World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
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Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
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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.
2019, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
This inaugural issue, offers a fresh perspective on the accessibility of literature, writers and style. Here, you will find features with Chris Kraus and Ariana Reines about online writing, an exploration into Kathy Acker’s books and influence on contemporary culture, interviews with young upcoming authors and more.
2020, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
Worms 2 the ‘Revolting Women’ issue looks at women who are literally disgusting, figuratively revolting. With a focus on writers who operate on the fringes of literature, ‘revolt' in a Worms context is vast-ranging. This issue includes features with Maggie Nelson, Tilly Lawless, Sarah Schulman, Amelia Abraham, Juliana Huxtable, Juliet Jacques, Olivia Sudjic and more.
2021, English
Softcover, 92 pgs, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
Worms 3, the ‘biomythography’ issue, looks at personal myth-making and the stories that shape us.
Featuring Michelle Tea, Moyra Davey, Lynne Tillman, Johanna Hedva, Jenny Hval, Ellen van Neervan, Caroline Calloway, Julie Enszerl and more.
2021, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms 4 looks at psychogeography and the Situationists from a non-male perspective. Taking flâneuserie and the creative benefits of a good walk as its starting point, the issue features conversations with Eileen Myles, Alison Bechdel, Lauren Elkin, Tilly Lawless, Mckenzie Wark, Therese Estacion and Carmen Winant. 2021 was a fraught year for walking; the pandemic restricted our right to movement, while the murders of women walking in London led us to ask the question: how can the act of walking the streets spark political conversation?
2022, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 $15.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
"In this issue, we explore New Narrative alongside writers working today that incorporate some of it’s themes. Our cover star Saidiya Hartman talks with Rhea Dillon about the limits and processes of creating stories from the archive, while Camille Roy and Dodie Bellamy give us insight into New Narrative from their experiences involved in the movement. Savannah Knoop tells us about her life playing the character of J.T Leroy, while Calla Henkel delves into ideas of using other people’s narratives as our own. There’s lots of gleaning, lots of stealing and lots of hard truths coming from the human body. We have poetry and fiction and all of the usual bits, as well as an experimental cut up piece demonstrating the appropriation method that Kathy Acker (via William Burroughs) used in so much of her work. Many more worms to be found in these pages."
2023, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Published by
Worms / London
$33.00 - In stock -
Worms is a bi-annual literary style magazine that celebrates female/non-binary writer culture.
"The themes of this issue are broad and sprawling. We look at humour, collage, and honesty - finding what’s relatable in the literature we love, and uncovering what it tells us about the present moment. Sheena Patel, our cover star, delves into the internet in all its darkness and hilarity, Elvia Wilk discusses the climate crisis and finding truth in fiction, and Chris Kraus and Ann Rower chat about everything from their influences to what a ‘career’ means as a writer. From Cosey Fanni Tutti to Lola Olufemi to Isabel Waidner, there are many more Worms to be found in these pages."
Featuring: Sheena Patel, Nada Alic, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Elvia Wilk, Ann Rower, Chris Kraus, Ghislaine Leung, Yelena Moskovich, Lola Olufemi, Sam Moore, Isabel Waidner, Cecilia Pavón, Ear Worms X Late Works
Contributors: Haydée Touitou, Nicole Della Costa, Zara Joan Miller, Erin Taylor, Jess Cole, Arcadia Molinas, Phoenix Losavio, Hope Roalfe, Hannah Pezzack, Chris Carter, Clem Macleod, Caitlin Mcloughlin, Isabel Maccarthy, Samantha Rosenwald, Elvira Garcia, Celestine Cooney, Bug Shepherd-Barron, Mary Watt, Delia Rainey
Founder & Editor In Chief: Clem Macleod; Managing Editor: Caitlin Mcloughlin; Art Direction And Design: Caitlin Mcloughlin; Features Editors: Pierce Eldridge, Arcadia Molinas; Contributing Editor: Violet Conroy
2023, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 11.2 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Silver Press / London
$33.00 - In stock -
This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. This title is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.
Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?
2023, English
Softcover, 20 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$16.00 - Out of stock
A pocket-sized zine containing the CIA's entire 'Gateway Process' document, a report written in 1983, and declassified in 2003, about using a series of exercises to produce states of expanded human consciousness such as astral projection, outer body experiments, and other altered states of mind.
2021, English
Softcover, 260 pages, 20 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$39.00 - In stock -
Derek McCormack is the author of fashion-inflected novels that cast luminaries such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Balenciaga as characters. This collection brings together for the first time McCormack's fashion journalism. He writes about and interviews fashion figures that fascinate him, tracing the ways they inspire and inhabit his novels. The result is a sort of memoir in essays: as he writes, "My tribute to [Judy] Blame is about him and about me—there are lots of my own tales woven in with the topics I touch on. The writing here is a sort of autobiography, a life seen through a scrim, or a life as a scrim—my moire mémoire."
Judy Blame's Obituary contains twenty years' worth of reminiscences, reviews of fashion shows and books, interviews with writers about fashion, and interviews with fashion designers about writing. He talks to Nicolas Ghesquière about perfume, and to Edmund White about which perfume he wore as a young fag in New York City. He inspects the clothes that Kathy Acker left behind when she died, and he summons the spirit of Margiela in a literary seance. He traces the history of sequins, then recounts the cursed story of Vera West, the costume designer who dressed the Bride of Frankenstein. These pieces were all previously published, some in Artforum, some in The Believer, and some in underground publications like Werewolf Express—what binds them together is a sense that though fashion victimizes us, this victimization is sometimes a sort of salvation.
Derek McCormack is a Canadian writer. His most recent novels are The Well-Dressed Wound and Castle Faggot, both published by Semiotext(e). Of Castle Faggot, Dennis Cooper said: "It is really just one of the best books ever, and maybe the greatest novel ever written."
Praise for Judy Blame's Obituary:
'Derek McCormack, Canada's most famous author as yet unsullied by Nobel Prize or television adaptation, hides in plain sight as a fashion journalist. Parallel to his writing incantatory, scatalogical fiction, he has reviewed collections and interviewed the great and good of la mode. His divagations are often darkly hilarious and always exquisitely tailored. The sublime and the ridiculous coexist in his prose, as they do in life. Fashion victims, ignore his insights at your peril.' — William E. Jones
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 19 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$33.00 - Out of stock
Responses to Derek Jarman's Blue is the third publication in a series of anthologies from Pilot Press seeking contemporary responses to works of art made during the AIDS crisis.
In this third iteration, responses were sought to the 1993 film Blue by the multidisciplinary artist Derek Jarman.
Contributors in order of appearance : Roelof Bakker, Jared Davis, Becca Albee, Linda Kemp, Ashleigh, A. Allen, David Nash, Sam Moore, Anton Stuebner, Gonçalo Lamas, Olivia Laing, Nate Lippens, Jason Lipeles, JP Seabright, Andrew Cummings, Sig Olson, Maria Sledmere, Cleo Henry, Jessie McClaughlin, Lars Meijer, Scott Treleaven, Declan Wiffen, Caitlin Merrett King, Harry Agius, António Manso Preto, Adriana Lazarova, Brooke Palmieri, D Mortimer, Mary Manning, Aaron James Murphy
Printed on 100% recycled paper
2023, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 17.5 x 11 cm
Published by
Index Journal / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) was a prolific, popular and controversial Australian artist. He is best known for his children’s book The Magic Pudding and his skilled prints, which mostly draw on Greek and Roman mythology and nineteenth century literature and philosophy. The Australian cultural consciousness is indelibly marked by Lindsay’s output, his prominence in the Sydney bohemian intellectual scene and by The Magic Pudding, which entrances the imagination of generation after generation of Australian children. This consciousness is marked too by the paradoxical conjunctions of Lindsay’s life: artistic bohemia and fascistic tendencies, avant-gardism and a fervour for the rule of law, libertinism and conservatism, worship and denigration.
This collection of essays examines Lindsay’s current position in Australian art history. The authors’ opinions are erudite, varied and often incendiary; few figures are as divisive as Lindsay.
Film critic Adrian Martin writes alongside Ian McLean, the Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne, art historian Cameron Hurst, and literary critic Jeremy George. Art historian Soo-Min Shim responds to a video work by artist James Nguyen.
The project develops research conducted during an exhibition of the University of Melbourne’s Norman Lindsay collection, also titled Venus in Tullamarine, held at the George Paton Gallery in 2022.
1993, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 19 x 14 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$55.00 - In stock -
Originally published in 1972 in France, Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire has become a classic in gay theory. Translated into English for the first time in 1978 and out of print since the early 1980s, this new edition, with an introduction by Michael Moon, will make available this vital and still relevant work to contemporary audiences. Integrating psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, this book describes the social and psychic dynamics of what has come to be called homophobia and on how the "homosexual" as social being has come to be constituted in capitalist society.
Significant as one of the earliest products of the international gay liberation movement, Hocquenghem's work was influenced by the extraordinary energies unleashed by the political upheavals of both the Paris "May Days" of 1968 and the gay and lesbian political rebellions that occurred in cities around the world in the wake of New York's Stonewall riots of June 1969.
Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the shattering effects of innumerable gay "comings-out," Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of anal desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.
Homosexual Desire remains an exhilarating analysis of capitalist societies' pervasive fascination with, and violent fear of, same-sex desire and addresses issues that continue to be highly charged and productive ones for queer politics.
“This remarkable essay was one of the first efforts to describe the psychological structure of homophobia into which we all were born and which still confine us. It examines, principally from the male perspective, the powerful and insideous ways the dominant heterosexual culture defines and marginalizes gay experience.”—Michael Roberts , Bay Windows
"Homosexual Desire represents the best of left social theory of sexual politics, a tradition that has never had an adequate reception in the United States. Reprinting this book now is a step toward recovering that tradition, and could therefore open debates about the significance of sexuality."—Michael Warner
"Written over two decades ago, in the aftermath of May '68 and Stonewall, Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire may well be the first example of what we now call queer theory. But its significance is more than historical: it remains an indispensable analysis of, and polemic against, institutionalized homophobia.”—Douglas Crimp
2009, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben's sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archaeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking in order to expose, examine, and elaborate what is obscure, unanalyzed, even unsaid, in an author's thought. To be archaeologically vigilant, then, is to return to, even invent, a method attuned to a ''world supported by a thick weave of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences.'' Collecting a wide range of authors and topics in a slim but richly argued volume, Agamben enacts the search to create a science of signatures that exceeds the attempts of semiology and hermeneutics to determine the pure and unmarked signs that signify univocally, neutrally, and eternally.
Three conceptual figures organize Agamben's argument and the advent of his new method: the paradigm, the signature, and archaeology. Each chapter is devoted to an investigation of one of these concepts and Agamben carefully constructs its genealogy transhistorically and from an interdisciplinary perspective. And at each moment of the text, Agamben pays tribute to Michel Foucault, whose methods he rethinks and effectively uses to reformulate the logic of the concepts he isolates. The Signature of All Things reveals once again why Agamben is one of the most innovative thinkers writing today.
Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Venice. He is the author of Profanations (2007), Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002), both published by Zone Books, and other books.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 144 pages, 20.5 x 13.7 cm
Published by
Orion / London
$35.00 - Out of stock
A lovesong to London in the early 80s: a pre-computer, pre-digital, pre-mostmodern, New Wave age.
'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s'—Neil Tennant
'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope'—John Burnside
'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had'—Philip Hoare
'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism'—Jonathan Coe
A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...
Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and two works of non-fiction including SAINT RACHEL, PERFECT TENSE, REMAKE/REMODEL and ENGLAND IS MINE. His writing has been published in THE FABER BOOK OF POP and a selection of his writings on art and culture, THE SPACE BETWEEN was published in 2012. He has written widely on modern and contemporary art, most notably about the work of Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton on the occasion of recent exhibitions of their work at The National Gallery, London. Also on the art of Damien Hirst and Gilbert & George for the Tate Gallery, London. His most recent publications include the Introduction to a new edition of Oscar Wilde's classic essay, 'The Critic As Artist'.
2023, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 307 pages, 20 x 27.5 cm
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$85.00 - Out of stock
The Books and Life of Raymond Roussel is a biographic and bibliographic study of the French author Raymond Roussel (1877–1933). It was researched and written by the art historian Michael Sanchez. The book takes the form of an inventory of every known state of every edition of Roussel’s lifetime publications. Interwoven into this bibliographic data are texts that analyze the relationship between Roussel’s literary procedures, the material construction of his books, and his life. The book also includes a list of primary and secondary literature related to Roussel.
2020, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Published by
Galerie Buchholz / Köln
$30.00 - In stock -
This publication contains the German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch’s seminal text Camp Materialism. Natural History in Jack Smith revised by the author and presented together with a new addendum A note on Camp Ridiculousness.
Juliane Rebentisch (born 1970, Bonn) is a German philosopher and art historian whose research focuses on the history and politics of aesthetics. She is the author of three major books: Aesthetics of Installation Art (Sternberg, 2003), The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence (Polity, 2012), and Theorien der Gegenwartskunst (Junius, 2013), and has edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy in both German and English. Josef Chytry, in the academic journal Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, called Aesthetics of Installation Art a "formidable work." In 2017, she received the Lessing Prize from the city of Hamburg, an award given to major German cultural figures who have a connection to the city; she was the first woman to be awarded the Lessing Prize since it was given to Hannah Arendt in 1959.
1994, Japanese
Softcover, 108 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$95.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 5 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in Winter 1994, this early issue features Derek Bailey, Motoharu Yoshizawa, Captain Beefheart, George A. Romero, Keiji Haino, Smegma, Patti Smith, Jean-Luc Godard, Hawkwind, Pierre Henry, Shinro Ohtake, Shoichi Ozawa, Alvin Lucier, Frank Zappa, history/discography of Akifumi Nakajima's (Aube) G.R.O.S.S. label, articles on extremely obscure psych from around the world, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Very Good, light cover wear.
1995, Japanese
Softcover, 112 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$85.00 - In stock -
Vol. 10 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in Winter 1995-1996, this early issue features Chisato Yamada, Dagmar Andrtova, AMM, Han Bennink, Captain Beefheart, Don Cherry, the ESP label, The Fanatics, Hawkwind, Die Krupps, LAFMS, Mu, Pearls Before Swine, Hiroshi Mikami, St.Mikael, Suicide, John Zorn, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Very Good, light cover wear.
1996, Japanese
Softcover, 112 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$85.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 12 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in Summer '96, this early issue features Peter Brotzmann, Keizo Inoue, Captain Beefheart, Eric Dolphy, Einstruzende Neubauten, Gong, Antonio Inoki, Hiroshi Mikami, David Jackman (Organum), Gonn, Lee Konitz, LAFMS, Pain Jerk, Astor Piazzola, Tiny Tim Vajra, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Fine copy.
1995, Japanese
Softcover, 110 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$85.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 7 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in Winter 1995, this early issue features Tori Kudo (Maher Shalal Hash Baz), AMM, Nihilist Spasm Band, Chie Mukai, Miles Davis, Misha Mengelberg, Faust, John Duncan, Mayo Thompson, George Lewis, Television, Captain Beefheart, Yoshio Hayakawa (Jacks), Hawkwind, Kazuo Hara, Canadian psych/folk, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Very Good, light cover wear.
1997, Japanese
Softcover, 112 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$75.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 17 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in Winter '97-'98, this early issue features Jutok Kaneko, Congregation, Current 93, Arthur Doyle, Klaus Dinger, Kikuchi Kōji, Barre Phillips, Chu Ishikawa, Nelly Pouget, Screamin' Mee-Mees, Solmania, Mike Whilhelm, Sumegma, unknown psychedelia, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Fine copy.
2006, Japanese
Softcover, 102 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
G-Modern / Tokyo
$55.00 - Out of stock
Vol. 26 issue of G-Modern, the scarcely seen cult underground music magazine published by the late Hideo Ikeezumi, founder of the legendary P.S.F. label and Modern Music record store, Tokyo’s home for underground, avant-garde and obscure musics. Published in 2006, this early issue features Keiji Haino, Derek Bailey, Wataru Okuma, Hiroyuki Usui, Suishou no Fune, Aural Fit, Hiroshi Mikami, Masayuki Takayanagi, Luc Ferrari, musical archeology by Yoshiyuki Konno, record reviews, and much more.
"The text is all in Japanese, but each issue is crammed with great photographs, weird artwork and ads, and lots of album reviews (the Japanese tradition of always reproducing every cover is helpful here). There's a big emphasis on older, ultra obscure stuff, so there's always a few repros of covers you'll definitely never see for the rest of your life. The accent is not only on the Tokyo underground as documented by PSF, but the entire history of worldwide psychedelic, avant-garde and underground music. Each issue is printed on nice book stock paper, in the 100 page range." - (Forced Exposure)
Very Good—Fine copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 25 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Cygnet Books / WA
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 edition of Innovisions by dancer, choreographer and poet Coralie Hinkley (1922–2021), one of the great original creative spirits of Sydney. Born in Glebe, Hinkley studied with (and later beside) Gertrud Bodenwiese, a pioneer of expressive dance, joining the Bodenwieser Ballet, one of the first influential dance companies in Australia. The first Australian dancer to receive the Fulbright Scholarship, Hinkley moved to New York in the late 1950's, working with luminaries such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Louis Horst and Merce Cunningham, returning to Australia to work with Ballet Australia and founded the Fort Street Dance Group in Sydney. Much of Hinkley's choreography work has been based on the imagery of poems. Her own verse has been described as "source material for creative movement".
Innovisions introduces new perspectives in Australian dance. Heavily illustrated throughout, with rare insight into the work of many Australian dance works, Innovisions is concerned with imaginative experiences in the practise of creativity in dance, leading to choreographies and creative compositions. The material is integrated in different ways through the shape and form of the content, which is diverse; the character of the ideas, drawn from the human condition, nature and the environment and the fairy tale, is unfolded in a flow of movement based on the modern or contemporary dance; elements of composition; improvisational skills. The use of the imagination, a rich source in the materialisation of the concepts and movement innovation, is utilized for individual studies, small and large groups in the fabric of choreography for performance and expressions of the process of creativity in compositions in dance education; extending from primary to secondary and tertiary levels of dance experience.
Very Good — Fine copy.
1963 / 1974, English
Softcover, 565 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
Early 1974 Princeton printing of this landmark book exploring the Great Mother as a primordial image of the human psyche.
In this profound and enduring work the renowned analytical psychologist Erich Neumann draws on ritual, mythology, art, and records of dreams and fantasies to examine how this archetype has been outwardly expressed in many cultures and periods since prehistory. He shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother.
"Neumann's creative intuition has enabled him to read in these records of the past a content and meaning that throws a beam of light on the psychological history of [hu]mankind."—Journal of Analytical Psychology
Very Good copy with erasable light pencil marginalia.