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.
2004, English
Softcover, 285 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Feral House / Los Angeles
$35.00 - In stock -
First 2004 edition. In 1986, the idea that death metal and grindcore would ever impact popular culture was unimaginable. Initially circulated through a scattered tape-trading network of underground thrill-seekers, bands rose from every corner of the globe and death metal and grindcore spread faster than a pandemic plague of undead flesh-eaters. By 1994, the genre's most prominent labels had sold millions of albums. This exciting history, featuring an introduction by famed DJ John Peel, tells the two-decade-long history of grindcore and death metal through the eyes and ringing ears of the artists, producers, and label owners who propelled them. Includes essential discography and "Life After Death" biography updates on the lives of those featured. Autopsy, Napalm Death, Carcass, Fear of God, S.O.B., Morbid Angel, Obituary, Terrorizer, Doom, Extreme Noise Terror, Decide, Entombed, Grave, Bolt Thrower, Brutal Truth, Morbid Angel, Suffocation, Siege, Cannibal Corpse, Discordance Axis, Decapitated, Exhumed, Vader, and so many more...
Average—Good copy with considerable wear, creasing.
1999, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 21 x 27 cm
Published by
Charta / Milan
$50.00 - In stock -
First edition of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's "Monument to a Lost Civilization" / "Monumento alla Civilità Perduta", the gorgeous, comprehensive catalogue/artist's book published the occasion of major art installation at the Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa in Palermo, curated by Chiara Bertola and Paolo Falcone, 16 April—27 June 1999. "The presence of the Kabakovs in Palermo is something more than a passage. Their creative universe, which the installation at the Cantieri represents in a unique composition, is an extraordinary opportunity of reflection: the relationship with memory; the traces of daily life, of biographies, of environments: the memory of the dissolution of a society that was all the more surprising the more unshakeable and immutable it appeared." Profusely illustrated with drawings, paintings, photographs, alongside texts by the artists, biography, bibliography. Bi-lingual English / Italian facing text.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are amongst the most celebrated artists of their generation, widely known as pioneers of installation art. Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro) in Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union. When he was eight, he moved to Moscow with his mother. He studied at the Art School of Moscow, and at the V.I. Surikov Art Institute. Artists in the Soviet Union were obliged to follow the officially approved style, Socialist Realism. Wanting to retain his independence, Ilya supported himself as a children’s book illustrator from 1955 to 1987, while continuing to make his own paintings and drawings. As an ‘unofficial artist’, he worked in the privacy of his Moscow attic studio, showing his art only to a close circle of artists and intellectuals. Ilya was not permitted to travel outside the Soviet Union until 1987, when he was offered a fellowship at the Graz Kunstverein, Austria. The following year he visited New York, and resumed contact with Emilia Lekach. Born in 1945, Emilia trained as a classical pianist at Music College in Irkutsk, and studied Spanish Language and Literature at Moscow University before emigrating to the United States in 1973. Ilya and Emilia began their artistic partnership in the late 1980s, and were married in 1992. Together, they have produced a prolific output of immersive installations and other conceptual works addressing ideas of utopia, dreams and fear, to reflect on the universal human condition.
Very Good copy.
2000, English
Hardcover, 120 pages, 22.3 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
The Drawing Center / New York
Merrell Publishers / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful hardcover volume exploring every aspect of the art of the celebrated Belgian/French writer and artist Henri Michaux, published to accompany the major exhibition Untitled Passages, curated by Catherine de Zegher and Florian Rodari for The Drawing Centre, New York. Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux investigates Michaux’s graphic works in tandem with his poetic practice, addressing the artist-poet’s research into the passages between “writing” and “drawing”, taking its title from Michaux’s extensive body of untitled drawings and from Passages, his book of poetic writings. Profusely illustrated with an interview with Michaux by John Ashbery. Edited with texts by Catherine de Zegher, also Raymond Bellour, Henri Michaux, Laurent Jenny, Florian Rodari, Richard Sirburth.
Fine copy, almost As New. Out-of-print.
2001, English
Softcover, 83 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skira / Milan
The Drawing Center / New York
$400.00 - In stock -
Rare, first-ever English translation of this Michaux classic, very quickly out-of-print and sought after.
One of the key works of the poet and artist Henri Michaux (1899-1984) whose original approach intertwines the written word with his visionary paintings and drawings.
First published in 1972, this English language translation of Henri Michaux’s celebrated book Émergences- Résurgences has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Untitled Passages by Henri Michaux organized by The Drawing Center in New York.
Part essay, part poem—by turns lyric, ekphrastic, didactic, gnomic, and comic—it is also one of Michaux’s most sustained self-portraits.
Very Good copy. Tanned.
1966, English
Hardcover (Burlap covered boards), 342 pages, 32 x 31cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harry N. Abrams / New York
$400.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1966 burlap-bound edition of this seminal work by Allan Kaprow documenting the milieu of performance art and happenings in the early-mid 1960s. Published by H. N. Abrams, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings is a legendary photo-artist-book by “one of the grand antiheroes of contemporary art”, produced in way we would never see today. Wrapped in a heavy, debossed and screen-printed raw burlap hardcover, this massive and visually stunning volume features incredible typography, commentary and lay-out by Kaprow himself, accompanying countless photogravures (photos taken by Oldenburg, Robert McElroy, Peter Moore and others) featuring the work of artists (and non-artists) such as Claes Oldenburg, Tetsumi Kudo, Jean Tinguely, Clarence Schmidt, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Wolf Vostell, George Brecht, Kenneth Dewey, Milan Knizak, Jackson Pollock, Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, George Segal, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, together with images of works by the Japanese Gutai Group (Murakami Saburo, Shozo Shimamoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Atsuko Tanaka, et al) and many more.
Allan Kaprow, “an artist who coined the term ‘happenings’ in the late 1950s and whose anti-art works contributed to radical changes in the course of late 20th-century art,” was a leading member-with artists George Segal, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenberg-of a group whose performance works were signally influenced by John Cage’s “reliance on chance as an organizing, or disorganizing element in art. Like Cage, Kaprow used a combination of choice and accident as a way of creating nonverbal, quasi-theatrical situations in which performers functioned as kinetic objects, the role of the single artist-genius was de-emphasized, audience members became creative participants and no-clear distinction was made between everyday actions and ritual…” (New York Times).
"Step Right In"
Very Good copy, spotless with tight-As New binding, perfectly preserved.
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 21 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Charta / Milan
$45.00 - Out of stock
This exhibition catalogue presents over 50 works of art that are representative of Wolf Vostell's artistic commitment in the social and political sphere. This wonderful selection of works by Vostell, a central member of the Fluxus movement, is taken from the late 1950s to the mid-1990s, the entire period of his artistic production. Disasters of Peace, which refers to Goya's "The Disasters of War", a benchmark for any artist who wishes to confront history and whose lover Vostell was, focuses on contemporary tragedies such as the Holocaust, the Wall of Berlin, Vietnam, the Gulf War or Sarajevo. Of particular significance is a work entitled "6 TV - de-coll/age" (1963); it was the first video installation shown in the US in which Vostell predicted the negative effects of television. An interview between the artist and his wife complements this catalogue. Includes an illustrated chronology of his artistic activities.
Very Good copy with light wear/age, bump to lower spine corner.
2015, English
Hardcover, 192 pages, 22.86 x 3.18 x 31.12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
National Portrait Gallery / London
$150.00 - Out of stock
First edition hardcover catalogue — an acclaimed book published to accompany an acclaimed exhibition held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2015.
Since his death at the age of sixty-four in 1966, Alberto Giacometti has become recognised internationally as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century and sales of his sculptures now achieve record-breaking prices. Belonging to no particular artistic movement, he developed through cubist and surrealist phases and later attained a mature, individual idiom whose preoccupation with the depiction of a human presence in an enveloping space may be seen in relation to contemporary existentialist concerns with defining the place and purpose of man in a godless universe.
Taking its title from Jean-Paul Sartre, who described Giacometti's endeavor to give "sensible expression" to "pure presence," this book explores the artist's work in relation to existentialist ideas. Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking, Giacometti's oeuvre ranges from surrealist objects to images of the human figure, with portraits of particular individuals at the center.
This book looks at the various phases of the artist's career and explores in detail his depiction of his main sitters, including his mother; Diego his brother; his wife Annette; Jean Genet the playwright; Caroline, a prostitute; and his friends Yanaihara and Lotar. Early drawings, paintings and sculptures of family members and his own image demonstrate Giacometti's awareness of Post-Impressionist and Divisionist styles.
From 1946 Giacometti resumed painting and depicting individuals became central to his work. After 1954, when he began making sculpture from life, his portraits expressed a dialogue between painting and sculpture.
As New copy, first edition, out-of-print.
2017, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 22 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Tate Gallery / London
$80.00 - In stock -
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) is one of the few artists of the last century whose work is almost more recognizable than his name. His distinctive elongated figures are well known, and appear in major museum collections worldwide. However, the story of Giacometti’s evolution, from his first professional works of art through his surrealist compositions to the emergence of his mature style, has rarely been explored fully and in depth. This comprehensive overview of his career focuses on the art, the people, and the events that influenced him, and on the original and experimental way in which he approached and developed his work. An illustrated glossary of texts on his life and art is accompanied by a plate section of strikingly beautiful illustrations of his sculptures, paintings, and drawings as well as sketchbooks, decorative works, photographs, and studio ephemera, much of which have never been published before. This accessible survey is the definitive resource for fans of the artist.
Out-of-print, first edition, Very Good copy with light cover wear.
2015, English
Hardcover (cloth-bound), 248 pages, 18 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Mousse Publishing / Milan
$400.00 - Out of stock
The great hardcover monographic book on the work of Giorgio Griffa, edited by Andrea Bellini, that very quickly disappeared from print and became understandibly collectible. This most comprehensive English-language book on the artist, published on the occasion of the cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the work of Giorgio Griffa (Turin, 1936) (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto; Bergen Kunsthall; and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome) aims—through a series of essays by Andrea Bellini, Luca Cerizza, Laura Cherubini, Martin Clark, Suzanne Cotter, and Chris Dercon, a conversation between Griffa and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a selection of artist’s writings and a chronology compiled by Marianna Vecellio—to highlight the very diverse features and extraordinary richness of Griffa’s paintings. Profusely illustrated throughout.
“Giorgio Griffa is one of the least-known Turin-born artists of the Arte Povera generation. Another precious ‘secret’ that the city of Turin, discreet and haughty as ever, has managed to keep under wraps—in this case for almost half a century. From the immediate post-war period, a singular group of young artists in the city helped write the history of European art in the second half of the twentieth-century. Together with now universally acclaimed figures, such as Alighiero Boetti, Giuseppe Penone, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gilberto Zorio, and Mario and Marisa Merz, there were also other leading artists in Turin, who have only recently begun to receive the international attention they deserve. Here I am thinking of the likes of Piero Gilardi, Gianni Piacentino, Carol Rama, Salvo, and Aldo Mondino, but also of the eccentric and eclectic Carlo Mollino. Griffa was one of the most discreet and isolated in this group of young people who revolved around Sperone’s gallery. He immediately showed an exclusive interest in painting, while his companions mainly moved out towards sculpture and installation from the mid-sixties.”—Andrea Bellini
Fine copy, almost As New.
2016, English / French
Softcover, 72 pages, 25 x 31 cm
Published by
Analogues / Arles
$65.00 - Out of stock
New monograph, with thirty emblematic paintings, a text by the artist, and an essay by Francesco Manacorda.
The art of the italian artist Giorgio Griffa developed quietly and with impressive coherence outside the latest movements broadly outlined on the contemporary scene. At the beginning of his career Griffa nonetheless associated himself with the representatives of Arte Povera, with whom he exhibited on numerous occasions in the 1960s and 1970s. His simultaneously “minimalist” painting also displayed an affinity in particular with the group Supports/Surfaces in France.
Elegant, unprimed and unstretched, the canvases by Italian artist Giorgio Griffa offer constellations of horizontal lines and the numerals of the golden mean in a graceful and warm minimalism. Like a melody, a rhythm or a line of poetry, these painted signs in half-tones convey a certain lyricism, one that is also found in the artist's poems.
Griffa's raw canvases are covered with marks in pastel shades of acrylic paint, which he says “are performed by the brush, by my hand, the paint, my concentration, etc.” They attest to his admiration for the artists of ancient times, and his “feeling for the centuries-old memory of painting”. His solo show at the Fondation presents earlier as well as very recent works, including Canone aureo 705 (VVG) (2015), a breath-taking homage to Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night of 1889.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Giorgio Griffa” at Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, from February 13 to April 24, 2016.
In 1968, Giorgio Griffa (born 1936 in Turin, where he lives and works) abandoned figurative painting in favor of a format of abstract painting that still characterizes his work to this day. Painting with acrylic on raw un-stretched canvas, burlap and linen, Griffa's works are nailed directly to the wall along their top edge. When not exhibited, the works are folded and stacked, resulting creases that create an underlying grid for his compositions. In keeping with his idea that painting is “constant and never finished”, many of his works display a deliberate end-point that has been described as “stopping a thought mid-sentence.” Despite early associations with movements such as Arte Povera and Minimalism, Giorgio Griffa's work was not exhibited in the United States for 40 years after his first solo exhibition in New York at Ileana Sonnabend's gallery. In 2012, Giorgio Griffa had a solo exhibition, Fragments 1968 - 2012 at Casey Kaplan in New York, leading him to be named one of the “10 thrilling rediscoveries from 2012.”
2023, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23.5 x 22.2 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$79.00 - Out of stock
Stories of the secret underground Cold War-era Soviet music subculture that distributed forbidden music on used hospital x-rays.
During the Cold War era, the songs that Soviet citizens could listen to were ruthlessly controlled by the state. But a secret underground subculture of music lovers and bootleggers defied the censors, building recording machines and making their own records of forbidden jazz, rock 'n' roll, and Russian music, cut onto used hospital x-ray film. Bone Music is the follow up the acclaimed X-Ray Audio: The Strange History of Soviet Music on the Bone, delving deeper into a forgotten era when being a music fan could mean a lengthy prison sentence, or worse.
Who made these records? Why did they do it and how was it even possible? Foregrounding interviews and oral testimonies gathered over five years, Bone Music presents the stories of the original bone bootleggers, their customers, musicians, record collectors, and commentators, evoking a spirited resistance to a repressive culture of prohibition and punishment. It reveals that although Western jazz and rock'n'roll were important to the Stilyagi youth culture, the true rebel music was that of forbidden Russian emigres, gypsy romances, and criminal tunes: the soul songs of a society brutally cut off from its culture.
Richly illustrated with dozens of new images of Soviet x-ray discs and sound letters, Bone Music details how the bootleggers worked, outlining the technical precedents of their techniques, situating their discs in a revised history of recorded media, and bringing a wealth of compelling new detail.
2022, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Clash Books / US
$32.00 - Out of stock
Through diaristic ellipses, Nash crafts an origin story of obsessional masochism
Drawing on the nostalgia of a nascent digital age and grappling with an eating disorder, indie cult author Elle Nash paints a realistic and poignant portrait of a teenager's quest for self-identification on both sides of the computer screen. Using Livejournal entries, we meet our protagonist, in her messy transition into adulthood in the midst of grappling with calorie counts, boys, and being honest with who she is only online. Following up her cult fiction debut Animals Eat Each Other, Nash shows she belongs in the same camp along with exciting feminist literary disrupters the likes of Melissa Broder and Alissa Nutting.
It's 2005. Lucy shambles through the last weeks of her senior year of high school, jonesing for a thinner body, desperate to connect with another human. Who is reflected back at her when she is sleeping with someone, when she is puking into the toilet bowl? Who is reflected back when she's alone? Only the internet knows, where she muses on the concept of her "self" through her Livejournal, with a cadre of online friends who are definitely NOT pro-anorexic. Everyone's sick here, but at least they understand.
2022, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 21 x 28 cm
$33.00 - Out of stock
Issue 4 of new literary journal from New York City, Forever Magazine, with contributions by Aaron Jupin, Alex Lee Moyer, Andrew Ross, Anna Delvey, Anna Dorn, Barry Hazard, Benjamin Lederach Styer, Brett3333333, Cakesforsport, Canyon Castator, Clara Debray, Dagmar Stap, Dave Singley, Dayton Castleman, Dragon Fleye, Eileen Myles, Erli Grünzweil, Gabriel Smith, Garielle Lutz, Hanah Lilith Assadi, Harris Rosenblum, Hayden Williams, Hiroshi Sato, Ida Newgarden, Izzy Lawrence, Jason Sebastian Russo, Jake Hanrahan, Jasmine Johnson, Johnny Dean Mann, Jordan Castro, Julian Glander, Kate Zambreno, Keegan Swenson, Line Hachem, Maggie Dunlap, Mariam Wo Ching, Matthew Davis, Matthew Gasda, Matthew Palladino, Max Tullio, Nate Sloan, Nichole Shinn, Noa Ironic, nomemene, Paul Dalla Rosa, Petra Cortright, Sean Thor Conroe, Sierra Armor, Sophie Vickers, Sheila Heti, Stephanie H Shih, Steve Anwyll, Taylor Carpenter, Tom Allen, Tom Keelan, Wenjing Yang, Zoe Stone-Molloy...
Edited by Madeline Cash, Anika Levy
Design by Nat Ruiz
2023, English
Softcover, 560 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$62.00 - Out of stock
“This invaluable research tool will hugely expand, update, and perhaps even revolutionize the feminist discourse. It might even be considered a work of conceptual art in itself."—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu, it includes more than 1000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art.
When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
“You can use it as a reference, follow a thread, or just access it at random and it delivers wit and wisdom from over three decades of one of the most politically and intellectually challenging movements of our era. What happens between sexed flesh and gendered tech? More than ever we all need to know."—McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto
Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.
1971, English
Softcover, 52 pages, 18 x 12 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Olympia Press / Paris
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare 1st Olympia Press UK edition of S.C.U.M by Valerie Solanas.
SCUM Manifesto is a legendary radical feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas, first published in 1967 as a mimeographed edition of 2,000 copies. It argues that men have ruined the world, and that it is up to women to fix it. To achieve this goal, it suggests the formation of SCUM, an organization dedicated to overthrowing society and eliminating the male sex. The Manifesto was little-known until Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol by shooting him at The Factory in 1968. This event brought significant public attention to the Manifesto and Solanas herself.
This edition was published when legendary French publisher Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press briefly relocated to Britain and came out the year Solanas’ left prison for attempted murder.
With a foreword by publisher Maurice Girodias and an introduction by radical feminist critic and essayist, Vivian Gornick.
VG copy with some splitting to spine (not to binding), cover wear, light creasing to back cover. Internally crisp copy.
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 93 pages, 11.1 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$52.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature.
Translated by Alyosha Edlebi.
The text is followed by Isaac Asimov's essay "The Billiard Ball."
2015, English
Softcover (letterpress boards), 214 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis
$55.00 - In stock -
Limited letterpress edition.
Those who are mad like Antonin Artaud, are they just as mad as he was? Madness, like the plague, is contagious, and everyone, from his psychiatrists to his disciples, family, and critics, everyone who gets close to Artaud, seems to participate in his delirium. Sylvere Lotringer explores various embodiments of this shared delirium through what Artaud called "mental dramas"-a series of confrontations with his witnesses or "persecutors" where we uncover the raw delirium at work, even in Lotringer himself. Mad Like Artaud does not intend to add one more layer of commentary to the bitter controversies that have been surrounding the cursed poet's work since his death in 1948, nor does it take sides among the different camps who are still haggling over his corpse. This book speaks of the site where "madness" itself is simmering.
Translated by Joanna Spinks.
2021, English
Softcover, 72 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
Plea / UK
$26.00 - Out of stock
Anti-ligature rooms are designed to protect the inhabitants from themselves. Cells that work to prevent us from any agency in the biggest, grandest sense. A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself. ANTI-LIGATURE ROOMS by Contemporary Art Writing Daily is an attempt to retexturize a world – a world streamlining a smoother digestion of us, of our resources and our art. Fear for an art that is affective palliative to an experience that's just generally bad.
Contemporary Art Writing Daily (www.artwritingdaily.com) is an author project. It has been described as “a black eye in the face of contemporary criticism.” Since 2014, it has contributed texts to numerous exhibitions and publications, including the Venice Biennale, CCS Bard, Isabella Bortolozzi, SPIKE, and Provence Magazine. Contemporary Art Writing Daily is represented by Cabinet, London.
ANTI-LIGATURE ROOMS is a co-publication by Plea and Cabinet, London. Plea is an occasional press based in Copenhagen specialising in poetry, commentary and fiction. Plea is run by Ed Atkins and Pablo Larios.
"My colleagues tell me I should start calling collectors on the phone to talk sales. Should I just read them passages from this book? Because otherwise what am I saying about art they’re not looking at?"–––Bridget Donahue
"For some years, Contemporary Art Writing Daily has been publishing some of the best art criticism — the only arts writing worth reading? – on their eponymous website. With this book, they frame their feelings in a way that approximates literature, but only to the degree that the site approximates journalism. It’s just as biting and prickly, longing and melancholic, fragmented, confusing, and ambiguous."–––Seth Price
"How might aesthetics be rethought at the level of the plastic and gastric forces that swamp human experience from all sides? In the human mouth with its 600 bacterial strains, in the fecal ooze of suburban asphalt, in the controlled hallucination of screen- space...a splenetic, spellbound sort of treatise-fable announces the posthuman destiny of art."–––John Kelsey
"This is a work of hostile inventiveness, a book of gleeful anxiety, of immanence. It is itself a product of the rubbled tautology of culture’s symbolist milkshake, a maniacal light shone down into semiotics’ intestinal dungeon. We insatiable readers bark at it, gulp into it, taking our places on the giddy train of consumed content and excreted meaning – fantastical, murderous, pharmaceutical. Anti-Ligature Rooms punches the mouth, then kisses it better, electrifying a taste for systems at their point of collapse. This is a sequence of writing that knits the mad particles of material information into theory that both wounds and is a piercing act of precision. In our world where image is a meta-event, Contemporary Art Writing Daily is a critical cauldron, with bile and dust its grinning gastric avatars."–––Helen Marten
"I have no idea what an Anti-Ligature Room might be, but the greatest advances in culture, or at least the most thrilling ones to me, are those that basically ask: If I learn the language of whatever this thing is, what will it reveal that at present I’m completely unaware of? Knock, knock. Open up, I’m coming in."–––Mark Leckey
2020, English
Softcover, 310 pages, 13.8 x 21 cm
Published by
Black Cat / New York
$33.00 - Out of stock
"Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know."—New York Times Book Review
The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kathy Acker's debut and the first in this three-novel collection, began as an episodic handmade pamphlet that Acker mailed out to influential writers and artists whose addresses she managed to get her hands on. In the novel, Acker steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer, and mixes in fragments from porn, historical romance, pulp fictions, and The Story of O. Collect with her second novel, the dreamy exploration of desire I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac, and her third, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Portrait of an Eye is dive into the frenzy of sexual wanting, the search for identity, and the invention of a new literary language.
"Now with an introduction by Kate Zambreno contextualizing the resurrection of these three early Acker novels, this new edition of Portrait of an Eye reminds us of all there is still to learn from Kathy Acker, a writer and artist whose work remains radical and uncanny, entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature"—Guardian
2023, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 12.7 x 21.6 cm
Published by
McNally Editions / US
$36.00 - Out of stock
A noir tour-de-force set in the world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers."—The Guardian
It's New York City, 1981, and everyone wants to be at the Emerson Club, from Cindy Crawford to Cindy Adams; from Famous Roger, one-time lion of the talk shows, to Sandy Miller, the “downtown” writer with the tattoos and the leather; from Lauren Hutton to the art star who does the thing with the broken plates. Everyone, that is, except Danny. Danny just works there, waiting tables to put himself through architecture school, turning tricks on the side. And when he’s not on the clock, he’s recording the sexual, aesthetic, and financial transactions that make up his life, in gruesome detail. But even a clever boy like Danny can wind up on the menu. Blinded by love for his fellow rent boy, Chip—as gorgeous as he is reckless—Danny is about to learn that there’s more than one way to turn your body into cash, and that cynicism is no defense when the real scalpels come out. A gimlet-eyed crime novel with an inventively filthy mind, Rent Boy is Gary Indiana at his most outrageous—and his best.
Gary Indiana is the author of the novels Horse Crazy, Gone Tomorrow, Do Everything in the Dark, and the acclaimed “true crime” trilogy made up of Resentment, Three-Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference. He has also published a memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love; a collection of art criticism, Vile Days; and Fire Season: Selected Essays.
1995, English
Softcover, 312 pages, 11.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$34.00 - In stock -
Borrowing its name from the notorious ’60s Ed Sanders magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, the editors have figured a way to rehone its countercultural and frictional stance with style and aplomb. A unique and provocative anthology of lesbian writing, guaranteed to soothe the soulful and savage the soulless.
Edited by Eileen Myles and Liz Kotz.
Contributors:
Tanya Barfield, Dodie Bellamy, Adele Bertei, Lisa Beskin, Rebecca Brown, Kelly Cogswell, Dominique Dibbell, Shannon Ebner, Laura Flanders, Eliza Galaher, Marilyn Hacker, Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Joan Larkin, Myra Mniewski, Honor Moore, Cynthia Nelson, Madeline Olnek, Nancy Redwine, Julie Regan, Annie Reid, Danine Ricereto, Camille Roy, Sapphire Joan Schenkar, Kathy Lou Schultz, Lucy Sexton, Linda Smukler, Pamela Sneed, Christina Sunley, Carmelita Tropicana, Laurie Weeks, Debra Weinstein, Joe Westmoreland, Millie Wilson, Linda Yablonsky.
Eileen Myles, named by BUST magazine “the rock star of modern poetry,” is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Sorry, Tree, and Not Me (Semiotext(e), 1991), and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You (Semiotext(e), 1995). Myles was head of the writing program at University of California, San Diego, from 2002 to 2007, and she has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation.
Liz Kotz teaches in the Art History Department at the University of California, Riverside.
2022, English
limited-edition 3-part zine, 29 x 38 cm
Published by
Red3licte / UK
$65.00 - In stock -
Red3licte is a creative collective whose first project, Collage Couture for a Good Cause, turns existing garments into new ones to benefit Hope for the Young, a London based charity which provides financial support, mentoring and advocacy to young refugees arriving in the UK.
Accompanying a 150-piece fashion collection made from upcycled pieces, is this limited-edition 3-part zine. Featuring contributions from Paloma Elsesser, Sharna Osbourne, Matty Bovan, Thistle Brown, Raine Trainor, Nell Kalonji and Emma Wyman, it is an optimistic look at fashion recontextualising previously loved items through a surreal and fun lens. A soup, a swirl and a true salade of ideas.
All of the purchase price of ReD3licte’s magazine and clothing will go to Hope for the Young.
2017, English
Softcover, 299 pages, 13.5 x 19.5 cm
Published by
Twisted Spoon Press / Prague
$40.00 - In stock -
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanité (for which Jasieński was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.
Translated from the Polish by Soren A. Gauger & Marcin Piekoszewski
Artwork by Cristian Opriș
"In Soren Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s translation, Jasieński’s description of a contagion infecting, paralyzing, and eviscerating a large metropolis is vivid, and now feels darkly prophetic."—Pasha Malla, The New Yorker
1990, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 24 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Magazine House / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1990, To Winter — Tokyo: A City Heading For Death is a beautiful, sentimental book of photographs taken in 1989 by Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki — a "homage to all living and perishing things taken while staring at the shadow of death approaching Mrs. Yōko". Yōko Araki was Nobuyoshi's wife who was hospitalised during the period these photos were taken in 1989 and died of ovarian cancer in January 1990. Araki captures the deep emotions and unconsciousness of the ever-changing city of Tokyo, through its public and most private lives. Also, at this time, buildings are being built in rapid succession and the landscape of Tokyo known to Araki, who grew up in the downtown area, was being lost. "This is a sentimental photo book that shows the death of my wife and the death of the city." From the afterword by Japanese author Toshiharu Itō, "To Winter and its sensuous undulations remind us that we all must join the procession of the dead, that we all are on the train heading for death. The flow of the photographs makes us recall the life of the dead in the landscape of the living. The father raged, the mother laughed, the wife wept.... Here, there, everywhere the dead are coming down. All kinds of thoughts pass through the mind in a frenzied dance. Those moments of life burst into the memory like stars. And all of us, every one, become shadows. Where else but photographs could tell us this? To Winter is perhaps a reminder of this very fact."
Text in English and Japanese.
Very Good copy.