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.
2009, English / French
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 160 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Published by
JRP Ringier / Zürich
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts / Lausanne
$88.00 - In stock -
The first overview of the variety and scope of the research carried out by Renée Green over the past twenty years.
This reference monograph provides the first overview of the variety and scope of the research carried out by Renée Green over the past twenty years through mediums as varied as film, video, installation, sound-related works, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites, and ephemera.
The essays by Nora Alter, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Quéloz, Gloria Sutton, Elvan Zabunyan, and the interview between Julian Renbentisch and Renée Green not only give an historical overview of the artist's work, but engage with issues central to her practice such as questions of genealogy and memory, archives and their reworkings, movements and displacements, site-specificity and location, positionalities and perceptions. They offer new insight into the artist's specific use of images, sound and text, and her inscription in art history.
Born 1958 in Cleveland, Ohio, artist, writer, and filmmaker Renée Green lives and works in New York and San Francisco. Her work is located both within the legacy of the most ambitious achievements of Conceptual and post-Minimal art, and within a post-colonial critique of culture. It often takes the form of complex, multi-layered archive-like installations that employ a vast array of sources, and point to a variety of issues, always involving the spectator as active participant through multiple points of access.
Edited by Nicole Schweizer.
Texts by Nora Alter, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Renée Green, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Quéloz, Juliane Rebentisch, Gloria Sutton, Elvan Zabunyan.
Published in collaboration with the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne.
2019, English
Softcover, 175 pages, 11.4 x 17.7 cm
Published by
PAJ Publications / US
$44.00 - Out of stock
The fourth volume in PAJ's Performance Ideas series, The Sun on the Tongue unfolds in an expanding universe of philosophical reflections on love, art, war, nature, and human existence. Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned Arab American writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in her literary texts, plays, poems, and art. Her plays At A Certain Hour of the Night, Crime of Honor and Tolerance are featured here, along with essays on Pina Bausch and Paul Klee, and an interview on her life and work. Her texts have been performed or adapted for theatre, opera, and radio in the U.S. and Europe. Robert Wilson invited her to write the French section of his multi-country opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, in 1984.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Klaudia Rucshkowski
2006, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 14 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$79.00 - Out of stock
Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. This collection of essays by art historians and artists from Europe and the Americas (including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Helen Molesworth, Isabelle Graw, Thomas Crow, Helmut Draxler, Alexander Alberro, Sabeth Buchmann, Henrik Oelsen, Edit András) introduces and develops the idea that conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art practice. Some of these contested commonplace assumptions of what art is; others served to buttress those assumptions. The bulk of the volume features newly written and highly innovative essays challenging standard interpretations of the legacy of conceptualism and discussing the influence of conceptualism's varied practices on art since the 1970s. The essays explore topics as diverse as the interrelationships between conceptualism and institutional critique, neoexpressionist painting and conceptualist paradigms, conceptual art's often-ignored complicity with design and commodity culture, the specific forms of identity politics taken up by the reception of conceptual art, and conceptualism's North/South and East/West dynamics. A few texts that continue to be crucial for critical debates within the fields of conceptual and postconceptual art practice, history, and theory have been reprinted in order to convey the vibrant and ongoing discussion on the status of art after conceptual art. Taken together, the essays will inspire an exploration of the relationship between postconceptualist practices and the beginnings of contemporary art.
2008, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$44.00 - Out of stock
As celebrated as it is reviled, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Catherine Breillat's novel Pornocracy viscerally enacts the dramatic confluence of mystery, desire, and shame that lies at the heart of sexuality. In Pornocracy, a beautiful woman wanders through a gay disco and engages a man, confident that he will follow her. Perversely and dispassionately, she offers her body as the ground of a ritualistic game in which, over the course of three evenings, the two will explore the numbing mechanics of sexual brutality. What follows is an exchange between a man and a woman that is both frankly sexual and deeply philosophical. Adapted and directed for film in France by Breillat as Anatomy of Hell (2004), Pornocracy leads the reader through an undulating and atmospheric exploration of the criminal and the erotic, finally climaxing in a place well beyond more familiar moral terrain. Although Breillat's films — most recently Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999) — are well known to international audiences, this publication marks her literary debut in America. It will demonstrate that Breillat's famous films are but one aspect of her strikingly original poetic and philosophical vision.
Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker and writer based in Paris. She is known not only for her films focusing on themes of sexuality, but also for her best-selling novels. Pornocracy is the first of her novels to be published in English.
Translated by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit
Afterword by Peter Sotos
Introduction by Chris Kraus
2021, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 112 pages, 22.23 x 14.61 cm
Published by
Hayward Gallery Publishing / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
The abiding presence of spiritualism in art, from af Klint to Susan Hiller.
Bringing together more than 30 international artists from the late 19th century to the present day, Not without My Ghosts surveys work inspired by spiritualism and its rich cultural history.
With original essays by art historian Susan L. Aberth and curators Simon Grant and Lars Bang Larsen, this publication explores the anti-authoritarian political agendas of 19th-century spiritualism and the movement’s close association to the history of feminism, as well as its continued influence on contemporary practitioners. Spanning diverse artistic approaches, Not without My Ghosts offers a unique insight into the ties that bind spirit and mediumistic art across the centuries.
Artists: William Blake, Cameron, Ann Churchill, Ithell Colquhoun, Louise Despont, Casimiro Domingo, Madame Fondrillon, Chiara Fumai, Madge Gill, Susan Hiller, Barbara Honywood, Georgiana Houghton, Anna Mary Howitt, Victor Hugo, Augustin Lesage, Pia Lindman, Ann Lislegaard, André Masson, Grace Pailthorpe, František Jaroslav Pecka, Olivia Plender, Sigmar Polke, Lea Porsager, Austin Osman Spare, Yves Tanguy, Suzanne Treister with The Museum of Blackhole Spacetime Collective
1970, English
Softcover, 450 pages, 20 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
E P Dutton / New York
$55.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this seminal 1970 work by Gene Youngblood, with an Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller, was the first to consider video as an art form. One of the most prescient books written about our modern age, Expanded Cinema was considered the Declaration of Independence for media arts. As the author writes, "The definition of cinema must be expanded to include videotronics, computer science, and atomic light." The introductory essay by R. Buckminster Fuller established an encompassing 1960s countercultural context for this new explosion of technologies. Heavily illustrated throughout, this classic original edition has been long out of print and is of such importance to this day that it has seen a re-publication in 2020.
Gene Youngblood is a well-known theorist of electronic media arts and a respected scholar in the history and theory of experimental film and video art. He has split his career between teaching and journalism and is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the Media Democracy movement.
R. Buckminster Fuller was an architect, designer, inventor, social theorist, and the author of more than thirty books, including the legendary Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Very Good copy with only light age wear.
2019, English
Hardcover, 256 pages, 19.2 x 24.6 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$100.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) - stage and film actor, director, writer, and visual artist - was a man of rage and genius. Expelled from the Surrealist movement for his refusal to renounce the theatre, he founded the Theater of Cruelty and wrote The Theater and Its Double, one of the key twentieth-century texts on the topic. Artaud spent nine years at the end of his life in asylums, undergoing electroshock treatments. Released to the care of his friends in 1946, he began to draw again. This book presents drawings and portraits from this late resurgence, in colour reproductions. Accompanying the images are texts by by Artaud's longtime friend and editor Paule Thévenin and the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
“We won't be describing any paintings,” Derrida warns the reader. Derrida struggles with Artaud's peculiar language, punctuating his text with agitated footnotes and asides (asking at one point, “How will they translate this?”). Thévenin offers a more straightforward biographical and historical account. (It was on the walls of her apartment that Derrida first saw Artaud's paintings and drawings.) These two texts were previously published by the MIT Press in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud without the artwork that is their subject. This book brings together art and text for the first time in English.
Paule Thévenin (1918–1993) knew Antonin Artaud well and edited many his complete writings for the French publisher Éditions Gallimard.
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), an enormously influential philosopher, theoretician, critic, and deconstructionist, is the author of Of Grammatology, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Aporias, and many other books.
1998, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Paragon House Publishers / US
$45.00 - Out of stock
Hailed by Martin Heidegger as "one of France's best minds," Georges Bataille has become increasingly recognized and respected in the realm of academic and popular intellectual thought. Although Bataille died in 1962, interest in his life and writings have never been as strong as they are today — Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva have all acknowledged their debt to him.
In his book, On Nietzsche, as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille comes as close as he would ever come to formulating his own unique system of philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something of a revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism.
In this volume, Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought where he left off--with God's death. At the heart of this work is Bataille's exploration of how one can have a spiritual life outside religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism. He skillfully weaves together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging outside with arguments against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and praise for the philosopher as a prophet foretelling "the crude German fate."
With an introduction, "Furiously Nietzschean," by Sylvere Lotringer, an Appendix in which Bataille defends himself against Sartre, and an Index, this volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's assertion that Bataille, "broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before."
1989, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$45.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 32
AUTUMN 1989
Edited by Paul Foss
CONTENTS:
David Wills — Deposition: Introduction To "Right Of Inspection" [Droit De Regards]
Marie-Francoise Plissart and Jacques Derrida — Right Of Inspection
David Bennett — Art And Rubbish: Contemporary British Colour Photography
Paul Gilroy — Cruciality And The Frog's Perspective: An Agenda Of Difficulties For The Black Arts Movement In Britain
Art &c.
Allen S. Weiss — Golem In Gotham
Mark S. Roberts — Lyotard And Art "After Auschwitz"
Therese Lichtenstein — Boltanski's "Lessons Of Darkness"
Therese Lichtenstein — Aborigines, Representation, Necrophilia John Von Sturmer
Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
1987, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$45.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 25
JUNE / AUGUST 1987
Edited by Paul Foss
CONTENTS:
Terry Smith — Black Swan in the City ... Detroit, first week of August, 1986
Christina Thompson — A Piece of Savage Mischief
Meaghan Morris — Tooth and Claw: Tales of Survival, and Crocodile Dundee
Merryn Gates — Transparency and Reinvention 70 in Rosslynd Piggott.
Eric Michaels — My Essay on Postmodernism
George Alexander — Get Back, Martin Sharp
Art & Text, one of the landmark contemporary art magazines of the 1980s and 1990s. Founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 1981 by Paul Taylor (1957–92), who soon moved to New York City to make his mark as an art critic, the magazine went on to become one of a handful of international art magazines that succeeded in capturing the turmoil and passing brilliance of that period of postmodernism.
2021, English
Softcover, 56 pages, 10.5 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Shelter Press / France
$24.00 - Out of stock
This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as ‘music’ is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music—this, ultimately, is the ambition of the lines to come.
1996, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Artspace / Sydney
$60.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this now very scarce volume of collected texts from Australian art critic and professor Rex Butler that resulted from five lectures by the author at Artspace Sydney in 1995: 'The 80s in Retrospect', 'Art & Text in the '90s', 'The Critics', 'The Object, Again' and 'On Michael Fried's Literary 'Impressionism'.
Very Good copy with dedicated / inscription from Rex on inside front cover.
2021, English / Dutch
Softcover, 176 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Nai010 Publishers / Rotterdam
$60.00 - Out of stock
Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) is one of the most important avant-garde artists of the 20th century and continues to inspire artists, designers and architects. He is known for his iconic monochromatic paintings with vertical cuts. Lucio Fontana: The Conquest of Space highlights the ideas of Fontana's Concetto spaziale and shows how these spatial notions took shape not only in his slashed canvases, but also in his sculpture, jewellery, and installations. With photography by Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm, and texts by Colin Huizing and Paulo Campiglio, this publication is an indispensable overview of Fontana's innovative spatial views on art.
2019, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 17 x 23 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
$80.00 - Out of stock
The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. Martens can be placed in the tradition of Dutch modernism, in the line of figures such as Piet Zwart, H.N. Werkman, Willem Sandberg. Yet he maintains some distance from the main developments of this time: from both the practices of routinized modernism and of the facile reactions against this. His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the decades of his practice, Martens has been prolific as a designer of books. He has also made contributions in a wide range of design commissions: including stamps, coins, signs on buildings. Also a renowned teacher of graphic design, Karel Martens is co-initiator of the Werkplaats Typografie, a two-year master’s design programme related to ArtEZ, Arnhem, and guest professor at Yale University, New Haven. Intimately connected with this design work has been his practice as an artist. This started with geometric and kinetic constructions, and developed in work with the very material of paper. Over a long period he has been making monoprints. This book looks for new ways to show and discuss the work of a designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterizes the work it presents. Its first edition was published in 1996 on the occasion of the award to Karel Martens of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art. In response to continued demand, the book has been extended to 2019 and appears now in this fourth edition presenting almost sixty years of practice.
2020, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 16 x 24 cm
Published by
écal / Renens
$60.00 - Out of stock
This book analyzes the work of Vico Magistretti in the field of industrial design. Starting in the 1960s, the Milanese architect successfully moved into mass-produced furniture and lamps. Some became museum pieces. Among others, he designed for companies such as Artemide, Cassina, De Padova, Flou, Fritz hansen, Kartell, Schiffini. Magistretti designed over 300 products and furniture pieces, about a fifth of these are still in production. Research in the archives of the Fondazione Vico Magistretti, analysis of specialist magazines and interviews with furniture companies have offered some surprising answers to the question: why does a brand stop manufacturing design classics?
Essays on the use of photography in the marketing of design products and on media coverage of furniture from the 1960s to the 2000s accompany a thorough analysis of twelve iconic Magistretti pieces, portrayed in the opening visual essay. Includes a biography, bibliography and illustrated chronological list of Magistretti designs, making this book a valuable reference for any fan of modern Italian design.
Edited by Anniina Koivu, with contributions and interviews by Maddalena Dalla Mura, Davide Fornari, Anniina Koivu, Carolien Niebling, Rosanna Pavoni, Francesco Zanot.
The "Visual Archives" series presents the results of research projects conducted at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne. It focuses on unpublished material on designers, authors and companies. Together with visual material from the archives, the documents are contextualized and accompanied by critical essays.
2021, English
Softcover, 432 pages, 11 x 18 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$58.00 - Out of stock
In this book, Dutch graphic designer Ruben Pater uses clear language and visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. Capitalism could not exist without the myriad banknotes, documents, infographics, interfaces, branding, and advertisements created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social and speculative design are appropriated to serve economic growth. Design, it seems, is locked in a cycle of exploitation and extraction, furthering global inequality and environmental collapse. Featured are six radical design cooperatives that resist capitalist thinking, hoping to inspire a more socially aware practice.
2019, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 26 cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
Brand-New-Life / Zürich
$60.00 - Out of stock
For the first time, this publication brings together the Mosaic works by the British artist Stephen Willats, which were created in Great Britain and Finland in the 1990s. In these works, Willats uses the medium of the book to enter into an exchange with people and to create a space in neighborhoods, museums, and bookstores where social bonds can be established. It is a collaborative process through which Willats redefines the web of relationships between artist, artwork, audience and society; a process of instituting in which the artwork becomes its own institution.
With contributions by Jamie Allen, Bernhard Garnicnig, Elsa Himmer, Lucie Kolb and Stephen Willats.
Edition of 500 copies.
1985, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 21 x 18.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Pluto Press / London-Sydney
$150.00 - Out of stock
The Rap Attack : African Jive to New York Hip Hop, first published in Britain in 1984, is David Toop's seminal, super early and important account on the evolution of rap music and hip hop culture, exploring its roots and various manifestations, from the music's African heritage to the electro-funk revolution. Toop's ever intelligent and in depth overview of the culture goes a lot further than introducing the seminal artists, it studies the socio-political and diverse musical landscape that shaped one of the most innovative movements in sound. The clubs (Roxy, Danceteria, Funhouse, etc.), the radio stations, the record stores, the video arcades, Beat Bop, Jive, Doo Wop, it's all here. Full of references, quotes, bibliography, discography, lots of background information on countless pioneering artists, the mcs, djs, breakdancers, producers, Afrika Bambaata, Cold Crush Brothers, Jazzy Jay, Kool Herc, The Sequence, Sylvia Robinson, Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, Double Trouble..., complimented with superb black and white photographs throughout by Patricia Bates. There's even a vocabulary section compiled by Monica Lynch from Tommy Boy Records. A pioneering book on the rise of hip-hop culture, and very scarce in the original British edition with vivid Dennis Morris cover. This is the second print of this edition (1985).
Good copy with only light cover wear/ageing. Very Good interior throughout.
2015, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Bloomsbury Academic / London
$59.00 - Out of stock
In four decades of abstract art practice, Lynda Benglis has not merely challenged the status quo. She has tied it in knots, melted it down and poured it across the floor, cast it in glass, clay and bronze. Daring and sometimes outrageous, her intense and provocative practice has produced some of the most iconic pieces of art from the late twentieth century. Richmond gives serious critical attention to work often dismissed as trivial and rootless, recovering the themes that link the different phases of the artist's quest to capture the 'frozen gesture'. Whether challenging popular tastes and definitions of art with her 1970s abstract knotwork or mocking puritanical aesthetics of gender with her colourful latex pourings and their allusions to corporeal topographies, Benglis never failed to provoke. Her sculptures commemorate and celebrate the processes of creation themselves, combining architectonic abstraction and feminized sensuality in a haunting, visceral theme of the strangeness of the body that runs through all her experiments in glass, video, metals, ceramics, gold leaf, paper and plastics.
Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process examines in depth the work and critical neglect of an artist who, perhaps more than any of her contemporaries, changed the face of American art in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues to fetishise, provoke and demand your attention.
2021, English / German
Softcover, 224 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
This September issue of Texte zur Kunst examines envy as the operating system of an art world based largely on networking, competition, and interdependencies. Envy, as understood here, develops when individuals orient and compare themselves to others. One could characterize the art world as a prototype for a competition-driven, envy-generating society; achievement in art is difficult to measure and counts less than success. Issue #123 takes a closer look at the productive as well as destructive potentials of envy in the field of art and examines the extent to which the diagnosis of envy plays into the competitive nature of work and life today. The specific social effects of contemporary forms of online communication are discussed here, as well as the political economy of envy with particular regard to art.
2021, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$37.00 - Out of stock
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.
So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.—Dodie Bellamy, “Hoarding as Ecriture”
This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.
Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, the essay and poetry. In 2018–19 she was the subject of On Our Mind, a yearlong series of public events, commissioned essays and reading group meetings organized by CCA Wattis ICA. With Kevin Killian, she coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997. A compendium of essays on Bellamy's work, Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, was published in 2020 by Wattis ICA/Semiotext(e).
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 11.4 x 17.8 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - Out of stock
How and when American-style slavery created the racial system, not just in the United States but internationally.
We see the hatred we elicit, Islamophobia, Negrophobia; we see police numbers increase, repression spread, mechanisms of control and surveillance strengthened, structures of corruption and cronyism flourish, and bodies of institutionalization, integration, and supervision develop, but we do not see the cause, or one of the causes, which is none other than the threat that we now pose to the white order.
— from The Colonial Counter-Revolution
Just as Capital produced classes and patriarchy produced genders, colonialism produced race. In The Colonial Counter-Revolution, Sadri Khiari outlines how and when American-style slavery created the racial system, not just in the United States but internationally, and why the development of relationships of equality within the white community favored the crystallization of specifically racial social relations. More than just a response to the dialogue, debate, and trauma of immigration today, this book looks beyond the right/left dichotomy of the issue in politics to the more fundamental political existence of immigrants and Blacks, who must exist politically if they are to exist whatsoever. Race is not biological: race is political. And it is the manifestation of the colonial counter-revolution. In France, that counter-revolution started with General de Gaulle, and continues today, where the anti-colonialist fight of Palestinian Arabs and the anti-racist fight of Arabs and blacks in France have the same adversary: white Western domination.
2017, English / French
Softcover, 456 pages, 15 x 21.5 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$85.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
This book offers a first report on the activities of the Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise (CATPC), an association based in Lusanga, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. CATPC brings together a unique gathering of individuals—along with its members and partner institutions that are engaged in dialogue with it—and attempts to rethink postcolonial power relations within the global art world. Initiated in 2014 by Renzo Martens, an Amsterdam-based artist whose radical and controversial practice feeds into many current debates, and René Ngongo, a Kinshasa-based biologist and environmental activist, this cooperative continues to develop independently and to redefine the relations between art, agriculture, industry, and value creation.
The publication CATPC—Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise/Congolese Plantation Workers Art League is part of an artistic research project initiated by Renzo Martens, affiliated as a researcher at KASK/School of Arts of University College Ghent, from 2012 to 2016.
Edited by Eva Barois De Caevel and Els Roelandt. Texts by Ariella Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Eléonore Hellio, Ruba Katrib, Alexander Koch, J. A. Koster, Renzo Martens, René Ngongo, Els Roelandt, Charles Sikitele Gize, Charles Tumba, Françoise Vergès
Photos by Léonard Pongo
Design by Jurgen Maelfeyt, Jonas Temmerman, 6'56''
2016, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$69.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
The role of photo agencies remains a blind spot in the history of photography. Emerging in the beginning of the 20th century to “satisfy the picture-hunger of modern man” (Tschichold), they transformed photography into a commodity. As catalysts for the picture market and through the creation of systematic collections, these companies shaped our western visual culture. The 1920s, 1930s and 1990s, in particular, ushered a paradigm shift in the economy of the medium, marked by major technological developments and the rise of new markets. Taking the example of the Bettmann Archive and Corbis – one of the world’s largest photo agencies, founded by Bill Gates – the book Banking on Images inquires into the criteria used in selecting these images, the way in which the value of a commercial “image bank” is determined, and the concept of photography that lies behind it.