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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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
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.
1984, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 46 pages, 30 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
CROWD / Melbourne
$35.00 - In stock -
Scarce copy of the November 1984 issue of Melbourne's CROWD magazine, committed to "Fashion Music Style", published in Melbourne with heavy ties to Tokyo. With cover (Yohji Yamamoto) by photographer Polly Borland, this issue opens with Street Fashion and includes an exclusive interview with Andy Warhol via Keith Haring, an interview with Divine, interview with Howard Jones, Berlin (with photography by Rozalind Drummond), Polly Borland interview, The Cure, Machinations, Australian fashion designer Kara Baker's Sirens clothing label, Japanese fashion designer Koshin Satoh's ARRSTON VOLAJU clothing label (designer for Miles Davis), fashion shoots, hair styling, films, records, social pages, clubs, clubs, clubs, fashion parade reviews, great Melbourne advertisements, and more!
Good copy with wear and marking to covers, edges.
2019, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 14 x 21 cm
Published by
Soft Skull Press / New York
$42.00 - Out of stock
In the aftermath of a reality TV deal gone wrong, Fiona Alison Duncan asks the question, Can you rewrite your life? The answer, her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa, follows a cast of housemates as they navigate questions of art making and economies, breakups and breakdowns, and the internet and its many obsessions.
Given the initials F.A.D. at birth, Fiona Alison Duncan has always had an eye for observing the trends around her. But after years of trying to please others, looking for answers in books and astrological charts, and clocking endless hours as a celebrity journalist just to make rent, Fiona discovers another way of existing: in the Real, a phenomenological state few humans live in.
Fiona’s journey to the Real takes her to Koreatown, Los Angeles, where she sublets a room in La Mariposa. There she meets a cast of friends and lovers, like Amalia, an artist whose muse is her pet pigeon; Lucien, an infamous philanderer; and Morgan, whose anxiety keeps her from ever sitting still. When Fiona is offered the chance to turn her new household into a reality TV show, she jumps at the opportunity—but it isn’t long before she begins to question this new script.
In the midst of her Saturn Return, Fiona pulls the plug on the reality TV deal, heals a few addictions, and returns to writing with Exquisite Mariposa, a debut novel starring her housemates as they ask questions of survival, art, love, language, and the possibilities of rewriting one’s life.
Fiona Alison Duncan is a Canadian American artist, writer, and organizer. She’s the founding host of Hard to Read, a lit series, and Pillow Talk, community organizing on sex, love, and communication. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.
"Ecstatic and painful, Exquisite Mariposa is a diligent search for the heart of The Real, taking its place alongside the great Young Girl books of becoming, from Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps to Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends. To Duncan, The Real equals self-knowledge, compassion, and perception. She is a genius, and I'd follow her anywhere." - Chris Kraus
2020, English
Softcover, 48 pages, 10.8 x 17.6 cm
Published by
Common Room / Naarm
$10.00 - Out of stock
Goori Reader No.1: History, Memory and the Role of Cultural Organisations in Entrenching Colonisation in Australia and Beyond is an introductory reader of republished texts by Gumbainggir activist, academic and writer Dr. Gary Foley, exploring Australian cultural institutions’ problematic relationship to owning how Indigenous artefacts and artworks are woven into local and global narratives; with an introductory text by Léuli Eshrāghi.
Published by Common Room, Melbourne.
2019, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 16 x 14 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$24.00 - Out of stock
Modern Queer Poets is the first poetry collection from Pilot Press, the independent press founded by artist Richard Porter. Selected by both invitation and open call, Modern Queer Poets features contributions from Eileen Myles, Wayne Kostenbaum and CA Conrad among many others, with two covers by the artist Matt Connors.
2020, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 21 x 15 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$33.00 - Out of stock
'Richard Porter’s Queer Anthology of Healing is a subtle, devastating mix of cuteness and embarrassment, beauty and confession, magic tricks and pain. The artworks and writings in this collection suggest that healing can be achieved through revelation, invocation, observation and disclosure. It’s a much-needed gift right now.' — Chris Kraus
a queer anthology of healing
with
Clay AD, Harry Agius, Barney Ashton-Bullock, Dodie Bellamy, Jack Bigglestone, Nick Blackburn, Helen Cammock, Charity Coleman, Swithun Cooper, Paul Gabrielli, Evan Garza, Erica Gillingham, Daniel Givens, Pete Hammond, Benedict Hawkins, Georgie Henley, Lubaina Himid, Fanny Howe, Jasmine Johnson, G.B. Jones, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum, Nic Lachance, Olivia Laing, Benedict Leader, Paul Lee, Mary Manning, Ben Miller, D. Mortimer, Monique Mouton, Annie Murrells, Chuck Nanney, David Nash, Isobel Neviazsky, Paul P., Richard Porter, Peter Scalpello, Hyacinth Schuss, Ryan Skelton, Verity Spott, Edward Thomasson, Timothy Thornton, Declan Wiffen, Ian Wooldridge
Cover artwork by Richard Porter
2018, English
Softcover, 180 pages, 15 x 21 cm
Published by
Pilot Press / London
$32.00 - Out of stock
The final anthology in this popular trilogy looks at the emotion of rage with contributors including AA Bronson, Christeene, Sarah Schulman, Olivia Laing, Paul Lee, Chris Kraus, Paul P. and G.B. Jones, John Maybury, David Rattray, FAG MOB and many more
A Queer Anthology of Rage is the third anthology from Pilot Press, founded in London by Richard Dodwell to shed new light on contemporary queer lives.
2016, English
Softcover (two-volume set), 260 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kunsthalle Wien / Vienna
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
Out-of-print.
Edited by Luca Lo Pinto. Texts by Andrew Ayers, Dafne Boggeri, Luca Lo Pinto, Stephen Piccolo, Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Barbara Radice
Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. During her time with the group she designed patterns for textiles and carpets as well as objects and furniture. Since 1987, however, her main focus and passion has been painting. The title of this publication describes the main focus of her work: the still life. Her distinct influences are visible here: travels to Africa, the ornamentation of the Wiener Werkstätte, the art of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, and Novecento painting by Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi.
This two-volume publication consists of an artist’s book by Du Pasquier with drawings, photographs, and reproductions of her paintings, and a book with photographs by Delfino Sisto Legnani of works from the past decades. Texts by writers and artists and an interview with Du Pasquier provide an informative and subjective view of her artistic practice.
Copublished with Kunsthalle Wien on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition, July 15–November 13, 2016
Design by Tank Boys
As New copy of this out-of-print title but with bumped corner of larger volume.
1984, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 82 pages, 30.5 x 22.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Gakken / Tokyo
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1984 edition of Sci-Fi Fantasy Illustration Theater Vol.1. This glossy, over-sized volume, a "visual commune to new generation", showcases the new wave of Japanese fantasy artists whose works were adorning the covers of science fiction paperbacks and magazine covers of the early 1980s. Vivid colour reproductions of the work of Takashi Koizumi, Noriyoshi Ohrai, Naoyuki Kato, Peter Sato, Noriko Ueno, Tadami Yamada, Sumio Tsunoda, and more, many seldom seen in an art book format, plus artist profiles and interviews, an address list of contacts for their studios and a chronology of science fiction. Pretty sure no other volume followed on from this inaugural edition.
Very Good copy in original dust jacket.
1973, Japanese
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Art Club Monthly / Japan
$90.00 - Out of stock
Scarce January 1973 issue of Japan's monthly periodical of art criticism, featuring a cover by Japanese avant garde artist Natsuyuki Nakanishi depicting one of his “Compact Objects”. This issue also features a coloured artwork section by Tadanori Yokoo, and contributions by/about director Michio Okabe, composer John Cage, director Sergei Eisenstein, Tenjō Sajiki / Shūji Terayama, critic Yoshida Yoshie, composer Yūji Takahashi, composer Tōru Takemitsu, art critic Isamu Kurita, and many more.
Good copy with some cover wear and tanning.
2003, Japanese / English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket and obi), 80 pages, 19 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Blue Interactions / Japan
$85.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the great hardcover collection of Aquirax Uno's poster work dating 1959-1975.
Aquirax Uno, also known as Akira Uno (b. 1934) is a Japanese graphic artist, illustrator and painter who was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s. His incredibly unique work is characterized by fantastic visuals, capricious and sensuous line flow, flamboyant (and occasionally grotesque) eroticism, and frequent use of collage and psychedelic bright colours. Uno was prominently involved with the Japanese underground art of the 1960s–1970s, and is particularly notable for his frequent collaborations with Shuji Terayama and his experimental theater Tenjo Sajiki.
Good in Good dust jacket with obi. Light foxing to edges of book block, otherwise a lovely copy.
2020, English
Hardcover, 88 pages, 16.5 x 20.6 cm
Published by
Siglio Press / Los Angeles
$60.00 - Out of stock
An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957−1996) was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by aesthetic and conceptual concerns as by politics. His work eschews the polemical and didactic, while challenging authority and our obeisance to it, dissolving the delineations between public and private, and inviting the viewer to collaborate and complete works with her own inferences, point of view, imagination, and actions.
Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, in a pre-internet era, the photostats—a series of fixed works with white serif text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface—are profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references. These works disrupt linear time, the seemingly causal relationships of chronology, and hierarchies of information as they ask how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats have a deep kinship with poetry in their use of specificity and ambiguity, operating as open fields: each juxtaposition and its oblique friction illuminates connections and disconnections.
The photostats also recall the screen—the television, and now the computer and phone—in which information is furiously delivered, and we are challenged to parse substance from surface, what we choose to assimilate from what we choose to reject. In the gallery, the glass surface of the framed photostats brings the viewer into an intimate relationship with the work as she may literally see herself in it—reflecting, too, her own assumptions. Now, as we find ourselves thirty years later, in a global pandemic, with a national reckoning in the face of enduring protests against police brutality and racial injustice, there is more to see of ourselves in the photostats and their uncanny multiplicity: layers of history with which we are only beginning to grapple as a society, grief in the wake of devastating loss, and the possibility of reinvention and regeneration.
Intended as discrete space to closely read the photostats with sustained attention, this elegant, clothbound volume opens from both sides: on one side, the framed photostats are reproduced as objects as one might encounter them in a gallery; on the other, white texts appear on full-bleed black fields to be read as writing. Its intimate size and its attention to the book as a physical object create a new way to experience the photostats.
In between the two sides, there are gorgeous and thought-provoking writings by poets Mónica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach that do not explicate the work but instead enter it. Lauterbach penetrates the atmosphere of the photostats, contemplating mourning and memory while invoking Gonzalez-Torres’s spirit of generosity. De la Torre mines Gonzalez-Torres’s dates and references in her constraint-based essay, tracing time from past to present, while keenly attentive to the impossibility of linearity. Both demonstrate the richness of the work and its potential to inspire multiple readings.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
MÓNICA DE LA TORRE works with and between languages. Her poetry books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat Books, 2020) and The Happy End/All Welcome (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She is co-editor of the anthology Women in Concrete Poetry 1959–79 (Primary Information, 2020). A contributing editor to BOMB, de la Torre has also written for Artforum, Granta 151: Membranes, and The Believer. She teaches poetry at Brooklyn College and is on the faculty of the Bard MFA.
ANN LAUTERBACH is author of ten books of poetry and three books of essays, including The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking 2006) and The Given & The Chosen (Omindawn, 2011) ; Spell, her most recent collection, was published by Penguin in 2018. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1993), she is Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she was co-Chair of Writing in Bard’s MFA (1992-2020). A native of New York City, she lives in Germantown, New York.
2016, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 412 pages, 21 x 27.3 cm
Published by
Steidl / Göttingen
$105.00 - In stock -
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, one of the most influential artists of his generation, lived and worked resolutely according to his own democratic ideology, determined to “make this a better place for everyone.” Combining principles of conceptual art, minimalism, political activism and poetic beauty, Gonzalez-Torres’s ever-changing arsenal included public billboards, give-away piles of candy or posters, and ordinary objects (clocks, mirrors, light fixtures) often used to startling effect. His work challenged the notions of public and private space, originality, authorship and—most significantly—the authoritative structure in which he functioned.
Now in its second edition, Gonzalez-Torres’s editor Julie Ault has amassed a comprehensive monograph of this important artist. In the spirit of the artist’s method, Ault rethinks the very idea of what a monograph should be. The book, which places strong emphasis on the written word, contains texts by Robert Storr and Miwon Kwon among other notables, as well as significant critical essays, exhibition statements, transcripts from lectures, personal correspondence, and writings that influenced Gonzalez-Torres and his work. Ample visual documentation adds another decisive layer of content. We see works not just in their finality, but often witness their transformation over a lifespan. This collection is a critical reference for the history of contemporary art.
Edited by Julie Ault
Designed by Pascal Dangin
1997, Japanese
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 230 pages, 18.2 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Kodansha Int / Tokyo
$35.00 - Out of stock
Original 1997 Japanese graphic novel edition of Seraphic Feather Vol. 4: Dark Angel, from the popular manga series by Hiroyuki Utatane (b. 1966). A buried alien starship on the dark side of the moon is ready to give up its secrets, and those who want to harness its incredible power draw in an ever-tightening circle of deception and death. A mysterious scientist with access to the otherworldly technology and in apparent contact with the aliens themselves and their death-dealing sentinels, who dispatch an armed-to-the-teeth elite U.N. strike team like so many toy soldiers. And Apep himself may have unlocked more than mere secrets - he may have transformed into something more - much more - than human!
From a master of adult and fantasy manga works. Japanese language. As New copy.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 862 pages, 17.4 x 22 cm
Out of print title / as new
Published by
Walther König / Köln
D.A.P. / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
This monumental hardcover publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of the late twentieth century. Having left East Germany in 1961, where he had already established a reputation as a Realist painter, Gerhard Richter went on to attend the Dusseldorf Academy, striking out on a radical new path and changing the history of painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism.
Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist's work, presenting the photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter's photographs - sometimes found, sometimes original - have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting. The images closely parallel, year by year, the subjects of Richter's paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter's working process, this monumental new edition (the second US edition), which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition, features 783 multi-image sheets, each reproduced full page and in full color.
Introduction by editor Helmut Friedel.
As New. Out-of-print.
2020, English
Softcover, 120 pages, 19 x 28 cm
Published by
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art / Denmark
$59.00 - Out of stock
The eerily prescient work of a near-forgotten Japanese artist, whose 1960s and ’70s sculptures anticipate contemporary ecological anxieties. Edited by Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Tine Colstrup. Texts by Tetsumi Kudo and Joshua Mack.
Contemplating Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s (1935-90) work in the 21st century provokes a sense of the uncanny on multiple levels: grotesquely beautiful on their own, his abject sculptures seem to foretell today’s environmental concerns with their depictions of ecological decay. Born in Osaka, Kudo’s life was greatly impacted by the aftermath of the atomic bomb in 1945; this trauma compounded by the Vietnam War’s ever-present atmosphere of destruction led to a consistent focus on dystopia and decomposition in his work.
Kudo’s fluorescent birdcages and blacklight terrariums are furnished with an assortment of sculptures and found objects: melted plastic flowers, colorful phallic chrysalises and dismembered resin body parts come together to convey a distinctly modern anxiety in regard to our ailing world. Kudo’s work does not intend to provide comfort in the midst of crisis; rather, his pieces urge viewers to reflect on how we may or may not continue to survive in a world that we ourselves have ruined through pollution and consumerism.
As the artist’s work reaches a peak of topicality, this volume presents a focused selection of Kudo’s pieces from the 1960s and 1970s that demonstrate a postwar awareness of the atomic bomb’s effect on reproduction and the environment.
1967, English
Softcover, 60 pages, 21.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of California / Berkeley
$100.00 - Out of stock
One of the great American exhibition catalogues, "Funk" was published on the occasion of the historical exhibition curated by the first director of the University of Art Museum in Berkeley, California, Peter Selz, April 18 - May 29, 1967. "Funk" captured a new anti-establishment spirit in the Bay Area arts encompassing experimentation in unusual materiality, ceramics and assemblage, “making things with the detritus of society”. Curator Peter Selz writes that the term funk was “borrowed from jazz: since the Twenties, Funk was jargon for the unsophisticated deep-down New Orleans blues played by marching bands, the blues that give you that happy/sad feeling… Funk art is hot rather than cool; it is committed rather than disengaged; it is bizarre rather than formal; it is sensuous; and frequently it is quite ugly and ungainly.”
This wonderful heavy illustrated catalogue features colour and b/w documentation of works of all exhibiting artists, including Arlo Acton, Bob Anderson, Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Mowry Baden, Jerrold Ballaine, Sue Bitney, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, William Geis, David Gilhooly, Mel Henderson, Robert Hudson, Jean Linder, James Melchert, Gary Molitor, William Morehouse, Manuel Neri, Harold Paris, Don Potts, Kenneth Price, Peter Saul, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley, and Franklin Williams. Includes text by curator Peter Selz, artists' biographies and statements, and exhibition checklist across various paper stocks.
Fine copy.
2012, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 24 x 29 cm
Published by
Roma / Amsterdam
WIELS / Brussels
$88.00 - Out of stock
From the early diametric abstraction to the recent series of silhouette paintings, passing through photographic works and ephemera never printed before, this book offers the most comprehensive gathering of Daan van Golden's work to date. It includes, moreover, a complete list of work, arranged by medium and chronologically, and the collections that hold them. Essays by Devrim Bayar, Sven Lütticken and Erik Thys. Published in collaboration with WIELS, Brussels.
1987, German
Softcover, 294 pages, 17 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 edition of this excellent compendium of early films by prolific German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Introduction by Michael Toteberg. 252 film stills alongside script excerpts from the 5 early films : ' Der Stadtstreicher '(1965),' Das kleine Chaos' (1966), 'Liebe ist Kalter als der Tod / Love is Colder Than Death' (1969), 'Katzelmacher' (1969), and 'Gotter der Pest / Gods of The Plague' (1969). A must for any Fassbinder fan. Unfortunately they only made this one, first volume, not to be followed with more. It would've a tremendous collection!
Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 – 1982) was a West German filmmaker, actor, playwright and theatre director, who was a catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. Although Fassbinder's career lasted less than fifteen years, he was extremely productive. By the time of his death, Fassbinder had completed over forty films, two television series, three short films, four video productions, and twenty-four plays, often acting as well as directing. Fassbinder was also a composer, cameraman, and film editor. Fassbinder died on 10 June 1982 at the age of 37 from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The films 1: Der Stadtstreicher; The little mess; Love is colder than death Katzelmacher; Gods of the plague: Ed. Michael Töteberg. - Nothing more appeared.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The movies 1
Published by Schirmer / Mosel Verlag GmbH, Munich, Federal Rep. Of Germany (1987)
ISBN 10: 3888141826 ISBN 13: 9783888141829
New Trade Paperback/ OBroschur First Edition Quantity: 1
Seller:Lighthouse
(Flensburg, Germany)
RatingSeller Rating: 5-star rating
Book Description Trade Paperback / OBroschur. Condition: New, New. First edition / first edition. no more appeared. 294 p., 17 x 23.5 cm. Films: Die Stadtstreicher: 1965, Das kleine Chaos: 1966, Love is colder than death: 1969, Katzelmacher and: Gods of the Plague: both 1969. RWF. Seller Inventory # 88814182_Bd.1_Y
2020, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$52.00 - In stock -
In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.
T. J. Demos is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, including The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, also published by Duke University Press, and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today.
1975, English / French / Japanese
Softcover, unpaginated, 26 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
? / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
Sex Doll is an extremely rare, amazing and odd-to-exist souvenir photo-book (from Japan) of the long-lost film "Lifesize" or "Grandeur Nature" or (in Japan) "Sex Doll", an obscure outlandish x-rated 1974 film by acclaimed Spanish director Luis García Berlanga, starring the great Michel Piccoli. A tragicomedy about a middle aged dentist who has been unfaithful to his wife and feels lonely, until one day he receives from Japan a gift : a mannequin. He falls in love with the doll, causing all manner of strife and with it a sad and desperate critique on the human condition. A box-office and critical flop, Berlanga proves his passion for erotic stories with a film of humour and pathos about loneliness, impossible desires, egoism, escapism, misogyny, human judgement and cruelty. Unlike the film, the starring mannequin was considered a masterpiece, sculpted by the great Hungarian-French production designer Alexandre Trauner and costing more to create than it would to hire French Actress Bridgette Bardot for a leading film role at the time. The movie was prohibited in Spain and heavily censored, which is only more reason to make it into a picture book in Japan! Wildly designed and explosively illustrated with many vivid stills from the film, along with strange phrases and captions in French and "English", which leads one to believe this film struck more a of sympathetic lifestyle chord in Japan than it did in Europe.
Very Good with light wear to covers.
2019, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 cm
Published by
FAB Press / UK
$52.00 - Out of stock
“I was not afraid of the dark, like most children. No, I was afraid of the bedroom corridor. It was a perfect form of terror: pure and unconditional.”
To his legion of admirers Dario Argento is a horror legend of the greatest magnitude. And to his genre filmmaking contemporaries he’s an inspiration and an icon.
For many years Argento’s ground-breaking shockers like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, Tenebrae and Opera meant box-office gold. Now the maverick auteur, lauded as the Italian Hitchcock and the Horror Fellini, has written his autobiography, revealing all about his fascinating life, his dark obsessions, his talented family, his perverse dreams, and his star-crossed work.
With candour and honesty, Fear lifts the lid on the trials and tribulations of Argento’s glittering career during the sensational Golden Era of Cinecittà. From his childhood mixing with glamorous Italian movie stars thanks to his noted photographer mother and his film industry father to his start in the fledgling field of cinema criticism, Argento shares compelling anecdotes about his life growing up in La Dolce Vita Rome.
Adapted from the Italian translation, annotated by world-renowned Argento expert Alan Jones, and illustrated with numerous rare photographs from his collection, the award-winning and critically acclaimed Master of Terror tells all. So put on your black leather gloves and start turning the pages of Fear for the answer to every question you’ve ever wanted to ask about the weird and wonderful world of Dario Argento.
1974, Italian
Softcover, 29 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Skema / Italy
$60.00 - Out of stock
Scarce, early 1974 edition of Skema, the Italian cultural magazine, dedicated entirely to the work of Irina Ionesco. Ionesco (b. Paris 1930) is a French photographer famous for her unique style of baroque, gothic, erotic photography. At a young age she was sent to Romania where she was raised by her family who were circus performers. From the ages of 15 to 22 she performed as a contortionist. She traveled and painted for several years before discovering photography and gained wide attention when she exhibited her work at the Nikon Gallery in Paris in 1974, leading to her work being published in this issue of Skema, along with other magazines, books, and exhibitions at galleries across the globe. A major part of Irina's work features lavishly dressed women, bejewelled, gloved, and in other finery, but also adorning themselves with symbolic pieces such as chokers and other fetishistic props, posing provocatively, offering themselves partially disrobed as objects of sexual possession. Irina Ionesco is most famous for her photographs using her young daughter, Eva, as her model and muse, a decision that remains controversial to this day.
Very Good copy.
2019, English
Hardcover, 245 pages, 19.5 x 25.8 cm
Published by
Dia Art Foundation / New York
Koenig Books / London
$95.00 - Out of stock
This hardcover catalogue forms the most comprehensive book on the work of Charlotte Posenenske (1930–1985), a German artist associated with the minimalist movement who predominately worked in sculpture, but also produced paintings and works on paper. This heavily illustrated catalogue traces the evolution of Posenenske’s practice from early experiments with mark making to transitional aluminium wall reliefs to industrially fabricated modular sculptures, which are produced in unlimited series and assembled or arranged by consumers at will.
Posenenske exhibited widely during the brief period (1956–68) that she was active as an artist, alongside peers such as Hanne Darboven, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt. Her work is distinguished by its radically open-ended nature: she used permutation and contingency as playful conceptual devices to oppose compositional hierarchy and invite the public to collaborate by reconfiguring her variable sculptures.
Embracing reductive geometry, repetition, and industrial fabrication, she developed a form of mass-produced Minimalism that addressed the pressing socioeconomic concerns of the 1960s by circumventing the art market and rejecting established formal and cultural hierarchies.
Includes texts by Alexis Lowry, Isabelle Malz, Rita McBride, Jessica Morgan, Charlotte Posenenske, Daniel Spaulding, Catherine Wood.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress at Dia:Beacon, New York (8 March – 9 September 2019), before travelling to Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (18 October 2019 – 8 March 2020), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf (4 April – 2 August 2020), and Mudam Luxembourg—Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2 October 2020 – 10 January 2021).
2021, English
Hardcover, 212 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$80.00 - Out of stock
An enchanting collection of Post-it note drawings done for a child's school lunchbox.
This volume assembles 200 drawings made by Berlin-based Ed Atkins (born 1982), internationally known for his video art. Drawn on Post-it notes during weekday mornings over breakfast and slipped into his daughter's lunchbox before school, these delightful and colorful illustrations are reproduced here in their original formats.
Ranging from the playful to the graphic and even sometimes grotesque, they mirror both the absurdity and mundanity of everyday love. Some contain, simply, the words "I love you" or a quick sketch of a sunset, while others seem to treat the format as a sort of canvas, with vividly surreal scenes filling the Post-it note from corner to corner. A true artist's book, this charming volume acts as a playful testament to, and a tender snapshot of, fatherly love.