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
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Occult / Esoterica
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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.
2022, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.4 x 17.3 cm
Published by
Transit Books / Oakland
$35.00 - Out of stock
"It is rare to find a writer who can take such candid pleasure in beauty—the beauty of faces, figures, clothing, and cities—while also querying its injustices. To watch Godard's films through Joanna Walsh's eyes is to see envy and appreciation, longing and disavowal, walking hand in hand. This book is a gorgeous complex gesture of criticism."—Merve Emre, author of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
As Joanna Walsh watches the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she considers beauty and desire in life and art. “There’s a resistance, in Godard’s women,” writes Walsh, “that is at the heart of his work (and theirs).” She is captivated by the Paris of his films and the often porous border between the city presented on screen and the one she inhabited herself. With cool precision, and in language that shines with aphoristic wit, Walsh has crafted an exquisitely intimate portrait of the way attention to works of art becomes attention to changes in ourselves. Taut and gem-like, My Life as a Godard Movie is a probing meditation by one of our most observant writers.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer, artist and arts activist. The author of eleven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End Break*up, and Girl Online, she also writes for performance, visual art and digital narrative, often working with programming and AI. She is a UK Arts Foundation fellow, and the recipient of the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland. She founded and ran #readwomen (2014-18), described by the New York Times as “a rallying cry for equal treatment for women writers” and currently runs @noentry_arts.
My Life as a Godard Movie is part of the Undelivered Lectures series.
“Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers.”—Deborah Levy, author of Real Estate
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of seven books, including Hotel, Vertigo, Worlds from the Word's End and Break*up, she has two new projects with Verso, Girl Online and On Screens (coming 2023). She also works as a critic, editor, teacher and arts activist.
1992, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 14 x 20.6 cm
Published by
New Directions / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
“Truly this is the best How To book I’ve read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what’s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous.” – Robert Creeley
Be strong Bernadette
Nobody will ever know
I came here for a reason
Perhaps there is a life here
Of not being afraid of your own heart beating
Do not be afraid of your own heart beating
Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm
Bernadette Mayer (born May 12, 1945) is an American poet, writer, and visual artist associated with both the Language poets and the New York School. Mayer's record-keeping and use of stream-of-consciousness narrative are two trademarks of her writing. In addition to the influence of her textual-visual art and journal-keeping, Mayer's poetry is widely acknowledged as some of the first to speak accurately and honestly about the experience of motherhood. Mayer edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and published 6 issues full of content by artists including Robert Barry, Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, Kenneth Koch, Sol LeWitt, Jackson Mac Low, Harry Mathews, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Hannah Weiner, and Emmett Williams. From 1978 to 1984 Mayer co-edited United Artists books and magazine with her then-partner Lewis Warsh. United Artists published some of the most significant books of Mayer's peers, in addition to several of her own volumes. Mayer taught at the New School for Social Research, where she earned her degree in 1967, and, during the 1970s, she led a number of workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York. Writers who attended or sat in on her workshops included Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, John Giorno, and Anne Waldman. From 1980 to 1984, Mayer served as director of the Poetry Project. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely. In 2016, her career was summarized as an instruction in "how to reject any model of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation."
2014 / 2015, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 13 x 13 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
After a couple of years out of print, Thomas Moore's stone-cold classic "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing.
Thomas Moore's stunning 2014 book "Skeleton Costumes" saw the writer's work stripped down to its most raw and effecting form yet. Now "Skeleton Costumes" returns with a new printing of its 2015 expanded edition which includes an additional 30 poems in the form of a haunting new section titled "No One Will Ever Find You". Skinned of any extraneous flesh, the simplicity of these pieces bely their emotional impact and visceral depth. These short stabs and sharp explosions of verse accumulate to create an unconventional and, at times, harrowing narrative that investigates fear, lust and an abandonment of moral codes.
"In his latest poetry collection, 'Skeleton Costumes', Thomas Moore takes the hideously beautiful and stretches it out into a pockmarked skin that enfolds his reflections on death, loneliness, fear and alienation. Like his lapidary 2011 novella, 'Graves', this new work is mostly populated by desperate youths who find themselves violently exploited by predatory adults or who are determined to end their own lives in grisly and courageous ways. 'Skeleton Costumes' is slighter and much more intense than the earlier work however, comprising 151 evocative haikus — tiny, delicate, and evanescent as eyelashes that appear unannounced on bright white pages."—Diarmuid Hester
2018 / 2021, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$35.00 - Out of stock
In his first book of poems in four years, “When People Die” finds Thomas Moore sharpening his distinctive voice to present a piercing collection of damaged and hyperemotional texts. Structured into three distinct sections, the reader is able to see the shape of the poems change as the form is pulled, tightened and then released into new shapes, with sex, death, paranoia and confusion warped into increasingly sparse and fragile sculptures.
Second printing, larger format on white paper.
2013, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Queer Mojo / US
$33.00 - Out of stock
Told through the eyes of a nameless teenage boy, A Certain Kind of Light sees the narrator attempt to find some kind of cohesion in a life from which he feels increasingly disconnected. As his family, friendships, sexuality and even his taste in music and pornography begin to feel distant from him, his alienation expands. The things that once meant everything to him are stripped of an essence he begins to doubt they ever had. He fixates on a profile of a boy that he finds on the Internet, projecting illusory ideas upon a person that he has never met but feels a profound intimacy with. Feeling more and more lost, he attempts to work out the connection between a disparate set of coincidences, objects and events: a dead, mangled bird, the funeral of his best friend’s father, a horrific experience with LSD, obsessive sexual fantasies and the disintegrating suburban life in which he was raised. Intensely emotional and disorientating, A Certain Kind of Light focuses on the intricacies of confusion.
“Thomas Moore is one of my very favorite contemporary fiction writers. His first novel A Certain Kind of Light is easily the most extraordinary, momentous work yet by this singular and sublime wordsmith.” —Dennis Cooper
2016, English
Softcover, 86 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Queer Mojo / US
$29.00 - Out of stock
Taking place across a mutating set of darkrooms, art galleries, blank apartments and bedrooms; In Their Arms is an acute inspection of loneliness, desire and confusion.
The narrator attempts to simultaneously find himself and become lost completely in a world of sex, internet hook-ups, drugs and pleasure.
Within the arms of nameless and unknown lovers, a strange, often conflicted spirituality is hinted at. In Thomas Moore’s second novel, he uses a deft and purposely layered prose to create a grey area of illusions and smokescreens, where needs and fears entwine, often becoming the same thing.
In Their Arms is a disturbingly seductive assault from one of the most exciting new voices in experimental fiction.
2017, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 21 x 14.85 cm
Published by
kiddiepunk / Paris
$59.00 - Out of stock
A reprint of Kiddiepunk's first-ever anthology, "Kiddiepunk Collected 2011-2015" presents ten out-of-print and sought-after Kiddiepunk publications in one 288-page volume. Included are works by Peter Sotos, Dennis Cooper, Thomas Moore, O.B. De Alessi, Scott Treleaven, Michael Salerno, Ken Baumann and Steven Purtill.
Once again out-of-print, limited stock!
1999, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
The Tears Corporation / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) remains the most inspirational, provocative and challenging figure in world-wide contemporary culture. His trajectory extends from the Surrealist movement, to the Theatre of Cruelty, to the lunatic asylums of France, and finally back to Paris and the most astonishing period of his work.
For the first time, the book gives a full and authoritative account of Artaud's film projects, and his conception of Surrealist cinema. It examines his unique series of drawings of the fragmented human body, begun in the ward of a lunatic asylum and finished in a state of furious liberation. Finally, the book captures Artaud's ultimate experiment with the screaming body in the form of his censored recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God - an experiment which is unprecedented in the history of art, and which ultimately decimates that history.
The Screaming Body is an essential resource and inspiration for those engaged in creating the definitive culture of our time, in film, art, music and writing.
Very Good copy, light wear.
2013, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 23 x 20 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
$55.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition John Knight, Quiet Quality, which took place in two sites, Cabinet Gallery, London, 10 October - 17 November, 2012 and the Frieze Art Fair, London, 11 - 14 October, 2012. Illustrated with texts by Ray McKenzie and Paedro de Llano, plus bibliography.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2018, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 23 x 20 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
Galerie Neu / Berlin
$55.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition John Knight, Bohemian Grove, Galerie Neu / MD 72, Berlin 2013. Illustrated with text by Marta Fontolan and Isabelle Graw, plus bibliography.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2016, English
Softcover (staple-bound, die-cut cover), 32 pages, 20 x 22.8 cm
Ed. of 1000,
Published by
Cabinet Gallery / London
$45.00 - In stock -
Artist's book / catalogue by John Knight and Robert Snowden, published on the occasion of John Knight's Vacant Possession exhibition at Cabinet London in 2016.
"It was an exhibition at Cabinet Gallery in 2016, a formerly unrealized proposal, which caused John Knight and I to descend into his filing cabinets, where not in haste we brought a number of unmade ideas, brilliant and uncirculated as they say of certain coins, nearly all out on the table".—RS
The catalogue text becomes an enquiry into the unrealised projects in the archive of the artist, and a reflection on the nature of the unmade, of memory and material evidence.
John Knight (b. 1945) is a conceptual artist in Los Angeles, California who works in situ. Since the 1960s, Knight has made pioneering works grounded in site-specificity and institutional critique, works that interrogate underlying economic systems.
2022, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$49.00 - Out of stock
Rab-Rab Press announces the third, expanded edition of the publication of Free Jazz Communism, an outstanding book (first published in 2019 by Rab-Rab) actualising Archie Shepp–Bill Dixon Quartet at the 8th World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki 1962. Including archive material and documents, commissioned theoretical and historical texts, and interviews, the book edited by Sezgin Boynik and Taneli Viitahuhta contextualizes politics of free jazz music in light of global decolonisation movements, anti-war activism, structures of racial capitalism, and forms of avant-garde music.
By focusing on concerts of Shepp–Dixon Quartet, leading avant-garde jazz musicians from the US, in the socialist anti-colonial festival in Helsinki, the book is introducing complexities in the usual Cold War stories about the sixties, and pictures politics of jazz as something transcending boundaries of nation-state and capitalist market regulations.
Apart from the theoretical and historical overview by its editors, the book includes testimonies of the collective and international spirit of the 1962 Youth Festival, translated documents from Finnish press, a new interview with Archie Shepp, commissioned text by Jeff Schwartz on the historical context of political engagement of free jazz musicians, and reproduction of three hard-to-find texts by Shepp.
The book is designed by Ott Kagovere.
3rd Edition.
2021, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Rab-Rab Press / Helsinki
$38.00 - In stock -
Punk Suprematism includes the first English translation of theoretical writings on punk, art, socialism, bureaucracy, and nationalism by Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, and Zoja Skušek.
Written in the first half of the eighties, these texts are a unique mixture of punk attitude with theoretical concepts borrowed from Althusser, Lacan, and avant-garde art. Written in a turbulent period of Yugoslav socialism, these texts were trying to understand the political importance of punk as a mass movement of impoverished youth. The conclusions of these interventions had a lasting effect on the theoretical formation of Yugoslav post-Marxism, as well to the organizational forms of the socialist alternative. The book also includes a foreword on the historical context of the eighties and the extensive narrative bibliography of punk related publications in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia written by Sezgin Boynik. In addition to this, it also includes translations of the two editorials to Punk Problemi written by renowned Slovenian theoreticians.
The book is the first in an upcoming series on punk research by Rab-Rab press. The series starts from the idea that punk is a break, and focuses on punk as something completely separated from bourgeois culture.
2002, English
Softcover, 164 pages, 20.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
ReR Megacorp / Surrey
Edition ReR Megacorp / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful book collection of interviews with Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana Maria Avram conducted by Gilles Peyret, Serge Leroy, Jerome Noetinger, Tim Hodgkinson and Costin Cazaban, collected by the mighty Recommended Records Megacorp into this vital reader published in 2002. Includes a catalogue of works and full discography. "This is serious meditation on the nature of making and receiving music, on the state of music in itself and on procedures and essences. This represents an important crystallisation of the thoughts and practices of two of today's unsung but indubitably important composers (unsung because they tread an unfashionable and deeply radical path - in disregarded Romania - and are therefore deemed 'outsiders to the official Western self declared 'mainstream'. From Phenomenology to Sampling, with a perspective that links deeply to a thread of uniquely Romanian orientation going back 80 years and is yet unquestionably contemporary and directed toward the future. A valuable collection."
Iancu Dumitrescu (b. 1944, Sibiu, Romania) is a Romanian composer, conductor, and musicologist. Between the ages of 7 and 22 he pursued conventional musical studies leading to an M.A. in composition at the National Conservatoire in Bucharest and after that period he became interested in electroacoustic music. In 1976, Dumitrescu founded Hyperion Ensemble. In 1990, with his wife Ana-Maria Avram, he formed the record label Edition Modern.
1968,
Silkscreen and offset print (85 x 46 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galleria Alexandre Iolas / Rome
$1000.00 - Out of stock
Stunning, extremely rare early Jannis Kounellis (1936—2017) exhibition poster, published on the occasion of one of his most iconic early solo exhibitions at Galleria Alexandre Iolas, Rome, 1968. A piece of printed history of the forefather of the Arte Povera movement, issued by the legendary Galleria Alexandre Iolas and published by Sergio Tosi Editore. Gorgeous silkscreen and offset print. Since the 1960s Greek—Italian artist Kounellis investigated the alienation inherent in contemporary society, juxtaposing the materials of mass urban and industrial civilization with symbols and values of the pre-industrial world.
A stunning collector's item, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 85 x 46 cm
Very Good condition, well preserved.
Signed offset printed poster (80 x 59 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$900.00 - In stock -
Rare and signed vintage Jannis Kounellis (1936—2017) litho/serigraph print poster. Possibly an Italian museum artist's edition, although we have never seen another like it available. Beautifully large print in offset halftone with over-print of black square and "KOUNELLIS". Hand signed in pencil in the lower right by Jannis Kounellis, Greek Italian artist and forefather of the Arte Povera movement. Since the 1960s Kounellis investigated the alienation inherent in contemporary society, juxtaposing the materials of mass urban and industrial civilization with symbols and values of the pre-industrial world.
A stunning collector's item, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 80 x 59 cm.
Very Good condition, well preserved.
1970—1980,
Offset poster (82 x 48 cm)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galerie Alexandre Iolas / Paris
$220.00 - Out of stock
Gorgeous vintage Man Ray (1890—1976) exhibition poster from the 1970s of the artist at the legendary Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Paris, where the American artist spent much of his life as a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. Issued by the gallery in a beautiful offset print on lovely wove paper featuring Man Ray's "Pêchage"Peaches"), 1969, painted wooden box, artificial peaches and cotton.
A stunning collector's item, ready to frame.
Dimensions : 82 x 48 cm
Very Good condition, well preserved.
2022, English
Softcover, 32 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
After 8 Books / Paris
$35.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
This volume gathers a collection of diary-like texts, posted in 2015 by Evelyn Taocheng Wang on her Facebook page, recording the experiences she had as an undercover transgender masseuse in a massage parlour in Amsterdam. The vignette-like chapters retrace the daily routine at the parlour, incidents with clients and conversations with fellow workers. A series of watercolours by the artist accompanies and illustrates the texts, interpreting her anecdotes in colourful visions. Also includes personal reflections that deftly mix bursts of humour with moments of tension, poetical notes and an acute sense of observation.Through transcriptions of discussions between Chinese immigrant women working together, the author proposes an unconventional portrait of the Chinese diaspora. Inaccuracies of language are an integral part of the narrative.
1994, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 392 pages, 30.5 x 23.5 cm
Edition of 1000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
Walker Art Centre / Minneapolis
$460.00 - In stock -
Very rare, first 1994 limited deluxe hardcover edition catalogue raisonné of American artist Bruce Nauman, published on the occasion of the major 1994-1995 touring retrospective that stunned critics by bringing together the full and largely underrated range of Bruce Naman's work, first held at Nuseo Nacioal Centro de Arte Rena Sofía, Madrid, before travelling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
A most vital reference on the artist's oeuvre, this deluxe hardbound version of the exhibition catalogue was issued in limited edition (1000 copies), almost doubling in page-count to contain the full illustrated catalogue raisonné of over five hundred works created (and in some instances destroyed) by the artist between 1965 and 1993. With provenance and notes for each, the work spans sculptures, films, videos, performances, drawings, neons, holograms, texts, installations, photographic pieces, et al. Profusely illustrated throughout with enlarged exhibition plates, along with a full exhibition checklist, chronology, exhibition history and bibliography, alongside texts by Neal Benezra, Kathy Halbreich, Paul Schimmel, Robert Storr, Laurie Haycock Makela and Kristen McDougal. Edited by Joan Simon and designed by Laurie Haycock Makela and Kristen McDougall. Still the most valuable published reference on Nauman.
Very Good copy only with minimal unobtrusive ex-libris stamps to preliminary pages, not affecting content. No library markings to outside, spine or edges. Very Good throughout with Very Good dust jacket protected under removable mylar wrap.
1997, English
Softcover, 86 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art / Connecticut
$55.00 $30.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition of Bruce Nauman 1985—1996 Drawings, Prints, and Relate Works, published on the occasion of an exhibition held May 4 to Aug. 31, 1997 at Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art February 27-April 19, 1998. Illustrated throughout in colour an b/w with many of Nauman's works accompanied by a prologue by Jill Snyder and with a sixteen-page essay by Ingrid Shaffner, "Circling Oblivion/Bruce Naumann through Samuel Beckett", plus a checklist of all works.
Good—Very Good copy.
1986, English
Softcover, 400 pages, 12.9 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pantheon / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1984 edition of The Foucault Reader, published by Pantheon, New York, edited by Paul Rabinow.
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines rang-ing from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose. The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor. This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enter-prise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.
Good—VG copy.
2000, English
Hardcover, 221 pages, 23 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Harwood Academic Publishers / UK
$180.00 - Out of stock
Impossibly rare, first edition of this first extensive study in English of the Greek composer Jani Christou (1926—1970), Anna M. Lucciano presents his exceptionally striking personality, that of a highly original composer who made an essential contribution to new music. Anna M. Lucciano has long studied the private archives of Jani Christou. She is a musicologist specializing in Greek contemporary music and is Professor of the History of Music, Musical Aesthetics and Analysis at the Conservatoire d'Aix-en Provence.
"Lucciaino provides important insights into the music of a Greek composer whose works are not widely known or performed at the current time....These texts contribute greatly toward the understanding not only of the composer's compositional techniques but also his artistic temperament....Uniquely and effectively organized....Recommended for all serious collections of 20th-century music."—CHOICE
Jani Christou was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1926 and died in a car accident in Athens, Greece in 1970. In 1945 he went to England to study at Cambridge, where he read philosophy with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In 1948 he gained an MA in philosophy. During this period Christou studied composition privately with H. F. Redlich, and in 1949 he travelled to Rome to study orchestration with F. Lavagnino. Later in Zurich he attended lectures in psychology with Carl Jung. In 1951 he returned to Alexandria where he married Theresia Horemi. Already at an early age his works displayed an inclination towards the mystical and the ecstatic. This tendency culminated during his last years (1965-1970) producing, next to incidental music for the staging of ancient Greek dramas, his works Mysterion, Praxis for 12, The Strychnine Lady, Enantiodromia, Anaparastasis I & Anaparastasis III and Epicycle that share a strong ritual feel, an exploration of primeval acts and of the state of trance plus an urge to unleash powers and behaviours that go beyond the self (a state Christou had named metapraxis).
Very Good—Fine copy, almost As New, light shelf wear to boards.
1999, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 11 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
Purple Books / Paris
Association Belle Haleine / Paris
$250.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful first printing of this long out-of-print artist book by Mark Borthwick, published in 1999 by Association Belle Haleine and Purple Books in Paris. An intimate, pocket-sized volume that collects together a gorgeous selection of Mark Borthwick's personal and fashion photographs. Mark Borthwick is a British photographer, film-maker and musician now living in Brooklyn, New York. He is among the generation of photographers who in the ’90s broke through the conventions of fashion photography, his distinct style being very light, intuitive and personal. He worked regularly shooting for Purple magazine, Vogue, and collaborated closely with Maison Martin Margiela in the 1990's. This book is in As New condition. Now very collectable.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 Pages, 22.8 x 15.2 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$72.00 - In stock -
Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.
“This is a landmark study that will change the terms in which Goya’s art will henceforth be understood.”—Peter de Bolla
“One doesn’t need to be a Frankfurt School buff to acknowledge that Anthony Cascardi has written the most convincing account of Goya’s work—all of Goya, the religious frescoes, the court paintings, and the tapestry cartoons as well as the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, and the black paintings in the Quinta del Sordo—using the lens of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment. An enlightening study indeed, which stops short of wanting to illuminate what in Goya should remain steeped in darkness.” —Thierry de Duve, Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History, Hunter College
“In this deeply reflective and thorough study, Cascardi blows the lid off standard accounts of Goya’s extraordinary art, demonstrating that both the ‘painter of light’ and the ‘painter of darkness’ theses fall way short of the artist’s immersion in the culture of his time. In chapter after chapter, Cascardi argues that Goya was involved in a critique of the world he lived in—its politics, religious belief, ethics, history—and, at the same time, of the means of representation at his disposal. This is a landmark study that will change the terms in which Goya’s art will henceforth be understood.” —Peter de Bolla, Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics, University of Cambridge