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.
1995, English
Softcover, 276 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$50.00 - Out of stock
" . . . will draw a wide readership from the ranks of literary critics, film scholars, science studies scholars and the growing legion of 'literature and science' researchers. It should be among the essentials in a posthumanist toolbox."—Richard Doyle
Automatic teller machines, castrati, lesbians and other "queers," people with AIDS, people with "multiple person-ality disorders," the Alien and the Terminator: all participate in the profound technological, representational, sexual, and theoretical changes in which bodies are implicated. Posthuman Bodies addresses new interfaces between humans and technology that are radically altering the experience of our own and others' bodies.
The contributors are Kathy Acker, Alexandra Chasin, Camilla Griggers, Judith Halberstam, Kelly Hurley, Ira Livingston, Carol Mason, Paula Rabinowitz, Roddey Reid, Steven Shaviro, Susan M. Squier, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Jennifer Terry, and Eric White.
Judith Halberstam is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Ira Livingston is Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Very Good copy of the first 1995 edition, not the print-on-demand reprint.
1994, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1994 edition, out-of-print.
This book presents an analysis of the phenomenon of the aesthetics of sexual and political violence, a central theme in European culture of the early 20th century. Presenting a synthesis of a wide range of material across disciplines and an analysis of the sources of such ideas in their political, historical and cultural context, this volume presents a broad treatment of the theme of violence during this turbulent period. The major cultural movements and individuals of the early 20th-century avant-garde are examined for their use of violence as inspiration in their artistic production. Themes explored include violence and the body; machinery and technology; Vorticism; Dada; Italian Futurism; Surrealism; violence in the avant-garde cinema; military defeat and the representation of war; the relationship of creativity and violence. Exploring the work of English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Russian painters and writers, including Georges Sorel, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Brecht and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the contributors provide an insight into the early 20th-century European avant-garde.
Very Good copy.
1987, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 260 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of Andrea Dworkin's most provocative book, Intercourse, published in 1987.
"This is the most shocking book any feminist has yet written: it forces us all to ask ourselves if we have not been deliberately ignoring the obvious."—Germaine Greer
Andrea Dworkin, once called "Feminism's Malcolm X," has been worshipped, reviled, criticized, and analyzed—but never ignored. The power of her writing, the passion of her ideals, and the ferocity of her intellect have spurred the arguments and activism of generations of feminists. Intercourse, her fourth non-fiction book after Pornography, Our Blood and Right-Wing Women, is the book that she's best known for—the book in which she provoked the argument that ultimately split apart the feminist movement, enraging as many readers as it inspired when it was first published in 1987. In it, Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men. (This argument was quickly—and falsely—simplified to "all sex is rape" in the public arena, adding fire to Dworkin's already radical persona.) Dworkin looks at the act of intercourse through the works of five male writers who have articulated its deeper meanings with particular trenchancy — Tolstoy, Kobo Abe, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer — and uses them as a springboard to explore and question every aspect of the myth, meaning and reality of this God-or-nature-created act, and its relation to the sexual, civil and social inferiority of women. What is the meaning of virginity? Is permissiveness necessarily freedom? Do women collaborate to keep men, as it were, on top? What of self-determination, identity, creativity? And where do we go from here? At once tough and humane, angry and tender, intimate and analytical, Dworkin asks us to reconsider every implication of an act without which we would be extinct. It is a book resonant with the possibility of human experience — an enlightening work, and a major one.
"This monumental work is feminist theory at its best —clear, coherent, profound, shocking, and even at times funny. It strikes the main nerve of oppression in the man's world. Intercourse is a work of deep healing, grief, and rage — and uncompromising vision."—Mary Daly
"Dworkin is one of the great radical thinkers of our time. Any man who ignores what she has to say is refusing the possibility of a dramatically better world, where women and men may at last find genuine equality — and enjoy an immense and lasting pleasure in their mutual sensuality." Michael Moorcock
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket. Some light foxing/age to reverse of dj, and book block edges, otherwise a lovely copy.
1968 / 1980, English
Softcover, 624 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
1968 edition, 1980 printing.
Edited by Herbert Read and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull.
A study of the analogies between alchemy, Christian dogma, and psychological symbolism. Revised translation, with new bibliography and index.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875—1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.
Good copy.
1970 / 1989, English
Softcover, 742 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
1970 edition, 1989 printing.
Edited by Herbert Read and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R. F. C. Hull.
Jung’s last major work, completed in his 81st year, on the synthesis of the opposites in alchemy and psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875—1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.
Good copy.
2020, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Zero Books / UK
$34.00 - Out of stock
This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief's Night; The Runaway's Night; The Drunkard's Night; The Insomniac's Night; The Revolutionary's Night; The Lunatic's Night; The Sorcerer's Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.
2019, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$28.00 - Out of stock
A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.
Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the "is" of natural orders with the "ought" of moral orders.
In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition-specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws-and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder.
Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.
1997, English / German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunstmuseum Bern / Bern
$80.00 - Out of stock
"Pictures, if they are to have effect, must have the tremendous intensity of silence [...] the silence before the storm."
First hardcover edition of Luc Tuymans — Premonition : Zeichnungen / Drawings, published by Kunstmuseum Bern in 1997 and long out-of-print. Beautifully designed volume on the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans works on paper, which, like his renowned paintings, explore people's relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it. His haunting drawings are reproduced in colour and b/w, with texts (bi-lingual English and German) by Josef Helfenstein, Hans Rudolf Reust, and Lawrence Rinder. Concept by Tuymans and Helfenstein.
Very Good—Fine copy in VG—Fine dust jacket.
2000, English / German
Hardcover (w. audio CD), 136 pages, 20 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
$30.00 - In stock -
Christina Kubisch (born 1948 in Bremen) belongs to the first generation of sound artists who also developed their own techniques, such as magnetic induction, to realize their installations. Since 1986, the trained composer, who has become known through numerous international exhibitions and participation in exhibitions (Venice Biennale, documenta 1987, Ars Electronica, Linz, etc.), has added light as a design element to her work with sound. This book brings together works created between 1980 and 2000 that can be understood as border crossings between music and fine arts. Although composed according to musical criteria, Christina Kubisch's sound installations are always related to the surrounding spaces, their atmosphere and history.
The accompanying CD contains compositions and remixes of sound installations from the period 1980 to 2000.
"This book provides an excellent overview of Christina Kubisch's sound-space-light-time installations, both optically in excellent color recordings and acoustically in shape previously unpublished compositions and remixes of sound installations as well as theoretically well-founded contributions by Carsten Ahrens, Hans Gercke, Antje von Graevenitz and Christoph Metzger (interview with Christina Kubisch)." (Artium Libri, New Releases on Art New Arts Publications, Issue 1, 2001).
Fine—As New copy, unplayed CD.
2003, English / German
Hardcover (w. CD), 120 pages, 24.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Kehrer Verlag / Heidelberg
$50.00 - Out of stock
"Works with Sound" presents a complex body of work, comprising thirty years of sculptures, drawings, environments, and performances. Fox, who since the 1960s radically rejected traditional art forms and sought new ways of artistic expression, has been increasingly concerned with investigating the seldom-observed energetic aspects of materials. Hence, sound gained a central significance in his works. The artist is dedicated to finding sounds that make energies palpable and connect the listener and his physical surroundings. Profusely illustrated rich chronology of all works with sound, including extensive biography and accompanying texts by Terry Fox and contributions by Matthias Osterwold and Eva Schmidt. Edited by Bernd Schulz. Bi-lingual English and German texts.
Accompanied by an audio CD with excerpts from six sound performances since 1975.
Fine—As New copy with unplayed CD.
1974, English
Softcover, 130 pages, 17.8 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$280.00 - Out of stock
First 1974 US edition of this historical publication by Cornelius Cardew, a key collection/collaborative manifesto of texts and scores by a group of British avant-garde musicians compiled and edited by the legendary experimental composer.
"Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral centre."
This is Morton Feldman's assessment of Cardew's importance, an assessment that took on prophetic status when Cardew cofounded the Scratch Orchestra in 1969. This orchestra was a culmination of the ideals expressed in Cardew's own music in the 1960s when, working in almost total isolation from the musical establishment, he patiently drew together a large group of composers and performers into experimental music through his own compositional activities and through teaching. This group became the nucleus of the orchestra.
The draft constitution of the Scratch Orchestra opens as follows: "Definition: A Scratch Orchestra is a large number of enthusiasts pooling their resources (not primarily material resources) and assembling for action (music-making, performance, edification).
"Note: The word music and its derivatives are here not understood to refer exclusively to sound and related phenomena (hearing, etc). What they do refer to is flexible and depends entirely on the members of the Scratch Orchestra.
"The Scratch Orchestra intends to function in the public sphere, and this function will be expressed in the form of—for lack of a better word—concerts."
This lively book on the repertory the orchestra created is as much graphic and visual as it is verbal and about aural events and happenings. After all, scratch music itself is meant to be perceived by the eye and all the senses—not just by ear—so the notation used in preparing the scores for performance might be graphic, collage, verbal, or musical. The scores in Scratch Music are composed of written words, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams, musical flow charts, conventional musical notation, whimsical drawings, playing cards, crossword puzzles, and other devices. Contemporary musicians, artists, and critics have long recognized both Cardew's music and this text as hugely influential and significant. Scratch Music demonstrates the extraordinary richness of this particular compositional matrix, giving the reader some idea of what it is like to put on a scratch music event.
Contents: Introduction; Scratch Music—Early Outlines and Later Notes; Scratch Music; Key to Scratch Music; Scratch Music Catalogue; 1001 Activities; Appendix: Four Compositions (David Ahern, Greg Bright, Michael Chant, Roger Frampton).
Cornelius Cardew (1936 – 1981) was an English experimental music composer. A student at the recently established the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, Cardew served as an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1958 to 1960. Cardew was particularly prominent in introducing the works of American experimental composers such as Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Cage to an English audience during the early to mid sixties and came to have a considerable impact on the development of English music from the late sixties onwards. In 1966, Cardew joined the free improvisation group AMM as cellist and pianist, alongside Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe, and one of his first students at the Royal Academy Christopher Hobbs. Performing with the group allowed Cardew to explore music in a completely democratic environment, freely improvising without recourse to scores. Cardew's most important scores from his experimental period are Treatise (1963–67), a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation, and The Great Learning, a work in seven parts or "Paragraphs," based on translations of Confucius by Ezra Pound. The Great Learning instigated the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. During those years, he took a course in graphic design and he made his living as a graphic designer at Aldus Books in London. While teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College in 1968, Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed the Scratch Orchestra, a large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. He later rejected experimental music, his creative output from the demise of the Scratch Orchestra until his death reflected his political commitment as a member of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) in the 1970s, and in 1979 as co-founder and member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist).
Very Good copy with some tanning and general wear.
1999, English
Softcover, 186 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cityful Press / Seattle
$200.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of "Think of The Self Speaking : Harry Smith — Selected Interviews", published in 1998 by Cityful Press and long out-of-print. In this incredible collection you will find the flavour and texture of experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s conversation, his rambling, obscure, luminous, cantankerous genius. This collection of interviews spans Harry Smith's long and influential life in American arts and letters. They cover a quarter-century, touching on the full range of Smith's activity as a groundbreaking experimental filmmaker, obsessive collector, folk music anthologist, visionary painter, student of Native American lore, anthropologist, cosmographer, alchemist, hermetic scholar, occultist, autodidact, classic American eccentric, and all-around explorer of the possibilities of human consciousness and creativity. Jordan Belson writes, "THINK OF THE SELF SPEAKING is the next best thing to being with Harry himself-perhaps better, certainly safer. The interviews are remarkably similar to his collage films. A brilliant mind unhinged." Includes an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
Very Good copy with only light shelf wear.
2022, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$36.00 - Out of stock
A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.
Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.
Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths. This expanded edition includes photos of Smith and many other color images.
1996, English
Softcover, 286 pages, 23.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Inanout Press / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
First, long-out-of-print 1996 edition of the first major in-depth and intimate book to explore the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith’s work and the people who knew him. Published by Inanout Press in New York, this wonderful, heavily illustrated, deeply researched volume includes interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas and many others, extensive collection Smith's catalogues, reproduced artworks and writings, photographs... A unique collage of materials and now very rare in this lovely original edition.
Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York.
Five years after Smith's death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting intimate interviews with the filmmakers, musicians, poets, and artists who knew him best. The result, American Magus — Harry Smith, offers a privileged look not only into Smith's life and artistic practice, but also into his era and the informal economy of influence that operated during that time. It provides invaluable insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic polymaths.
Fine—As New copy of this collectible first edition.
2022, English
Softcover, 102 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
Walther König / Köln
$36.00 - Out of stock
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”
Building on artistic research into the politics of queer spaces and culture some 20 years later, British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings revisit Bersani’s polemic with a response in three acts. Through a kaleidoscopic array of drawings, preparatory sketches and egg tempera paintings, a narrative of everyday (homo)sociality emerges.
Leo Bersani (1931–2022) was an American theorist best known for his books Is the Rectum a Grave?, Homos and Receptive Bodies. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from Harvard in 1952 and eventually joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he became an influential teacher, remaining there for the rest of his career.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 224 pages, 26.3 x 18.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$56.00 - Out of stock
The life, times, and mysteries of Fred Halsted, gay porn's first film auteur, in a new, updated, and expanded edition.
Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn’s first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering “new information for me.” Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted’s star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989. In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted—to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time—and what it looked like when it collapsed.
The revised and expanded edition of Halsted Plays Himself includes material that came to light since the book’s first publication, including details about the restoration of Halsted’s films by the Museum of Modern Art, the true identities of several key figures in his life, new testimony from family members, and the rediscovery of his feature film Truck It (1973), previously considered lost.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 616 pages, 23.6 x 16.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$62.00 - In stock -
The writings of one of the greatest film critics of his generation on the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film.
"Serge Daney was the end of criticism as I understood it."—Jean-Luc Godard
One of the greatest film critics of his generation, Serge Daney wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma before becoming a journalist for the daily newspaper Libération. The writings collected in this volume reflect Daney’s evolving interests, from the auteur approach of the French New Wave to a more structural examination of film, psychoanalysis, and popular culture.
Openly gay throughout his lifetime, Daney rarely wrote explicitly about homosexuality but his writings reflect a queer sensibility that would influence future generations. In regular intellectual exchanges with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes, Daney wrote about cinema autobiographically, while lyrically analyzing the transition from modern cinema to postmodern media. A noted polymath, Daney also published books about tennis and Haiti’s notorious Duvalier regime. His criticism is open and challenging, polyvocal and compulsively readable.
"Serge Daney was the key French film critic of his era. His untimely death in 1992 at 48, from AIDS, robbed international cinema of its most important critical voice. Despite his achievements as a writer and editor, little of Daney's work has been published in English. The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962–1981 covers Daney's years as a contributor and editor at the magazine that launched the French New Wave. It is about time English-language readers had access to the full range of Daney's thought and his unparalleled work on cinema. His prose, with its keen insights into individual films and the cinema as concept and practice, is original and transformative, a must-read for serious cinephiles and anyone else who believes in the ongoing tale of cinema."—A. S. Hamrah
"Thirty years after his death, Daney's revenant presence offers a most welcome disquietude."—Nick Pinkerton
Serge Daney became the editor of Cahiers du Cinema in 1974. In 1981, he left Cahiers and wrote about visual culture for Libération, turning his attention to television and coverage of the Gulf War. He collaborated with Claire Denis on a documentary film, Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990). He died of AIDS-related causes in 1992.
A. S. Hamrah is a writer living in Brooklyn. He contributed a column on film to n+1 from 2008 to 2019, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Harper's, Bookforum, Cineaste, and other publications. Heis the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018.
1986, English
Softcover, 253 pages, 13.8 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
minnes
$65.00 - In stock -
Reprint of the 1986 edition, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
A revolutionary work in philosophy and a book about cinema that identifies three principal types of image-movement using examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers including Griffith, Eisenstein, Cassavetes, and Altman.
The appearance of Cinema 1 is an exciting event for film study and one that well deserves serious attention and commentary.—Film Quarterly
1986, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 13.8 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$65.00 - In stock -
Reprint of the 1986 edition, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
Brings to completion Deleuze’s work on the implications of the cinematographic image. In Cinema 2, Deleuze explains why, since World War II, time has come to dominate film. Among the filmmakers discussed are Rossellini, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Pasolini, and many others.
2022, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 10.8 × 17.6 cm
Edition of 400,
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
Australian artist David Egan's (b. 1989) exploration of Colour Handling — Colour as Embodied Substance in Jutta Koether's Red Paintings; Colour as Portal in Rosie Isaac's Green Mirror; Colour as Time Machine in Tony Conrad's Yellow Movies; Colour as Dissemblance for Pain in Derek Jarman's Blue; Colour as Medium in Etel Adnan's Worldly Paintings.
Originally written as part of a practice based PhD in Fine Art, completed at Monash University Art, Design & Architecture in 2022, this popular paperback book edition has been edited by Helen Hughes and Amy Stuart, with an introduction by Tessa Laird, designed by Zenobia Ahmed, and published by Discipline in an edition of 400 copies. Features accompanying full-colour plates section.
2022, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 256 pages, 10.9 x 180 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$30.00 - Out of stock
Newly commissioned writing and artwork on the themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, dissolution and extinction, and exile.
What happens between the knots? is the third book in the annual A Series of Open Questions published by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. Each book in the series includes newly commissioned writing as well a selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long research seasons dedicated to single artists. Each book takes the work of a single artist as its point of departure and spirals outward from there to create an expansive and carefully edited ecosystem of ideas and voices.
This third issue is informed by themes found in the work of Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.
Contributors
Gloria Anzaldua, Elvira Espejo Ajca, Erika Balsom, María Berrios, Marisol de la Cadena, Lynne Cooke, Miho Dohi, Ricki Dwyer, Silvia Federici, Tonya Foster, Phillip Greenlief, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Brian Karl, Dionne Lee, Zoe Leonard, Rosemary Mayer, Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira, Denise Newman, Thao Nguyen Phan, Frances Richard, Dylan Robinson, Abel Rodriguez, Oscar Santillan, Alessandra Troncone, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Ignacio Valero, Jacopo Cathrine Veikos, Cecilia Vicuña, Diego Villalobos, Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, Carla Zaccagnini
2022, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
$48.00 - In stock -
Selected texts that survey the full range of Kara Walker's artistic practice, emphasizing the work itself rather than the debates and controversies around it.
Kara Walker's work and its borrowings from an iconography linked to the fantasized and travestied history of American chattel slavery has been theorized and critiqued in countless texts throughout her career. Exegeses of her work have been shaped by the numerous debates on the very debates it generated. How, then, do we approach a work that has been covered by such "thick theoretical layers"? This collection is unique in emphasizing Walker's work itself rather than the controversies surrounding it. These essays and interviews survey Walker's artistic practice from her early works in the 1990s through her most recent ones, from her famous silhouette projects to her lesser-known drawings and lantern shows.
The texts, by art historians, curators, critics, scholars, and writers engage scrupulously with Walker's pieces as material works of art, putting them in the context of the sociopolitical and cultural environments that shape--but never determine--them. They include an interview of the artist by Thelma Golden of the Studio Museum in Harlem; an essay in the form of a lexicon, cataloguing key elements in Walker's art, by curator Yasmil Raymond; and an essay by volume editor Vanina Géré on Walker's use of historical archives. Finally, novelist Zadie Smith considers Walker's public art as counter-propositions to colonial monuments and as a reflection on colonial history.
Contributors : Lorraine Morales Cox, Vanina Géré, Thelma Golden, Tavia Nyong'o, Yasmil Raymond, Jerry Saltz, Zadie Smith, Anne M. Wagner, Hamza Walker
2022, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
$52.00 - In stock -
The first collection of critical writing on the work of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton.
Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) was one of the most important experimental filmmakers and theorists of his time, and in his navigation of artistic media and discourses, he anticipated the multimedia boundary blurring of today's visual culture. Indeed, his photography continues to be exhibited, and a digital edition of his films was issued by the Criterion Collection. This book offers the first collection of critical writings on Frampton's work. It complements On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matter, published in the MIT Press's Writing Art series, which collected Frampton's own writings.
October was as central to Frampton as he was to it. He was both a frequent contributor--appearing in the first issue in 1976--and a frequent subject of contributions by others. Some of these important and incisive writings on Frampton's work are reprinted here. The essays collected in this volume consider Frampton's photographic practice, which continued even after he turned to film; survey his film work from the 1960s to the late 1970s; and explore Frampton's grounding in poetics and language. Two essays by the late Annette Michelson, one of the twentieth century's most influential writers on experimental film, place Frampton in relation to film and art history.
Contributors : George Derk, Ken Eisenstein, Hollis Frampton, Peter Gidal, Barry Goldensohn, Brian Henderson, Bruce Jenkins, Annette Michelson, Christopher Phillips, Melissa Ragona, Allen S. Weiss, Federico Windhausen, Lisa Zaher, Michael Zryd
2022, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 13.5 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$36.00 - In stock -
Exquisitely crafted essays on medieval criminal slang, ancient Greek prostitution, laughter, anarchy and more from the endlessly influential Marcel Schwob.
"All over the world," wrote Jorge Luis Borges, "there are devotees of the writer Marcel Schwob who constitute little secret societies." Spicilege, Schwob's last book published under his name, constitutes the handbook to these societies--to Schwob's work, to himself as erudite scholar and author, and to the twilight of the era of French Symbolism. Schwob was, as Paul Léautaud described him, a "living library," and the critical biographies gathered in the essays of Spicilege display a few of the volumes in that library: his groundbreaking research on François Villon (work that remains a cornerstone to our knowledge of Villon), his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is the carefully developed ideas in these essays and the eccentric yet thorough scholarship that draws them together that are of particular interest today: the understanding of criminal slang in the Middle Ages; the study of prostitution in ancient Greece; the folklore inspired by a Flaubert story; a complex critique of individuality that effectively laid the groundwork for Jarry's "pataphysics"; as well as ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy.
Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) was a scholar of startling breadth, an incomparable storyteller and a secret influence on generations of writers, from Apollinaire and Borges to Roberto Bolaño and J. Rodolfo Wilcock.
Translated by Alex Andriesse.