World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1997, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 15 x 23 cm
Published by
Art issues Press / Los Angeles
$40.00 - In stock -
"Compared to enjoying Dave Hickey—who writes like a Raymond Chandler blessed with Giovanni Morelli's eye—reading any other art critic (and I mean any other art critic) is like doing your taxes'." — Peter Plagens
David Hickey (1938—2021), nicknamed "The Bad Boy of Art Criticism" and "The Enfant Terrible of Art Criticism", was a prolific American art critic and professor who wrote for many American publications including Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Parkett, Interview, The London Review of Books, ARTnews, Harper's Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Nest, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many more.
Air Guitar is Dave Hickey's "memoir without tears"—23 essays or "love songs", a journey through the vernacular cultural landscape of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Looking back from the vantage-point of his adopted hometown of Las Vegas, Hickey speculates on everything from jazz and rock-and-roll to basketball and professional wrestling—from magic and psychedelia to gambling and the culture of "little stores"—from automotive design to series television to Saturday-morning cartoons. The emphasis in these 23 essays is on the way the arts function in the drift of everyday life, outside the venues of official culture, and on singular "lives in the arts," lived outside those venues, with meditations on the careers of Liberace, Hank Williams, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol, Johnny Mercer, Norman Rockwell, magicians Siegfried & Roy, and wrestler Lady Godiva. Underlying Hickey's writing is an abiding belief that cultural life in a democracy can (and occasionally does) function in a democratic manner, sustained by the whims of affection and the commerce of opinion.
2023, English
Softcover, 408 pages, 20 x 14 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - Out of stock
The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog.
Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang's trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an "odd girl" from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education- an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot's Fool, with a leap of faith.
"Jackie Wang is dissolute. She refuses the word "work" so her writing is full of location and devoid of it, continuing I guess what was really ripe in the '70s about what a sentence is and what "my" mind is doing today. It's not all lost territory but Alien Daughters, most of all, is just profoundly beautiful, hellish new writing. I feel fucking lucky to have this suitcase of Jackie's, these pets of hers, deflating and surging, bobbing & rocking here right now. Something glorious. What can it be?"—Eileen Myles
"Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun is a patchwork epic of feral girlhood, faithful to the subterranean dignity of its materials—dreams, zines, and Tumblr posts. Jackie Wang has written a book I've been waiting my whole life to read."—Anne Boyer
"Absolutely personal, like a plant or a dream, Jackie's handbook of how to live backwards tumbles through the tumult of a dying and resurrecting world. Jackie appears in these pages as a playful high-priestess spider holding together the weave of a web that leads to the punk house and the prison and the university library and the inner world and the underworld and so on. This writing is very alive as in decomposing into the cosmos. To quote her: “the gift of the word has been given to women who are not afraid of the rapture of turning themselves inside out."—Hannah Black
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police.
2023, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Uh Books / Amsterdam
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$25.00 - In stock -
Riffing off the title, this volume includes Catherine Damman interviewing Carolyn Lazard – an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation, in addition a feature on contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, plus contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler. [...] Lee Lozano, Sturtevant, Margarethe Raspé, Jef Geys, Martin Wong, Bernadette Mayer, Louise Lawler, Sarah Rapson, Ketty La Rocca, Stanley Brouwn, Lutz Bacher, Hanne Darboven, Pope L., Silvia Kolbowski, Ilmari Kalkkinen, Henrik Olesen, Otto Wagner...
2022, English
Softcover, 240 Pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Divided Publishing / London
$34.00 - Out of stock
Never does the patient seem more ill than when they try to order associations into a logical tale. Classical analysis sees this in terms of a repudiation of sexuality: an attempt to avoid speaking from a place of desire. But why should psychoanalysis reduce everything to sex? If sex only ever achieves partial satisfactions, fragments of pleasure, its pursuit creates our subjectivity and our world. Disorganisation & Sex argues that the sexuality of psychoanalysis is not a reductive biologism, but an archaic remainder that cannot be colonised, endlessly disorienting meaning in our everyday lives. It is our proximity to this terrain that undoes our most tedious habits, and opens onto something revelatory.
"This book is a dare. By giving desire back to sex, Webster offers us a blueprint for talking about sex at a time when we’ve forgotten how to do so."—Ricky Varghese
"Putting her finger on the difficulty of sexuality, one of our savviest psychoanalytic commentators limns its impossibilities – but also its potential for inventing something new."—Tim Dean
"Being dragged into the orbit of Webster’s mind is like entering the Magic Mountain: you go in as a visitor, and stay as a patient."—Tom McCarthy
"Who knew the hole was what Freud had in mind when he invented psychoanalysis and wouldn’t stop saying ‘sex’. Take a tumble into Wonderland with Dr Webster and decide for yourself what counts as real."—Courtney Love
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011) and Conversion Disorder (Columbia University Press, 2018); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books.
1971, Dutch / English
Softcover (2 volumes), 232 pages + 96 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sonsbeek / Arnhem
$180.00 - In stock -
Scarce Sonsbeek '71 complete 2 volume catalogue set, published in conjunction with exhibition held at Sonsbeek Park, Arnhem, June 19 - August 15, 1971. Sonsbeek Park had been the site of international sculpture exhibitions periodically from 1949. The concept of sonsbeek '71, which was described in the catalogue as an adventure and a dynamic manifestation, was both revolutionary and controversial. It made a radical departure from the usual format by expanding the conceptual and physical territory "beyond the boundaries" and commissioning site-specific works that appeared throughout all of Holland. Along with sculpture, installation, environmental works, and performances, the exhibition aimed to make visitors aware of the influence of (new) communication technologies, such as the telephone and the telex machine, on the perception of space, distance and time. An on-site film and audio studio produced new video works and an offset printing press where artists' plans could be printed was installed, with new artists' publications being sponsored by the exhibition (such as Ruscha's Dutch Details; the artist's book statement reproduced herein). This catalogue itself becomes a vital element of the conceptual activity, reproducing documentation of the works, statements, drawings, instructions, and many artist page-works created specifically for the publications. Edited by Geert van Beijeren and Coosje Kapteyn, with texts (in English and Dutch) by art historian Willem A. L. Beeren and others.
Participating artists include Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Carl Andre, Ben d`Armagnac, Richard Artschwager, Bruce Baillie, Douwe Jan Bakker, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, Boezem, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Javacheff Christo, Tony Conrad, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Ad Dekkers, Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Pieter Engels, Groep Enschede, E. R. G., Hans Eykelboom, Barry Flanagan, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Ken Jacobs, joepat, Donald Judd, On Kawara, W. Knoebel, Hans Koetsier, Axel van der Kraan, Peter Kubelka, George Landlow, Standish Dyer Lawder, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Moving Mass, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Mario Merz, Moore, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Robert Nelson, Groep Noord-Brabant, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Panamarenko, Egbert Philips, Emilio Prini, Klaus Rinke, Peter Roehr, Ulrich Rückriem, Edward Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Wim T. Schippers, Richard Serra, Paul Sharits, Eric Siegel, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Kenneth Snelson, Michael Snow, Ellen Edinoff, Koert Stuyf, Shinkichi Tajiri, Sajiki and Yokoyama Tenjo, Carel Visser, Andre Volten, Hans de Vries, Lex Wechgelaar, Lawrence Weiner, Joyce Wieland.
Very Good copies each, with light wear/tanning/creasing, otherwise tight and well preserved.
1975, English
Softcover (glassine covers, staple-bound), 30 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Arts Council of Great Britain / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of Order and Experience — a guide to the exhibition of American minimalist prints, published by Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 in the occasion of a group exhibition featuring the works of Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Edda Renouf, Dorothea Rockburne. Authored by Norbert Lynton (1927—2007), professor of the History of Art at the University of Sussex, this handsomely designed oblong catalogue, with printed glassine covers, is illustrated by works by the featured artists, Lynton provides two introductions, a discourse upon "Minimalism" in print-making.
Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Serpent's Tail / London
$85.00 - Out of stock
"Cookie Mueller was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all, a goddess.... It was much later in life that I realized Cookie's biggest talent was her writing. Even the worst experiences in her life were neutralized by retelling them in print as tall tales; she could become a sort of fractured but hilarious Uncle Remus for the brave but culturally wounded."—From the Introduction by John Waters
Rare first 1997 edition of the long out-of-print collection, Ask Dr. Mueller — The Writings of Cookie Mueller, published by High Risk Books / Serpent's Tail, with introduction by John Waters.
"Ask Dr. Mueller captures the glamour and grittiness of Cookie Mueller's life and times. Here are previously unpublished stories—wacky as they are enlightening—along with favorites from Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black and other publications. Also, the best of Cookie's art columns from Details magazine, and the funniest of her advice columns from the East Village Eye, on everything from homeopathic medicine to how to cut your cocaine with a healthy substance. This collection is as much an autobiography as it is a map of downtown New York in the early '80s—that moment before Bright Lights, Big City, before the art world exploded, before New York changed into a yuppie metropolis, while it still had a glimmer of bohemian life."
Cookie Mueller was a fiction writer, columnist, cult movie star who appeared in several of John Waters films, and an art critic. She died of Aids in 1989.
Very Good copy with light tanning to pages.
2020, English / French / Italian / Dutch
Softcover (3 volumes in slipcase), 400 pages, 24 x 16.9 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$300.00 - Out of stock
At 400 pages, this is the definitive overview of the great and influential pioneers of Italian radical architecture, Superstudio. Immediately out-of-print and now collectible.
The avant-garde Italian architecture collective Superstudio was founded in 1966 by Adolfo Natalini (1941–2020) and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia (1941–2019), and quickly leaped to the forefront of the 1960s radical architecture movement alongside the likes of Archigram and Haus-Rucker-Co. Through their architectural projects (housing, industrial buildings, banks, interiors), design objects, photocollages, drawings, texts, installations, models, films and exhibitions, Superstudio found brilliant and highly inventive ways in which to inhabit a world transformed by capitalist forces and technological evolutions. This beautifully produced, slipcased, 400-page volume explores their oeuvre through the lens of “migrations” (migrazioni). Borrowed from Superstudio’s vocabulary, this term serves as a conceptual and poetic key to the group’s architecture and their works in all mediums.
Presented in 3 books, the first is a collection of critical essays and interviews with three prominent figures in architecture who have been in close contact with Superstudio over the past 50 years; By examining their personal and theoretical careers, these different voices show the great influence of the small group, bringing to life this “journey to the higher realms of reason.” The second book proposes a thematic journey through the work: it shows the rich iconography through a series of concepts from Superstudio’s vocabulary. They reveal the richness of the projects and images produced over the active years of the group that go beyond the narrative contained in some of the quasi-iconic photo collages. The last book presents previously unpublished letters from the archive of Adolfo Natalini. The exchanges between the members of Superstudio and the letters to prominent architects from the second half of the twentieth century form a collective autobiography in which architecture and life increasingly converge. In addition to the group’s oeuvre, the publication also presents work by 9999, Archizoom, Hiromi Fujii, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, Ugo La Pietra, Leonardo Ricci, Aldo Rossi, Leonardo Savioli, Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Bernard Tschumi.
Edited with text by Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou. Text by Beatrice Lampariello, Gabriele Mastrigli, Frédéric Migayrou. Interviews with Veronique Patteeuw, Rem Koolhaas, Aurelien Vernant, Bernard Tschumi, Yûki Yosikawa, Hiromi Fujii.
As New sealed copy.
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$90.00 - In stock -
Inaugural 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a pioneering platform of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", introduces a new wave of illustrators and photographers, radical criticism, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, poetry, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, alongside well-known authors... This scarce first issue with incredible cover by Japanese illustrator Ken Katayama, features work/contributions by author Izumi Suzuki, film director Michio Okabe, artist Genpei Akasegawa, critic Junzo Ishiko, author Boris Vian, film director Eiichi Uchida, film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori, author Mieko Kanai, music critic Masaaki Hiraoka, artist Koichi Tanigawa, manga artist Shigeru Sugiura, graphic designer Mad Amano, doll artist Shimon Yotsuya, illustrator G. Akechi, art critic Junzo Ishiko, art critic Yoshida Yoshie, film director Toshio Matsumoto, graphic artist Keiichi Tanaami, author Koji Suzuki, artist Toshio Saeki, manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, manga artist Mori Masaki, manga artist Mitsuhiko Yoshida, artist Tsunehisa Kimura, playwright Jūrō Kara, and many more. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
Good—Very Good copy, general wear/age.
1971, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lemon Inc. / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Third 1971 issue of legendary Japanese underground arts periodical, Black Magazine (or Black Notebook), a pioneering platform of the 1970s subculture in Tokyo. A magazine like no-other, each issue "a paradise of 1970's heretical culture", introduces a new wave of illustrators and photographers, radical criticism, avant-garde comics, sadistic literature, poetry, underground film and theatre, and all manner of transgressive, esoteric and erotic material, alongside well-known authors... This third issue, themed "Heaven and Hell", features incredible cover by renowned Japanese doll artist (and female doll actor) Simon Yotsuya, and contributions by ero guro master Toshio Saeki, artist Genpei Akasegawa, art critic Junzo Ishiko, "Funeral Parade of Roses" director Toshio Matsumoto, Butoh dancer Natsu Nakajima, poet and critic Akiko Baba, photographer Masatoshi Naitō, manga artist Ryuzan Aki, literary critic Katsutarō Isogai, illustrator Akechi Goro, writer Masaki Umehara, author Utagawa Taiga, literary critic Nobuo Kasahara, essayist Shinichi Kusamori, critic Hidetomo Kanaoka, illustrator (Flower Travellin' Band) Shinobu Ishimaru, manga artist Shigeru Sugiura, scholar Aoi Suenaga, artist Takahashi Shōtei, illustrator Yosuke Inoue, and many more. A lot of great things started in the pages of this unique magazine. A highly recommended publication!
Good copy, general light wear/age/some creasing to corners, tanning.
1969, Japanese
Softcover (staple-bound), 54 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ATG / Tokyo
$25.00 - In stock -
Rare copy of issue 64 of Tokyo's ATG (Art Theatre Group) publication, published in 1968/1969, with extensive cover features on the works of Japanese director Yoshida Yoshishige and French director Jean-Luc Godard. Includes many photographs, as well as filmographies on both directors, plus in-depth articles on Yoshishige's Farewell to the Summer Light (1968) and Godard's Le petit soldat (1963). Also includes an article and advertisements for Diary of a Shinjuku Thief by Nagisa Ōshima, listing for the ATG program, galleries and more.
Good—VG copt with some cover/spine wear.
1979, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 22.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Facets Multimedia Center / Chicago
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of "Images at the Horizon": A Workshop with Werner Herzog, a staple-bound publication that transcribes a far-reaching interview with German film director Werner Herzog conducted in 1979 by film critic Roger Ebert, followed by a group discussion between Herzog and attendees of the Facets Multimedia Center workshop. Excerpts from this revealing discussion are frequently quoted in essays about Herzog. Illustrations in b/w throughout texts, filmography, portrait of W. H.
Average copy. Average cover due to bug-nibbling front and back boards, light tanning, internally Good throughout with no bug damage.
1981, English
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st US Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tanam Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this anthology of texts on the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, published in New York in 1981 by Tanam Press.
Illustrated throughout with stills from his filmography spanning 1965-1980. Full filmography is included, along with biography and the following major chapters and essays:
"History of Anti-Teater : The Beginnings" by Yaak Karsunke; "The Impact-Maker" by Peter Idem; "The Doll in the Doll : Observations on Fassbinder's Films" by Wilfried Wiegand; Interview with Rainer Werner Fassbinder by Wilfried Wiegand; "Fassbinder's Reality: an Imitation of Life" by Ruth McCormick; "Franz, Mieze, Reinhold, Death and the Devil : Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Wolfram Schulte; "Annotated Filmography" by Wilhelm Roth; "Documentation" by Hans-Helmut Prinzler.
The influential Tanam Press was founded in 1980 by Reese Williams with the release of LP recordings featuring talks by Buckminster Fuller and Susan Sontag. Over the course of five years, Tanam published lively individual and collaborative projects from writers, visual and media artists that utilize the page in innovative ways. Playing across genre, the publications incorporate critical essays, poetry, experimental prose, photography, film, video and television.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) was a West German filmmaker, actor, playwright and theatre director, who was a catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. Although Fassbinder's career lasted less than fifteen years, he was extremely productive. By the time of his death, Fassbinder had completed over forty films, two television series, three short films, four video productions, and twenty-four plays, often acting as well as directing. Fassbinder was also a composer, cameraman, and film editor. Fassbinder died on 10 June 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.
2023, English
Softcover, 200 Pages, 19.6 x 14.2 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - In stock -
A kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, and mystery, Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman's long-awaited first full-length book: a kaleidoscopic study of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Written over a short period "in the spirit" of RWF, who would often get films made in a matter of weeks or months, Thousands of Mirrors presents the filmmaker as Penman's equivalent of what Baudelaire was to Benjamin: an urban poet in the turbulent, seeds-sown, messy era just before everything changed. Beautifully written and extraordinarily compelling, echoing the fragmentary works of Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran, Eduardo Galeano and Alexander Kluge, this story has everything: sex, drugs, art, the city, cinema, and revolution.
1979 / 1983, English
Softcover, 90 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
One of America's most brilliant writers examines the mythology of disease.
1979 Penguin edition, 1983 print of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as "one of the most liberating books of its time."
This is Sontag's penetrating analysis of the social attitudes toward various major illnesses — chiefly TB and cancer, and its symbolic use as a romantic tool in writing. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment. By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is — just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed. Illness as Metaphor has been translated into many languages and continues to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.
VG copy with tanning, light age, sticker on back cleanly removed.
1982, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
1982 Penguin edition of Susan Sontag's On Photography - a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject of photography.
Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' - The Times
'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves' - Washington Post
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject' - New Yorker
One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.
Good copy.
1980, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 204 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Farrar Straus & Giroux / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition from 1980 of Sontag's exploration of the most important artists of our time. Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. Along with essays on Paul Goodman and Antonin Artaud, there are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.
VG copy in Good dust jacket. Small previous owner's inscription to blank endpaper, some tanning/small chip/marking to jacket otherwise nicely preserved.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 194 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carcanet New Press / Manchester
$45.00 - Out of stock
First UK hardcover edition of this incredible collection of Selected Stories by Robert Walser, published by Carcanet New Press, Manchester. Foreword by Susan Sontag. Translated by poet Christopher Middleton.
"The imp inside Kafka (the one that got out to ride coal scuttles or be Josephine the folksinger among the Mouse Folk) was Robert Walser's whole genius. Walser is a Kafka inside-out: his darkly prophetic vision remains inside a magically whimsical, brightly imaginative exterior. These fine translations, made or instigated by the poet Christopher Middleton, are a big step toward our as yet meager awareness of one of the most interesting writers of our time."—GUY DAVENPORT
One of the great writers of the twentieth century in the German language—and an important influence on Kafka—comes to light in this extraordinary, compact selection of the best of his short fiction pieces. Shining with brilliant intensity, Walser's stories range from a mere page to many pages, and hew to a haunting new voice. "For me," Walser writes, "the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself." Through his protagonists, be they young men of modest means, famous artists, upper-class women, workers, or animals endowed with the gift of speech, Walser's stories cohere into a fragmentary but powerful collage of life in the Europe of his time.
In a rare combination of lyricism and ruthlessness, philosophy and realism, Robert Walser—admired not only by Kafka but by such writers as Hesse and Benjamin—maps man's futility and isolation while rendering a moving account, at once personal and universal, of life's painful and yet mystically beautiful tenacity. As Susan Sontag writes in her foreword to the book, "He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with sunning to spine.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hayashi Bookstore / Tokyo
$45.00 - In stock -
Second issue of cult Japanese underground magazine, Heretical Literature, "A New Magazine Exploring The Unknown World of Aesthetics", published in August 1974. Edited by Munehiro Hayashi, with cover artwork by Pierre Molinier, this issue features colour galleries of Muzan-e (also known as "Bloody Prints", Japanese woodcut prints of violent nature published in the late Edo and Meiji periods), Viennese fantastic realist Rudolf Hausner, gallery of historical mistress illustrations, features/stories on Medieval subcontinental tales, the homo romantiscism of Rome, sadistic pornography, adult toys, rape, western astrology, and "miscellaneous notes on human waste and loincloths", with illustrations by Kaname Ozuma, Masao Koaku, Ran Akiyoshi, plus much more. Texts in Japanese.
VG copy, general light wear/tanning.
1998, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 168 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of "Vintage Erotica", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1998. An ardent collector of vintage erotica, Akita's knowledgable in-depth historical study covers the development of nude photography, curiosa, pornography and fetishism from around the world. From naturalism to glamour photography, dirty comics, girly mags, artistic nudes, classic bondage, to the protagonists of photographer/director Harrison Marks, model Betty Page, photographer E. J. Bellocq, Whitehouse magazine, under-the-counter publisher Alexandre Dupouy, photographer Peter Basch, and many more, all subjects illustrated in b/w with many photographic reproductions and magazine cover references. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Vintage Erotica" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with dust jacket.
1994, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 212 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of "Modern Sexuality Bizarre", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1994, an in-depth study of Japanese "abnormality" and the sexual bizarre in modern society, from its origins through to the culture of 'Ero-Guro Nonsense' — a period ranging from the end of the Taisho era (1912—1926) to the beginning of the Showa era (1926—1989). Akita discuss' the history of sexual media and the modern era of the bizarre with emphasis on its influence on psychology and sexual customs. From "The Dawn of Metamorphosis Research" and "Grotesque Trends" of modern pioneers of eroticism in Japan, including the legendary ero-guro magazines "Hentai Documents" and "Grotesque", their editors and authors Kitaaki Umehara and Kiyoshi Sakai, to othe rearly examples of modern obscene publishing, books of Showa modern bizarre, the modern female body and the beauty era, publishing of criminal sciences and the study of sexual criminals, the torture arts and Seiu Ito "the father of modern kinbaku", hentai psychology and the female viewpoint in criminal psychoogy, postwar marital theory, and more, all subjects illustrated in b/w. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity from the fringes to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) mainstream Japanese audience. "Modern Sexuality Bizarre" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine "textured" and illustrated dust jacket.
1990, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kahn & Averill / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 softcover edition of this most important biography and study of a legendary composer who altered the course of post-war music. His fearsome talents, both as theoretician and artist enabled him to create an entirely revolutionary body of work through the development of new concepts - stochastic music, games theory, sieves, new forms of timbral composition, rhythms and scales - all of which are discussed in a clear and illuminating way, with reference to their scientific and philosophical underpinning. The fruit of ten years' study and close collaboration between Xenakis and Matossian, Xenakis authorised, for the first time, the publication of interviews, letters and documents of a highly personal and controversial nature, portraying vividly his relationships with his wife, novelist Françoise, Varèse, Messiaen, Le Corbusier, Boulez, Scherchen. The discussion of major works, both musical and architectural, is generously illustrated with musical examples, drawings, photographs and sketches, and appended by valuable lists of all Xenakis' compositions, architectural projects, discography and bibliographies.
Iannis Xenakis revolutionized post-war music more forcefully than any other 20th-century composer. A Resistance leader in World War II, he escaped from Greece to Paris under sentence of death. He became one of Le Corbusier's chief architects, and a pioneer of the computer age in music and the arts. Milan Kundera called him 'the prophet of insensibility'. Xenakis harnessed chaos theory and invented 'stochastic music'. He freed the sound spectrum from western scales and based music on natural principles. He combined architecture, light and sound in a radical new art form to create a boundless aesthetic in music. Shunned by contemporaries, this influential thinker created over 150 vast compositions imbued with elemental passion, and brilliantly reinvented the landscape of music forever. Since it was first published in 1981, Nouritza Matossian's perceptive book on Xenakis has helped students, musicians and audiences appreciate his music. She shares his Greek culture and interest in philosophy, and has chronicled vital discoveries in his work. A reserved man, he spoke frankly to her about his mysterious methods of composition, and his relationships with Varèse, Messiaen, Le Corbusier and Boulez. Xenakis' prophecy that computers, science and art would converge makes this book essential reading for understanding the digital revolution of our time. Matossian's well-researched biography is an unrivalled classic on modern music.
Nouritza Matossian, born in Cyprus of Armenian parents, was educated there and in England, graduating in philosophy at Bedford College, University of London. She has interviewed the foremost composers of new music and her articles have appeared in journals in England and abroad. She is married to the composer, Rolf Gehlhaar, and they live with their two sons in London.
Very Good copy with some light foxing, tanning and light creasing to cover.
1996, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.6 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 softcover edition of Bálint András Varga's "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis", published by Faber and Faber. Later re-published as print on demand reprint.
Messiaen said that Xenakis was "one of the most extraordinary men that I know ... a hero, unlike any other". His music is elemental, primordial, yet it could not have existed at any other time. It comes out of the most personal experience of the horrors of the age, and from an intense engagement with the conceptual world of modern architecture and higher mathematics. His musical thinking from the start incorporated many of the preoccupations that have since become fashionable, such as chaos and game theory, fractals and probability, transformed into a music that has an energy and violence both disturbing and exhilarating. These conversations reveal a man of uncommon integrity, with a breadth of artistic empathy that is unique in the music of our time.
"Xenakis has developed a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West."—Ben Watson, The Wire
The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.
VG copy with some light general wear and tanning.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series..
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Very Good copy, with some light edge wear.