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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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.
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.1 x 19.1 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$32.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Stephen Barber and Clayton Eshleman
With a foreword by Ros Murray
To end GOD’S JUDGEMENT
In the last two years of his life, following his release from the Rodez asylum, Antonin Artaud decided he wanted his new work to connect with a vast public audience, and chose to record radio broadcasts in order to carry through that aim. That determination led him to his most experimental and incendiary project, To have done with the judgement of god, 1947-48, in which he attempted to create a new language of texts, screams, and cacophonies: a language designed to be heard by millions, aimed, as Artaud said, for ‘road-menders’. In the broadcast, he interrogated corporeality and introduced the idea of the ‘body without organs’, crucial to the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The broadcast, commissioned by the French national radio station, was banned shortly before its planned transmission, to Artaud’s fury.
This volume collects all of the texts for To have done with the judgement of god, together with several of the letters Artaud wrote to friends and enemies in the short period between his work’s censorship and his death. Also included is the text of an earlier broadcast from 1946, Madness and Black Magic, written as a manifesto prefiguring his subsequent broadcast. Clayton Eshleman’s extraordinary translations of the broadcasts activate these works in their extreme provocation.
2020, English / French
Softcover, 136 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$32.00 - In stock -
English translation of Artaud le Mômo, edited in the spatial format Artaud intended, for the first time since its original edition in 1947. Includes eight original drawings by the French poet.
Artaud the Mômo is Antonin Artaud's most extraordinary poetic work of the brief final phase of his life, from his return to Paris from a nine-year incarceration in France's psychiatric institutions in 1946 until his death in 1948. The work is an unprecedented anatomical excavation carried through in vocal language, envisioning new gestural futures for the human body in its splintered fragments, while also generating black-humor illuminations into Artaud's own status as the scorned Marseille-born child-fool, the “mômo” (a self-naming that fascinated Jacques Derrida in his writings on this work). Artaud moves between extreme irreligious obscenity and delicate evocations of his immediate corporeal perception and his sense of solitude. The book's five-part sequence ends with Artaud's caustic denunciation of psychiatric institutions and of the very conception of madness itself.
This edition, translated by Clayton Eshleman—the acclaimed foremost translator of Artaud's work—presents the work in the spatial format Artaud intended, for the first time since its original edition in 1947. It also incorporates the eight original drawings by Artaud—showing reconfigured bodies, weapons of resistance and assault—which he selected for that edition, having initially attempted to persuade Picasso to collaborate with him.
The editorial material draws on Artaud's previously unknown manuscript letters of 1946-48 to the book's publisher, Pierre Bordas, which give unique insights into the work from its origins to its publication.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theater director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theater and the European literary avant-garde.
2019, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$29.00 - In stock -
First English translation of Antonin Artaud's writings from his apocalyptic journey to Ireland in 1937.
Antonin Artaud's 1937 apocalyptic journey to Ireland and his writings from that journey form an extraordinary moment of accumulating disintegration and tenacious creativity in his work. After publishing a manifesto prophecy about the catastrophic immediate—future entitled The New Revelations of Being, Artaud abruptly left Paris and travelled to Ireland, remaining there for six weeks and existing without money, travelling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland's western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, where he was arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in lunatic asylums, including the entire span of the Second World War. During that journey to Ireland—on which he accumulated signs of his forthcoming apocalypse, and planned his own role in it as “THE REVEALED ONE”—Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris and also created several magic spells, intended to curse his enemies and to protect his friends from Paris's forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist's appearance at the Deux Magots cafe. To André Breton, he wrote: “It's the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable— it's the Unbelievable which is the truth.” Many of his writings from Ireland were lost, and this book collects all of his surviving letters, drawn together from archives and private collections, together with photographs of the locations he travelled through.
This edition, with an afterward and notes by the book's translator/editor, Stephen Barber, marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud's death.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theater director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theater and the European literary avant-garde.
2022, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 22 x 15 cm
Published by
Caesura / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
Caesura (seh-'zhur-uh) is a magazine of art and criticism. This inaugural issue of Caesura looks back on Surrealism not as an answer to the current crisis of art, but as one of the last movements to raise it as a question for life. The legacy of Surrealism is undoubtedly problematic: its novel techniques and strange effects have been repeatedly hypostatized and deployed in the production, both high and low, of culture industry kitsch. Still something remains of its original drive: to pierce the veil of appearance for a glimpse at the underlying forms that constitute subjective experience. For the concrete, as Marx says, “is concrete by virtue of being the concentration of many determinations.” Surrealism — more real than reality itself.
Featuring work by Will Alexander, Gabriel Almeida, Dato Barbakadze, Roberta Boffo, Roberto Calasso, Austin Carder, Mary Ann Caws, Billie Chernicoff, Róbert Gál, Allison Hewitt Ward, Robert Kelly, Timothy Kelly, Carlos Lara, Juliette Neil, Joel Newberger, Tamas Panitz, Andrei Pokrovskii, Irakli Qolbaia, Alice Paalen Rahon, Laurie Rojas, Kira Scerbin, Bret Schneider, David Short, Rosmarie Waldrop, Madison Winston, Patrick Zapien, and Maggie Louisa Zavgren.
COVER: Kira Screbin, Triple Breather, 2019
DESIGN: Renata Cruz Lara
About Caesura:
The alarm bells are ringing and catastrophe is at the door. As the last century begins its final exit from the stage, what will happen to the experience it gave humanity? Will this experience survive the world that bore it? Not only common sense but the stars themselves are realigning in an effort to forget the objects of our shattered dreams, shedding them as empty husks of strange, unpleasant times. What shines true today in light of yesterday will not be counted on tomorrow. Only those who learn to brush against the flow of time will have any chance of staying afloat. Thus the sun that we see setting is not the same that will be rising, and everything — all that is holy and all profane — shall be transfigured in the course of night. Art too must stake its place in the world that will dawn in the approaching epoch.
Contemporary art, which has dominated artistic practice for fifty years or more, adheres to a concept of the contemporary which obliterates the shape of history and demands the strictest currency as the criterion of art’s success. Like fashion, it has come to be distinguished by the marvelous arbitrary ascents and subsequent ridiculous falls that churn and cycle through art’s fortune, trend after trend, season after season. Each and every moment is compelled to find its style and is extinguished in a bright and empty glimmer that leaves one wondering, much like Gauguin long ago: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
The academic theory proffered in the schools, journals, galleries, and museums that educate young artists and critics today mistrusts — and oftentimes condemns! — such basic, searching questions about the meaning and purpose of art. More often than not, the theorists and critics of contemporary art regret the fact that artworks strive towards a freedom which seems unforgivably barbaric when so many continue to suffer. But such a ‘critical’ perspective gradually grows indifferent to those images of future happiness which permeate artworks that grasp towards something truly new and different in creation. Thus the history of art has come to give form to the history of the species — to the irresistible rhythm of self-creation and self-destruction that constantly drives humanity to a world beyond its own.
Caesura is a modest project to collect the scattered fragments of art and criticism working to escape the aimlessness that plagues the present. What is necessary is a break, a pause, and some room to breathe. We are looking to publish visual art, poetry, prose, and music as well as fundamental criticism and commentary from artists and writers that recognize the task before us and the need for something new. We have no schemas or positive ideals to enshrine, nor do we endorse particular styles, techniques, or media. What we have to offer is a sense of history, of the dead-end of the present, and the disappointment of the past: “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it.” What we ask is simply that art prove its right to exist. //
“IT IS SELF-EVIDENT THAT NOTHING CONCERNING ART IS SELF-EVIDENT ANYMORE, NOT ITS INNER LIFE, NOT ITS RELATION TO THE WORLD, NOT EVEN ITS RIGHT TO EXIST.”—Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Camden Art Centre / UK
$98.00 - Out of stock
Humanity’s place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, The Botanical Mind investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree was conceived as a trans-generational group exhibition by Gina Buenfeld and Matt Williams for the Camden Art Centre, bringing together surrealist, modernist, visionary, outsider, indigenous Amazonian, and contemporary works alongside historical and ethnographic artefacts, textiles and manuscripts spanning more than 500 years. Through the symbolism of diverse cultural artefacts and the works of mystics, artists and thinkers around the world, 'The Botanical Mind' reveals how the vegetal kingdom has metaphysical importance to the development of consciousness and spirituality.
This richly illustrated 224-page companion publication includes essays by the curators and contributions from scholars on the key themes of the exhibition – alchemy, art history, plant ontology, Gaian ecology, anthropology and ethnobotany – unifying philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic approaches to meditate on the cosmic significance of plants in different worldviews.
Edited by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark
Designed by Sara De Bondt studio.
Artists and Writers
Eileen Agar / Anni Albers / Josef Albers / Sarah Angliss / Consuelo "Chelo" González Amézcua / Gemma Anderson with Wakefield Lab and John Dupré / Anna Atkins / Kirk Barley / Jordan Belson / Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater / Karl Blossfeldt / Carol Bove / Jagadish Chandra Bose / Kerstin Brätsch / Bernd Brabec De Mori / Hildegarde von Bingen / Andrea Büttner / Adam Chodzko / Ithell Colquhoun / Bruce Conner / Brenda Danilowitz / Das Institut / Mirtha Dermisache / Minnie Evans / Cerith Wyn Evans / Charles Filiger / Robert Fludd / Monica Gagliano / Giorgio Griffa / Brion Gysin / Friedrich Wilhelm Heine / Ernst Haeckel / Dr Stephan Harding / Anna Haskel / Tamara Henderson / Channa Horwitz / Textiles from the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa) people / C.G. Jung / Joachim Koester / Rachid Koraïchi / Hilma af Klint / Emma Kunz / Yves Laloy / Ghislaine Leung / Linder / Simon Ling / Michael Marder / Agnes Martin / André Masson / John McCracken / Terence McKenna / Henri Michaux / Matt Mullican / Wolfgang Paalen / Paul Păun / Stefan A. Pedersen / Santiago Ramón y Cajal / Steve Reinke and James Richards / Edith Rimmington / Adele Röder / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Rupert Sheldrake / Textiles and ceramics from the Shipibo-Conibo people / Penny Slinger / F. Percy Smith / Janet Sobel / Philip Taaffe / Priscilla Telmon and Vincent Moon / Fred Tomaselli / Delfina Muñoz de Toro / Alexander Tovborg / David Tudor / Lee Ufan / Scottie Wilson / Terry Winters / Adolf Wölfli / Bryan Wynter / Henriette Zéphir / Anna Zemánková / Unica Zürn / artists from the Yawanawá community
1939 / 1973, French
Softcover (w. lace-printed dust jacket), 26 pages, 13.4 x 9.5 cm
1st Facsimile Edition,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
GQ / Tokyo
$250.00 - Out of stock
Super rare and mysterious 1973 reprint of the exceptionally rare 'Oeillades Ciselées en Branche' (1939), Hans Bellmer's (1902 – 1975) collaboration with fellow Surrealist Georges Hugnet (1906 – 1974), published in Paris by publisher Jeanne Bucher in an edition limited to 230 hand-numbered copies wrapped in lace paper. Although Bellmer had illustrated books before 'Oeillades Ciselées en Branche', those, such as the notoriously scarce 'Die Puppe' (1934) and the later French version 'La Poupée' (1936) were illustrated with original photographs, this was his very first illustrated book. Bellmer had worked as a draftsman for his own advertising agency and his technical virtuosity combined with his inspirational predilections produced a highly original body of illustration - here in heliogravure - for Hugnet's erotic text. In the words of Pierre Seghers, the poet and publisher, the text and illustration, as well as the design of the book, with its patterned lace over pink paper, combined to produce 'an absolutely perfect little book'. Hugnet was a French graphic artist, poet, writer, art historian, bookbinding designer, critic and film director and a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism. This was his second book after the famous collage novel Le septième face du dé (1936). The text is a prose poem on the theme of young adolescent girls, articulated with the erotic images of Bellmer, whose extraordinary skill, inherited from the technical drawing of his engineering studies, perfectly serves this particular eroticism. 'Bellmer's color engravings, placed outside the text or using free spaces in the text, offer variations on the theme of the metamorphosis of the female body associated with that of the double. Disarticulated puppets or slender silhouettes with sometimes disproportionate limbs, young girls evolve slightly over the pages, drawn with spider-like finesse by Bellmer, one of the most successful of all. '
Lovingly reproduced here in limited offset-print on warm, fragile, soft paper stocks with delicate dust jacket lace over-prints, reproducing in simplified facsimile edition number "221" of the original 230. Published in Tokyo by the great 1970s GQ (Graphic Quarterly) periodical, their facsimile editions were widely regarded for their quality, and very collectible in their own right, usually only available to those on their mailing list. They were also official reproductions, permitted by their original publishers and authors. That said, there is little to no information anywhere about this particular 1973 edition, published shortly before the deaths of both artists.
Very Good copy.
1964, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 24.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Melbourne University Film Society / Melbourne
$30.00 - In stock -
This scarce brochure was published by Melbourne University Film Society on the occasion of a special season of screening of Early French Cinema Classics in 1964. Edited by Laurie Clancy and Peter Hourigan, features texts and illustrations on the films of Luis Bunuel, Jean Vigo, and Jean Cocteau, along with filmographies and a screening programme. Published in Melbourne in 1964 (we estimate, not dated).
The Melbourne University Film Society published periodicals (Annotations on Film) and guides to accompany their film programme, aimed at presenting films in Melbourne in the medium they were created and providing a critical reading of them for an independent, membership-based film society. Starting in 1948, the Melbourne University Film Society (MUFS) changed its name to Cinémathèque in 1984 and continues to this day in Melbourne. A written accompaniment to their programme can be seen in the form of the current-day online journal Senses of Cinema.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2022, English
Hardcover, 304 pages, 21.3 x 28.2 cm
Published by
MASP / São Paulo
$120.00 - In stock -
A leading figure in New York’s Surrealist circles and in Latin American modernism, the Brazilian artist Maria Martins (1894–1973) was known for her bronze sculptures of hybrid and mythological figures. Through her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, Martins built a large part of her career outside Brazil, having lived in New York in the 1940s, when she was part of the city’s expat Surrealist community. This survey examines Martins’ central and active role in Surrealism (in a counterpart to the narratives about her romantic involvement with Duchamp), her interpretation of Amazonian mythologies and iconography from the outset of her career, and her female perspective on themes of desire and eroticism.
Edited with text by Isabella Rjeille. Text by Alyce Mahon, Beverly Adams, Joanna Fiduccia, Veronica Stigger, Tirza True Latimer, Terri Geis, et al.
2015, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 17.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$52.00 - Out of stock
This book collects the writings of a radical group of writers close to Paris Surrealism—principally René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte—as published in their now legendary magazine, Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game). Le Grand Jeu ran to three issues between 1928 and 1930, before collapsing due to its editors' infighting, drug use and vehemently unreasonable aspirations for both art and life. The Grand Jeu is often associated with Surrealism (they were invited to join the group), but their ideas were far more extreme. The magazine was the public face of a group of artists and writers who systematically attacked their perceptions of reality through narcotics, anaesthesia and near-death experiences.
Le Grand Jeu describes a politico-mystical outlook which combined a critique of the apathy and repression of contemporary Western society with a quest to take leave of the individual ego and to reconnect with a collective Universal Mind. The group's esoteric program united narcotic and parapsychological practices with asceticism, revolutionary politics (the Russian Revolution was barely a decade old) and a prophetic mode of poetry which they identified in antecedents such as Rimbaud and Mallarmé. In this definitive collection, the theories of the Grand Jeu are presented in the group's own words for the first time, through the essays and articles which formed the bulk of their magazine.
2000, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Exact Change / Boston
$32.00 - Out of stock
Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zurn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists.
Unica Zurn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970--an act foretold in this, her last completed work.
2012, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 260 pages, 29 x 30 cm
Published by
Five Continents Editions / Milan
$130.00 - In stock -
The major monograph on Cuban artist Agustin Fernandez.
'As a painter I use a realist technique, but the emblems I invent are not real. They are purely imaginative... Painting is a thing of the mind. My realism is not nature, or landscape, or still life, but the psychological world.' — Agustin Fernandez
At the time of his death in 2006, Agustin Fernandez (b. 1928) ranked among Cuba's most outstanding artists. Defying simple categorisation, today his work is most recognisable for its ambiguous and precariously balanced forms, erotic overtones, surreal juxtapositions, and metallic palette. This superbly illustrated book is the first comprehensive study of Fernandez's work, and includes contributions by renowned critic Donald Kuspit and a team of experts. Fernandez's work has been exhibited throughout Europe and North and South America, and is represented in major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work found a wider audience when one of his larger paintings was featured in the 1980 Brian de Palma film, Dressed to Kill.
Introduction by Donald Kuspit. Texts by Susan Aberth, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Abby McEwen.
1977 / 1984, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 88 pages, 29 x 21 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Bracken Books / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
Hardcover edition of Fantastic Painters by Simon Watney, first published in 1977, this 1984 edition published by Bracken Books, London. Includes the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Max Ernst, Lyonel Feininger, Luigi Russolo, Paul Delvaux, Arnold Böcklin, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Caspar David Friedrich, Henri Rousseau, Paul Klee, Georde Frederic Watts, Giovanni Segantini, Edward Burne-Jones, John Anster Fitzgerald, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Richard Dadd, Francisco de Goya, Henry Fuseli, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Hubert Robert, William Blake, François de Nomé (Monsù Desiderio), Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Jacopo Pontormo, Matthias Grünewald, Luca Signorelli, David Hockney, and more.
Very Good in VG dust jacket.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 25 x 29 cm
Published by
Ludion / Brussels
$100.00 - Out of stock
The first English edition of the ultimate monograph on painter Léon Spilliaert.
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) was one of the most important Flemish Symbolist painters. Although he was embedded in the Symbolist tradition, he was also drawn to the avant-garde. He was, in fact, an einzelganger, or loner, balancing on the fault line between two centuries, a transitional figure between Symbolism and Surrealism.
Spilliaert, like James Ensor, was born and raised in Ostend. And like Ensor, he was also driven by ridicule and irony, non-conformism and the urge to look at the world from a different perspective. He created his own spiritual imagery, experimented with pastel and gouache, and played with purified areas of colour and graceful lines. The sea under a cool moon, lonely figures with a vacant gaze, desolate beaches, empty rooms and stylised silhouettes in backlight: Spilliaert was always able to evoke an atmosphere of mystery, magic and alienation in abstract lines and colour.
Anne Adriaens-Pannier, former curator at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, has been working on the catalog raisonné of his oeuvre since 1995 at the Spilliaert family's request. She pays tribute to the artist with this beautifully illustrated book, in which she describes his drawings and paintings, as well as referring to his book illustrations and lithographs. The author presents Spilliaert as a link between the major art movements in the fascinating era in which he lived and worked. A unique book about an exceptional artist.
2022, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$49.00 - In stock -
This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement. Leonora Carrington, Léonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Meret Oppenheim, Dora Maar, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, became an embodiment of their age as they struggled towards artistic maturity and their own 'liberation of the spirit' in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Their stories and their achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico.
Foreword by Dawn Ades.
2015, English
Softcover (french-folds), 608 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Ridinghouse / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. Ades addresses themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde, across time periods and art movements, from Europe to the Americas. She offers alternative readings and investigates the particular dynamics that affect the ways images and objects are produced, presented and received.
With topics ranging from close-up photography to the female subject in Mexico, and from automatism to photomontage, as well as monographic essays on artists such as Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Hannah Hoch, this collection explores major figures of the twentieth century as well as art beyond the canon. The selected writings are divided into sections that correspond to the overarching concerns of gender, identity, the impact of new mediums and the enduring significance of the materials of art.
2011, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 14.7 x 22.4 cm
Published by
Graywolf Press / Washington
$39.00 - Out of stock
Still later, when I was more in touch with
the world, they told me, "You have a future."
I thought that over. Even if I believed them,
what did my little future, whatever that was,
have to do with the real thing, whatever that is?
—from "Waiting"
In this second daring collection, Coming to That, the centenarian painter and poet Dorothea Tanning illuminates our understanding of creativity, the impulse to make, and the longevity of art. Her unique wit and candor radiate through every poem, every line, and her inquisitive mind is everywhere alive and restless. As she writes in one poem, "If Art would only talk it would, at last, reveal / itself for what it is, what we all burn to know."
"[Coming to That] is playful and unrestrained, each poem containing a spontaneous logic of its own. . . . Tanning's poems take the reader on unexpected journeys that stray far from their beginnings, moving with the momentum of sheer joy and restless artistic energy. Pulsing underneath are larger questions, sometimes almost bittersweet, sometimes daunting." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tanning's poems are beautifully created, filled with rich rhythms and imagery. . . . Often ironic and often filled with wisdom and humor, a Tanning poem asks readers to believe in her artistic vision. These are poems of beginnings and choices, of marriage and aging, and of creation--poems still filled with wondering." —Library Journal
"Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet." —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
"Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight." —J. D. McClatchy
2020, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 27 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Lund Humphries / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
The definitive study of the work and life of artist, writer and poet Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), positioning her as one of the most fascinating and significant creative forces to emerge during the 20th century. It provides a framework within which to consider the range and depth of Tanning's work, well beyond the better-known early Surrealist works of the 1940s, and makes connections between her life experiences and thematic preoccupations. Extensively illustrated and featuring unpublished material from interviews which the author Victoria Carruthers conducted with the artist between 2000 and 2009.
Victoria Carruthers is Senior Lecturer in modern and contemporary art history and theory at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. Her research explores the intersections between art, literature, and music across visual cultures in the twentieth century. Victoria completed her doctoral thesis on the work of Dorothea Tanning and has published several articles on her practice. She was fortunate enough to visit the artist on a number of occasions and enjoy many lengthy conversations on her life and work.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in hard cloth-covered slipcase w. softcover supplement), 252 pages, 34 x 25 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$190.00 - In stock -
Duchamp’s historic 1959 catalogue raisonné-cum-artist's book now back in print in a facsimile English edition. ‘Marcel Duchamp’ became the go-to book on the artist for many decades following its publication in late 1959, when exclusive grand-deluxe and deluxe editions in French, along with trade editions in French and English, were simultaneously released. While Trianon Press’s French trade edition was reprinted numerous times, the Grove Press English edition languished out of print for the better part of two generations—until now, with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ fully authorized facsimile re-edition.
By Robert Lebel. Edited by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Association Marcel Duchamp. Foreword by Harald Falckenberg. Introduction by Michaela Unterdörfer. Text by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Henri-Pierre Roché, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Man Ray, Michael Taylor.
Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s first legendary monograph and draft catalogue raisonné, was written by art historian and novelist Robert Lebel and published in French in 1959; later that same year, it was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton for Grove Press. The book was a cooperation between Lebel and Duchamp, and beyond Lebel’s extensive writing and bibliography, additional chapters were authored by Duchamp, H.P. Roché and André Breton. The coupling of these texts with diverse archival photographs and an illustrated compendium of Duchamp’s artworks delivered a complex and personal rendering of the artist’s life and inner circle. For the first time since its release more than 60 years ago, this landmark publication is back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ meticulous facsimile of the English edition, reflecting everything from its hand-tipped images to its recto-verso dust jacket appearing as close to the original as possible.
Fully authorized by artist Jean-Jacques Lebel—Robert Lebel’s son—and the Association Marcel Duchamp, the facsimile is accompanied by a supplement volume of essays and archival material that tells the story of Duchamp and Lebel’s close collaboration, and, as contributor Michael Taylor writes, how the original publication signified a "sea change in the artist’s receptivity to critical interpretation." The supplement includes texts by both Robert and Jean-Jacques Lebel and a newly discovered note by Man Ray, among a bevy of photographs from the Lebel and Duchamp archives, extending the story presented in the 1959 edition.
Robert Lebel’s analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre remains fresh to this day, as does the book’s design, which was personally supervised by the artist. Hauser & Wirth Publishers reanimated Marcel Duchamp with the curatorial-design firm fluid, who recast the original typefaces as digital fonts, positioning each letter and image exactly as it was in the original. To achieve a near-exact facsimile, fluid consulted with paper conservators and printers to recreate the book with modern materials that match those available in 1959. This precise production quality assures that today’s readers will experience this historic book as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel intended.
2005, English
Softcover, 290 pages, 24 x 16 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$40.00 - Out of stock
'Approximate Man' & Other Writings, is the only English language source for Tzara's majestic and powerful epic poem "The Approximate Man" as well as an anthology of writings by legendary poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963). It includes a critical introduction, an account of variants, and an essay by translator Mary Ann Caws setting the context for "Approximate Man." Originally published in 1973, this title has continued to be one of the true Tzara English language rarities, commanding a very high price, when a copy could be located at all.
Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement.
2007, English / French
Softcover, 400 pages, 23 x 16 cm
Published by
Black Widow Press / Boston
$59.00 - Out of stock
The most comprehensive anthology of the works of Robert Desnos ever assembled into the English language. Edited with a critical introduction and extensive analysis of works by Mary Ann Caws.
Translators include: Mary Ann Caws, Terry Hale, Bill Zavatsky, Martin Sorrell, Jonathan Eburne, Katherine Connelly, Patricia Terry, and Paul Auster.
Robert Desnos (1900-1945) was one of the primary poets and writers of the Surrealist movement of 1924-1930. He wrote, and collaboratively wrote, many influential and celebrated books. He died as a result of his internment. This title presents a comprehensive anthology of the writings of Desnos.
2003, English
Softcover, 440 pages, 15.6 x 23.5 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$79.00 - In stock -
The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures.
Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and complex bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art's varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic.
Dispensing with simple narratives of re-enchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture's tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care.
Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a 'magical-critical' thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.
Artists surveyed:
Holly Pester, Katrina Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, Anna Zett, Monica Sjoeo, Sofia Al-Maria, Jack Burnham, Jeremy Millar, Susan Hiller, Mike Kelley, Morehshin Allahyari, Center for Tactical Magic, David Steans, Porpentine, Travis Jeppesen, Linda Stupart, Caspar Heinemann, Elizabeth Mputu, Faith Wilding, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, Henri Michaux, Kenneth Anger, Benedict Drew, Mark Leckey, Robert Morris, Jenna Sutela, Haroon Mirza, Zadie Xa, Saya Woolfalk, Ian Cheng, Tabita Rezaire, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Elijah Burgher, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sahej Rahal
Writers:
Charles Fort, Victoria Nelson, Gary Lachman, Yvonne P. Chireau, Randall Styers, Isabelle Stengers, Alan Moore, Simon O' Sullivan, Lucy Lippard, Louis Chude Sokei, Patricia MacCormack, Mark Pilkington, AE, Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Michel Leiris, Aime Cesaire, Austin Osman Spare, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Elaine Graham, Jeffrey Sconce, Giulia Smith, Esther Leslie, Alice Bucknell, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Hannah Gregory, Kristen Gallerneaux, Mahan Moalemi, Jamie Sutcliffe, Gregory Sholette, Aaron Gach, Eugene Thacker, Diane Di Prima, Allan Doyle, Aria Dean, Emily LaBarge, Lou Cornum, Joy KMT, Scott Wark, McKenzie Wark, Phil Hine, Jackie Wang, Sean Bonney
1972/2006, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket, slipcase, obi), 92 pages, 31 x 25 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kawade Shobo Shinsha / Tokyo
$150.00 - Out of stock
2006 facsimile edition of this wonderful 1972 slip-cased hardcover monograph on German artist Hans Bellmer, considered one of the most important representatives of Surrealist Art. Bound in brown cloth and wrapped in illustrated original dust-jacket, this heavily illustrated book surveys Bellmer's incredible paintings, drawings, photography and sculptural dolls through beautiful colour and monochrome gravure reproductions, with alongside various texts, biography, bibliography and portrait of the artist. Published as volume 2 of the deluxe La Septième Face du Dé series by Kawade Shobo Shinsha in Japan in the 1970s, all later re-printed in the 2000s. All editions now out-of-print.
German artist Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975), was best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. "Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925).
Fine copy.
1989, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called "Texticles," the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass ), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Selavy ("Eros, c'est la vie" or arouser la vie", drink it up" celebrate life"). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century's most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.