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.
1972, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Futurism volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1971 and written by Jane Rye, this heavily illustrated overview spans Futurism's beginnings as an aggressively modern style in art and literature in the 1920 and 1930s, its activities and developments via central protagonists such as Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who coined the term, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, etc.
Includes chapters on all major Futurist disciplines : Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Literature, Theatre, plus chapters on Futurism and politics, Futurism within Italy and Futurism outside Italy, a book list, index, and more.
Good copy.
1970, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Dada volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1970 and written by Kenneth Coutts-Smith, this heavily illustrated overview spans Dada's activities via central locations and protagonists such as Picabia, Janco, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Grosz, Man Ray, Arp, etc.
Chapters : "Zürich - the beginning", "Anti-art and the irrational", "The roots of Dada", "New York - Duchamp and philosophical irony", "Berlin - political commitment", "Cologne - Ernst and the hallucinatory vision", "Hanover - Schwitters, freedom through lyricism", "Paris - last fling and obsequies", "Dada is dead-long live Dada", "Book list", "Index".
1994, Softcover
Softcover, 644 pages, 15.2 x 22.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harvest Books / New York
$45.00 - In stock -
To some the Marquis de Sade was a monster, to others an apostle of sexual freedom and a literary genius. Lever reconstructs the life of the "divine marquis" in all its splendor and perversity. Named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Includes a full index of Sade's works. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Very good copy of the first 1994 edition of this acclaimed Sade biography.
1994, English
Softcover, 704 pages, 13.3 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$35.00 - In stock -
The works of Friedrich Nietzsche have fascinated readers around the world ever since the publication of his first book more than a hundred years ago. As Walter Kaufmann, one of the world's leading authorities on Nietzsche, notes in his introduction, "Few writers in any age were so full of ideas," and few writers have been so consistently misinterpreted.
The Portable Nietzsche includes Kaufmann's definitive translations of the complete and unabridged texts of Nietzsche's four major works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In addition, Kaufmann brings together selections from his other books, notes, and letters, to give a full picture of Nietzsche's development, versatility, and inexhaustibility.
"In this volume, one may very conveniently have a rich review of one of the most sensitive, passionate, and misunderstood writers in Western, or any, literature." — Newsweek
1965, English
Softcover, 438 pages, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The Citadel Press / New York
$70.00 - In stock -
First 1965 English edition of this splendid introduction to the philosophy of existentialism.
In Essays in Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the leading French exponent of existential philosophy, wrote a book that open many doors to the mind. Sartre challenged his readers to think beyond the meaning of their everyday thoughts and beliefs. His essays on nothingness, on the emotions, and on the image—including “The Problem of Nothingness,” “The Role of the Image in Mental Life,” and “Essays in Aesthetics”—contain the essentials of his metaphysical speculations.
An introductory essay by Professor Jean Wahl clarifies the origins of Sartre’s humanistic, religious, and aesthetic ideas.
Essays in Existentialism challanges and encourages us to alter how we think about the choices that we make: to live “authentically” we must be concious of our freedom to choose and concerned with the effect our choice will have on all others. It is an essential text for any student of philosophy.
Good copy of first 1965 English Citadel Press edition.
1974, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$15.00 - In stock -
English 1974 Penguin edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's "The Age of Reason", translated by Eric Sutton.
The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom. Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".
Good copy.
1977, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Panther / London
$18.00 - Out of stock
English 1977 Panther edition of Sartre's collection of short stories, published originally in 1939. "This is Sartre's masterly portrait of life seen from new and revealing angles, in which the human soul is stripped of all its civilized veneer, and layers of experience are peeled back with ferocious skill - to reveal the depths of the private oppressions, sensualities and neuroses of our time and the overpowering evil to which modern man can descend." Collects the stories Intimacy, The Room, Erostratus, The Childhood of a Leader, and The Wall, considered one of the author's greatest existentialist works of fiction.
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honours and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".
Very Good copy. 1977 print of this edition.
2022, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$58.00 - In stock -
Consulting an extensive archive of early modern literature, Joy of the Worm asserts that voluntary death in literature is not always a matter of tragedy.
In this study, Drew Daniel identifies a surprisingly common aesthetic attitude that he calls "joy of the worm," after Cleopatra's embrace of the deadly asp in Shakespeare's play-a pattern where voluntary death is imagined as an occasion for humor, mirth, ecstatic pleasure, even joy and celebration.
Daniel draws both a historical and a conceptual distinction between "self-killing" and "suicide." Standard intellectual histories of suicide in the early modern period have understandably emphasized attitudes of abhorrence, scorn, and severity toward voluntary death. Daniel reads an archive of literary scenes and passages, dating from 1534 to 1713, that complicate this picture. In their own distinct responses to the surrounding attitude of censure, writers including Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Addison imagine death not as sin or sickness, but instead as a heroic gift, sexual release, elemental return, amorous fusion, or political self-rescue. "Joy of the worm" emerges here as an aesthetic mode that shades into schadenfreude, sadistic cruelty, and deliberate "trolling," but can also underwrite powerful feelings of belonging, devotion, and love.
Drew Daniel is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats, a study of the English "industrial" music pioneers Throbbing Gristle, and The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology of the English Renaissance. He is also one half of the electronic duo Matmos.
"The lucidity of Daniel's razor-sharp prose is surpassed only by the boldness and sensitivity of his thought. Joy of the Worm resists the easy logic of secularization, whereby classical valorization and Christian condemnation of self-killing sequentially give way to a modern understanding of suicide as a cry for help. Instead, Daniel attunes us to materialist understandings and aesthetic representations of self-destruction in which cruelty and tenderness, sorrow and mirth, ugliness and beauty mingle conceptually and tonally. Daniel's meticulous and humane readings attune us to a complex affective and social landscape surrounding suicide." — Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania
"What happens if we take seriously the failed seriousness of literary scenes of self-killing? 'Joy within death' is the ambit of Daniel's revelatory book, which gathers instances on both sides of Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643)-the work that debuted the word 'suicide'-to show this 'contrary aesthetic tendency' accreting generic force. By reckoning with the levity that animates the choice not to bear what must be borne, Joy of the Worm offers a brilliant and necessary meditation on the resources early modernity furnishes for finding pleasure in an age of destruction and setting down the burden of false hope." — Ellen MacKay, University of Chicago
"Joy of the Worm is a brilliant, deeply thoughtful, conceptually agile, ethically serious, and surprisingly funny work. Before the emergence of suicide as the pathologized act we currently understand it to be, self-killing enabled a wider set of affective and aesthetic responses. Alert to the difficulty of this topic, Daniel moves deftly back and forth between our twenty-first-century present and the early modern past so that we can understand our own assumptions for what they are: historically contingent ways of framing and perhaps diminishing a fundamental human possibility." — Timothy M. Harrison, author of 'Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England'
1982, English
Hardcover (dust jacket), 280 pages, 27 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$75.00 - In stock -
When The History of Photography by Hemut and Alison Gernsheim was first published in 1955, it immediately established itself as the standard work on the subject, described by the Financial Times as 'the most important singe historical work in the field.' The first part of this classic book was revised by Professor Gernsheim and published here as The Origins of Photography (1982). Now, in The Rise of Photography, he brings the revision of his magnum opus up to 1880.
First 1982 hardcover edition of this important volume.
Helmut Gernsheim (1913—1995) was a photographer, collector, historian, curator, author and lecturer, and the first historian to be inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame. Gernsheim pioneered many aspects of collecting photographica and writing about photography’s history.
Profusely illustrated with beautiful historic images of photography as an art and technique from its antecedents to 1857, the book contents cover : the prehistory of photography — Heliography — The daguerreotype — Negative/positive processes on paper — Direct positives on paper — Other independent inventors — The daguerreotype in France — The daguerreotype in America — The daguerreotype in Great Britain, 1839-c. 1857 — The daguerreotype in German-speaking countries — The origins of photography in Italy — Stereoscopic daguerreotypes — The calotype and other paper processes in Great Britain, 1841-c. 1857 — The progress of photography on paper in other countries.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket (w. some small chips to edges, light wear). Preserved under mylar wrap.
2021, English
Hardcover, 196 pages, 22.9 x 26.2 cm
Published by
Guggenheim Museum / New York
$99.00 - In stock -
One of the foremost artistic innovators of abstraction in the 20th century, Vasily Kandinsky sought to liberate painting from its ties to the natural world and promote the spiritual in art. This richly illustrated publication looks at Kandinsky anew, through a critical lens, reframing our understanding of this vital figure of European modernism, who was also a prolific aesthetic theorist and writer.
A series of thematic essays considers his engagement with avant-garde artistic communities including the Bauhaus, his relationship to improvisation and music, his travels in Europe and Russia, and the influences behind his self-declared anarchist mode of abstraction, among other topics. Tracing Kandinsky’s life and work through his years in Moscow, several cities in Germany, and Paris, the texts offer striking new insights into an artist whose creative production and style were intimately tied to a sense of place—and displacement—and evolved amid the political and social upheavals catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II.
Kandinsky’s history is closely linked to that of the Guggenheim Museum. Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting the artist’s work in 1929; a year later, they met at the Bauhaus, in Dessau. This book features more than half of the museum’s deep holdings of works by Kandinsky, presenting the full arc of his artistic development and career. Included are paintings in oil and oil with sand, reverse-glass paintings, as well as woodcuts, watercolors and drawings on paper. An illustrated chronicle of Kandinsky’s life and career, including selected exhibitions and publications, rounds out the volume.
Edited with text by Tracey Bashkoff, Megan Fontanella. Text by Mark Antliff, Patricia Leighten, George E. Lewis.
2022, English
Hardcover, 350 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$65.00 - Out of stock
Long unavailable and highly sought after, Ringbom's classic 1970 volume launched the study of esotericism's influence on abstract art.
For many years, relatively few people knew of spiritualism's impact on the birth of abstract art. But when the Finnish art historian Sixten Ringbom's book The Sounding Cosmos was published in 1970, the writing of history changed forever. Through his research on Wassily Kandinsky, one of the pivotal figures in modern art, Ringbom showed how Theosophy and esoteric teachings were absolutely essential to the development of nonfigurative painting.
This discovery generated great debate at the time, and the book was both celebrated and controversial. Although the original publication is extremely rare and sought after, to this day The Sounding Cosmos is a classic of art history that continues to be discussed--especially in recent years, as the presence of esotericism in modernist art from Hilma af Klint to Mondrian and beyond has been revisited.
The Sounding Cosmos is now being reissued for the first time in this elegant new edition. The richly illustrated original text has been supplemented with a new foreword by Daniel Birnbaum and Julia Voss.
Sixten Ringbom (1935-92) was an influential Finnish art historian. In 1965 he completed a PhD under the great art historian Ernst Gombrich. Ringbom succeeded his father as professor of art history at Åbo Akademi University in 1970, and became the first art historian to explore in depth the connections between early abstract art and occultism. He published prolifically until his death in 1992.
1980/1986, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
LACMA / Los Angeles
$45.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published to accompany an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1980-1981. Edited by Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman, this groundbreaking, richly illustrated (465 items) book documents "the most comprehensive survey of 1910—1930 Russian avant-garde art ever shown in this country"—Portfolio. Covering painting, sculpture, prints, drawing, books, photographs, costumes and examples of industrial, architectural, and theatrical design, with a special focus on Suprematism and Constructivism, this generous volume contains 19 authoritive and enlightening essays, excellent illustrated reference profiles on each artists, biographies, bibliographies, and a detailed chronology of the period. An essential art history reference, containing the works of Natan Altman, Yurii Annenkov, David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, Marc Chagall, Iiia Chashnik, Vasilii Ermlov, Vera Ermolaeva, Alexandra Exter, Pavel Filanov, Naum Gabo, Natalia Goncharova, Vasilii Kamensky, Vasilii Kandinsky, Ivan Kliun, Gustav Klucis, Petr Konchalovsky, Ivan Kudriashev, Mikhail Larionov, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Mansurov, Mikhail Matiushin, Konstantin Medunetsky, Petr Miturich, Alexei Morgunov, Vera Nikolskaia, Liubov Popova, Ivan Puni, Alexandr Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Georgii Stenberg, Vladimir Stenberg, Varvara Stepanova, Nikolia Suetin, Vladimir Tatlin, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Alexandr Vesnin, K.A. Vialov, Georgii Yakulov.
Good copy, with some general cover wear.
2020, English
Softcover, 126 pages, 14 x 22.2 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$40.00 - Out of stock
The American composer and writer John Cage, born 1912, and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, born 1928, have emerged as the leading figures of the bourgeois musical avant-garde. They are ripe for criticism. The grounds for launching an attack against them are twofold: first to isolate them from their respective schools and thus release a number of younger composers from their domination and encourage these to turn their attention to the problems of serving the working people, and second, to puncture the illusion that the bourgeoisie is still capable of producing “geniuses.” —Cornelius Cardew
Originally published in 1974, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is a collection of essays by the English composer Cornelius Cardew that provides a Marxist critique of two of the more revered avant-garde composers of the post-war era: Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage.
A former assistant to Stockhausen and a champion of Cage in England, Cardew provides a cutting rebuke of the composers’ works and ideological positions, which he saw as reinforcing an imperialist order rather than spotlighting and serving the struggles of the working class. The author also provides constructive criticism of his contemporaries Christian Wolff and Frederic Rzewski for utilizing politically progressive content, yet failing to work in a musical form that would appeal to the proletariat. Cardew’s music does not escape his own scrutiny: the book contains critiques and repudiations of his canonical compositions from the 1960s and early 1970s, Treatise and The Great Learning. After abandoning the avant-garde, Cardew devoted his work to the people’s struggle, creating music in service of his radical politics until his mysterious death in 1981.
Edition of 2500.
1981, English
Hardcover (library bound), 350 pages, 28 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schirmer Books / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
Library hardbound copy of the rare Scores: An Anthology of New Music, edited by Roger Johnson and published in 1981. Wonderful, heavy 350 page collection of New Music scores from a wide cross-section of the most innovative "avant-garde" or "experimental" artists of the time, spanning various categories, schools and movements. Includes the work of Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, Harold Budd, Carole Weber, Philip Corner, Meredith Monk, Charlemagne Palestine, Michael Nyman, Joan La Barbara, Otto Luening, James Tenney, Dick Higgins, Marion Brown, Jana Haimsohn, Jon Gibson, Trevor Wishart, Alison Knowles, Daniel Lentz, Gordon Mumma, Laurie Anderson, Terry Riley, and many others. Expansive chapters of scores throughout the anthology include: "Exercises, Rituals, and Meditations"; "Music For Voices"; "Percussion Music"; "Piano Music"; Music for Instruments"; "Electronic Music"; "Music for Mixed Ensembles"; "Music/Theater/Dance Pieces"; accompanied by composer biographies, a directory of publishers, distributors and agents for New Music, Bibliography, and Index.
Nicely preserved library hardbound copy of this usually very fragile softcover book. Light associated library markings not effecting content pages, a generally very tight, clean copy.
2021, English
Hardcover, 190 pages, 20 x 27.5 cm
Published by
Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne
$65.00 - Out of stock
A chronicle of the genesis and creation of Memoria, the new film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
After visiting Colombia in 2017, Apichatpong chose the country as the location for his first feature shot outside of his native Thailand. In the following two years, he returned for several visits and travelled extensively, listening to the stories of the people he met along the way.
The book Memoria gathers the memories he collected, in the form of photographs, a personal diary and sketchbook, research notes, treatment excerpts, and email correspondence. These are placed alongside exclusive materials from the film’s production: set photographs, a diary of the shoot, annotated pages from the shooting script, storyboard panels, contributions from the cast and crew, and more.
Printed in a beautiful art book edition, the result is an extraordinary immersion into the creative processes and work methods of one of contemporary cinema’s true visionaries.
2021, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne
$21.00 - In stock -
Part of the Decadent Editions series.
Few actors of her generation are as eclectic, thrilling and fearless as Laura Dern. In this seductive study, Melissa Anderson discusses Dern’s dazzling body of work, focusing on her authorial stamp on Inland Empire – a movie in which her phenomenal performance shatters every scene – and her enduring and revelatory collaborations with director David Lynch. A whirling, digressive journey through time and place, cinema and storytelling.
‘Melissa Anderson’s wonderful, insightful writing changes not only how we see cinema, but feminism and politics in general. Her profound examination of actor Laura Dern’s astonishing presence in David Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of that waking dream also known as movies. What a marvellous book!’—Hilton Als
‘A whirling, digressive journey through time and place, cinema and storytelling, Anderson’s slim yet mighty volume is a transcendent work of queer, feminist film criticism, saturated in deep scholarship, affection and respect for Lynch and their shared muse, Laura Dern.’—Jenni Olson
‘Melissa Anderson is one of my favourite film critics of all time. In her bravura and compassionate account of Lynch’s (and Laura Dern’s) Inland Empire, Anderson gives a masterclass in how to elucidate star magic.’—Wayne Koestenbaum
About the film
When a once-feted Hollywood actress is cast in a movie rumoured to be cursed, she tumbles into a dark L.A. odyssey. Reality splinters and identities multiply in Lynch’s final film, a phantasmagoric epic electrified by Laura Dern’s lead performance.
About the author
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns. From 2015 to 2017, she was the senior film critic for the Village Voice. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Bookforum.
2022, English
Softcover, 216 Pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne
$21.00 - In stock -
In the fourth title of our Decadent Editions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film.
‘With Hong Sangsoo less is more. Less time to shoot, fewer explanations, fewer people on set – more inspiration, more cinema. Working with him (twice) counts among my most rewarding experiences as an actress. Every day was a miracle. Camera movements, frames, dialogues, costumes – Dennis Lim’s brilliant book shows us that, with Hong, it is about getting to what’s essential. Poetry, humour, emotion.’ Isabelle Huppert
‘To discuss the entirety of Hong Sangsoo’s oeuvre, which spans some thirty titles, Dennis Lim decided to focus on one. Lim loves and knows Hong’s work thoroughly, and the film he chose is the crystal in which all the others are reflected. Here is the best gateway into the Hong multiverse.’ Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
‘Dennis Lim deconstructs one by one the usual tropes assigned to Hong’s mise en scène and illuminates other paths to think anew about a filmmaker who stays in constant and elusive movement. Tale of Cinema is both insightful and humorous, a pleasure to read, and a wicked invitation to keep on deciphering Hong Sangsoo’s irreconcilable geometries of love and friendship.’ Matías Piñeiro
About the film
Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around?
About the author
Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival and was Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center from 2013 to 2022. His previous book David Lynch: The Man From Another Place (2015) has been translated into three languages.
2021, English
Softcover, 168 Pages, 10.5 x 15 cm
Published by
Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne
$21.00 - Out of stock
Part of the Decadent Editions series.
James Benning’s landscape film TEN SKIES (2004) becomes an ecstatic launchpad to survey artistic representations of the sky. Looking up, Balsom’s lyrical and idiosyncratic text drifts through the skyscape of historical and contemporary filmmaking, approaching the sky as an archive that offers tantalising clues to the shifting relations between nature and people, clouds and earth.
‘James Benning’s movies show me how to look, and confirm the way I want to see. Erika Balsom, clearly a kindred spirit in her regard for these movies, has not just studied TEN SKIES, unfolding hidden intricacies of meaning, but apprehends it on instinct, too. The results are precise and also wise.’—Rachel Kushner
‘Part of the epic achievement of Benning’s TEN SKIES is to confound expectations of minimalism with a mesmerising study of time, light, movement and moisture that traces the shifting relations between clouds and earth, nature and people, teaching us how to look and listen in the process. Erika Balsom’s study – ‘a punch of clean rigour’, like the film she describes – recognises and extends those lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of (and access to) depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become.’—Jonathan Rosenbaum
‘Erika Balsom brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through the history of experimental cinema, to philosophical musings and art historical scholarship, and back into Benning’s thoughtful imagery. Take this little book, put it in your pocket, and wander the landscape until you find the perfect spot to sit and read, pausing now and then to look at the sky.’—Sharon Lockhart
About the film
Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde.
About the author
Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London. She is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London, a frequent contributor to Artforum, 4Columns and Cinema Scope, and the author of four books, including An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (2018) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017).
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages. 10.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Fireflies Press / Berlin—Melbourne
$21.00 - In stock -
Part of the Decadent Editions series.
Is cinema really dying? As movie houses close and corporations dominate, the art form is at risk of changing beyond recognition. In this wide-ranging and elegiac essay, Nick Pinkerton reflects upon Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a modern classic haunted by the ghosts and portents of a culture in flux.
About the film
In an old Taipei movie theatre, on the eve of a ‘temporary closing’, King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn plays to a dwindling audience. Lonely souls cruise the aisles for companionship while two actors from Hu’s film watch themselves writ large, perhaps for the last time.
About the author
Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s and the Village Voice, among other venues, and he operates the Substack newsletter Employee Picks.
Praise for the book
‘A brilliant concept brilliantly executed, Tsai Ming-liang’s deceptively modest Goodbye, Dragon Inn is among the most resonant films of the still young twenty-first century. Its exegetist Nick Pinkerton ranks among the top film critics who have emerged this side of the millennium. The book is a fortuitous match – engagingly personal, securely erudite, stylish, and very, very smart.’—J. Hoberman
2018, English
Softcover, 452 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Published by
Paper Monument / New York
$44.00 - Out of stock
The Earth Dies Streaming collects the best of A. S. Hamrah’s film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper’s, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful, hilarious, and damning, Hamrah’s aphoristic capsule reviews and lucid career retrospectives of filmmakers and critics have taken up the mantle of serious American film criticism—pioneered by James Agee, Robert Warshow, and Pauline Kael—and carried it into the 21st century. Taken together, these reviews and essays represent some of the best film criticism in the English language. The Earth Dies Streaming showcases a remarkable critical intelligence while offering a cultural history of the cinema of our times.
“Hamrah is committed to his ambivalence, conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good ’ or ‘bad ’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed) . . . A political awareness imbues Hamrah’s criticism without weighing it down. He doesn’t succumb to a leaden moralizing because he pays close attention to the medium he’s writing about, alert to what he sees and hears.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
2022, English
Softcover, 416 pages, 15.3 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello.
This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Classsignposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio's exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians' zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group's experiments with Gestalt theory.
Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.
“The 1970s in Italy were a decade of social conflicts and intense cultural and aesthetic innovation, but only now, thanks to the Galimberti’s book we can have a glimpse of the visual dimension of the movement of Autonomia and of the cultural field that is generally known as “operaismo”.”—Franco "Bifo" Berardi
2022, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
Since Plato, philosophers have dreamed of establishing a rational state ruled through the power of language. In this radical and disturbing account of Soviet philosophy, Boris Groys argues that communism shares that dream and is best understood as an attempt to replace financial with linguistic bonds as the cement uniting society. The transformative power of language, the medium of equality, is the key to any new communist revolution.
Boris Groys is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, and since 2005, the Global Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU. He has published numerous books including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, and The Communist Postscript.
2022, English
Hardcover, 112 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$34.00 - In stock -
Our current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about the things as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the "creative class" over the rest of the population that is predominantly occupied by forms of care - medical care, child care, agriculture, industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, but here again our culture tends to thematize the bodies of desire and to ignore the bodies of care - ill bodies in need of self-care and social care.
But the discussion of care has a long philosophical tradition. The book retraces some episodes of this tradition - beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander Bogdanov through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The central question discussed is: who should be the subject of care? Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the dominating mechanisms of control.
1993, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 15 x 22.6 cm
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
Derek Bailey's Improvisation, originally published in 1980, and here updated and extended with new interviews and photographs, is the first book to deal with the nature of improvisation in all its forms: Indian music, flamenco, baroque, organ music, rock, jazz, contemporary, and "free" music. By drawing on conversations with some of today's seminal improvisers, including John Zorn, Jerry Garcia, Steve Howe, Steve Lacy, Lionel Salter, Earle Brown, Paco Pena, Max Roach, Evan Parker, and Ronnie Scott, Bailey offers a clear-eyed view of the breathtaking spectrum of possibilities inherent in improvisational practice, while underpinning its importance as the basis for all music-making.
Derek Bailey (1930—2005) was an English avant-garde guitarist and an important figure in the free improvisation movement. Bailey abandoned conventional performance techniques found in jazz, exploring atonality, noise, and whatever unusual sounds he could produce with the guitar. Much of his work was released on his own label Incus Records. With other musicians, Bailey was a co-founder in 1975 of Musics magazine, described as "an impromental experivisation arts magazine". In addition to solo work, Bailey collaborated frequently with other musicians and recorded with collectives such as Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Company, which at various times included Han Bennink, Steve Beresford, Anthony Braxton, Buckethead, Eugene Chadbourne, Lol Coxhill, Johnny Dyani, Fred Frith, Tristan Honsinger, Henry Kaiser, Steve Lacy, Keshavan Maslak, Misha Mengelberg, Wadada Leo Smith, and John Zorn.