiry into shifting forms of human behaviour and self-presentation, the entropy of materials, and the habits of dress. Fashion photographs are read as fossils of graphic production: although embedded in the past, they point forward to conditions of contemporaneity.
Authors: Joke Robaard & Camiel van Winkel
Design: Elisabeth Klement
1976, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Mathews Miller Dunbar / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
Barry Kay's wonderful "The Other Women" photo book from 1976. Intimate black and white documentary portrait collection of Australian transgender women in Sydney (and Melbourne) in the mid 1970's. Melbourne-born Barry Kay (1932-1985), was a highly acclaimed stage and costume designer of international renown, who later in his career also made a name for himself as a distinguished photographer.
From the cover : "In this book Barry Kay documents Australian transvestism, female impersonation and Sydney's unique transsexual community. His photographs were made during visits to Australia in 1974 and 1975"
Scarcer first hardcover English edition. Ex-library copy with associated markings/binding and lacking dust jacket. General wear.
1984, German / English / Spanish
Softcover, 80 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$15.00 - Out of stock
novum Gebrauchsgraphik issue 1/1984 features The Art Directors Club of New York, International Animted Film Festival Annency '83, space advertising for HI-FI, trademarks by Jim Donoahue, the identity of Ferrovie Nord Milano, and more.
novum was founded in Germany in 1924, under the name of Gebrauchsgraphik. The magazine quickly developed into the foremost journal of graphic design, valued widely at home and abroad as a source of inspiration. The magazine was founded by Prof. H. K. Frenzel and published by Phönix Berlin.
Very Good copy.
1985, English / German / French
Softcover, 92 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Graphis Press / Zürich
$20.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Graphis issue 238, July/August 1985, featuring the work of Swiss design agency GGK (Karl Gerstner, Paul Gredinger + Markus Kutter), the conceptual photography of Henry Wolf, New Yorker illustrator Eugène Mihaesco, Diagrams/Charts/Graphs, calendars, and more. Cover by Eugène Mihaesco.
Graphis is the world's foremost international publishers of books on communication design, presenting and promoting the best work in International Design, Advertising, Photography and Art/Illustration since it's founding in 1944 by Walter Herdeg and Dr. Walter Amstutz in Zurich, Switzerland. Graphis published over 350 issues of the highly-regarded, influential Graphis Magazine, along with hardcover Annuals including: Graphis Design Annual, Graphis Advertising Annual, Graphis Photography Annual, Graphis Annual Reports Annual, and Graphis Poster Annual.
Very Good copy.
1985, English / German / French
Softcover, 92 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Graphis Press / Zürich
$20.00 - Out of stock
Graphis issue 237, May/June 1985, featuring the visual identity of Swissair, the graphic design of Knoll International, Swiss Posters 1984, Kodak '85, Roger Bezombes fantastic shoe creations for Bally, Hans Georg Raunch, and more. Cover by Rudolf Beck.
Graphis is the world's foremost international publishers of books on communication design, presenting and promoting the best work in International Design, Advertising, Photography and Art/Illustration since it's founding in 1944 by Walter Herdeg and Dr. Walter Amstutz in Zurich, Switzerland. Graphis published over 350 issues of the highly-regarded, influential Graphis Magazine, along with hardcover Annuals including: Graphis Design Annual, Graphis Advertising Annual, Graphis Photography Annual, Graphis Annual Reports Annual, and Graphis Poster Annual.
Very Good copy.
1979, English / German / French
Softcover, 92 pages, 30 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Graphis Press / Zürich
$40.00 - Out of stock
Graphis issue 207, 1979/80, featuring the work of Herb Lubalin's Associates (Alan Peckolick, Ernie Smith, Tony DiSpigna), Photographis '80, Jürgen Sohn's poster design, Swiss Posters 1979, Kodak calendar 1980, Elwood Smith, Chicago '79, Paul Degen, and more. Cover by Herb Lubalin's Associates (Alan Peckolick, Ernie Smith, Tony DiSpigna).
Graphis is the world's foremost international publishers of books on communication design, presenting and promoting the best work in International Design, Advertising, Photography and Art/Illustration since it's founding in 1944 by Walter Herdeg and Dr. Walter Amstutz in Zurich, Switzerland. Graphis published over 350 issues of the highly-regarded, influential Graphis Magazine, along with hardcover Annuals including: Graphis Design Annual, Graphis Advertising Annual, Graphis Photography Annual, Graphis Annual Reports Annual, and Graphis Poster Annual.
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 19.2 x 25.5 cm
Published by
Koenig Books / London
WIELS / Brussels
$78.00 - Out of stock
Conceived and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans, and published in association with the exhibitions Rebuilding the Future, at IMMA, Dublin and Today Is The First Day, at WIELS, Brussels, this richly illustrated artist’s book explores the latest developments in Tillmans’s work over the last three years. Today Is The First Day spans the artist’s multifaceted approach to image-making, video, performance, music and political activities, presenting newly commissioned texts from contributors including novelist Olivia Laing, historian Brian Dillon, curator Catherine Wood, and geologist Dr David Chew, each of whom illuminate a different aspect of Tillmans’s work. The scope of the book includes over 30 pages featuring his set design for the English National Opera’s production of War Requiem, recent portraits, and detailed installation views that allow to see in depth Tillmans’s installation practices in venues as far afield as Kinshasa and Goslar, Hong Kong and Johannesburg.
2016, English
Hardcover, 60 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise / New York
$600.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of the incredible, and now very rare Love is the Message : The Message is Death by Arthur Jafa. Published in 2016 by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York to accompany the exhibition of the same name. Illustrated throughout with text by Greg Tate and Christina Sharpe.
Very Good copy.
2018, English
Hardcover, 850 pages, 28.2 x 34.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$400.00 - In stock -
First, only edition of the absolutely epic, award winning and now extremely rare 850 page Arthur Jafa book. Very quickly out-of-print.
Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.
Jafa’s work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the ‘power, beauty and alienation’ of Black music in American culture?
Building upon Jafa’s image-based practice, this enormous (over 840 pages) and now out-of-print volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life.
Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa’s artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.
Jafa's imagery is placed in conversation with texts by over 30 outstanding contributors including Hilton Als, Jean Baudrillard, Amiri Baraka, Judith Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Fred Moten, Dave Hickey, John Akomfrah, Tina Campt, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Cecil Taylor. Edited by Joseph Constable and Amira Gad.
Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June – 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February – 25 November 2018).
Fine - In pristine new condition
1981, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Sydney College of Arts / Sydney
$55.00 - Out of stock
Fantastic publication from the Sydney College of Arts, 1981. Densely packed with essays and photo-essays focussing on photography, politics, theory, criticism, sexuality and racism. "This is the first publication in what we hope to be a continuing commitment to critical thought and practice in photography. Contributors from all over Australia were invited to participate on a collective basis for selection, layout and production." (from Foreward).
Features contributions from Fiona Hall, Terry Smith, Experimental Art Foundation, Sue Ford, John Williams, Ted Colless, Mimmo Cozzolino, Jacki Redgate, Violet Hamilton, Kris Hemensley, Charles Merewether, Martyn Jolly, Robyn Stacey, Esther Faerber, Anne Zahalka, Catherine De Lorenzo, Anne-Marie Willis, and many more.
1983, English / Japanese
Softcover (w. in original obi-strip and inserted 1983 exhibition ticket stub, flyer and newspaper clipping), 147 pages, 30.3 x 24 cm
1st Japanese Edition, Out of print title / Used*,
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
First Japanese printing from 1983 of Issey Miyake's great "Body Works" book.
In the 1980s, acclaimed Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake furthered his exploration of the body’s motions and form, enthusiastically taking on the challenge of designing garments using materials other than cloth: plastic, paper, and wire. He called his creations from this period “Body Works.” The American art magazine Artforum featured a Rattan- vine Body created by Miyake on its February 1982 cover—the first time clothing had been featured on the cover of an art magazine.
This is the book that fully encapsulates this incredible period of Miyake's work. With beautiful photography throughout by the likes of Marcus Leatherdale, Daniel Jouanneau, and Helmut Newton, illustrated contributions by Milton Glaser, iconic appearances by Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and many others, alongside behind the scenes photography, garment photography, texts (in English and Japanese) and much more, this museum book is as much an artist's book as it is a catalogue or monograph.
Very fine plastic-wrapped original printing copy with obi-strip comes with ticket-stub to the Japanese "Bodyworks" exhibition in 1983, as well as the exhibition flyer and a Japanese newspaper cutting from the time! A small Miyake archive!
2020, English
Softcover, 58 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$32.00 - Out of stock
This classic surrealist photobook pioneered the imagery of the domestic uncanny
First edited and published by Marcel Marien in 1968 in a limited edition of 230 copies, half a year after Paul Nougé's death, The Subversion of Images is a miniature classic in both the photobook and surrealist canons. It collects Nougé's notes and photographs from 1929-30 to form a guidebook to the surrealist image. Nougé here outlines his conception of the object and the surrealist approach to it, while also offering an accompaniment to the visual work of his colleague, René Magritte, whose paintings he sometimes titled. How might a tangle of string elicit terror? How might the suppression of an object move one to sentimentality? What is the effect of a pair of gloves on a loaf of sliced bread? Nougé's accompanying photographs explore these notions, and feature a number of his Belgian surrealist colleagues.
This translation is presented as a facsimile of the original edition, with an afterword by Xavier Canonne, director of the Musée de la Photographie.
A biochemist by trade, Paul Nougé (1895-1967) was a leading light of Belgian surrealism and its primary theorist, as well as a decisive influence on such Lettrists and Situationists as Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, who would take inspiration from his conception of plagiarism for what would come to be termed "détournement." Nougé steered the Brussels surrealist group toward a more rational approach to visual and verbal language that discarded the Parisian surrealists' proclivity for irrationality and occultism.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 150 pages, 27 x 21 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shogakukan / Tokyo
$90.00 $60.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful Japanese photobook by famed Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama, published in 1995. This entire photographic collection is dedicated to Shinoyama's photographs of his friend, Japanese actress and model Aki Mizusawa (1954-) spanning 1975‐1995. “It is extremely rare for a photographer to be able to shoot a single subject; one woman continuously for twenty years. Now, seeing all those images - as fleeting and instantaneous then as the magazines that carried them - revived and bound together gives that particular history a closure that weighs like marble. This book captures the twenty year photogenic evolution of a wonderful friend and subject, Aki Mizusawa. — Kishin Shinoyama
Kishin Shinoyama was born in 1940, in Tokyo, Japan. He embarked on his career while studying in the Department of Photography at Nippon University, and was awarded the Advertising Photographer’s Association prize, among others. After being employed at the Light Publicity advertising company, he started to work as a freelance photographer in 1968. His work is acclaimed for the portraits of the most famous celebrities of our day and age, such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Rie Miyazawa, and other major personalities. In his “Gekisha” and “Shinorama” series, he carries on capturing the times using new forms of expression and new technologies. He is also an exponent of solarization and has used it to challenge preconceived ideas of beauty and the nude.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket with publisher's obi strip.
1978, English
Softcover, 194 pages (plus insert), 21 x 29 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
LIP / Melbourne
$50.00 - Out of stock
The incredible book-sized 1978-79 edition of Melbourne's great LIP journal. Published out of Carlton between 1976-1984, LIP encapsulated Australian feminist artistic practice of the period, publishing articles and interviews by women on women in film, sound, theatre, painting, photography, poetry, criticism, activism, journalism, publishing, sculpture, design, education, and much more.
In this issue: Art Sense and Sensibility: Women's Art and Feminist Criticism - Janine Burke; Aboriginal Women: Ritual and Culture - Diane Bell interviewed by Lesley Dumbrell; Map of Transition: Performance - Jillian Orr; Jane Sutherland - Frances Lindsay; Sybil Craig - Mary Eagle; Make Your Own Teaset - Mary Newsome; Women's Images of Women - Barbara Hall; In Search of Old Mistresses - Patricia Symons; Women Ceramacists; Olive Bishop interviewed by Julie Ewington; Margaret Dodd Talking with Julie Ewington; Lorrain Jenyns; Wendy Stavrianos interviewed by Pauline Petrus; The Development of a Political View: A Conversation Between Two Women Artists - Jennifer Barwell and Vivienne Binns; Micky Allan interviewed by Suzanne Davies; Photographs - Jacqueline Mitelman; From the Ground Up - Photographs - Virginia Coventry; Survey of Women's Art Theory Courses and Feminine Sensibility - Janine Burke; The Women's Art Register Extension Project - Bonita Ely; Sisterhood ― For Whom? Jude Adams and Jenny Barber; Posters by Women in the Earthworks Poster Collective; Film - Margaret Fink and Her Brilliant Career - Frida Freiberg; Following My Star - Elsa Chauvel; Monique Schwarz interviewed by Christine Johnston; A Dialogue between Toni Robertson, a Feminist Poster Maker, and Jeni Thornley, a Feminist Film-maker; Nina Claditz interviewed by Annette Blonski; Introducing Helmer Sanders - Frida Freiberg; Reviews: Shopping in Hearbreak Arcade - Meredith Nolte; Me and Daphne - Linda Rubinstein; Feminine Focus at the Festival - Frida Freiberg; Supplement: Australian Women in Music - Australian Women in Music - Terry Radic; Margaret Sutherland - Helen Coles; May Brahe: Composer - Mimi Colligan; Dr. Ruby Davy - Silvia O’Toole; Four Women Composers: Helen Gifford, Ann Boyd, Ann Carr-Boyd and Peggy Glanville-Hicks - Marcia Ruff; Esther Rofe interviewed by Pauline Petrus; Talking with Linda Phillips by Kerry Murphy; Mary Nemet interviewed by Jeanette Fenelon; The Women's Electric Band interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; Robyn Archer interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; The Shameless Hussie A.C.R.; Jane Clifton and Celeste Howden interviewed by Jeannette Fenelon; Janie Conway and Marnie Sheehan - Virginia Fraser; Theatre - The Women's Theatre Group: A Selection of Scripts, Interviews and Comments Kerry Dwyer, Jenny Walsh and Suzanne Spunner; Roma: A One Woman Play - Jan Macdonald and the Roma cast; Tongue to Lip - Valerie Kirwan; And Women Must Wait: Savage Sepia - Suzanne Spunner; Dance and Movement - Marilyn Jones interviewed by Roseanne Hull-Brown; Betty Pounder interviewed by Roseanne Hull-Brown; Yum Wing Chun: Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman - Karen Armstrong; Media - An Open Letter - Shere Hite; Feminism and Publishing: Interviews with Women Publishers - Cathy Peake; Two Early Melbourne Journalists - Lurline Stewart; Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop - Anna Couani and Pamela Brown; The Australian Women's Weekly ― The Case of the Bald Cockatoo - Cathy Peake, Maree Conway and Sue Parvaris.
LIP Collective members: Annette Blonski, Janine Burke, Isabel Davies, Suzanne Davies, Lesley Dumbrell, Jeannette Fenelon, Freda Freiberg, Christine Johnston, Elizabeth Owen, Cathy Peake, Meredith Rogers, Suzanne Spunner, Lynne Wilkinson.
This copy includes the original 1978 etching "Make Your Own Teaset" insert by Mary Newsome.
Good-Very Good copy. Bump to one corner, light wear/tanning.
2017, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 25.4 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Karma / New York
$140.00 - Out of stock
First collectible edition of Women with Cameras (Anonymous), a new artist's book by Anne Collier (born 1970), with a text by Hilton Als (winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism), that consists of a sequence of 80 images of found amateur photographs that each depict a female subject in the act of holding a camera or taking a photograph.
Dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s, these artifacts of the pre-digital age were collected by Collier over a number of years from flea markets, thrift stores and online market places. Each of these photographs has, at some point in the recent past, been discarded by its original owner. The concept of "abandonment," of photographic images and the personal histories that they represent, is central to Women with Cameras (Anonymous), which amplifies photography's relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. The sequence of the images in Collier's book follows the format of her 35mm slide projection work Women with Cameras (Anonymous) (2016), that was recently shown to great acclaim in Tokyo, Japan, and Basel, Switzerland.
Printed in two editions by Karma (both 1,500 copies), both are out-of-print. This is the first edition. As New copy.
1983, German
Softcover, 118 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ullstein KunstBuch / Frankfurt
$40.00 - Out of stock
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. The first edition of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprised a series of Bellmer's photographs "illustrated" with prose poems by Paul Éluard; Bellmer's hand-colored photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Later editions of the book were expanded to incorporate a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts that together comprise one of the most important expositions of Surrealist cultural theory. Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason."
This 1983 printing from Frankfurt is in the original German language, as are majority of editions of Die Puppe, and includes Die Puppe, Die Spiele der Puppe, and Die Anatomie des Bildes, and more. Illustrated throughout. Very Good copy.