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:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
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.
1971, English
Softcover, 196 pages, 27.7 x 21.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vintage Books / New York
$85.00 - Out of stock
"Celebrations, storm warnings, formulas, recipes, rumors, and country dances harvested by Alicia Bay Laurel."
Originally published in Berkeley, California in 1970, more than fifty years ago, the seminal "Living on the Earth" is for people who would rather chop wood for fire than work behind a desk to pay the electric company. It's for people who want the best recipe for lavender soap or huckleberry jam. It's for people who want to make their own clothing, play guitar, learn woodcarving, gardening, canning and drying food, and natural first aid methods. The book has no chapters; no rigid structures or rules. It grew naturally out of the lessons the author has learned, and which she shares. Living on the Earth is a beautiful book to see and read, as well as a spiritually uplifting work whose simplicity radiates warmth and promotes serenity and goodwill to all those who encounter it. The large format paperback is entirely written in Alicia's cursive script and beautifully illustrated on every page with her line drawings. Alicia's innovative illustration and book design styles have been enthusiastically emulated in dozens of books and greeting cards since it's original publishing, and in 2012 "Living on the Earth" was chosen as one of the 101 most influential American cookbooks of the 20th century. Alicia was just 20 years old when the book was first published, and it would go on to become a New York Times "best-seller" and one of the most influential manuals for natural, conscious living ever created.
Very Good copy, beautifully preserved with only a few nicks to the cover edges, very light tanning. Very rarely is the first popular edition found in such lovely condition.
2021, English
Hardcover, 128 pages, 29 x 33 cm
Published by
Borgerhoff & Lamberigts / Belgium
$135.00 - In stock -
Discover Richard Tuttle as story teller and writer: first publication of 44 short stories by the artist paired with 22 sculptural works from the "Stories" Series.
In his new body of work Stories, I–XX Richard Tuttle elaborates on the displacement of painting into other realms to engage us in a rhythmical and phenomenological reflection on color. Using various aspects of painting in a freehanded way his work exceeds rational determinations and occupies a liminal space in-between mediums. As we move from one Story to the next, the idiosyncratic nature of these cutout plywood pieces comes to confront their seriality—form and logic sporadically emerge and disappear.
In this volume each work is paired with 2 short stories from his writings during the Covid confinement, in the spirit of the Decamerone, that inspired the titling of his new body of art works. The book ends with color images of Tuttle's solo exhibition Stories I-XX at Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels.
Born 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey, Richard Dean Tuttle lives and works in New Mexico and New York. His work spans a range of media, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking and artist's books to installation and furniture. During the 1980s, Richard Tuttle began experimenting with materials and framing devices to probe art's relationship to scale, form and systems of display. Diverting from the cold precision of Minimalist his approach to art making embraces a playful and handmade quality that promotes the idea that things are always "just beginning". Often made out of humble materials such as plywood, cardboard, Styrofoam and paper, his work pushes the viewer to find forms of appreciation that aren't related to craftsmanship. In his own words, Tuttle proclaims that he loves materials, and at the same time is not really interested in them. The subtlety of this paradigm exemplifies his attitude towards art as a tool for life and an activity of sublimation engrossed in language and story telling.
Text by Richard Tuttle.
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 40 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Ed. of 250 copies,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$40.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 1987 booklet edited by Australian artist Peter Cripps and published in an edition of only 250 copies by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, where Cripps was director at the time. Handsomely designed by Cripps and typeset by Ian Hodgkiss, this fantastic publication was published in dedication to artist Robert MacPherson, as sales from his survey catalogue had helped to fund its publication. Comprising entirely of nine short interviews by Peter Cripps with eight artists (Robert MacPherson, Peter Tyndall, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Tim Johnson, Geoff Lowe, Bronwyn Clark-Coolee, Scott Redford, Mark Webb) who had all exhibited at the IMA, and one with curator Robyn McKenzie, whose exhibition "The Gothic: Perversity and Its Pleasure" was held at the institute in 1986. Includes source references.
Very Good copy, only light cover wear.
1989, English
Softcover, 16 pages, 21 x 29.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
City Gallery / Melbourne
$80.00 - Out of stock
Beautiful, scarce catalogue to accompany Peter Cripps' exhibition "From Here On", held at City Gallery, Melbourne, in September 1989.
"This exhibition consists of six sets of works.
The installation of each set is variable.
Each set consists of plywood constructions of varying sizes, six glass slides, display case and table."
Features an essay by Bob Kingard that is broken into the themes of Introduction; Archive; Models; Manifesto - and include some Q&A with Peter Cripps on each.
Very handomely designed catalogue with photographic documentation of the exhibition installation, works on display, and a selection of earlier works.
Very good, clean copy, light pinching on spine.
1989, English
Softcover (bi-fold single sheet, double-sided), 63 x 29.7 (unfolded)
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$55.00 - In stock -
Rare catalogue/bulletin from the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, to accompany the solo exhibition "20 Frog Poems: Distant Thunder (A Memorial) For D.M." 1987-1989, by Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson, curated by Sue Cramer. This bi-fold-out single sheet catalogue includes b/w illustrations of Robert's work with extensive essay by Ingrid Periz, followed by artist biography.
Over the course of his 40 plus-year career, Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporated familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
Good copy with mail-out fold through middle and light Australia Post register stamp on front face.
1976, English
Printed postcard, 15.7 x 12.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ray Hughes Gallery / Sydney
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare "Four Works" exhibition invite postcard produced to accompany early solo exhibition of Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson at Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, March 6th—25th, 1976. This early exhibition (only his second year of exhibiting) possibly presented MacPherson's "Sarah's Merle" or "Scale From The Tool" paintings (?).
Over the course of his 40 plus-year career, Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporated familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
Established in 1970 by Australian grazier, art collector, gallerist, art dealer, and art patron Chandler ("Channy") Phillip Coventry AM (1924–1999), The Coventry Gallery was a landmark in Australian gallery history, energetically showing new and emerging Australian artists, notably abstract, colourfield and hard-edge artists (in the early years), as well as staging exhibitions by leading overseas artists such as Bridget Riley and David Hockney.
Very Good unposted, clean copy.
1977, English
Single sheet, 33.5 x 20.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Coventry Gallery / Sydney
$55.00 - In stock -
Rare exhibition release and price-list produced to accompany early solo exhibition of Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson at the Coventry Gallery on Sutherland Street, Paddington, April 19th—May 7th, 1977. This early exhibition presented MacPherson's iconic "Scale From The Tool" works on canvas (1976-77), whose proportions and scale dictated by the use of the artist's tool, a four inch Oldfield housepainters brush, the brush-stroke, and the artist's reach. Includes biography, collections list, artist's statement, work-list with prices, and gallery information.
Over the course of his 40 plus-year career, Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporated familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
Established in 1970 by Australian grazier, art collector, gallerist, art dealer, and art patron Chandler ("Channy") Phillip Coventry AM (1924–1999), The Coventry Gallery was a landmark in Australian gallery history, energetically showing new and emerging Australian artists, notably abstract, colourfield and hard-edge artists (in the early years), as well as staging exhibitions by leading overseas artists such as Bridget Riley and David Hockney.
Very Good, light tanning, light wear.
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 20 pages, 20.5 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Various Artists Inc. / Sydney
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce catalogue of Australian artist Robert MacPherson's exhibition at Artspace, Sydney, 1987. Curated by Ingrid Periz, the exhibition (neither a retrospective nor a survey) presents works from 1975—1983; Exhibition 1 : The Rectangle Is a Container; Exhibition 2 : I See a Can of Paint as a Painting Unpainted. Illustrated in b/w with accompanying text by Periz, text by MacPherson, list of works and biography.
Over the course of his 40 plus-year career, Australian conceptual artist Robert MacPherson (1937–2021) explored the philosophical propositions of what constitutes a work of art. He often incorporated familiar imagery, everyday materials and visual elements from daily life, honouring the beauty of the mundane. MacPherson’s fascination with systems of objects and language is manifested through broad fields of knowledge, including art history and social history, biology and mythology.
Very Good copy with light pinch to lower spine, otherwise nicely preserved.
1989, English
Softcover, 6 page foldout (colour & b/w ill.), 21 x 29.5 cm
1st edition, Out of print title / As New,
Published by
Queensland Art Gallery / Brisbane
$65.00 - Out of stock
Rare catalogue/artist's publication for John Nixon's solo exhibition "Tableaux", at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1989. Texts, score and red printed monochrome by Nixon.
John Nixon (1949-2020) was a seminal figure in contemporary Australian abstraction. Since 1968 his work has been dedicated to the ongoing experimentation, analysis and development of radical modernism, minimalism, the monochrome, constructivism, non-objective art and the readymade – key reference points in his work. Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), which began in 1978, forms the basis of Nixon’s rigorous and long-standing intellectual investigation into the making of art, over time expanding to encompass not only painting, but collage, photography, video, dance and experimental music performance.
Very Good, New copies from storage, some rust to staples, light ageing.
1989, English
Softcover, 10 pages, 29.7 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Artspace / Auckland
$40.00 - In stock -
Rare catalogue/artist's publication for John Nixon's solo exhibition at Artspace, Auckland, 7 February—10 March, 1989. Texts, scores and imagery by Nixon.
John Nixon (1949-2020) was a seminal figure in contemporary Australian abstraction. Since 1968 his work has been dedicated to the ongoing experimentation, analysis and development of radical modernism, minimalism, the monochrome, constructivism, non-objective art and the readymade – key reference points in his work. Experimental Painting Workshop (EPW), which began in 1978, forms the basis of Nixon’s rigorous and long-standing intellectual investigation into the making of art, over time expanding to encompass not only painting, but collage, photography, video, dance and experimental music performance.
Very Good, New copies from storage, some rust to staples, light ageing.
1987, Italian / German
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 22 pages, 21 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Galleria Pieroni / Rome
$360.00 - Out of stock
Very rare, collectable catalogue published on the occasion of the two-person exhibition between then married artist-couple Isa Genzken and Gerhard Richter ("Isa Genzken e Gerhard Richter") held at Galleria Pieroni, Rome, Italy, December 1987. Illustrated throughout with sculptures by Genzken and paintings by Richter, reproduced in colour along with text by Paul Groot (in parallel Italian and German), and four double self-portraits of Genzken and Richter together. In the early 1970s, Richter was Genzken’s professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. Upon graduating in 1977, Genzken taught sculpture at the academy. She married Richter in 1982 and moved to Cologne in 1983. The couple separated in 1993.
Very Good copy.
2021, English / French
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 24 cm
Published by
May Revue / Paris
$32.00 - Out of stock
I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack Smith. I will not interpret Jack… — Felix Bernstein
Finally, a new issue of long standing favourite May revue, with a cover feature on American filmmaker, actor, performance artist and pioneer of underground cinema, Jack Smith (1932 –1989)!
Jack Smith (Michael Krebber, Felix Bernstein, Enzo Shalom, Branden W. Joseph), Gary Indiana, Bruce Hainley and Sohrab Mohebbi, Jean-Luc Godard by Ferdinand Gouzon, Leilah Weinraub by Juliana Huxtable, Nina Könnemann by Megan Francis Sullivan, Louise Lawler by Nick Irvin, Claire Fontaine by Anita Chari, Robert Malaval by Valentin Gleyze, Afuma (Stefan Tcherepnin & Taketo Shimada) by Keith Connolly, Park McArthur by Noah Barker, Ken Okiishi by Felix Bernstein...
Conceived as a collective space in which to develop thoughts and confront positions on artistic production, May magazine examines, twice a year, contemporary art practice and theory in direct engagement with the issues, contexts and strategies that construct these two fields. An approach that could be summed up as critique at work – or as critique actively performed in text and art forms alike.
Featuring essays, interviews, art works and reviews by artists, writers and diverse practitioners of the arts, the magazine also intends to address the economy of the production of knowledge – the starting point of this reflection being the space of indistinction between information and advertisment typical of our time. This implies a dialogue with forms of critique produced in other fields.
2021, English
Softcover, 688 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Mousse / Milan
$79.00 - In stock -
Enrico Cattaneo: Studio Marconi 1968–78 is Fondazione Marconi’s first editorial project dedicated to the study, documentation, and mediation of the history and cultural heritage of this Milanese gallery, and the numerous personalities that have crossed its path. Created with the involvement of prominent figures in the international artistic and curatorial panorama, careful research in archives, and historical reconstruction, the project complements the foundation’s other promotional activities by which it seeks to tell this story, with particular attention to a transversal audience both geographically and generationally. The photo selection reproduced in this volume aims to document, albeit in a non-exhaustive way, Studio Marconi’s activities from 1968 to 1978 as seen through the eyes of Enrico Cattaneo, one of its most active photographers in those years.
Edited by Fondazione Marconi, Gió Marconi, and Alberto Salvadori
2021, English
Hardcover (cloth bound loose cover w/ elastic band), 2 softcover books (ring + perfect bound), 136 + 146 pages, 24 x 32 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
KW Institute for Contemporary Art / Berlin
$80.00 - Out of stock
From his refuge in upstate New York—the studio/ living complex where he enacted a late pivot back to figuration—the American painter Philip Guston once offered the following outburst to the question of how such a turn could happen.
“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”
Over time, this sparse utterance takes on an architectural form in the imagination, a model that proposes a tantalizing proposition when fleshed out. The painter’s words situate us in two distinct yet adjacent rooms. The first: a lounge with a TV, its live feed constantly aflicker. The second, a space that’s more sequestered, which we can simply understand as a place of production: “the studio.” Between these spaces, the painter, often working through the night, is also the viewer or reader, shuffling back and forth as he navigates these two rooms. At a certain point, night becomes day, and we shuffle back and forth together, the presence of one room arriving in the other.
1969, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 24 pages, 24.5 x 17 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Apex Novelty / California
$55.00 - Out of stock
Zap Comix No. 0, first published in the later half of 1968 only weeks after Zap Comix No. 2, was intended to be the first book in Robert Crumb's mighty Zap series, were it not for the fact that publisher Brian Zahn had kept Crumb's artwork for Zap #0 when he traveled to India in 1968 and lost it. Luckily, Crumb had made xeroxes which he managed to locate months later, allowing it to be put it to be put to print. Packed with Crumb's comics, including Mr. Natural, Ducks Yas Yas, Itzy and Bitzy, Freak Out Funnies, City of The Future and much more. There were many precursors to the underground comix revolution in 1968, but none had a fraction of the impact that Robert Crumb's Zap Comix had when it came out in San Francisco early 1968.
An early printing by Apex Novelties, roughly a 7th-8th print run, indicated by the "75 cents" on the cover.
Very Good copy, light wear.
1992, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 80 pages, 28 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
OB Enterprises / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
Premiere issue of Art? Alternatives magazine, published in April 1992. Although short-lived, A?A was the perfect embodiment of a spirit in 1990s American visual culture that attacked the distinctions between "high culture" and counterculture, championing the underbelly of new outlaw artistic expression. Edited by Michelle Delio, A?A heralded a sensibility that exploded in 1990s America, that, like the underground press movement of the 1960s/70s that proceeded it, confronted the rise of conservatism and bourgeois attitudes, this time in the face of Reagan-era strip-mall gentrified America. A?A became the mouthpiece of new underground/"lowbrow" art, bringing together the legacy of underground comic art, modern primitivism (tattoo and body art), folk and outsider art, kitsch, occultism, psychedelia, and much more, into a melting pot that foreshadowed such magazines as Juxtapoz, established 2 years later. This premiere issue with a cover feature on artist Robert Williams, features on artists S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, Guy Aitchison, and Joe Coleman, legendary Los Angeles gallerist La Luz de Jesus (of Soap Plant and Wacko fame), along with illustrated articles on Underground Comix, Tattooing, and more.
Very Good copy.
1969, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 28 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Apple Press Office / London
$100.00 - In stock -
Very rare original 1969 Beatles Press book, issued privately by the Apple Records Press Office on Saville Road and not available for commercial sale. Contains all record releases, tour dates and performances, and diary of events 1962 to 1969. Illustrated throughout with photographs of the band and wrapped in stiff airbrushed covers.
Very Good copy with some light marking, light cover wear.
1985, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 96 pages, 28 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
HM Communications / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
Heavy Metal January 1985 issue, featuring comic stories/art by Milo Manara, Tanino Liberatore, Beppe Madaulo, Enki Bilal, Daniel Torres, Charles Burns, Paul Kirchner, John Findley, Rod Kierkegaard Jr, Ugo Bertotti, and many more, plus interview with Timothy Leary and all the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Cover art by Tanino Liberatore (front) and Mark Hannon (back).
Heavy Metal is an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine that exploded onto the publishing scene in 1977 and shaped a generation with its blend of dark fantasy/science fiction and erotica. Unlike the traditional American comic books of that time bound by the restrictive Comics Code Authority, Heavy Metal featured explicit content. The magazine started out as a licensed translation of the French science-fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant, including work by Enki Bilal, Philippe Caza, Guido Crepax, Philippe Druillet, Jean-Claude Forest, Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), Chantal Montellier, and Milo Manara. The magazine later ran Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore's ultra-violent RanXerox. Heavy Metal gradually evolved into a publication featuring North American contributors like Richard Corben, Matt Howarth, Stephen R. Bissette, Alex Ebel, John Holmstrom, Paul Kirchner, Terrance Lindall, Gray Morrow, Walt Simonson, Dan Steffan, Jim Steranko, John Shirley, Arthur Suydam, Bernie Wrightson, and Olivia De Berardinis.
Very Good copy. Light wear and price markings to cover.
1983, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 96 pages, 28 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
HM Communications / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
Heavy Metal October 1983 issue, featuring comic stories/art by Stefano Tamburini, Tanino Liberatore, Jeff Jones, Luis Royo, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pepe Moreno, John Findley, Didier Eberoni, José Maria Martín Sauri, Paul Kirchner, Enki Bilal, Arno (Arnaud Dombre), Rod Kierkegaard Jr, and many more, plus interview with Timothy Leary and all the usual fare of sci-fi, movies, music... Cover art by Luis Royo (front) and Tanino Liberatore (back — Ranxerox).
Heavy Metal is an American science fiction and fantasy comics magazine that exploded onto the publishing scene in 1977 and shaped a generation with its blend of dark fantasy/science fiction and erotica. Unlike the traditional American comic books of that time bound by the restrictive Comics Code Authority, Heavy Metal featured explicit content. The magazine started out as a licensed translation of the French science-fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant, including work by Enki Bilal, Philippe Caza, Guido Crepax, Philippe Druillet, Jean-Claude Forest, Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius), Chantal Montellier, and Milo Manara. The magazine later ran Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore's ultra-violent RanXerox. Heavy Metal gradually evolved into a publication featuring North American contributors like Richard Corben, Matt Howarth, Stephen R. Bissette, Alex Ebel, John Holmstrom, Paul Kirchner, Terrance Lindall, Gray Morrow, Walt Simonson, Dan Steffan, Jim Steranko, John Shirley, Arthur Suydam, Bernie Wrightson, and Olivia De Berardinis.
Good copy, but cover detached and neatly re-taped to body.
1995, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 480 pages, 26 x 18.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Core Magazine / Tokyo
$220.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1995 edition of Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki's bountiful book, Tokyo Sex, collecting his photographs of the Tokyo sex scene between 1983-1985. This is the ultimate augmented version of Araki's most controversial book from 1990, Tokyo Lucky Hole, cited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger (in The Photobook Vol.1) as Araki's best and most famous work. Tokyo Lucky Hole was Araki's intimate document of Japan's sex industry in full flower and this huge, large-format book composed by Araki expands that collection, printing 1000 new photos of that time. Before Shinjuku's infamous red-light district was closed in 1985, Araki made this obsessive documentation of its every aspect: the pleasure-seekers and providers, street scenes, performances, peep-shows, parlours, parks, dungeons. This incredible collection reveals the core of Araki's art: the desire to create a portrait of Tokyo without the niceties (and prudishness) of convention. Bondage, cross-dressing, role-play, cos-play, femdom, from the capsule hotels and bars to famed sex shops such as the Pink Salon, Cabaret, and Soapland, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with great humour, self-expression and poetry. Published by the legendary photo publisher, Akira Suei.
Very Good copy in Very Good dust jacket.
2017, English
Softcover, 44 pages, 22 x 23 cm
Edition of 500
Published by
Robert Heald Gallery / Wellington
$30.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published by Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, on the occasion of the exhibition 'Miroslav Tichý', Robert Heald Gallery, 14 September 2017 - 14 October 2017. Illustrated throughout in colour with a beautiful selection of Tichý's photographs featured in the exhibition, accompanied by a new text by Serena Bentley.
Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011)
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague (1945-48), Miroslav Tichy withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches with pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result are works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
1992, English
Hardcover, 32 pages, 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
ABDO & Daughters / Minneapolis
$25.00 - Out of stock
Rare hardcover book on actress and model, Brook Shields. Published in 1992 as part of the ‘Cover Girls’ series of profile books by Minneapolis publisher ABDO & Daughters, focussing on prominent models in the early 1990s. The book describes the early career of Brooke Shields and how she achieved success as a fashion model. Includes her goals and personal beauty tips. Illustrated throughout with black and white images and ending with her contact address with The Ford Model Agency in New York.
Ex-Libris copy with associated stickers/cards/stamps, otherwise Good in every way.
2012, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Creation Books / London
$38.00 - Out of stock
FRACTURED EYE was a large-format annual film journal, edited by well-known authors Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter, who between them have produced around 50 books on global cinema and cultural history. FRACTURED EYE does not concern itself with either "mainstream" or "cult" cinema, but rather takes its cue from Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 study Film As A Subversive Art. Subjects covered by FRACTURED EYE Volume One include illegal film pornography in the 1970s, execution film documents of WW2, film documents of extreme performance art, subversive film documentaries, unfilmed surrealist film scenarios, revolutionary Japanese cinema of 1969, the origins of film projection technology, films of urban demolition, surgical films, and various works of renegade, politically prohibited or transgressive cinema. The book is heavily illustrated with unusual and often disquieting photographs, and is recommended for adult readers only. Subjects covered include Vienna Aktion Cinema, Tokyo 1969, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, Koji Wakamatsu, Jean Painlevé, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jean Vigo, Luis Buñuel, Skladanowsky Brothers, Georges Franju, and much more. Only one volume was published.
As New copy with some page edge wear from dead-stock storage.
1970, Czech
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 172 pages, 17 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Odeon / Prague
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this major, long out-of-print hardcover monograph on Czech photographer Jaromír Funke, published by the great Prague publishing house Odeon in 1970. Profusely illustrated with 132 beautiful photo-gravure reproductions, includes some of the best known photographs from this important Czech photographer, presented alongside a text by Ludvik Soucek.
Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) was a Czech photographer. Funke was a leading figure in Czech photography during the 1920s and 1930s. Although his earliest imagery was influenced by Pictorialism, Funke quickly turned to a more sharp-focus, documentary style. Abstract images of shadows and organic forms made in the early twenties evolved into more objective representations of objects by the end of the decade. In 1924 he cofounded the Czech Photographic Society with Josef Sudek and Adolf Schneeberger. Two years later he produced a series of Surrealist images of store windows originally titled Glass and Reflection, based on the photographs of Eugène Atget. Also influential as a teacher, Funke served for several years as editor of the journal Fotograficky obzor (Photographic Horizons).
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with some wear.