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.
2020, English
Softcover, 332 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Mandrake / Oxford
$38.00 - Out of stock
2020 Edition features fascinating new revelations, as well as over a dozen rare and new images.
In the first-ever biography written about her, Wormwood Star traces the extraordinary life of the enigmatic artist Marjorie Cameron, one of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the American Underground art world and film scene.
Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in 1922, Cameron's uniqueness and talent as a natural-born artist was evident to those around her early on in life. During World War 2 she served in the Women's Navy and worked in Washington as an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But it was after the War that her life really took off when she met her husband Jack Parsons. By day Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist, but by night he was Master of the Agape Lodge, a fraternal magickal order, whose head was the most famous magus of the 20th century... Aleister Crowley.
Gradually, over the course of their marriage, Parsons initiated Cameron into the occult sciences, and the biography offers a fresh perspective on her role in the infamous Babalon Working magick rituals Parsons conducted with the future founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard. Following Parsons death in 1952 from a chemical explosion, Cameron inherited her husband's magickal mantle and embarked on a lifelong spiritual quest, a journey reflected in the otherworldly images she depicted, many of them drawn from the Elemental Kingdom and astral plane.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cameron became a celebrated personality in California's underground art world and film scene. In 1954 she starred in Kenneth Anger's visual masterwork, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, stealing the show from her co-star Anais Nin. The budding filmmaker Curtis Harrington was so taken with Cameron, he made a film study dedicated to her artwork entitled The Wormwood Star. He then brought Cameron's powerful and mysterious presence to bear on his evocative noir thriller, Night Tide, casting her alongside a young Dennis Hopper.
Cameron was an inspirational figure to the many artists and poets that congregated around Wallace Berman's Semina scene, and in 1957 Berman's show at the Ferus Gallery was shut down by LA's vice squad, due to the sexually charged nature of one of her drawings. Undaunted, she continued to carve a unique and brilliant path as an artist.
A retrospective of Cameron's work, entitled The Pearl of Reprisal, was held at LA's Barnsdall Art Park in 1989, and after her death, some of her most admired pieces were included in the Reflections of a New Aeon Exhibition at the Eleven Seven Gallery in Long Beach, California. Cameron's famous Peyote Vision drawing made its way into the Beat Culture and the New America retrospective held at the Whitney Museum in 1995. And in 2006, a profile of her work was featured in the critically lauded Semina Culture Exhibition. The following year an exhibition of her sketches and drawings was held at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York.
With so much of her life and work shrouded in mystery, Wormwood Star sheds new light on this most remarkable artist and elusive occult icon.
2003, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 158 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Apple Comics / Tokyo
$35.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this hardcore hentai collection from the prolific artist Shizuki Shinra, includes the title comic story Slave's Blood, along with Trick of Temptation, Maid Window, Wet Gym Clothes, Preparation fro Rape, Daughter Slave, Torture and Rape Interrogation, Breeding Outpatient, Vicarious Training, Slave Lineage, and Discipline. Obviously packed full of delirious BDSM dom/sub fetish scenarios. Published in 2003. Mature readers.
As New with As New dust jacket.
2003, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 158 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Apple Comics / Tokyo
$35.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this hardcore hentai collection from the prolific artist Shizuki Shinra, includes the title comic story My mother is a Bitch, along with Forbidden Gambling, Hyena's Prey, Collared Secretary, Training period, Into the Pitch-black Darkness, Bad Nightmare, Day of The Nurses, How to Raise a Pet Dog, and After-school Classes. Obviously packed full of delirious BDSM dom/sub fetish scenarios. Published in 2003. Mature readers.
As New with As New dust jacket.
1997, English / Dutch
Softcover, 500 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
SUN / Nijmegen
$45.00 - Out of stock
First, only edition of Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics / Voorbij ethiek en esthetiek, a 500 page book based on the experiences during the formation, realization and evaluation of the exhibition: I + the Other. Art and the Human Condition, in the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam 1994. Edited by Ine Gevers and Jeanne Van Heeswijk.
"Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics has been compiled in the knowledge that it is impossible to avoid a history in which the meaning of ethics and aesthetics has already been fixed. Rooted in tradition, these notions determine the space and scope of contemporary practices such as fine art, exhibition-making and theory. Whenever an attempt is made to cross the dividing lines, for instance in trying to connect art with life, it becomes immediately apparent how unproductive it is to continue to com-ply with structures that are no longer functional in a technology- and information-based, postmodern society. This is particularly true when it becomes clear that notions such as ethics and aesthetics, which are basically idealistic, often have a controlling and, in this sense, limiting function. With this book we want to draw attention to the sometimes subtle, though often radical attempts to escape from the way modernity has divided the world into manageable and relatively safe specializations. The continuing institutionalization, 'museification' and 'mediaization' of our society provides an example. They seem to pull the above-mentioned obstructions even sharper into focus." — from book introduction
With contributions by Oscar van Alphen, Ute Meta Bauer, Yvonne P. Doderer, Marianne Brouwer, Martin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Simon Critchley, Helmut Draxler, Jean Fisher, Avital Geva, Ine Gevers, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Tijs Goldschmidt, Roy Villevoye, Multiple Autorenschaft, Jouke Kleerebezem, Viktor Misiano, Everlyn Nicodemus, Sadie Plant, Martha Rosler, Rob Schroder, Jorinde Seijdel, Barbara Steiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Ross Sinclair, and more.
Good copy with some cover wear.
2005, English / German
Softcover, 184 pages, 15.2 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$260.00 - In stock -
As new copy of the out-of-print and fantastic 2005 artist book Alien Hybrid Creatures by German painter Michael Krebber.
Alien Hybrid Creatures addresses, amongst other things, the historical figure of the dandy--and among the dandies implicated is the spawning sea anemone on the cover. It functions as a reading list for the Seminar "Dandyism I/II (Düsseldorf Academy of Art) 2001/2002, with additional material from Krebber's seminar "Geniuses and Dandies/Historical and Theoretical Reflections" 2001. Such material includes the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Bernhard Willhelm, Robert Bresson, Kai Althoff, Charles Baudelaire, Odilion Redon, Merlin Carpenter, Devince, Josephine Pryde, Kenneth Anger, Albert Camus, Cosmia Von Bonin, Jack Smith, John Waters, Susan Sontag, Russ Meyers, Marcel Broodthaers, and French & Saunders (amongst many more).
Alien Hybrid Creatures was published on the occasion of Michael Krebber's legendary lecture "Puberty in Painting", delivered in the context of Renate Goldmann's seminar at the Institute of Art History at the University of Cologne in 2003.
Essay by Oswald Wiener.
Designed by Markus Ziegler in cooperation with Yvonne Quirmbach.
Now a very scarce collector's item. Some light shelf wear only.
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 20.9 x 15 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
The Cute tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, The Cute explores the ramifications of an aesthetic 'of' or 'about' minorness - or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening - on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology is the first of its kind to show how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, and in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but reshape their own artistic practices.
Artists surveyed include Peggy Ahwesh, Cosima Von Bonin, Nayland Blake, Paul Chan, Henry Darger, Adrian Howells, Juliana Huxtable, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dean Kenning, Wyndham Lewis, Jeff Koons, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Tala Madani, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Charlemagne Palestine, Mika Rottenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo Nara
Writers include Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Ian Bogost, Lauren Berlant, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Bridget Minamore, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, John Roberts, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa
is the author of Ugly Feelings (Harvard, 2005), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard, 2012), and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Belknap/Harvard, 2020). She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
2022, English / French
Softocver, 160 pages, 25.5 x 18 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$57.00 - Out of stock
Published on occasion of Thea Djordjadze's first exhibition in a museum in France at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne (MAMC+), 5 Feb – 15 May 2022. Entitled ‘Remember and Witness’ (‘Se souvenir et témoigner’ in French), this eponymous catalogue unveils materials, archives and writings from the artist in the first part, while the second combines exhibition views from the Gropius Bau in Berlin and MAMC+ to apprehend her sense of installation and composition in two opposite spaces. An interview with the artist by MAMC+ director, Aurélie Voltz, and an essay by the art historian, Thomas Boutoux, question her practice, influences and works.
English and French text.
1963, German
Hardcover (clothbound), 216 pages, 24.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft / Stuttgart
$25.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1963, lavishly illustrated book of 100 Treasures from museums around the world, spanning art history, antiquity, archaeology, handicrafts, biology, architecture, with text by Dr. Traudl Seifert, edited by J.E. Schuler. Includes the throne of Tutankhamun, Order of the Golden Fleece, Venus von Milo, Nike von Samothrake, Ming dynasty vase, Arabian celestial globe, the Taj Mahal, Meißner porcelain, Louis XIV pistols, Renaissance Venetian cabinet, statue of Uta von Naumburg, Venus von Milo, Altar of Verdun, Nike von Samothrake, The Tabatière rifle, the bust of Nefertiti, The lady and the Unicorn
... the work of Michelangelo, Veit Stoss, Aristide Maillol, Tilman Riemenschneider, Albrecht Dürer, and many more.
Good copy with general wear and rubbing to linen boards.
2020, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 13.7 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$48.00 - Out of stock
A collection of writings on art by Barry Schwabsky.
"Many consider Barry Schwabsky to be the critic on painting today, even if he does write copiously on other art forms," write editors Rob Colvin and Sherman Sam in their foreword to this selection of Schwabsky's writings. Written since the turn of the millennium, the texts in The Oberver Effect include meditations on the broader context of painting today alongside reflections on such well-known American painters as Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, and Dana Schutz, as well as practitioners from Europe and beyond—Bernard Frize, Tal R, and Ha Chonghyun among them. As Colvin and Sam point out, the book "documents a dialogue between abstraction and the image" in which "images serve less to represent their described subject than to articulate the sort of painting each one desires to be."
2022, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 17 x 13 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$54.00 - Out of stock
A compilation of house, techno, trance and jungle audio cassettes from the 90s rave era.
Limited edition.
2022, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$30.00 - Out of stock
An archive of 8-bits porn video games loading screens from 1980 to 2020.
Limited edition.
2022, English
Softcover, 236 pages, 13 x 17 cm
Published by
Masala Noir / Paris
$45.00 - Out of stock
2022, English
Softcover, 448 pages, 20.5 x 14.5 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$59.00 - Out of stock
In these essays and conversations, Daniel Birnbaum explores what conceptual artist Daniel Buren referred to as the ‘frames of art’. As a director of institutions, Birnbaum has organized events inside and outside some of the most significant art institutions in Europe, including the Venice Biennale, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, Moderna Museet and the Centre Pompidou. Like few other curators he has pushed the boundaries of the studio, the exhibition, and the museum in an attempt to find new ways to ‘frame’ art. This volume contains examples of curatorial approaches to education, exhibition-making and the presentation of collections.
Daniel Birnbaum, born 1963 in Stockholm, is a Swedish art curator and an art critic.
2022, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 27.5 x 20.8 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$62.00 - In stock -
An artist's book of fungal portraiture.
Dutch artist Magali Reus’ (b. 1981) new photographic series, Knaves documents an array of mushrooms in headshot-like close up. As though in an al fresco portrait studio, the fungi are posed against backdrops of colourful vintage t-shirts – synthetic intrusions into the natural landscape. This beautifully designed artist book sets images from the series within the sepia-tinted pages of a 1990s telephone directory for Park Cities – an area of Dallas whose name acts as shorthand for the way in which urban design domesticates nature for ease of human use. Novelist, Kathryn Scanlan’s text zooms in on a series of fleeting quotidian dramas, mobilising a cast of evocatively named characters that, like Reus’ fungal protagonists, bloom and then disappear.
2021, English / German
Hardcover, 64 pages, 24 x 30 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen / München
$68.00 - In stock -
Catalogue published to accompany Michael E. Smith’s exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlungen, München, September 2—October 24, 2021.
Michael E. Smith makes sculptures out of cast-offs, waste and other residues of our consumer society. He assembles and manipulates this found material in an unusual way. He isolates objects, makes changes to their form and seeks out the limits of their imaginative power. His presentations are characterised by an intense yet sparse choreography of the exhibition space.
Extensively illustrated in colour throughout.
1961, English
Softcover, 220 pages, 20 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Penguin Books / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Kafka's short fiction collection, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, first published in English together in 1961. Includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, first published 1916, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation, along with The Great Wall of China (1931), Investigations of a Dog (1931), The Burrow (1931), In the Penal Settlement (1919), The Giant Mole (1931). UK edition first printed in 1961, this edition ?, with Max Ernst cover artwork.
Franz Kafka (1883—1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the short story "The Metamorphosis" and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe situations like those found in his writing.
Very Good copy with some light creasing to cover/light wear.
1973, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 30 x 32 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Los Angeles County Museum of Art / Los Angeles
Praeger Publishers Inc. / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
Large format paperback catalogue beautifully designed by Louis Danziger and produced for an exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 27-Aug. 27, 1972. This publication explores in pictures and words the beautiful, intricate blankets of the Navajo. Beginning with the earliest surviving examples through to the classical period of the 1880's, this lavishly illustrated book (in colour and b/w), includes all technical and material details of each exhibited piece, alongside history and stylistic developments. Published by Praeger Publishers Inc. in New York, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts.
A gorgeously designed publication, for anyone interested in the history of tapestry and textiles.
Louis Danziger (born November 17, 1923) is an American graphic designer and design educator. He is most strongly associated with the late modern movement in graphic design, and with a community of designers from various disciplines working in Southern California in the mid-twentieth century. He is noted for his iconoclastic approach to design, and for introducing the principles of European constructivism to the American advertising vernacular. In 1998, Danziger was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal for “standards of excellence over a lifetime of work.”
Very Good copy with light tanning to covers/spine.
1980, Japanese
Softcover, 200 pages, 28 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Futabasha / Tokyo
$45.00 - Out of stock
Rare issue of Japanese "men's magazine" Chat Noir, published in Shinjuku in 1980. Cover to cover full-colour female nude photography from Paris, around 200 pages of saturated colour, skin, and textiles, almost no text or advertising. Each model chapter has many pages, and there are about 30 models featured. Possibly these are all the photo features collected from a French magazine published in 1980?
Good copy with some waving to page edges, marking to cover.
1997, English
Softcover (foiled faux leather w. CD), 374 pages, 22 x 27.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
St. Martin's Press / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition of Post Punk Diary, 1980-1982, by George Gimarc; a day-by-day, eyewitness account of the underground music scene. A brilliant reference that documents the record releases from the major to the obscure and other events that shaped this often misunderstood rock music era — over three years/900 bands/3,300 recordings. Millions of Dead Cops, Orange Juice, The Fall, Nurse with Wound, Marine Girls, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Discharge, Go Go's, D.A.F., Iggy Pop, G.B.H., Death in June, Legendary Pink Dots, Crass, S.P.K., Psychic TV, Xmal Deutchland, Public Image Limited, Durutti Column, The Germs, Anti-Pasti, Pere Ubu, Cocteau Twins, XTC, Bow Wow Wow, Exploited, Swell Maps, Tuxedomoon, Adam Ant, Gang of Four, The Bush Tetras, The Saints, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Black Flag, Minutemen, Flying Lizards, The Go-Betweens, Hüsker Dü, Cabaret Voltaire, The Damned, Family Fodder, Alien Sex Fiend, Killing Joke, Raincoats, Lydia Lunch, Minor Threat....... you get the idea, plus hundreds more...
This copy with original accompanying compilation CD present, featuring music by many of the groups in the book: The Bangles, Psychedelic Furs, Gang Of Four, Exploited, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Oingo Boingo, Eyeless In Gaza, U2, Stray Cats, Meteors, Go Gos, Ramones, Squeeze, Comsat Angels, Devo, O.M.D., Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, 4 Skins, The Alarm, Pete Shelley, The Buzzcocks, Peter & The Test Tube Babies, The Church, Lords Of The New Church, Attila The Stockbroker, XTC, The Damned, Everything But The Girl, Birthday Party, R.E.M., Paul Weller, The Cure, Chameleons, Southern Death Cult, Elvis Costello, The Teardrop Explodes....
George Douglas Gimarc is an American disc jockey, record and radio program producer and author based in Texas and is in the Texas Radio Hall of Fame. He is known for his extensive and authoritative knowledge about the classic rock radio format, recorded music in general, and specifically the era of punk rock.
Very Good with some light wear/creasing. Includes the often missing CD, this copy unplayed and still sealed.
1981, Japanese
Softcover, 86 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
College Press / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
Published in Tokyo by College Press in 1981, this odd adult magazine is aimed at assisting young Japanese men in finding their ideal young woman. Only Japan, only 1981. Heavily illustrated throughout in colour and b/w, this glossy erotic mag lampoons a school exercise book, providing photographic analysis of female physical attributes, illustrated sex puzzles, and comic questionnaires that would more likely encourage inceldom. Superficial education aside, it is really just an excuse to compile a magazine of Western female nudes, which makes it all the more confusing.
Very Good copy.
1976, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 200 pages, 21 x 14.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Haga Bookstore / Japan
$80.00 $20.00 - Out of stock
The wonderful, very rare first 1976 edition Japanese photo-book / "Cine Album" devoted entirely to Jack Nicholson. Long out-of-print, this amazing volume documents Jack's films up to the time of printing in 1976, from his feature debut The Cry Baby Killer (1958), through Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971),The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), The Passanger (1975)..... and so many more. Countless stills and behind the scenes shots from all the films alongside visual documentation of all of the film poster artwork, Jack's magazine cover appearances, award ceremonies, full filmography, extensive texts on each film and essay by editor Yuji Konna. Texts in Japanese. An absolute must for any fan or collector of Jack Nicholson, exploding with hundreds of images. Even has excellent endpapers tiled with Jack's cover for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, and the book cover beneath the dust jacket is even better than the jacket itself. Published by the great Haga Bookstore imprint.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket.
1986, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
ICA / Boston
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of this long out-of-print seminal catalogue published by MIT Press on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the ICA Boston in 1986, curated by Yve-Alain Bois and Elisabeth Sussman.
The six illustrated essays by some of today's most noted art historians and critics which comprise Endgame provide the first comprehensive discussion of reference in contemporary art and the commodification of the art object. The interrrelated concerns of painters Sherry Levine, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe — who ironically adapt the visual strategies of earlier modern artists—and those of sculptors Jon Kessler, General Idea, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, and Haim Steinbach—who use consumer objects and their mode of representation as the raw material of their sculpture—are the sources of the authors' varied and acute arguments on this theme of the political and social economy of the image.
Contents: The return of Hank Herron / by Thomas Crow; Painting, the task of mourning / by Yve-Alain Bois; The last picture show / by Elisabeth Sussman; Modern leisure / by David Joselit; The future of an illusion, or, The contemporary artist as cargo cultist / by Hal Foster; Notes on new media theater / by Bob Riley. Includes an exhibition checklist. Preface by David A. Ross
Good copy, with some tanning to cover, light wear/marking.
1962, German
Softcover, 190 pages, 21 x 16.8 cm
Numbered ed. 0688/2000,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Gerhardt Verlag / Berlin
$400.00 - Out of stock
Very scarce first numbered edition of Bellmer's "Die Puppe", published by Gerhardt Verlag in Berlin in 1962. German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was one of the most subversive artists associated with Surrealism, famous--notorious, even--for his erotic engravings, objects and photographs. This collectable first edition (numbered of 2000 copies) of Die Puppe (The Doll) comprises a series of Bellmer's hand-painted photographs in the form of 10 monochrome and 15 coloured tipped-in plates accompanying his remarkable texts, here published for the first time. Bellmer's hand-coloured photographs subsequently acquired an iconic status as perhaps the purest exemplification of the Surrealist ideal of "convulsive beauty." Bellmer weaves a remarkably disparate set of concepts and intuitions--from fields as diverse as mathematics, morphology, optics and psychology--into a theory of eroticism that provides a totally unexpected rationale for his uncompromising art. His ideas are, in the words of poet Joë Bousquet, a "scandal to reason." The book also contains many b/w drawings by Bellmer along with prose poems by Paul Eluard. A book like no other!
Fine, perfectly preserved copy of this stunning edition with the die-cut decal cover.
2022, English
Softcover, 68 pages, 30 x 21 cm
Published by
Bill / Brussels
$68.00 - Out of stock
‘Cut a Door in the Wolf’ is an exhibition in the form of a single, site-specific artwork by Jason Dodge. In exploring systems made up of organic and inorganic matter, he is interested in the refuse that humans shed every day: micro-and macro-landscapes made up of the familiar and often discarded things that result from our individual and collective habits. Dodge recognises this not as a singular artistic process, but rather as a shared landscape in which cause and effect are circular phenomena that belong to everyone. He therefore investigates the potential of his audience as producers of meaning. This publication documents the work through a series of photographs.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition by Jason Dodge at MACRO Museum for Contemporary Art of Rome. Photography Adrianna Glaviano. Book design Julie Peeters.