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.
1968, English
Softcover, 124 pages, 20 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Lorrimer / London
$40.00 - In stock -
First edition of the Luis Buñuel volume of Classic Film Scripts, dedicated entirely to his masterpieces "Un chien andalou" and "l'Age d'or" (both co-scripted by Salvador Dali). Illustrated throughout with stills from these iconic surrealist films, accompanied by their full scripts translated from French by Marianne Alexandre. Surrealist cinema, as epitomised by Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or, was a knife through the very heart of the establishment - a scorpionic, scatological black joke galvanised by the irrational, the uncanny and the spectre of de Sade.
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in Spain, Mexico and France. When Luis Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in the New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later". His first picture made in the silent era was called "the most famous short film ever made" by critic Roger Ebert, and his last film made 48 years later won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. His work spans two continents, three languages, and an array of genres, including experimental film, documentary, melodrama, satire, musical, erotica, comedy, romance, costume dramas, fantasy, crime film, adventure, and western. Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films".
2014, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$58.00 - Out of stock
Maya Deren (1917–1961) was a Russian-born American filmmaker, theorist, poet, and photographer working at the forefront of the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Influenced by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp, she is best known for her seminal film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a dream-like experiment with time and symbol, looped narrative and provocative imagery, setting the stage for the twentieth-century's groundbreaking aesthetic movements and films.
Maya Deren: Incomplete Control assesses both the filmmaker's completed work and her numerous unfinished projects, arguing Deren's overarching aesthetic is founded on principles of incompletion, contingency, and openness. Combining the contrasting approaches of documentary, experimental, and creative film, Deren created a wholly original experience for film audiences that disrupted the subjectivity of cinema, its standards of continuity, and its dubious facility with promoting categories of realism. This critical retrospective reflects on the development of Deren's career and the productive tensions she initiated that continue to energize film.
This book is a thorough review of Maya Deren's total oeuvre, offering a study of one of our most important filmmakers who has been more overlooked than one might expect. Further study of Deren from a distinct point of view, as Keller offers, is a vital contribution. (Bill Nichols, film critic and editor of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde)
Keller's truly excellent book considers both Deren's theoretical writings and cinematic work and places them within the context of her life and the difficulties she faced as an experimental artist (frequently unfunded and living on the edge). This volume fills a gap in scholarship on Deren with clear and elegant writing. (Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh)
Maya Deren: Incomplete Control is a tour de force of historical and critical scholarship that explores new primary research material from Maya Deren's voluminous and complex archive to assert the significance of incompletion and process as central to Deren's artistic and intellectual production. Keller's clear, erudite prose offers brilliant new readings of Deren's extant films, including canonical works like Meshes of the Afternoon, and comprehensively explores Deren's incomplete projects―films, research projects, writings―to draw out Deren's radical imaginings of art and culture. (Michael Zryd, York University)
A required resource for serious examination of Deren's groundbreaking films.... Keller's smoothly organized, cleanly written text is perhaps the most comprehensive single volume on Deren's work.... Essential. (Choice)
A must-read for scholars of experimental cinema, women filmmakers, and Maya Deren. (Film Criticism)
About the Author
Sarah Keller is assistant professor of Art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. She is coeditor, with Jason Paul, of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations.
2016, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 16 x 24 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$40.00 - Out of stock
Texts by Hannes Bajohr, Paul Benzon, K. Antranik Cassem, Bernhard Cella, Annette Gilbert, Hanna Kuusela, Antoine Lefebvre, Matt Longabucco, Alessandro Ludovico, Lucas W. Melkane, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Aurélie Noury, Valentina Parisi, Michalis Pichler, Anna-Sophie Springer, Alexander Starre, Nick Thurston, Rachel Valinsky, Eva Weinmayr, Vadim Zakharov
What does it mean to publish today? In the face of a changing media landscape, institutional upheavals, and discursive shifts in the legal, artistic, and political fields, concepts of ownership, authorship, work, accessibility, and publicity are being renegotiated. The field of publishing not only stands at the intersection of these developments but is also introducing new ruptures. How the traditional publishing framework has been cast adrift, and which opportunities are surfacing in its stead, is discussed here by artists, publishers, and scholars through the examination of recent publishing concepts emerging from the experimental literature and art scene, where publishing is often part of an encompassing artistic practice. The number and diversity of projects among the artists, writers, and publishers concerned with these matters show that it is time to move the question of publishing from the margin to the center of aesthetic and academic discourse.
Design by Studio Pandan | Pia Christmann & Ann Richter
1981, English
Softcover, 76 pages, 18.5 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$50.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 1
Autumn 1981
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS :
Editorial: On Criticism
The lk and Australian Aborigines by Peter Brook
The Mirror Without A Memory by Giorgio Colombo
Australian 'New Wave' and the 'Second Degree' by Paul Taylor
SPECIAL SECTION:
Artists in Society
Collaboration : Artists Working Collectively by Janine Burke
Modernism and Morality by Suzi Gablik
The 'Sixties Crisis and Aftermath by Ian Burn
Book Reviews:
'A Fable of Modern Art' by Dore Ashton by Memory Holloway
Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige by Philip Brophy
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning. Spotting/toning to cover.
1981, English
Softcover (w. John Nixon insert), 68 pages, 18.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$60.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 2
Winter 1981
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS:
"On Some Alternatives to the Code in the Age of Hyperreality: the Hermit and the City—Dweller" by John Young and Terry Blake
"The Desire of Maria Kozic" by Adrian Martin
"David Wilson’s New Sculpture" by Patrick McCaughey
"Modernism and Realism: Some Orientations" by Terry Smith
"Culture Corner" by Peter Tyndall
Manifestos:
"Manifesto for a future Sculpture Triennial" by Judy Annear
"Manifesto for a Renewed Art Practice 1980" by John Nixon
Book Reviews:
"About Looking by John Berger" by Ian North
"The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change by Robert Hughes" by David Bromfield
"The Years of Hope: Australian Art and Criticism 1959 — 1968 by Gary Catalano" by Noel Hutchison
note: this is a rare copy that still contains the insert manifesto "Manifesto for a Renewed Art Practice 1980" by John Nixon
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning. Includes Nixon's inserted manifesto.
1981, English
Softcover, 72 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 4
Summer 1981
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS:
"The Decentred Unicorn (A Mild Perversion)" by Margaret Grafton
"Spider Woman in Australia" by Juan Davila
"Spider Woman in Playing With Fire!" by Juan Davila
"The Re―education of Desire: Some Thoughts on Current Erotic Visual Practice" by Mick Carter
"What can we do with the Art Class?" by Donald Brook
"Slave Guitars (formerly Slave Guitars of the Art Cult)" by Peter Tyndall
"Gays and Film" (edited by Richard Dyer) by Dave Sargent
"Women, Sex and Pornography by Beatrice Faust; The History of Sexuality Part 1 by Michel Foucault" by Judy Annear
"Three Facts by Imants Tillers" by John Young
"Index to numbers 1 ― 4"
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning.
1982, English
Softcover, 96 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 5
Autumn 1982
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS:
"Self and Theatricality : Samuel Beckett and Vito Acconci" by Paul Taylor
"Beyond Beckett: Reckless Writing and the Concept of the Avant-Garde within Post-Modern Literature" by Nicholas Zurbrugg
"Dr. Spitzner’s Scrapbook" by Zerox Dreamflesh
"Literal Cloth: Elizabeth Paterson’s Masquerades" by Suzanne Spunner
"Musical Perception and Exploratory Music" by Warren Burt
"On Animism in Art" by Jenny Zimmer
"The 1979 Biennale ― ‘European Dialogue’" by Nick Waterlow
"Rebels and Precursors by Richard Haese and Murray/Murundi by Bonita Ely" by Jill Graham
"On Photo-Discourse" by George Alexander
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning.
1983, English
Softcover, 104 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 10
Winter 1982
Edited by Paul Taylor
CONTENTS :
The End of Civilisation Part 2: Love Among The Ruins by Vivienne Shark LeWitt
Fear of Texture by Imants Tillers
Items On The Menu by Paul Taylor
Presence and Absence: The Gallery As Other Place by Bruce Adams
Demolition Man by Ted Colless and Paul Foss
The Strip Laid Bare: Unevenly by Mick Carter
Put Youryoney Where Your Mouth Is by David James and Dave Sargent
Chameleon by John Davies
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning. Light ring mark to cover.
1983, English
Softcover, 104 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 11
Spring 1983
Edited by Paul Taylor
Blurb by Malcolm McLaren
CONTENTS:
"The Precession of Simulacra" by Jean Baudrillard (translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton
"Kristeva, Bakhtin and Carnival" by Kateryna Arthur
"Performance Art As Politicised Epistemology" by Thomas Huhn
"Anything Still" by John Young
"Duck Rock" by Andrew Preston
"A Melbourne Mood" by Frances Lindsay
"Made by →↑→" by Mary Eagle
"Horrality" by Philip Brophy
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning.
1987, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Art & Text / Prahran
$40.00 - Out of stock
ART & TEXT 23/4
March - May 1987
"After THE EVENT, a special double issue of Art & Text on "culturecidal" aspects of appropria-
tion and (post) modernity, with Juan Davila, Laleen Jayamanne and Geeta Kapur, and Eric
Michaels - plus Yvonne Rainer discusses The Man Who Envied Women, Peter Tyndall sket-
ches the 1986 Sydney Biennale, Imants Tillers plays Bicentennial in the Park, Paul Carter takes
a gondola through Gondwanaland, Sophie Calle and Jean Baudrillard follow perfect strangers,
Allen S. Weiss mocks the Sun King dazed in anamorphic gardens, and Danielle Duval chases
Borges and others through the labyrinth of Australian "picturing".
Edited by Paul Foss
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.
Very Good - general wear/tanning. Ex-library sticker to cover and stamp inside.
2018, English
Hardcover, 264 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
e-flux / New York
$75.00 - Out of stock
Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.
Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov’s vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov’s writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant.
Contributors
Alexander Bogdanov, Alexander Chizhevsky, Nikolai Fedorov, Boris Groys, Valerian Muravyev, Alexander Svyatogor, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood
A copublication with e-flux, New York
About the Editor
Boris Groys is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Professor at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. He is the author of Art Power, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.
2019, English
Softcover, 424 pages. 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Telephone Publishing / Melbourne
$40.00 - Out of stock
A Constructed World is the collective project of Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva, founded in 1993 in Australia. This bilingual English/French book presents their complete writings on contemporary art and culture from 2001 to 2018. In fourty plus texts A Constructed World discuss the subject matter of their work, other artists work and subjects that seemed prescient and in need of discussion at the time. For ten years they produced Artfan magazine, their first foray into publishing, followed by the web magazine SPEECH, and also the publications of Speech and What Archive. They have developed ongoing working relationships with curators that have expand into durational modes of presentation concerned with not-knowing as a shared space, transmission, translation and satisfaction without delay. During their first survey exhibition, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, they proposed the series Change Forums, inviting more than thirty guest speakers to discuss the topics — Collectivity, Losers and Failure, Publishing Without Publishers, The Changing Audience For Contemporary Art and Politics and Art.
2019, English
Softcover, 4 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
Published by
Hedge School / Melbourne
$4.00 - In stock -
A baptism of sun gazing and demonic pop, HS001 is the inaugural issue of irregular newsletter, Hedge School. This issue includes The Masked Romancer’s hyperstitional love story, drawings by Marc Matchak, and Thomas Moran’s reflections on that ‘zone of indistinction’ where God and Ariana Grande collapse into one.
2019, English
Glass encrusted slipcase, artist's work on paper, 4 pages (HS001), 21 x 29.7 cm
Ed. of 3,
Published by
Hedge School / Melbourne
$150.00 - Out of stock
First artist edition to accompany Hedge School Issue One, published in April 2019. In an edition of only three, Darcy Wedd’s artist edition comprises glass encrusted slipcases with a work on paper and copy of the issue inside. A baptism of sun gazing and demonic pop, HS001 is the inaugural issue of irregular newsletter, Hedge School. This issue includes The Masked Romancer’s hyperstitional love story, drawings by Marc Matchak, and Thomas Moran’s reflections on that ‘zone of indistinction’ where God and Ariana Grande collapse into one.
2016, English
Hardcover, 360 pages, 17.8 x 25.4 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$75.00 - Out of stock
This groundbreaking and richly illustrated book tells a new story of the twentieth century’s most influential artist, recounted not so much through his artwork as through his “non-art” work. Marcel Duchamp is largely understood in critical and popular discourse in terms of the objects he produced, whether readymade or meticulously fabricated. Elena Filipovic asks us instead to understand Duchamp’s art through activities not normally seen as artistic—from exhibition making and art dealing to administrating and publicizing. These were no occasional pursuits; Filipovic argues that for Duchamp, these fugitive tasks were a veritable lifework.
Drawing on many rarely seen images, Filipovic traces a variety of practices and projects undertaken by Duchamp from 1913 to 1969, from his invention of the readymade to the release of his last, posthumous work. She examines Duchamp’s note writing, archiving, and quasi-photographic activities, which resulted in the Box of 1914 and the Green Box; his art dealing, marketing, and curating that culminated in experimental exhibitions for the Surrealists and his miniature museum, The Boîte-en-valise; and his administrative efforts and clandestine maneuvering in order to posthumously embed his Étant donnés into a museum. Demonstrating how those activities reflect the artist’s questioning of reproduction and originality, as well as photography and the exhibition, Filipovic proposes that Duchamp’s “non-art” labor, and in particular his curatorial strategies, more than merely accompanied his more famous artworks; in a certain sense, they made them.
Through Duchamp’s elusive but vital activities he revised the idea of what a modern artist could be. With this fascinating book, Filipovic in turn revises the very idea of Duchamp.
About the Author
Elena Filipovic, an art historian, is Director and Chief Curator of the Kunsthalle Basel. Among her curatorial projects is the traveling retrospective “Marcel Duchamp: A Work That Is Not a Work ‘of Art'” (2008-2009).
Endorsements:
“In the 1970s Lucy Lippard remarked that Duchamp was already too much written about. How, then, is one to contribute effectively to the Duchamp literature today, given that it has become all the more voluminous since? In The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp Elena Filipovic finds a way, and does so with great intelligence. She claims, rightly, that the dominant readings of Duchamp have led to an occlusion of the ‘fugitive actions’ undertaken by Duchamp vis-à-vis the institution of art, and it is there that she locates her incisive study—specifically on ‘his role as administrator, archivist, art advisor, curator, publicist, reproduction maker, and salesman.’ Rather than see these activities as ancillary to his life as an artist, Filipovic locates them, brilliantly, at its center; they are indeed only ‘apparently marginal.’ This is just the book to reanimate discourse around Duchamp.”
—Hal Foster, Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor, Princeton University, author of Compulsive Beauty and Prosthetic Gods
“When an artist becomes a curator today, the exhibition is often treated like an extension of the artist’s medium. A century ago when Duchamp, having ceased to consider himself a professional artist, undertook to help out his friends by designing their exhibitions, did he think like a modernist fixated on medium specificity? This is the classic question that lies behind Elena Filipovic’s careful research in the archives. In light of her new syntheses, she rewrites the question to read: just how did Duchamp open up new possibilities for curators? The answer: the medium was not his message. Duchamp worked without professing, in a series of small, nonretinal steps; he avoided creating a single, prototypical model. He left behind a panorama of new ideas. Filipovic has collected them into a book that curators will come to regard as a resource.”
—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art History, Vassar College, author of Their Common Sense
“In 1959, Marcel Duchamp referred to himself as ‘a non-artist.’ Exactly what he meant by this has never been fully explained until now, a lacuna in the vast literature on this artist that finally has been filled by Elena Filipovic’s marvelous new book, the first to deal with the various activities that preoccupied Duchamp when he wasn’t making art, particularly in the realm of curating (not only his own work, but that of his fellow artists in various exhibitions that he oversaw). Filipovic argues that these activities occur with such frequency and consistency in Duchamp’s life that they must be considered an integral component of his creative endeavors. The result is an entirely new way to look at the work of this important and highly influential artist.”
—Francis M. Naumann, author of The Recurrent, Haunting Ghost
“Yes, another Duchamp book. The one we least expected, but perhaps the one that we now need the most. Elena Filipovic’s brilliant book locates a ‘curatorial’ logic at the heart of Duchamp’s (deeply fascinating, often confusing, and impossibly disparate) activities. But more crucial even than its tracing of a long-ignored curatorial modernism, this book will in turn challenge what it might mean to curate today, at precisely the moment curators increasingly claim an artistic dimension for their own work.”
—George Baker, Professor of Art History, UCLA, author of The Artwork Caught by the Tail
2018, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 600 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$55.00 - Out of stock
Gary Indiana's collected columns of art criticism from the Village Voice, documenting, from the front lines, the 1980s New York art scene.
In 1985, the Village Voice offered me a job as senior art critic. This made my life easier and lousy at the same time. I now had to actually enter all those galleries instead of peeking in the windows. At times, the only tangible perk was having the chump for a fifth of vodka whenever twenty more phonies had flattered my ass off in the course of a working week. - from Vile Days
From March 1985 through June 1988 in The Village Voice, Gary Indiana reimagined the weekly art column. Thirty years later, Vile Days brings together for the first time all of those vivid dispatches, too long stuck in archival limbo, so that the fire of Indiana's observations can burn again. In the midst of Reaganism, the grim toll of AIDS, and the frequent jingoism of postmodern theory, Indiana found a way to be the moment's Baudelaire. He turned the art review into a chronicle of life under siege.
As a critic, Indiana combines his novelistic and theatrical gifts with a startling political acumen to assess art and the unruly environments that give it context. No one was better positioned to elucidate the work of key artists at crucial junctures of their early careers, from Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince to Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, among others. But Indiana also remained alert to the aesthetic consequence of sumo wrestling, flower shows, public art, corporate galleries, and furniture design. Edited and prefaced by Bruce Hainley, with an afterword by Tobi Haslett, Vile Days provides an opportunity to track Indiana's emergence as one of the most prescient writers of his generation.
2010, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$39.00 - In stock -
Previously unpublished plays and writings by one of today's foremost satirical authors.
Before publishing his celebrated first novel, Horse Crazy, in 1987, Gary Indiana wrote and directed twelve plays for an informal company whose performers included the painter Bill Rice, composer Evan Lurie, the poet George-Therese Dickenson, writer and film actress Cookie Mueller, Warhol superstar and painter Viva, writer Victoria Pedersen, singer/actress Sharon Niesp, photographer Allen Frame, the legendary Taylor Mead, novelist Larry Mitchell, and others. Performed at the Mudd Club, Club 57, The Performing Garage, and Bill Rice's E. 3rd Street studio, Indiana's plays offered a kind of community theater for New York's underground.
This volume presents highlights of that repertoire, including Alligator Girls Go to College, The Roman Polanski Story, and Indiana's script for Michel Auder's videofilm A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking, accompanied by archival performance photographs and selections from Indiana's contemporaneous journals and poems. These hilarious, incisive writings and scripts evoke a vivid and accurate portrait of writers and artists in the lower Manhattan of the 1980s—arguably America's last avant-garde—and anticipates Indiana's impressive subsequent literary career.
2019, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$38.00 - In stock -
How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center.
No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers “freedom” to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.
Afterword by Kevin Vennemann
Translated by Katy Derbyshire
"...chillingly effective, not least for its accumulation of details, which seem both aggressively banal and freighted with an excess of symbolic meaning....The ubiquitous linguistic debasement and corporate doublespeak is made strange and new again, the small humiliations and injustices pile up along with their psychological and social consequences." - Harper's Magazine
2015, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$36.00 - Out of stock
By Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith
Jacques Rivette is perhaps the best-kept secret of French cinema. A founding figure in the New Wave, and at the centre of the Cahiers du cinéma team, he developed into one of the most unusual and adventurous French directors of the last sixty years, yet his work remains little-known in comparison with his contemporaries, and this study is the first in English to look at the full span of his career. Starting with his decisively influential film criticism of the 1950s, it moves from the New Wave through the complex, experimental films of the 1970s to the challenging, playful dramas which ensured his visibility during the following two decades, and ends in the present, including Rivette's most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007).
The book takes a thematic approach, offering detailed discussion of key elements of Rivette's film world, including games, conspiracy and jealousy, as well as a study of what Rivette's cinema adds to our understanding of key theoretical concepts in Film Studies such as narrative, space and adaptation.
From Manchester University Press' French Film Directors series, edited by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram.
2016, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Published by
Manchester University Press / Manchester
$36.00 - Out of stock
By John Phillips.
Placing Robbe-Grillet's filmic oeuvre in the related contexts of both his novelistic work and the different historical and cultural periods in which his films were made, from the early 1960s to the present, the book traces lines of influence and continuity throughout his work, which is shown to exhibit a consistent preoccupation with an identifiable body of themes, motifs and structures. Close readings of all the films are skilfully combined with a thematic approach, ranging across the entire filmic corpus. The book also contains chapters on cinematography and technique.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922 – 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman (new novel) trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Robbe-Grillet's career as a creator of fiction was not restricted to the writing of novels. For him, creating fiction in the form of films was of equal importance. His film career began when Alain Resnais chose to collaborate with him on his 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. Robbe-Grillet then went on to launch a career as a writer-director of an award-winning series of cerebral and often sexually provocative feature films which explored similar themes to those in his literary work (e.g. Voyeurism, The Body as Text, The 'Double'), including L'Immortelle (The Immortal One) (1962); Trans-Europ-Express (1966); L'homme qui ment/Muž, ktorý luže (The Man Who Lies) (1968); L'Eden et après/Eden a potom (Eden and After) (1970); Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Progressive Slidings towards Pleasure) (1974); Le jeu avec le feu (Playing with Fire) (1975); La belle captive (The Beautiful Captive) (1983); and more.
Now available in paperback, this lucid, comprehensive and fascinating study shows Robbe-Grillet's contribution to the evolution of the cinematic art both in France and internationally to have been considerably more important than previously acknowledged.
From Manchester University Press' French Film Directors series, edited by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram.
1993, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 88 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Pataphysics Books / Melbourne
$33.00 - Out of stock
Out of print 1993 issue of the great Pataphysics magazine from Melbourne.
Question: It has been suggested that autobiography, as with letters, establishes the moments of arrival as being critical. What are you currently working on?
Responses from John Cage, Sylvčre Lotringer, Brigitte Engler, Gerald Murnane, Achille Bonito Oliva, Carl Andre, Bernard Heidsieck, Tory Dent, Gregory Botts, Laurance Wiedler, Alex Katz, Harry Zohn, Chris Kraus, Paul Violi, Laura Mullen, John Giorno, Juan Davila, Larry Clark (B&W photographs), Bob Black, Judith Elliston, Sarah Morris, Richard Kostelanetz, John Nixon, Leon Golub, Pete Spence, Javant Biarujia, Daniel Shapiro, Ania Walwicz, Stephen Bram, Charles North, Graeme Hare, David Shapiro, Brian Aldiss.
Published by Leo Edelstein and Yanni Florence in Melbourne, 1993, and long out of print. Fine copies.
1967 / 2000 Ed., English
Softcover, 118 pages, 14 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Black & Red / United States
$25.00 - Out of stock
Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle, The Das Kapital of the 20th century, offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists, few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.
Writer, filmmaker, and cultural revolutionary, Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a founding member of the Lettrist International and Situationist International groups. His films and books, including Society of the Spectacle (1967), were major catalysts for philosophical and political changes in the twentieth century, and helped trigger the May 1968 rebellion in France.
This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print by Black & Red publishing. Very Good copy of the 2000 edition.
1977, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Delta / US
$25.00 - Out of stock
Delta edition of Susan Sontag's On Photography - a seminal and groundbreaking work on the subject of photography.
Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere, and the 'insatiability of the photographing eye' has profoundly altered our relationship with the world. Photographs have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In these six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.
'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' - The Times
'A brilliant analysis of the profound changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world, and at ourselves' - Washington Post
'The most original and illuminating study of the subject' - New Yorker
One of America's best-known and most admired writers, Susan Sontag was also a leading commentator on contemporary culture until her death in December 2004. Her books include four novels and numerous works of non-fiction, among them Regarding the Pain of Others, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, At the Same Time, Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Reborn: Early Diaries 1947-1963, all of which are published by Penguin. A further eight books, including the collections of essays Under the Sign of Saturn and Where the Stress Falls, and the novels The Volcano Lover and The Benefactor, are available from Penguin Modern Classics.
Very Good copy of the Delta edition (1977).
1983, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 27 x 33 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tension / South Yarra
$35.00 - Out of stock
Tension 1 (July / August 1983) features Iggy Pop (by Richard Guilliat), David Salle (by John Walker), reviews of Tall Poppies and Perspecta '83, review of Sedition music festival, Laughing Clowns, John Cale (by Bruce Milne), "Fashion '83" spread and profiles on Australian fashion by Robin Barden, "Quarelle" by Adrian Martin and Paul Taylor, photospreads by Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Paul Taylor's article on "A Melbourne Mood" exhibition, record reviews, and much more.
TENSION (1983-1990) was one of the central "popular" culture arts periodicals to come out of Melbourne in the 1980s, emerging from the ashes of Virgin Press. Independently published and edited by critic Ashley Crawford, Tension magazine lasted for 25 bi-monthly issues dedicated to Art, Music, Fashion, Theatre, Film, Photography, across reviews, interviews, reports, critical essays and artist pages. Now an important document of culture in Australia, and especially Melbourne in the 1980s, issues featured the writing and contributions of Paul Taylor, McKenzie Wark, Mike Parr, John Nixon, Catharine Lumby, Philip Brophy, Adrian Martin, Ashley Crawford, Peter Tyndall, Jean Baudrillard, Timothy Leary, Gerard Malanga, Keith Haring, Gerald Murnane, and many more. In 1985 Crawford, with John Buckley, staged an exhibition issue of the magazine, 'Visual Tension', at ACCA featuring the work of Howard Arkley, Marianne Baillieu, Peter Booth, Paul Boston, Peter Cripps, Richard Dunn, Maria Kozic, John Lethbridge, Geoff Lowe, Linda Marrinon, John Matthews, John Nixon, Stieg Persson, Robert Rooney, Gareth Sansom, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, John Young.