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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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.
1977, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 19.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Quartet Books / London
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1977 edition of this essential masterpiece of jazz history by renowned photographer and music historian, Val Wilmer.
In this classic account of the new black music of the 1960s and 70s, celebrated photographer and jazz historian Val Wilmer tells the story of how a generation of revolutionary musicians established black music as the true vanguard of American culture.
Placing the achievements of African-American artists such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra in their broader political and social context, Wilmer evokes an era of extraordinary innovation and experimentation that continues to inspire musicians today.
As vital now as when it was first published in 1977, As Serious As Your Life is the essential story of one of the most dynamic musical movements of the twentieth century.
About the author
Val Wilmer is an internationally acclaimed photographer, journalist, author and black music historian who has been documenting African-American music since 1959. In that time she has interviewed and photographed almost every significant figure in post-war jazz, blues and R&B, from Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler via Muddy Waters and Aretha Franklin. As a photographer, her work features in the permanent collections of the British Library, the V&A Museum and the National Portrait Gallery; as a writer and historian, she has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary Of National Biography and the New Grove Dictionary Of Jazz. She lives in London.
Good copy, solid binding.
2019, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 11 x 16 cm
Published by
Ignota / UK
$15.00 - Out of stock
Introduction by Donna J. Haraway
Illustrated by Lee Bul
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew. With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.
2020, English
Softcover, 118 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Weirdpunk Books / US
$30.00 - Out of stock
Three Women, One Battle
A world gone mad. Cities abandoned. Dreams invade waking minds. An invisible threat lures those who oppose its otherworldly violence to become acolytes of a nameless cult. As a teenage girl struggles for autonomy, a female weapons director in a secret research facility develops a living neuro-cognitive device that explodes into self-awareness. Discovering their hidden emotional bonds, all three unveil a common enemy through dissonant realities that intertwine in a cosmic battle across hallucinatory dreamscapes.
Time is the winning predator, and every moment spirals deeper into the heart of the beast.
"I'm awestruck by Joanna Koch's nonstop spellbinding, almost paralyzingly inventive and yet propulsive, ultra-focused prose. The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a truly amazing find."—Dennis Cooper (The Marbled Swarm, The Sluts)
"Koch's latest novella is what might have happened if Robert W. Chambers had been a surrealist with a penchant for body horror. A strange trip to Carcosa offered in thickly evocative language, The Wingspan of Severed Hands is a highly original hallucination."—Brian Evenson (Song For the Unraveling of the World, A Collapse of Horses)
"Joanna Koch is a stunning and talented writer, and their new book, The Wingspan of Severed Hands, is a horror story that opens new vistas in the genre."—Jack Zipes (Literature and Literary Theory: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion)
2010, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 21.6 x 15.2 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$38.00 - Out of stock
Derek Jarman’s stunning account of his life and art
From his sexual awakening in postwar England to life in the sixties and beyond, Derek Jarman tells his life story with the in-your-face immediacy that became his trademark style in his films and writing. Accompanied by photographs of Jarman, his friends, lovers, and inspirations, the candid accounts in Dancing Ledge provide intimate and vivid glimpses into his life and times.
The clarity with which Derek Jarman offered up his life and the living of it, particularly since the epiphany—I can call it nothing less—of his illness was a genius stroke, not only of provocation, but of grace.—Tilda Swinton
2009, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$39.00 - Out of stock
This text is the iconoclastic and controversial filmmaker Derek Jarman's candid journals from 1989 to 1990. In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.
Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living.
'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' — Hans Ulrich Obrist
2020, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 21 x 13 cm
Published by
Apocalypse Party / Philadelphia
$30.00 - Out of stock
Gary J. Shipley's fascinating mixture of horror, apocalypse, and experimental theory-fiction.
"Shipley's Terminal Park pounds fiction into entirely new shapes. Disintegrating and blissful. Highly Recommend."—Tony Burgess, author of Pontypool Changes Everything
"Gary J. Shipley's writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy."—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
"The world is a void and there are no more prophets left to serve. There is still vision, however, and Shipley's is one we might all surrender to."—Travis Jeppesen, author of The Suiciders
"Shipley's writing is important because it's a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. It's an unforgettable experience."—3: AM Magazine
Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.
2015, English
Softcover, 96 pages. 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Fordham University Press / New York
$38.00 - Out of stock
"Like Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Hervé Guibert's hospitalization diary speaks with moonlit clarity about the threshold between life and death; with this heartbreaking and exemplary book Guibert has earned literary immortality."—Wayne Koestenbaum, Author and Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY
By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed.
This new edition includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the quotidian aspects of terminal illness.
Translated by Clara Orban
Afterword by Todd Meyers
Introduction by David Caron
Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was a French journalist and photographer before becoming a prominent literary figure in the early 1980s. He published nearly two dozen works in his lifetime, several of which deal with HIV/AIDS.
David Caron is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV.
Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.
Clara Orban is Professor and Chair of French and Italian at DePaul University.
2014, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 52 x 80 cm
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$44.00 - Out of stock
Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays - meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems - and not a single image. Herve Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert's parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert's particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues-answers, or even questions-about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives.
Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, "I don't even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl." In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how - in writing - he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert's Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful - a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.
HERVÉ GUIBERT (1955-1991) was a French writer and photographer. A critic for Le Monde, he was the author of some thirty books, most notably To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which presents an intimate portrait of Michel Foucault and played a significant role in changing public attitudes in France towards AIDS.
2004, English
Softcover, 219 pages, 14 x 21.6 cm
Published by
FC2 / US
The University of Alabama Press / Alabama
$42.00 - Out of stock
The 2004 definitive edition of a classic and controversial novel. First written in 1969 and completed days before the Stonewall riots in New York, Hogg is one of America’s most famous “unpublishable” novels. It recounts three horrifically violent days in the life of truck driver and rapist-for-hire, Franklin Hargus. Narrated by his young boy accomplice, the novel portrays a descent into unimaginable depravity, a hell comprised of the filth and brutality civilization exists to forget. What transforms this nightmare into literature is Delany’s refusal, faced with our moral anxieties, to mutilate his appalling creation. Hogg’s monsters wear our faces, possessing the human complexities of intense loyalty, perverse admiration, and an integrity so pure that pity becomes betrayal. No reader can be prepared for such a story. It is a stunning achievement.
"Hogg is a truly significant book. It is distasteful, raw, and upsetting; it also treats some of the sexual taboos that Americans do not want addressed in either art or politics. Hogg is an artistic triumph, as well as a political one." — John O'Brien, Dalkey Archive Press
"There’s no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit." — Norman Mailer
"Hogg is explicitly and violently pornographic. Delany takes his readers to the limit of readability – but as long as you keep reading, you repeatedly face up to some of the darkest and most carefully hidden parts of your own desire." — Dennis Cooper
"Hogg is a truly experimental novel and a minimalist testing of a single hypothesis. It wants to know to what limits appetite can suffuse consciousness before that consciousness stops being human." — Bruce Benderson
Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942), nicknamed "Chip", is an award-winning American science-fiction novelist and critic whose highly imaginative works address sexual, racial, and social issues, heroic quests, and the nature of language. Delany was the first African American writer to achieve note through commercial American science fiction. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany, a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature, as one of the hundred men and women who have most changed our concept of gayness in the last century. Delany’s books include Atlantis: Three Tales (Wesleyan University Press), Dhalgren (Vintage Books), as well as the best-selling Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York University Press).
1977, French
Hardcover (gilt-blocked, decorated clothbound w. gold dust jacket), 294 pages, 22 x 31 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Draeger / Paris
$220.00 - In stock -
First French edition of this extravagant, lavishly illustrated book of wines and famous vineyards, created by Dalí in honor of his wife Gala and published in 1977 by Draeger, Paris. The perfect, equally surreal and sensual viticulture follow-up companion to Dalí's best-selling cookbook, Les dîners de Gala. A Dalínian take on pleasures of the grape and a coveted collectible, the book sets out to organize wines “according to the sensations they create in our very depths.” Through eclectic metrics like production method, weight, and color, the book presents wines of the world in such innovative, Dalíesque groupings as “Wines of Frivolity,” “Wines of the Impossible,” and “Wines of Light.”
Bursting with imagery, the book features more than 140 illustrations by Dalí. Many of these are appropriated artworks, including various classical nudes, all of them reconstructed with suitably Surrealist, provocative touches, like Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus, one of Dalí’s favorite points of reference over the decades. Dalí also included what is now considered one of the greatest works from his late “Nuclear Mystic” phase, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which sets the iconic biblical scene in a translucent dodecahedron-shaped space before a Catalonian coastal landscape. Dalí was by this stage a devout Catholic, simultaneously captivated by science, optical illusion, and the atomic age.
The first section is dedicated to “Ten Divine Dalí Wines,” an overview of 10 important wine-growing regions, while the second develops Dalí’s revolutionary ordering of wine by emotional experience, instead of by geography or variety. Rather than any prescriptive classification, it’s a flamboyant, free-flowing manifesto in favor of taste and feeling, as much a multisensory treat as a full-bodied document of Dalí’s late-stage oeuvre, in which the artist both reflected on formative influences and refined his own cultural legacy. Texts in French by Dalí, Max Gerard, Louis Orizet.
Very Good copy in beautiful gold dust jacket, only light wear.
1976, English
Softcover, 432 pages,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Vision / London
$55.00 - In stock -
First softcover edition of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, published by Vision in London in 1976. Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
This early autobiography, first published in 1942, which takes him through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer. As a whole, he ... communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray. Dalí's flamboyant self-portrait begins with his earliest recollections and ends at the pinnacle of his earliest successes. His tantalizing chapter titles and headnotes—among them Intra-Uterine Memories, Apprenticeship to Glory, Permanent Expulsion from the School of Fine Arts, Dandyism and Prison, I am Disowned by my Family, My Participation and my Position in the Surrealist Revolution, and Discovery of the Apparatus for Photographing Thought—only hint at the compelling revelations to come.
Here are fascinating glimpses of the brilliant, ambitious, and relentlessly self-promoting artist who designed theater sets, shop interiors, and jewellery as readily as he made surrealistic paintings and films. Here is the mind that could envision and create with great technical virtuosity images of serene Raphaelesque beauty one moment and nightmarish landscapes of soft watches, burning giraffes, and fly-covered carcasses the next. For anyone interested in twentieth-century art and one of its most gifted and charismatic figures, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí is essential reading.
Illustrated with photographs of Dalí and his works, and scores of Dalí drawings and sketches. Translated by Haakon M. Chevalier; introduction by Robert Melville.
Good copy, creasing to covers, light general wear.
2007, English
Hardback (w. dust jacket), 242 pages, 21 x 28 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$45.00 - In stock -
As a very young artist in training at the academy in Madrid, Salvador Dalí worked in two distinct modes a highly detailed naturalism (under the influence of the return to order”) and a more avant-garde, cubist-derived style that owed much to Picasso (whom Dalí visited in Paris in 1926). Then, in 1927, the twenty-three-year-old artist, influenced by André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 and the paintings of such artists as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy, began to move towards Surrealism. In the spring of 1929, to coincide with the shooting of Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, Dalí organized his first Paris exhibition, thereby gaining acclaim as a full member of the surrealist movement.
This book offers a wealth of new material about Dalí’s formative years as a young artist in Spain and first years in Paris. Fèlix Fanés, one of the most knowledgeable Dalí scholars in the world, transforms perceptions of the artist and shows how the stage was set for the emergence of Dalí’s mature artistic personality. With a fresh and detailed assessment of Dalí’s truly revolutionary work, Fanés reveals the central role of the artist not only in the development of the Surrealist movement but also the course of 20th-century art.
Out-of-print, As New copy.
1979, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 32 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Park Lane / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
First English hardcover edition of this monographic on Salvador Dalí by Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, published by Park Lane in 1979.
This book is a tribute to two great Spanish personalities of our century, the painter Salvador Dali and the writer Raman Gomez de la Serna. When Raman Gomez de la Serna undertook a study of Salvador Dali, Dali himself promised to illustrate the text with original drawings. Unfortunately, the death of the writer in 1963 prevented the project from being realized until recently, when the study, almost complete, was discovered posthumously among his papers. Dali kept his word and this magnificent book is the result.
Supported by other writings, photographs, and illustrations, Dali is made up of three sections. The first of these is largely composed of the essay and the drawings, with a note by the Spanish scholar Sebastian Grasso on Ramon Gomez de la Serna, and a chronology which charts the life and works of the surrealist artist. The second section contains more than 80 color reproductions of Dali's works....
Lavishly illustrated in paintings, drawings, Dalí's home, studio, furniture, musuem, testimonials, and much more.
Painter, designer, and filmmaker Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures in twentieth-century art. A pioneer of Surrealism, he was both praised and reviled for the subconscious imagery he projected into his paintings, which he sometimes referred to as hand-painted dream photographs.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig (3 July 1888 in Madrid – 13 January 1963 in Buenos Aires) was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel.
Very Good in Good dust jacket, some edge wear.
1982, English
Softcover, 34 pages, 17.5 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Alternative Museum / New York
$100.00 - In stock -
Extremely scarce, lovely catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition "Visual Politics", curated by Geno Rodriguez at the Alternative Museum in New York, 1982.
Featuring the work of Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Francesc Torres, Sonia Balassanian, Benedict J. Fernandez, Daniel Kazimierski, Despo Magoni, Juan Sanchez, Randy Lee White, amongst others. Illustrated throughout with the artworks featured in the exhibit, plus biographical info for each artist and a foreword essay by Robert H. Browning.
Very Good with light edge tanning with age.
1986, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 16 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Athletic Model Guild (AMG) / Los Angeles
$30.00 - Out of stock
Premier issue of the Athletic Model Guild trade catalogue of photos, slides, videos, and magazines, from the makers of the iconic Physique Pictorial magazine (back-issues also all listed). Packed with male nudes and their profiles. Published in 1986.
In 1945, gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer's AMG produced the trailblazing, iconic Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine. Bob, himself, worked on every aspect of PP's production from the graphic design and tedious cut-and-paste production of the layout to the composition of the texts and the all-important selection of photographs and illustrations. Physique Pictorial was and still is the most highly coveted publication of its genre, introducing the world to such fantastic photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles, Lon of London and Champion Studios, models such as John Apache, Jim Paris, and Tico Patterson, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Etienne and George Quaintance. In the 1960s, the pretense of being a digest about about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for physique "beefcake" magazines collapsed. These magazines are a gorgeous time capsule.
Very Good copy.
1991, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Athletic Model Guild (AMG) / Los Angeles
$40.00 - Out of stock
Athletic Model Guild's Nude Wrestlers & Wrestling Information Catalog (Vol. 2), published in 1991. Densely packed with photographs of full-frontal male nude models with catalog numbers relating to available VHS and Beta video tapes as well as cover and inner cover stills from the wrestling videos produced by AMG.
In 1945, gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer's AMG produced the trailblazing, iconic Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine. Bob, himself, worked on every aspect of PP's production from the graphic design and tedious cut-and-paste production of the layout to the composition of the texts and the all-important selection of photographs and illustrations. Physique Pictorial was and still is the most highly coveted publication of its genre, introducing the world to such fantastic photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles, Lon of London and Champion Studios, models such as John Apache, Jim Paris, and Tico Patterson, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Etienne and George Quaintance. In the 1960s, the pretense of being a digest about about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for physique "beefcake" magazines collapsed. These magazines are a gorgeous time capsule.
Very Good copy.
1970, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Athletic Model Guild (AMG) / Los Angeles
$60.00 - In stock -
Physique Pictorial Vol. 18, #1 January, 1970 issue of the iconic Physique Pictorial magazine from Los Angeles. Original issue packed with nude photographs and illustrations from various artists. Includes both covers by Tom of Finland.
In 1945, gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer's AMG produced the trailblazing, iconic Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine. Bob, himself, worked on every aspect of PP's production from the graphic design and tedious cut-and-paste production of the layout to the composition of the texts and the all-important selection of photographs and illustrations. Physique Pictorial was and still is the most highly coveted publication of its genre, introducing the world to such fantastic photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles, Lon of London and Champion Studios, models such as John Apache, Jim Paris, and Tico Patterson, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Etienne and George Quaintance. In the 1960s, the pretense of being a digest about about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for physique "beefcake" magazines collapsed. These magazines are a gorgeous time capsule.
Very Good copy.
1976, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Athletic Model Guild (AMG) / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
Physique Pictorial Vol. 28 August, 1976 issue of the iconic Physique Pictorial magazine from Los Angeles. Original issue packed with nude photographs and illustrations from various artists. Includes cover artwork by Tom of Finland.
In 1945, gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer's AMG produced the trailblazing, iconic Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine. Bob, himself, worked on every aspect of PP's production from the graphic design and tedious cut-and-paste production of the layout to the composition of the texts and the all-important selection of photographs and illustrations. Physique Pictorial was and still is the most highly coveted publication of its genre, introducing the world to such fantastic photographers such as Bruce of Los Angeles, Lon of London and Champion Studios, models such as John Apache, Jim Paris, and Tico Patterson, and artists such as Tom of Finland, Etienne and George Quaintance. In the 1960s, the pretense of being a digest about about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for physique "beefcake" magazines collapsed. These magazines are a gorgeous time capsule.
Very Good copy.
1984, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 69 pages, 28 x 21cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Drummer / San Francisco
$65.00 - Out of stock
Very rare copy of The Erotic Art of Bill Ward, a book of homoerotic fantasy comic stories by British gay graphic artist, Bill Ward (1927–1996), published by Drummer magazine. This volume collects his various graphic erotic adventures that would appear in the pages of British and American magazines from about 1976 onwards, such as Him, Zipper, Manifest Reader, Stroke, Drummer, etc. It particularly focusses on his famed "Adventures of Drum" series, and also the strips of "King". Muscular bears, bikers, barbarians, cops and mythological creatures in sexual quests that play out in clubs, alleys and dungeons.
Bill Ward was a gay graphic artist born 20th August 1927 in East London. (Not to be confused with the American heterosexual erotic artist by the same name, William Hess Ward 1919-1998). Bill's publishing career began as a copyboy in newspaper publishing before becoming an art editor for children’s comics and then a graphic artist. He worked as a graphic artist for Amalgamated Press and Fleetway on childrens’ comics, notably their Thriller series (November 1951 – May 1963). In 1957 Bill had his first erotic drawings published anonymously in the British physique magazine Male Classics and he would later work openly for hard-core American magazines. Bill’s work features in the same issue of Drummer that includes Robert Mapplethorpe’s first commissioned cover (issue 24, September 1978). Bill was a member of the British gay bikers club called MSC London. Bill Ward died on 24th July 1996 at Stratford in London at the tail end of the worst period of the AIDS epidemic.
Good copy with light wear and spine pinching.
2008, English
Softcover, 368 pages, 12.9 x 19.6 cm
Published by
Penguin Books / Australia
$28.00 - Out of stock
Translated by Celina Wieniewska
Foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer
Introduction by David Goldfarb
The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe"—Cynthia Ozick
Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
2015, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$40.00 - In stock -
Three savage plays from the man André Breton designated as one of the only “true Dadas” (alongside Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia): The Emperor of China (1916), The Mute Canary (1920) and The Executioner of Peru (1928). The first two have long been acknowledged as highpoints in the Dada movement’s contribution to the theater, but in their brutal depictions of violent sexuality and nightmarish tyranny, and their casts of manipulative bureaucrats, murderous henchmen, insane dictators, lascivious virgins, Ubuesque cuckolds and nonsense-spewing enigmas, these plays also echo the work of such other dissident surrealists of the era as Georges Bataille and André Masson. These unsettling theatrical works were significant anticipations of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of the Absurd of the 1960s.
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes (1884–1974) was a French writer and artist, and one of the fiercest adherents of the Paris Dada movement, acting as the group’s secretary, and for which he authored some of its most vitriolic texts. Disenchanted with the Surrealist movement that followed, Ribemont-Dessaignes allied himself instead with such other Surrealist dissidents as René Daumal and the Grand Jeu. Throughout his long life, Ribemont-Dessaignes authored a sizable oeuvre of novels, plays, poetry, essays and memoirs, none of which has to date been translated into English.
“[The Emperor of China] is a powerful play that combines the elements of nonsense and violence which characterizes the Theater of the Absurd.”—Martin Esslin
Translated, with an introduction, by Christopher Butterfield
2011, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by
Wakefield Press / Cambridge
$39.00 - In stock -
A foundational classic of Surrealist literature, The Leg of Lamb: Its Life and Works brings together the arch-Surrealist Benjamin Péret’s short prose: a smorgasbord of automatic writing and fantastical narratives that play on a medley of registers, employing everything from the cinematic antics of Buster Keaton and slapstick animation to the storytelling devices of detective novels, alchemical operations, and mythology. The Leg of Lamb consists of twenty-four delirious narratives, including the novella-length works … And the Breasts Were Dying… and There Was a Little Bakeress…. Péret’s adult fairy tales bear equal allegiance to Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade, and present one of the clearest examples of Surrealist humor, in which the boundaries between character and object blur, and where a coat rack, artichoke, or a pile of manure is just as likely as Napoléon, El Cid, or Pope Pius VII to take on the role of hero and adventurer.
Péret himself edited this collection toward the end of his life. Originally published in French in 1957, almost all of the stories in this collection had been written in the 1920s, half of them even preceding André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism. The Leg of Lamb offers not just a highpoint of Surrealist automatic writing, but a key chapter in the genesis of the Surrealist movement. Here, Péret’s unfettered imagination does not so much represent Surrealism as constitute it, and describes a world defined by childlike delight and aggression—a world in which metamorphosis is endless and death is dream.
Benjamin Péret (1899–1959) was a Surrealist’s Surrealist, audaciously baroque and incessantly irreverent, a founding member of the Surrealist movement and its only member besides André Breton to remain a Surrealist to the end. He was Salvador Dalí’s favorite poet, an inspiration to Luis Buñuel, and a major influence on Octavio Paz. Péret fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Durutti Column, but also fought every literary current he came up against in his lifetime. He was a fierce antinationalist, a true revolutionary, and a lifelong insulter of priests.
“One of the most extraordinary poets of our time.”—Salvador Dalí
“Humor gushes here as if from the source.”—André Breton
“[T]he quintessential surrealist poet; his work seems to flow freely, untrammeled by any cultural effort, from a hidden source of inspiration, spontaneously recreating a wholly new and different world.”—Luis Buñuel
Translated, with an introduction, by Marc Lowenthal
2022, English
Softcover, 210 pages, 21.7 x 28 cm
$35.00 - Out of stock
The Art & Crime issue.
Spike #72 puts the art world's money launderers, tax evaders, forgers, and brutes on trial. But it doesn't stop there. Inquisitiveness leads to bigger questions, like: Is "crime" only defined by its evil twin "justice?" Are our rights and wrongs only norms to be probed? How do we rewrite past injustices? But then, isn't rupture needed for change? Is acting outside the law the only way to dream of a better world?
Grab a copy of "Art & Crime" and dirty your mind with the liberty of villains, Russian high rollers, the metaphysics of shoplifting, prison literature, fashion crimes, psychopaths, and more.
In Spike #72 we learn what James Bridle’s favorite queer podcast and sea animal are, why Marlene Dumas keeps haunting Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, and what it was like for Denys Zacharopoulos to curate Cady Noland’s psychotic exhibition at documenta 9. The issue continues with Francesco Tenaglia and Tommaso Pincio discussing Caravaggio the murderer, Tobias Timm investigating the places where artworks are only ever seen by the empty gaze of CCTV cameras, and Estelle Hoy making a case that some of the greatest world literature was written in the clink.
What’s crime got to do with seduction, freedom, and the past are questions answered by Brad Phillips, Steve Hall, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze. Mug shots of “criminal” artists like Darja Bajagić (by Ingrid Luquet-Gad), Stéphane Mandelbaum (by Colin Lang), and the art collective Asco (by Isabella Zamboni) are taken, and Dan Mitchell’s image contribution will get you humming the theme from Cops.
Artur Klinau depicts a time when art was a crime in Russia, Sam Kriss makes a case for the great grifters of our age, and Cara Schacter pontificates on the values of shoplifting. Biz Sherbert then gives advice on one of the most committed crimes: bad fashion. As ever, there are views from exhibitions, postcards, and things we like, and Tea Vlahovic Hacic closes the issue with Gesellschaft am Ende.
1977, English
Softcover, 100 page, 22 x 30 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Ballantine Books / New York
$10.00 - Out of stock
The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher, published in 1971 at the height of Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher's new-found appreciation, and only a year before his death in 1972. Born in 1898, Leeuwarden, Netherlands, Escher made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. Escher was for most of his life neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. His popularity in the 1960's amongst hippies, admiring Escher's prints for their psychedelic qualities, ushered in a wider appreciation in the late twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world. Today he's seen as a precursor of chaos theory and cyberspace for his Moebian diagrams and weird doppelgangers. This popular book presents 76 of his most beloved graphics, mostly in b/w, some colour.
Average copy with wear, cover creases.