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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
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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.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 21.6 x 13.8 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$29.00 - Out of stock
The life’s work of two of British music’s most unique and timeless artists, with an introduction by Jarvis Cocker.
Selected and arranged by the authors themselves, Side by Side presents the lyrics, poems, writings and drawings of innovative musician Robert Wyatt and his creative partner, English painter and songwriter Alfie Benge. As a founding member of influential English rock bands Soft Machine and Matching Mole, and with a solo career which has lasted for over forty years and seen him collaborate with a diverse range of artists including Bjork, Brian Eno, Carla Bley, Paul Weller and David Gilmour, his own music remains unclassifiably personal. Alfie Benge is a visual artist, songwriter and pioneering music manager, having managed Robert’s career for fifty years. She is also married to Robert. Since 1982 they have collaborated on many of Robert’s most well-known songs. This unique volume celebrates one of the most enduring creative partnerships of the last half-century.
"Whenever an aspiring musician asks me about songwriting I point them towards Robert and Alfie. Their work is so unusual, so perceptive, so playful and so grownup. I don’t think there's anyone to compare. If you want songs that touch your mind as well as your heart, these are the best. Wide distribution of this book could improve the state of music dramatically." — Brian Eno
"Taken together Alfie & Robert’s lyrics combine to create a humanist world-view that is at once global & particular. Take it from me: that’s no mean feat." — Jarvis Cocker
2021, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Sound American / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
Sound American's 25th issue, the Folk Issue, celebrates and explores the intersections of experimental and folk music. Guest edited by Sarah Hennies and Anna Roberts-Gevalt–two of America's most forward-looking practitioners in experimental and folk music, respectively–this issue takes on questions of musical community and what it means to work inside and outside of its traditions.
The issue features writing by Ana Alonso-Minutti on La Llorona, Drew Daniel on Throbbing Gristle, Henry Flynt on his own violin practice, Suzanne Kite in conversation with Scott Benisiinaabandan, John McCowen interviewing Sean Meehan, Kurt Newman and Martin Arnold, Ian Nagoski on bird call impresario Charles Kellogg, and Anna Roberts-Gevalt's moving COVID diary and conversation with Meredith Monk and Peggy Seeger. This issue’s Exquisite Corpse is by vocalist and composer Amirtha Kidambi.
Produced in an edition of 500.
2020, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Sound American / New York
$36.00 - Out of stock
A quarterly journal founded in 2012 by Nate Wooley, providing in-depth interviews and essays, 'Sound American' starts from a simple desire to open the doors of experimental music to a wider audience. Their latest issue celebrates interstellar icon and generative force of nature, Sun Ra. Sun Ra (1914–1993) is an African-American experimental jazz pianist and composer. A prolific artist, he recorded over 100 albums with his band, the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Contributors include Taylor Ho Bynum, John Corbett, Naima Lowe, Luke Stewart with Thomas Stanley, and Ken Vandermark. The issue also features supplemental writing from Jessie Cox on Marshall Allen, Reg Bloor on Glenn Branca, Chris Pitsiokos on Miles Davis's On The Corner, Peter Margasak on Derek Bailey's On The Edge series, and a conversation between Audra Wolowiec and Freya Powell. The issue closes with the first exquisite corpse of the new season: a phenomenal text work by Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother).
1969, English / Swedish
Softcover, 640 pages, 26.8 x 21 cm
2nd Ed. ,
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Moderna Museet / Stockholm
$640.00 - Out of stock
Still the best Warhol catalogue ever made, the very collectible and iconic Warhol photo book published to accompany his first European museum show "Andy Warhol" at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, February - March, 1968, only three months before he was shot by Valerie Solanas. With virtually no text and adorned with Warhol's flower cover vividly printed in five spot colors, the concept of the catalogue was developed by the great German curator and museum director Kasper König, who commissioned Factory chronicler and inhabitant Billy Name, and a teenage Stephen Shore (!), to document Warhol's world and his co-conspirators living, working, and performing around his East 47th Street New York studio. Both Name and Shore composed rhythms of their own sequences, and neither of them added any captions: they felt the images should speak for themselves. This absence of text contributed to the object-status of the book. The result is one of the most historical photographic capsules of a pivotal time in the New York art scene of the late 1960s. Alongside hundreds of wonderful photographs from the studio, the film-sets, the Velvet Underground performances, the happenings, the road trips, the parties, including further photography by Rudy Burkhardt, Eric Pollitzer, and John Schiff, there are also selections of Warhol's artworks (where König's use of the xerox machine to reproduce Warhol's own work gives this catalogue its signature feel), and documentation of his exhibitions, including fantastic social imagery of the Moderna Museet proceedings not included in the first edition. The only text comes, fittingly, in the form of a series of introductory Warhol quotes and aphorisms.
Since Warhol himself had so much input into the production of this book, this catalogue-as-artist's-book-as-photobook can truly be considered a work of art in its own right. It quickly becoming a cult object, then a collector’s item.
Edited by Andy Warhol, Kasper König, Pontus Hultén, and Olle Granath.
This is the expanded 2nd edition, published in May 1969.
An excellent copy of a fragile book that is extremely prone to wear. Well preserved but with the common brittle binding issue from age and a bulky page count, with some loosening/disconnecting of sections from the spine glue. Much better than most copies out there! A tiny chip to the top back corner (spine corner), otherwise a very clean, presentable copy with only light corner wear and tanning to the newsprint.
2017, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 11.8 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
The Serving Library / New York
$25.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt
With contributions by Vincenzo Latronico, Mathew Kneebone & James Langdon, Sarah Demeuse, Johan Hjerpe, 9mother9horse9eyes9, Jumana Manna & Robert Wyatt, Lucy McKenzie, Mark de Silva, Jocelyn Penny Small, Abigail Reynolds
This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world. And so we find Vincenzo Latronico attempting to get in touch with E.T., a collection of Lucy McKenzie’s illusory quodlibets, a conversation between Jumana Manna and Robert Wyatt on art and ethics, a timely analysis of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” by Sarah Demeuse, along with other points of view from Mark de Silva, Jocelyn Penny Small, Abigail Reynolds, James Langdon & Mathew Kneebone, Johan Hjerpe, and the inimitable 9mother9horse9eyes9.
Published by The Serving Library
2016, English / German
Softcover, 44 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Halle für Kunst / Lüneburg
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$34.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
Edited by Sandro Droschl
Texts by Christian Egger and João Ribas
Following the 2015 exhibition “Florian Hecker/John McCracken” at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz, this publication probes the experimental capacity of the white-cube space of the gallery. For the exhibition, two complementary yet autonomous artists were brought into dialogue with each other: German artist and computer composer Florian Hecker, and the late American sculptor John McCracken.
The fiberglass-coated, monochrome “planks” by McCracken spanned the floor and the walls of the building, evoking a juncture between painting and sculpture, while Hecker’s computer-generated sound pieces dramatized both space and time. By combining the work of the two artists, a framework was created in which an aesthetic experience occurred between the shifting boundaries and intersections of sculpture and sound as they affected each other within a space consisting of geometric and architectural formations as well as temporal and subjective formations. At the same time, the viewer/listener became more sensitized to the conditions, qualities, and degrees of intensity between the physical and the ephemeral.
The publication includes a curatorial introduction by Christian Egger, and a comprehensive essay by the author and curator of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, João Ribas. The cover has been designed by Florian Hecker using an objectness measure algorithm.
Copublished with Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien Graz
Design by NORM, Zurich
1967, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Howard Publishing / Sydney
$45.00 - Out of stock
Very rare first, only (?) issue of Australian counterculture/mondo magazine Freakout, published in 1967 by Howard Publishing, Sydney, purveyors of permissive magazines. Documenting "the Freakout movement of the U.S. and across the globe. [...] the age of liberation, the end of the phony sexual puritanism", this issue seems to feature heavy editorial from America's beat and hippie scene, including articles on Los Angeles and Greenwich Village, L.S.D. (including LA police statement and photo-documentation of an LSD session), banned film "The Freaks", Sunset Strip curfew riots and the artists Vietnam tower protest, "Mondo Balordo" (A Fool's World) the 1964 documentary, "Attack on Mulholland Drive" (crime photo reenactment), cartoonist Ron Cobb, model Gypsy Flame, sculptor Vito, Guambo (The Underground Arts masked ball and orgy), the girls of the Penny Arcade, psychedelic art, transsexuality, and nude colour pin-up. Also littered with ads for Australian adult bookstores from the period.
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 21 x 29.7
Ed. of 100,
Published by
Endless Lonely Planet / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Melbourne Artist Facilitated Biennial publication by Melbourne artist Christopher LG Hill is both the ninth issue of his ongoing publishing imprint Endless Lonely Planet, and a major survey art book marking the end of his 12 year artist facilitated biennale project, spanning 2008-2020.
"Multiple sites and moments, artist facilitated biennials extending on structures and limitations set by Signs of life: Melbourne International Biennial 1999. Abstracting and bringing new meaning to the form of a biennial as a more casual and independent entity, the project has seen many participants and collaborators over the last 12 years. This book hopes to document some of these moments, but more so to be a catalyst for different modes and models that it may inspire." — publisher
Includes extensive photographic documentation of The (self initiated, Artist funded) second (fourth) Y2K Melbourne Biennial of Art (& Design), TCB art inc., 2008; The First & Final Y3K Second (third) Inaugural Melbourne Biennial of International Arts, Y3K, 2011 (curated by Joshua Petherick, James Deutsher, and Christopher L G Hill); Third/Fourth Melbourne Biennial, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 2013; 4th/5th Melbourne Artist Facilitated Biennial, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2016 (as part of TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation curated by Victoria Lynn and Helen Hughes/Discipline); 5th/6th final Melbourne Artist Facilitated Biennial, Dec 2018 -Dec 2020 (co-facilitated by Virginia Overell and Christopher L G Hill in their apartment/ the ex-Telecom building that was the site of the Melbourne International Biennial 1999)
Includes the work of ACW, Liz Allen, Animal Charm, Dan Arps, Sean Bailey, Liv Barrett, Matthew Brown, Ruth Buchannan, Jon Campbell, Jane Caught, Xin Cheng, Fiona Connor, Ying Lan Dann, James Deutsher, Daniel du Bern, Ida Ekblad, ffiXXed, Pat Foster & Jen Berean, Justin K Fuller, Matt Griffin, Ardi Gunawan, Hao Guo, Bianca Hester, Christopher L G Hill, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Lisa Kelly, Devin Kenny, Taree Mackenzie, Simon McGlinn, Rob Mckenzie, Nick Mangan, Scott Mitchell, Tahi Moore, Kate Newby, Geoff Newton, John Nixon, OSW, Alexander Ouchtomsky, Damon Packard, Spiros Panigriakis, Sean Peoples/ Cheese Peoples, Joshua Petherick, Kain Picken, Janneke Raaphorst, Nick Selenitsch, Christopher Schueler & Matthew Hopkins, Gregory P Sharp, Kate Smith, Sriwhana Spong, Dylan Statham, Masato Takasaka, Ben Tankard, Simon Taylor, Alex Vivian, Annie Wu, Hany Armanious, Andreas Banderas, Mikala Dwyer, Katherine Huang, Tobias Kaspar, Piotr Łakomy, Taree Mackenzie, Tahi Moore, Michael O’Connell, Ester Partegas, Natalie Rognsoy, John Spiteri, Dan Arps, Sean Bailey, Olivia Barrett, Matthew Benjamin, Jon Campbell, Trevelyan Clay, Fiona Connor and Michala Paludan, James Deutsher, DoubleFly, George Egerton-Warburton, Endless Lonely Planet, ffiXXed, Alicia Frankovich, Justin K Fuller, Marco Fusinato, Greatest Hits, Ardi Gunawan, Hao Guo, Christopher L G Hill, Matt Hinkley, David Homewood, Matthew Hopkins, Lou Hubbard, Renee Jaeger, Helen Johnson, Kenneth Biennale (curated by Kenny Pittock and Amy May Stuart: Chris Clarke, Christo Crocker, Christina Hayes, Chris L G Hill, Christine Pittock, Christopher Sciuto), Legendary Hearts (Kieran Hegarty and Andrew Cowie), S.T. Lore, Patrick Lundberg, Carrie McGrath, Rob McKenzie, Taree McKenzie, Nick Mangan, Gian Manik, Kate Meakin, Adelle Mills, Tahi Moore, Kate Newby, Elizabeth Newman, Virginia Overell, Sean Peoples, Joshua Petherick, Kain Picken, Lisa Radford and Sam George, Nick Selenitsch, Kate Smith, Studio Masatotectures, Sydney (Esther Edquist), Masato Takasaka and Madeline Kidd, Ben Tankard, Alex Vivian, Nicki Wynnychuk, y3k, Lauren Burrow, Counterfeitnessfirst, James Deutsher, Laurel Doody, George Egerton-Warburton, ELP3 Vine, Endless Lonely Planet, Lewis Fidock, Aurelia Guo, Christopher L G Hill, Lou Hubbard, Lucina Lane, Kate Meakin, Tahi Moore, Elizabeth Newman, Liam Osborne, Virginia Overell, Joshua Petherick, Lisa Radford, Zac Segbedzi, Nick Selenitsch, Nicholas Tammens, Alex Vivian, Rudi Williams, Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn, Candida ((Gian Manik and Ricarda Bigolin) in collaboration with Agnieszka Chabros, Samuel Heatley and Jaala Jensen), Xin Cheng, Fiona Connor, Renee Cosgrave, Christo Crocker, Ying Lan Dann, Endless Lonely Planet, Richard Frater, Aurelia Guo, HB Peace, Hoggle, Lou Hubbard, Olivia Koh, Spencer Lai, Laurel Doody Library Supply, Patrick Lundberg, Kate Meakin, Olivia O’Donnell, Jason Willers, and more...
More info at http://www.christopherlghill.com
2020, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Ed. of 200,
Published by
Daisart / Naarm-Melbourne
$18.00 - Out of stock
“weeds change the colour of water”… is a speculative effort, one dreamt to collect ideas, interpretations, and interactions. By listening patiently, we may come to recognise some pattern in the tangle that surrounds and involves us – a spot to sense that, like a weed, we are insecurely tethered amid choppy and changing waters, which now, more than usual, have us flailing and adrift.
Features:
Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, an Audible Polyphony, Ros Bandt; Ephemeral Tears: Interview with Kazumichi Grime and Nick Wilson of Clan Analogue; "underneath a pile of rags": A playlist by friends of related "Australian" artists; that from which can be told is divided into two sections, Wound Without A Tear.
Extract:
Australian identity is a complex interplay of site, language and technology. Sound installations are powerful tools to access the collective consciousness associated with sites, each one an ever-changing audible polyphony. For each site there are many stories, dissolving around each other, some reflecting, some disappearing, many mutating according to the context, the time of hearing and the manner in which it is told. Sound carries layers of meaning and nonverbal information not possible with text-based accounts. The breath, the timbre, the speed and the intonation of each authentic voice influence the content and meaning of the spoken word. Utterance shapes narration and identity. Different voices when made audible side by side in a slipping mobile confluence, can inform each other in different and changing ways.
2020, Enlgish
Softcover, 336 pages, 19.1 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Eurock Publications / Portland
$60.00 - In stock -
A collection of 'Artifacts' from the files of the legendary Eurock Magazine, "Archives" presents rare images, letters, and communiqués that help complete the intimate Eurock portrait of an era, the music and the friendships spanning 1970-2000. Haphazardly tracing Eurock founder Archie Patterson's life in music, "Archives" is at once both a visual scrapbook and idiosyncratic introduction to 1970s-80s experimental music networks around the world (Krautrock, Musique Française, Behind the Iron Curtain, Musica de Mexico, experimental music from Japan, Brazil, UK, Sweden, the labels, fanzines, distributions...), all heavily illustrated with ephemera, press images, hand-bills, letters, clippings, gig posters, zine covers, and much more.
Includes Cosmic Couriers, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Manuel Göttsching, Wallenstein, Witthüser & Westrupp, Floh de Cologne, Hoelderlin, Emtidi, Mythos, Amon Düül 2, Roedelius, Can, Konrad Schnitzler, Peter Baumann, Kraftwerk, Spacebox, Embryo, Lard Free, Guru Guru, Gilbert Artman, Urban Sax, Art Zoyd, Heldon, Etron Fou Leloublan, Patrick Gauthier, Ilitch, ZNR, Bernard Szajner, DDAA, Didier Bocquet, Wapassou, Univers Zero, Fondation, Shub Niggurath, Troll, Pascal Comelade, Eskaton, Christian Vander, Catherine Riberio + Alpes, Yochk'o Seffer, Luc Marianni, Pulsar, Pataphonie, Michail Chekalin, Patrick Vian, Plastic People of the Universe, Carlos Alvarado, Chac Mool, Decibel, Jorge Reyes, Far East Family Band, Stomu Yamash'ta, Magical Power Mako, Samla Mammas Manna, Aska Temple, Legendary Pink Dots, Michael Huygen, Vangelis, Neuronium, Klaus Schonning, Cybotron, Steve Maxwell Von Braund, Ian McFarlane, Rainbow Theatre, Kulu Hatha Mamma, Savage Rose, Metabolist, Henry Cow, Lemon Kittens, Half Japanese, Chrome, and many more...
Founded by Archie Patterson in Portland 1971 as an FM radio show in Central California, Eurock developed into the fanzine bible of European rock and electronic music, promoting space, cosmic music, krautrock, ambient, and experimental music through its pages and subsequent Intergalactic Trading Company and Paradox Music Mailorder services. Whilst releasing and distributing the "100 Points" recording by the imprisoned Czech underground band Plastic People of the Universe, consulting on film scores in LA (introducing director Michael Mann to Tangerine Dream), and teaching Rock music history classes in public high school, Archie published 45 issues of the invaluable, internationally distributed, vanguard Eurock magazine.
2007, English
Softcover, 718 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Eurock Publications / Portland
$80.00 - In stock -
"the Second Culture ... a culture that will not be dependent on the official channels of communication, social recognition, and the hierarchy of values laid down by the establishment." – Ivan Jirous, Plastic People of the Universe
"Eurock Magazine documents a particular time in the world when the limits of imagination and what was possible sonically were stretched beyond the norm. The futuristic alchemy of free-flowing ions, mind-expanding chemical substances and mega-watts of electricity resulted in an explosion of creativity unparalleled in the history of rock music." – from foreword
European Rock & the Second Culture, "The Book of Eurock", compiles all the feature articles, interviews, reviews and essays published in Eurock Magazine during its existence from 1973 - 1992. Founded by Archie Patterson in Portland 1971 as an FM radio show in Central California, Eurock developed into the fanzine bible of European rock and electronic music, promoting space, cosmic music, krautrock, ambient, and experimental music through its pages and subsequent Intergalactic Trading Company and Paradox Music Mailorder services. Whilst releasing and distributing the "100 Points" recording by the imprisoned Czech underground band Plastic People of the Universe, consulting on film scores in LA (introducing director Michael Mann to Tangerine Dream), and teaching Rock music history classes in public high school, Archie published 45 issues of the invaluable, internationally distributed vanguard Eurock magazine.
At over 700 pages, European Rock & the Second Culture contains an enormous wealth of information, illustrated and collated in chronological order, and rounded off with an extensive index of the musical artists and subjects covered over 30 years. Includes Amon Düül, Faust, Heldon, ZNR, Can, Magma, Plastic People of the Universe, Urban Sax, Henry Cow, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Art Zoyd, Univers Zero, Pascal Comelade, Floh de Cologne, Hoelderlin, Emtidi, Mythos, Amon Düül 2, Konrad Schnitzler, Peter Michel Hamel, Savage Rose, Urban Sax, Neu, Embryo, Yochk'o Seffer, Wigwam, Catherine Riberio + Alpes, Chrome, Area, Kluster, ZAO, Ange, Tolonen, Sensation's Fix, Osanna, DDAA, Le Orme, Kraan, SBB, Omega, Mark Shreeve, Cyrille Verdeaux, Holger Czukay, Pekka Pohjola, Richard Pinhas, Tasavallan Presidentti, and many many more, plus the labels, the fanzines, the politics, and above all else, the spirit of the music.
A Special Bonus is the previously unpublished tome on Krautrock from 1971 by Lester Bangs, late Editor of Creem Magazine and gonzo rock journalist extraordinaire, Amon Düül - A Science Fiction Rock Spectacle: "the combined accomplishments of American and Limey bands have been seeded in less-sung rock scenes around the world, and some of these seeds are coming to the weirdest blooms heard in the Western world with the mostest bloom in one of the seemingly unlikeliest places imaginable: Scandinavia and Germany." – Lester Bangs
A must!
1988 / 2000, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 8.2 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arc Publications / UK
$60.00 - Out of stock
2000 edition of this now very scarce Ivor Cutler book, published by Arc first in 1988. This small tartan-covered pocket-book contains a wonderful collection of many of Cutler's poems, along with his illustrations.
Scottish poet, songwriter and humorist Ivor Cutler (1923–2006) was a singular force in popular culture. His oeuvre encompassed absurd songs and poems, surreal performances, and illustrated publications. These abstract the banal and everyday with warmth, occasional darkness, and quiet radicalism. Self-styled as an "Oblique Musical Philosopher", Cutler saw himself as having "….the effect of a very mild earthquake, one that nudges people into having a look around themselves, through all the rubbish that passes for convention". His whimsical performances gained him a cult following across generations, not least as part of 60s and 70s counterculture. Broadcasts on the Home Service in the 1950s lead to albums, later with Virgin Records and Rough Trade. TV appearances on the BBC caught Paul McCartney’s attention. Cutler appeared in the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and George Martin produced his album ‘Ludo’ (1967). He collaborated with pianist Neil Ardley, singer and musician Robert Wyatt (formerly of Soft Machine), and Phyllis King, his companion who appears on several of his records, and for a number of years was a part of his concerts and King Cutler BBC radio series. New generations were introduced to his work in the 1980s on TV for the Old Grey Whistle Test, and on radio for John Peel and later Andy Kershaw. Cutler was an anti-intellectual and noted eccentric, dressing in a distinctive style, travelling mainly by bicycle and often communicating by means of sticky labels printed with "Cutlerisms". Many of Cutler's poems and songs involve conversations delivered as a monologue and, in these, one party is often Cutler as a child, a part of his intended "bypassing the intellect". Cutler recited his poems in a gentle Scottish burr, and this, combined with the absurdity of the subject matter, is a mix that earned him a faithful cult following. Cutler also wrote books for children and adults and was a teacher at A. S. Neill's Summerhill School and for 30 years in inner-city schools in London. Cutler was a member of the Noise Abatement Society and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. He retired from performing in 2004, and died on 3 March 2006. The reception room of his home contained a number of pieces of ivory cutlery, deliberately intended as a pun on his name.
Very Good-Fine copy.
1989-1991, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24-44 pages ea., 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Facelift / Manchester
$65.00 - In stock -
First five issues of the first and only music fanzine entirely dedicated to covering 'The Canterbury scene and beyond...', independently published out of Manchester between 1989 and 1999. Original, As New copies.
The Canterbury scene (or Canterbury sound) was a musical scene centred around the city of Canterbury, Kent, England during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Associated with progressive rock, the term describes a loosely-defined, improvisational style that blended elements of jazz, rock, and psychedelia. These musicians played together in numerous bands, with ever-changing and overlapping personnel. The "beyond" byline meant that the scope of the fanzine was in fact much wider than the editor, its contributors or its readers first envisaged. Heavily centred around the bands Caravan, Soft Machine, Gong, Hatfield and the North, Matching Mole, National Health, and Henry Cow, Facelift was a committed to all the spin-off musical projects by the many prominent British avant-garde and fusion musicians that began their career in Canterbury bands, including Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen, Hugh Hopper, Steve Hillage, Dave Stewart, Elton Dean, Tim Blake, Lol Coxhill, Dave Stewart, Hugh Hopper, Pip Pyle, Keith Tippett, Allen Holdsworth, Richard Sinclair, Mike Ratledge, and many more. Includes many obscure Canterbury groups and others in the world of UK/EU avant-garde/jazz rock/prog. Interviews, articles, discographies, record reviews, live reports past and present, and much more. A delight for any Canterbury aficionado. The life's-blood of World Food Books!
Fine dead stock copies.
2019, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 15.2 x 22.6 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$52.00 - In stock -
“What was it all about, to me? Thinking. Henry Cow really thought about the why, the what, the appropriate methods of making music. Their riveting music was the sound of thinking out loud: Henry Cow seemed to be asking, ‘So, what is the significance of these sounds in our heads?’ And they were always witty: just look at the name of the band and the unwearable sock representing ‘the Henry Cow legend.’ I am very glad this book exists. Henry Cow’s history —in all its inevitable turbulence— tells an inspiring story.” - Robert Wyatt
In its open improvisations, lapidary lyrics, errant melodies, and relentless pursuit of spontaneity, the British experimental band Henry Cow pushed rock music to its limits. Its rotating personnel, sprung from rock, free jazz, and orchestral worlds, synthesized a distinct sound that troubled genre lines, and with this musical diversity came a mixed politics, including Maoism, communism, feminism, and Italian Marxism. In Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem Benjamin Piekut tells the band’s story—from its founding in Cambridge in 1968 and later affiliation with Virgin Records to its demise ten years later—and analyzes its varied efforts to link aesthetics with politics. Drawing on ninety interviews with Henry Cow musicians and crew, letters, notebooks, scores, journals, and meeting notes, Piekut traces the group’s pursuit of a political and musical collectivism, offering up its history as but one example of the vernacular avant-garde that emerged in the decades after World War II. Henry Cow’s story resonates far beyond its inimitable music; it speaks to the avant-garde’s unpredictable potential to transform the world.
2006, English
Hardcover, 220 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms—a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best—the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.
2020, English
Softcover (ring-binding), 368 pages, 24.5 x 33.5 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$99.00 - Out of stock
The mid-1960s witnessed a boom in underground and self-published works. Hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing not only allowed for the production of small, low-cost print runs but also promoted a unique aesthetic: using wild mock-ups, 'messianic amateurs' combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips. The typography consciously frees itself, in parallel to a liberalization of linguistic and visual forms of expression in the name of a new 'sensibility'. This book is the first to present the underground and self-published works that came out of West Germany in such depth, while also showing the international context in which they emerged: not as an anecdotal history but as an attempt to tap into the aesthetic cosmos of a Do-It-Yourself rebellion, one that also challenges us to take a new look at the current boom in 'independent publishing', the risograph aesthetic, and so on.
An incredible collection and valuable volume for anyone interested in underground publishing history!
Finally reprinted.
2017, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 15.3 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
Art Sex Music is the wise, shocking and elegant autobiography of Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Art Sex Music is the autobiography of a musician who, as a founding member of the avant-garde group Throbbing Gristle and electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, has consistently challenged the boundaries of music over the past four decades.
It is the account of an artist who, as part of COUM Transmissions, represented Britain at the IXth Biennale de Paris, whose Prostitution show at the ICA in 1976 caused the Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to declare her, COUM and Throbbing Gristle 'Wreckers of Civilisation'...shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure, and whose work continues to be held at the vanguard of contemporary art.
And it is the story of her work as a pornographic model and striptease artiste which challenged assumptions about morality, erotica and art.
1994, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 68 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Feature Inc. / New York
$300.00 - Out of stock
The rarely seen, first edition of G.B. Jones' artist book, published in the US in 1994 and seized at the border and officially banned in Jones’ native Canada.
G.B. Jones (b. 1965) is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and founding member of Canadian queer punk band Fifth Column (K Records/Outpunk/Kill Rock Stars/et al). She published legendary queercore fanzine J.D.s (Juvenile Delinquents) with fellow queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, which regularly featured her iconic Tom Girl drawings. According to novelist Dodie Bellamy, G.B. Jones' drawing "co-opts the male-on-male objectifying gaze of gay erotica and converts it to a female-on-female gaze." Depicting autonomous women through fantasies of bikers, punks and degenerates in the style of and situations similar to those drawn by Tom of Finland, her Tom Girls are "unapologetic, thrillingly anti-assimilationist." Compiling a scrapbook curriculum vitae of her work to date, this wonderful book presents the Tom Girl series of drawings alongside stills from videos, excerpts from J.D.s zines, gig flyers, photos and essays and commentaries by Dennis Cooper, Vaginal Davis, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Caroline Azar, Johnny Noxzema, and others. The essential book on the artist.
Very Good, beautiful copy of the very first banned edition. Possibly in 1996 more were printed (also barely exist), but this is definitely the original 1994 print, exceptionally rare.
2020, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 15 x 20.2 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$44.00 - In stock -
Edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Joe Bucciero.
Contributors and featured artists include Masayuki Takayanagi, Louise Landes Levi, Joseph Jarman, Catherine Christer Hennix, Charles Stein, Henry Orlov, Maryanne Amacher, Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida.
Aspirations of Madness, Blank Forms’ fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, takes its title from a series of interviews with Japanese free jazz pioneer Masayuki Takayangi that were published in Japanese in 1975–76 and are published here in English for the first time. The interviews provide a rare look at Takayanagi’s eccentric practice and personality, both long under-recognized by audiences outside (and often, inside) of Japan. In this respect, the interviews speak to the goals of Blank Forms’ publication enterprise, that is, to expand upon our work in performance programming, record production, and archival preservation, and to foster new dialogues on vanguard art and music from the past 50-plus years.
Aspirations of Madness considers the work of Masayuki Takayanagi, the poet Louise Landes Levi, musician and writer Joseph Jarman, polymath Catherine Christer Hennix and her one-time student the poet Charles Stein, Russian musicologist Henry Orlov, and Maryanne Amacher—brilliant and overlooked artists whose work Blank Forms will continue to champion in a variety of contexts. Aspirations of Madness features additional contributions by Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida, and is edited by Lawrence Kumpf with Joe Bucciero.
2020, English
Hardcover, 208 pages, 25 x 21 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein / Vaduz
$80.00 - Out of stock
The first ever monograph on Steven Parrino.
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was one of the most influential artists of the New York art scene since the late 1980s. Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. Parrino’s work is defined by an unconditional will to be free that stems from American biker culture and is also influenced by punk rock existentialism. Borrowings from underground comics and the “Kustom Kulture” of the motorcycle world with its specific symbolic language are the main themes of his drawings in the early years. His monochrome painting in the tradition of “Radical Painting” evolved in parallel. As early as 1981 he began creating the large monochrome paintings that he violently slashed, tore or twisted off their stretchers, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting. Predominantly a painter, music played a role that was at least as important for his artistic practice. Drawing on various "high" and subcultural sources, Parrino created an oeuvre of painting and music that contradicted increasing social and cultural conformism and also provided a fresh and intelligent contribution to the debate on modernism's demise. Parrino died in a motorcycle accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46.
Parrino “came to painting at the time of its death, not to breathe its last breath, but to caress its lifelessness.”
Heavily illustrated throughout with mostly full-page colour reproductions of his work, Steven Parrino: Nihilism Is Love includes texts by Konrad Bitterli, Catherine Dossin, Reinhard Ermen, Fabian Flückiger, Amy Granat, Pierre Huber, Friedemann Malsch, Matthew McCaslin, Olivier Mosset, Bob Nickas, Steven Parrino, Mai-Thu Perret, Amy O'Neill, Rolf Ricke, Marc- Olivier Wahler. Published on the occasion of the first comprehensive retrospective of his work in Europe.
2019, English / Italian
Softcover, 216 pages, 17 x 24 cm
2nd Edition,
Published by
Danilo Montanari Editore / Ravenna
$68.00 - In stock -
Luigi Bonotto dedicated himself to keeping the work of the artists of Fluxus and Experimental Poetry alive, and to preserving, cataloguing, and promoting their poetry, music, and work, which was strongly influenced by John Cage and the key concept of his theoretical framework, indeterminacy. Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Patrizio Peterlini and Walter Rovere, with the collaboration of Giorgio Maffei, this catalogue delves deeply into this aspect of the Fluxus network. Rife with illustrations, the materials of the collection, as well as the movement and its history, are analysed in scholarly essays by Anna Cestelli Guidi, Alison Knowles, and the curators.
features the work of Henning Christiansen, Wolf Vostell, Eric Andersen, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Giuseppe Chiari, Philip Corner, Esther Ferrer, Juan Hidalgo, Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Joe Jones, Milan Knizak, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Walter Marchetti, Charlotte Moorman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Patterson, Terry Riley, Mieko Shiomi, Takako Saito, Gianni-Emilio Simonetti, Ben Vautier, Yoshimasa Wada, La Monte Young and others.
Reprint edition.
2020, English
Softcover, 350 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$50.00 - In stock -
Exploring the relationship between art and pop music over the last fifty years.
Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what drew John Lennon, in turn, to visual art? Why, in 1982, did Joseph Beuys record the pop single “Sonne statt Reagan,” and why, around the same time did, West German artists such as Michaela Melián move into pop music?
In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Heiser looks closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. The seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring a pop and art history of more than fifty years, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while he points toward radical alternatives.
2019, English
Softcover, 20 pages, 16.5 x 23.6 cm
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
$28.00 - Out of stock
"EYƎ Mix" is a new publication by Japanese artist/musician EYE, published in 2019 by Innen Books on the occasion of TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR 2019 at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, July 12 – July 15, 2019.
EYƎ is a Japanese vocalist and visual artist, best known as co-founder of the influential rock music band Boredoms and Naked City. He has changed his stage name several times, from Yamatsuka Eye, to Yamantaka Eye, to Yamataka Eye and now simply calls himself EYƎ.
EYƎ is a member of the bands Hanatarash, UFO or Die, Puzzle Punks, Noise Ramones and Destroy 2. He is notorious for his vast, confusing discography and countless guest appearances. Notable collaborations include his work with Nam June Paik, Sonic Youth, Yamamoto Seiichi & Yamazaki Maso, Bill Laswell's Praxis and John Zorn's groups Naked City and Painkiller.
As well as his music, EYƎ is famous for his mixed-media style of art that utilises airbrush, marker pen and collage, amongst other materials. His artworks have adorned a number of records, including the majority of Boredom’s releases and, perhaps more famously, Beck's Midnite Vultures. Drawing as much from Japanese mythology as from his musical influences, his work aims to complement the music as well as to provide another dimension to the sound.
2019, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 13 x 19 cm
Ed. of 200,
Published by
Innen Books / Zürich
Nieves / Zurich
$18.00 - In stock -
"The Rock T" is a limited edition publication by Japanese artist/musician EYE. Published in 2019 by Innen Books and Nieves in Zürich in an edition of 200 copies only on the occasion of TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR 2019 at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, July 12 – July 15, 2019.
EYƎ is a Japanese vocalist and visual artist, best known as co-founder of the influential rock music band Boredoms and Naked City. He has changed his stage name several times, from Yamatsuka Eye, to Yamantaka Eye, to Yamataka Eye and now simply calls himself EYƎ.
EYƎ is a member of the bands Hanatarash, UFO or Die, Puzzle Punks, Noise Ramones and Destroy 2. He is notorious for his vast, confusing discography and countless guest appearances. Notable collaborations include his work with Nam June Paik, Sonic Youth, Yamamoto Seiichi & Yamazaki Maso, Bill Laswell's Praxis and John Zorn's groups Naked City and Painkiller.
As well as his music, EYƎ is famous for his mixed-media style of art that utilises airbrush, marker pen and collage, amongst other materials. His artworks have adorned a number of records, including the majority of Boredom’s releases and, perhaps more famously, Beck's Midnite Vultures. Drawing as much from Japanese mythology as from his musical influences, his work aims to complement the music as well as to provide another dimension to the sound.