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
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
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.
2021, English / Arabic
Softcover, 178 pages, 13 x 21 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$29.00 - Out of stock
This publication presents four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators from different backgrounds and origins (Jerusalem, Lebanon, Kuwait, USA, Egypt) who discuss their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.
Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab
Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, Mirene Arsanios and Nikki Columbus and Basma Alsharif
1991, French / Japanese
Softcover (2 volumes in cardboard slipcase), 112 pages / 112 pages, 19 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First two-volume box edition of this scarce publication on the work of Bernard Faucon, issued only in Japan in 1991 by PARCO and dedicated entirely to Faucon's major body of photographic work (accompanied by his writings) Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991). Beautifully printed and bound in Japan.
“Idols and Sacrifices mark the end of a long cycle of abstraction, idealisation, that had led from the first pleasant times on the beach to the gold haze of the Chambers. The end also of an innocence, a magic confidence in the power of the image, in that 'leibnitzian' idea that every image contains all others, contains the world.
Dressed up as a sort of back-to-basics of photography, back to the classic genres, 'the Portrait and the Landscape'. Idols and Sacrifices constitute a laying-bare, a radicalisation, a simplifying of the means that will take me to the End Of The Image. The wish to face, once at least, the body only, beauty without artifice. The wish to answer in my own way the question of the living: since the living cannot be photographed, we will try and photograph the gods!
The red landscapes imposed themselves later, because Idol and Sacrifice make up an inseparable couple, and also as a metaphor of the powerlessness of photography, of its incurable deficiency faced with the intensity of the living, the red of Sacrifices becomes the wound, the despair of photography itself.” - Bernard Faucon
Bernard Faucon (b. 1950 in Provence) is a French photographer and writer. Faucon was one of the first photographers in the second half of the 20th century to systematically create and master the constructed image, gaining fame worldwide in the late 1970s when he started a new trend of mise en scène photo. His photographic work has a love of youth and dreamy beauty, using saturated colour, natural settings, rooms and often tableaux of mannequins. For more than 20 years, his staged photographs have been exhibited in international galleries such as Leo Castelli in New York, and Agathe Gaillard and Yvon Lambert in Paris. Elsewhere, he has also been a part of collective exhibitions dedicated to staged photography. He has won numerous awards from his work, including the Grand Prix National (1989), and the Prix Leonard de Vinci (1991). His major photographic series are, in date-order: Les Grandes Vacances (1977–1981); Evolution probable du Temps (1981–1984); Les Chambres d'amour (1987–1989); Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991); Les écritures (1991–1993); and La Fin de L'image (1993–1995).
Very Good—Fine copy (Fine pristine volumes in VG original cardboard slipcase, with small closed tear, minor wear and tear.
2015, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Spector Books / Leipzig
$58.00 $15.00 - Out of stock
How might a resistive art be imagined, despite it being enmeshed in the economic structures that need to be countered? What other knowledge, and what other communities, can art foster? What tools and weapons can it supply? This publication is focused on three projects — independent and interwoven in equal measure — which explore and newly survey, each in their own way, the relations between art, politics, and knowledge generation: the exhibitions Unrest of Form: Imagining the Political Subject as part of the Wiener Festwochen in Vienna (curators: Karl Baratta, Stefanie Carp, Matthias Pees, Hedwig Saxenhuber, and Georg Schöllhammer); Monday Begins on Saturday as part of the Bergen Assembly (curators: Ekaterina Degot and David Riff); and Giving Form to the Impatience of Liberty at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (curators: Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler). Co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
2020, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 25 x 30 cm
Published by
Archive Books / Berlin
$90.00 - Out of stock
Ian Kiaer's new monograph is based on a project that the artist began several years ago and whose configuration changes with the circumstances. Drawing on the notion of marginal endnotes in books, it references the utopian concepts of the Austrian American architect Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965).
In the late 1940s, Kiesler—an atypical figure whose writings were a significant influence on postwar art, architecture and design—came up with the (unrealised) Tooth House, a residence modelled on the human tooth and integrated into its environment.
Guided by his reading of art history and architecture, and by the structural concerns underlying his own ideas, Kiaer has been developing an approach to painting as a "minor form". Each of his installations has a title linking it to a thinker, architect, philosopher or utopianist, with everyday objects and found materials assembled in such a way as to raise the question of their use and their appearance.
Here he continues his explorations of modernist architectural styles, taking as his cornerstone the Monsanto panoramic restaurant overlooking Lisbon, built by the architect Chaves da Costa in 1968. Intended as the embodiment of modernity, luxury and power as seen by Portugal's "New State" dictatorship (1933-1974), the building is now abandoned and as a ruin continues to ask questions of its history, politics and present position as a critical monument.
Published as part of the the eponymous exhibition at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2017.
Ian Kiaer (born 1971 in London) produces fragile installations involving various architectural models, intact or slightly altered found objects and two-dimensional works to create fragmented narratives. His installations often function as projects or proposals, challenging notions of totality and permanence.
Venues for past solo exhibitions include the Neubaeur Collegium in Chicago, Lulu in Mexico City, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, the Aspen Art Museum, Kunstverein Munich and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. He has also taken part in group shows at Kunstshalle Berlin, MUDAM Luxembourg, the Rennes Biennial, Tate Britain, the British Art Show, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the 10th Lyon Biennial.
2021, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, the fourth of seven volumes, about one of Sweden’s most fascinating collections of artistic output.
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Volume IV, within the series Parsifal she explored her inward self through the journey of a boy and a girl and their various levels of consciousness. In her Atom series, af Klint explored the inner parts of our existence through what scientists then considered the smallest particles in the world.
Produced with the permission of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and featuring introductions by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist.
2021, English
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited English translation of a pioneering account of af Klint’s oeuvre.
Text by Åke Fant. Translation by Ruth Urbom.
For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant’s pioneering account of Hilma af Klint’s life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant’s original text and curator Lars Nittve’s foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint’s art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant’s work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.
2020, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 14.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic.
Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.
After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 368 pages, 14.7 x 21.8 cm
Published by
W W Norton & Co / New York
$48.00 - Out of stock
The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.
Drawing on her own experiences in protest and alternative medicine, and traveling from Weimar Berlin to the prisons of McCarthy-era America, Laing grapples with some of the most significant and complicated figures of the past century-among them Nina Simone, Christopher Isherwood, Andrea Dworkin, Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X.
Despite its many burdens, the body remains a source of power, even in an era as technologized and automated as our own. Arriving at a moment in which basic bodily rights are once again imperiled, Everybody is an investigation into the forces arranged against freedom and a celebration of how ordinary human bodies can resist oppression and reshape the world.
2021, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 13 x 21 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$47.00 - Out of stock
In modernity, the museum was the institution that made art accessible to the broader public. An artwork was collected if it was considered beautiful, passionate, engaged, or critical—and primarily if it was deemed historically relevant. But today, with the total availability and saturation of images, the museum has lost its privileged status as the exclusive place for the display of art. In our age of digital media, how is a particular artwork selected for a museum collection? Which symbolic criteria must this artwork satisfy for it to obtain value? And in what ways does the institution of the museum remain relevant?
Logic of the Collection is framed by Boris Groys’s original and provocative proposition: an artwork is considered historically relevant if it fits the logic of the museum collection. In these critical essays, the distinguished philosopher and theorist of art and media analyzes the relationship between the logic of the collection and various modern ideologies. He reflects on the explosion of art production and distribution through the ascendancy of digital media as well as the ways in which the accumulated artworks will be collected and preserved in the future.
2021, English
Softcover, 512 pages, 17 x 23.9 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$60.00 - Out of stock
Artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers revisit the films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
Jean-Marie Straub (b. 1933) and Danièle Huillet (1936-2006) met in Paris in 1954. Straub wanted to make a film about Johann Sebastian Bach, to which Huillet thought: "He's planning to do far too much; he won't manage it alone." It was the beginning of a fifty-year collaboration, which brought about one of the most unconventional and controversial bodies of work in modern cinema. Tell it to the Stones presents variations from a prolonged re-encounter with Huillet and Straub's work that was sparked by a three-month exhibition, complete cinema retrospective, workshops, and music performances in Berlin in the fall of 2017.
Contributing artists, scholars, filmmakers, and writers have revisited this collective experience in new texts, revised transcripts, conceptual essays, and visual montages. What happens during an encounter happens in-between: between language and image, gestures and words, looks and everything unsaid. "To help us build the in-between," is how Danièle Huillet once imagined a task for those who come to see their films. The present compendium revives these encounters and reveals the urgencies of how Straub and Huillet's oeuvre matters today, perhaps more than ever.
Contributions by Manfred Bauschulte, Renato Berta, Manfred Blank, Barton Byg, Paolo Caffoni, Rinaldo Censi, Diedrich Diederichsen, Luisa Greenfield, Louis Henderson, Ute Holl, Volko Kamensky, Peter Kammerer, Jan Lemitz, Armin Linke, Elke Marhöfer And Mikhail Lylov, Mochida Makoto, Peter Nestler, Maggie Perlado, Patrick Primavesi, Florian Schneider, Danièle Huillet And Jean-Marie Straub, Oraib Toukan, Ming Tsao, Barbara Ulrich, Rembert Hüser And Nikolaus Wegmann, Antonia Weisse, Ala Youni
2016, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 17.5 x 20 cm
Published by
Austrian Film Museum / Vienna
$58.00 - In stock -
From their first film in 1963, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet distinguished themselves as two of Europe's most inventive, generous, and uncompromising filmmakers. From Machorka-Muff (1963) through These Encounters of Theirs (2006), and in the subsequent solo work of Jean-Marie Straub, they developed groundbreaking and unique approaches to film adaptation, performance, sound recording, cinematography, and translation in films made across Germany, Italy, and France - including such modern classics as The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1967), Moses and Aaron (1974), Class Relations (1983), and Sicilia! (1999).
On the occasion of the first complete North American retrospective of their films in more than two decades, this dense and profusely illustrated volume traces the history of Straub's and Huillet's work, placing their films in the specific cultural, linguistic, and critical contexts in which they were produced and providing an account of their distribution and reception in the English-speaking world.
Author Ted Fendt is a critic, translator, projectionist, and filmmaker based in New York. His translations have appeared in print and online in Cinemascope, Mubi Notebook, and Robert Bresson (Revised), and as subtitles on films by Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Luc Godard, Max Ophuls, and Alain Resnais.
2016, English
Softcover, 624 pages / 135 pages, 14.8 x 21.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Sequence Press / New York
$120.00 - Out of stock
A text is spoken; it merges the sphere of ideas, from which it comes, with an immediate and sensible sphere of bodies that give life to them, with a nature that sustains these bodies, and that they in turn nourish by naming it. The body, in which language resonates, becomes the body of the text itself and protracts its speaking.
Here trees are trees and become trees. We learn by taking pleasure in the sublime essence of colors (leaf-green, earth-brown, sky-blue, bronzed-skin...), of timbres (voices, birds, steps...), of textures (flesh, fabric, earth...), the irreversibility of gestures.
These shots are rich in their concerted poverty: here’s how.
—Anne Benhaïem
from introduction to "Conception of a Film"
Sequence Press is pleased to announce the publication of the writings of the filmmaking couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, presented for the first time in a critical, English-language edition. Two of the most exacting directors of the past fifty years, Straub and Huillet are renowned for their meticulous adaptations of works by giants of Western art and literature: Sophocles, Corneille, Bach, Hölderlin, Cézanne, Brecht, Schoenberg, Kafka, Pavese, et al. The publication coincides with the first complete U.S. retrospective of their films opening on May 6 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the concurrent exhibition, Films and Their Sites, at Miguel Abreu Gallery.
Jean-Marie Straub came of age as a slightly younger contemporary of the French New Wave. Like those directors, he began his career writing film criticism. “Writing about films,” Jean-Luc Godard later said, “was already a way of making films.” This volume thus begins with Straub’s early film criticism from the 1950s and traces the evolution of over five decades of writing activity, from manifestoes and trenchant declaratory texts, to detailed descriptions of working methods, letters, questionnaires and select interviews and oral interventions.
Writings opens with an introduction by Sally Shafto that provides an in-depth look at Straub and Huillet’s beginnings, within the context of the emergent filmmaking forces of the time. The book highlights their rigorous methodologies as translators of key texts, and the precision work required to adapt those translations for the screen. As Straub himself said, “We are the only European filmmakers, filmmakers of European nations. We make films in Italian as well as in French and in German. Who else can say that?” The book brings us behind the scenes and reveals how their publication practices mirrored those of their film production and distribution, as they often made distinct versions of the same film using alternative takes and different languages.
In addition to the published texts, the book comprises a richly illustrated Atelier section featuring three full length annotated film scripts, along with other pieces of writing, such as letters to their collaborators, shooting diagrams and schedules, lab notes, and press kits, all of which bring the reader into the heart of Huillet and Straub’s creative process. The volume closes with a Portfolio of intimate photographs of the filmmakers at work, with onsite observations by their long-time director of photography and collaborator, Renato Berta, and a detailed filmography.
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet resolutely eschewed a Hollywood style of spectacle filmmaking to create some of the most raw and beautiful, as well as innovative and profoundly moving films of our times. Their writings open up a further understanding of their essential contributions, and their unique place in film history.
Design by Scott Ponik
Edited, translated and with an introduction by Sally Shafto
Foreword by Miguel Abreu
Out-of-print. As New copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 160 pages,12.7 x 17.8 cm
Published by
AK Press / Edinburgh
$29.00 - Out of stock
"The Abolition of Prison encapsulates Jacques Lesage de La Haye’s four-decade long activism against the prison system in France and his anarchist perspectives on penal abolitionism. Jacques Lesage de La Haye brings together theoretical analysis and his inspiring personal journey as a criminalized youth turned into a psychologist with an extensive experience of alternative approaches to institutionalization." —Gwenola Ricordeau, author of For Them All: Women Against the Prison System (forthcoming from Verso)
The Abolition of Prison provides a reflection from a longtime prison abolitionist on the ideas, actions, and writings of anti-prison activism over the last fifty years. This book powerfully makes the case for the end of prisons, punishment, and guilt and, instead, suggests we work towards social change, care, collectivity, and ending regimes of repression and violence.
The book weaves together Lesage de La Haye’s own experience in prison, as a psychologist, and as an abolitionist, with arguments and proposals from abolitionist writings, and countless examples of prisoner actions, prison alternatives, and attempts to create a more just world. Lesage de La Haye argues simply that, if we take the justifications for prison and punishment at their word, we must evaluate the system as a complete failure and stop supporting and funneling money into it. There is a long history of alternative ways to address problems in society, both inside the Western systems of law and from Indigenous communities. Lesage de la Haye starkly portrays the effects of punishment, concluding that prison is simply a slow death. The move toward abolition is achievable today and necessary for a society free from systematized oppression.
Jacques Lesage de La Haye is a formerly incarcerated psychoanalyst, and the author of La Guillotine du sexe (Gender’s Execution), among other books. He broadcasts the radio show, Ras les murs (Tear down the walls) on Radio Libertaire and has been fighting prisons for more than fifty years.
1972, Japanese / French
Softcover, 180 pages, 21 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Yomiuri Shimbun / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
Wonderful and scarcely seen Japanese catalogue on the work of Argentine artist Leonor Fini. Profusely illustrated throughout with Fini's incredible (Surrealist) paintings and drawings from 1936-1972, in colour and black and white. Includes biography and artist's introduction by Fini in French. All other texts are in Japanese.
Leonor Fini (1907–1996), an Argentine painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful women, is considered one of the most important women artists of the twentieth century and also one of the most misunderstood. Fini had no formal artistic training. Born in Buenos Aires, she travelled extensively from a young age, living in Milan and then moving to Paris in 1931-32 where she was considered part of a pre-war generation of Parisian artists, becoming acquainted with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, who inspired much of her work, and also Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. She had her first one person show in Paris when she was twenty-five at a gallery directed by Christian Dior. Her work caught on fast and was included in the pivotal and groundbreaking Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the MOMA in 1936 while at the same time she had her first New York exhibition at the avant-garde Julien Levy Galley. Surrealist artists in France came to know her as important in the movement. She is mentioned in most comprehensive works about surrealism, although she did not consider herself a surrealist, nor a part of any particular artistic movement. Fini preferred to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. The originality of her art as well as her intelligence, famous wit and charisma accorded her celebrity status in the Paris art world and beyond beginning in the late thirties. Her panache and glamour, once they found a place in the collective imagination of the time, turned her into a much-publicized fashion and feminist icon. Always controversial, with as many detractors as admirers, she lived and painted consummately on her own terms.
In Paris in 1939 she curated the inaugural exhibition of her friend Leo Castelli’s first gallery (of surrealist furniture) and shortly thereafter, just before the German occupation, she traveled with André and a new lover to Arcachon in the southwest of France to begin waiting out the war. She remained there for almost a year with Salvador and Gala Dali before moving to Monte Carlo where she met the young Italian diplomat, Stanislao Lepri who became one of the great and enduring loves of her life. As the war intensified she moved with Stanislao to Rome where she lived, worked and formed close friendships with Anna Magnani, Luchino Visconti and other leading figures of world of art and letters. After the Liberation of Paris in 1946 she returned there to live and work for the remainder of her life, exhibiting extensively around the world.
The predominant themes in Leonor Fini’s art are sexual tensions, mysteries and games. One of her favored subjects is the interplay between the dominant female and the passive male, and in many of her most powerful works the female takes the form of the sphinx to which she felt a strong identification. She was also a renowned portraitist, and among her subjects were such friends as writers André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jean Genet, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas), such actresses as Anna Magnani and Suzanne Flon, ballerina Margot Fonteyn, film director Luchino Visconti and artists Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington.
Her genius for stage and screen design is evident in her numerous ground breaking theater decors with their elaborate conception, costumes and phantasmagorical masks. She designed for the Paris Opera, George Balanchine’s ballet Palais de Crystal, and choreographer Roland Petit’s company Ballets de Paris, for Maria Callas at the La Scala theater in Milan, as well as over seventy productions at theaters in Paris between 1946 and 1969. She had a unique talent for film design and created costumes for Fellini's 8 ½ as well as for Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet and John Huston’s A Walk with Love and Death.
In the 1970s, she wrote three novels, Rogomelec, Moumour, Contes pour enfants velu and Oneiropompe. Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris. She illustrated many works by the great authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers. She was very generous with her illustrations and donated many drawings to writers to help them get published. She is, perhaps, best known for her graphic illustrations for Histoire d'O.
The provocative and much-publicized life of Leonor Fini was pure theater. Her story is that of a hard-won struggle to forge her life as a woman artist in a man’s world and to invent herself on her own terms. It is the story of a woman possessing exceptional independence, a highly original vision and great personal magnetism who lived passionately through her art and friendships and in the process became a feminist role model.
1977, French
Softcover, 66 pages, 21 x 27 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Les Humanoïdes Associés / Paris
$45.00 - Out of stock
Seventh issue of the pioneering Ah! Nana, a quarterly journal devoted to comics (bande dessinée) by women, the first such publication in France. With the theme of ‘La France Cruelle’ (Cruel France), No. 7 revolves around comics and articles on the subject of Sadomasochism ('La Sado-Maso: Une leçon de Tolérance'). Features the work of Chantal Montellier, Nicole Claveloux, Émilie Labroux, Marianne Leconte, Isabelle Sacuto, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Janie Jones, Trina Robbins, and many more.
Published by Les Humanoïdes Associés (Paris), best known as the publisher of Metal Hurlant (Heavy Metal), Ah! Nana was a ground-breaking but short-lived (1976-1978) bande dessinée journal devoted to comics by women. Ah! Nana's first editorial in 1976 described the conception of this new publication in the following way:
‘Several female artists, colourists and journalists were complaining to each other about having to incorporate male fantasies disguised as essential features of publishing into our work. We decided to act, sketching out the idea of a journal…’ With the slogan "fait par et pour les femmes", Ah! Nana was an explosion on the scene, uniting the energy of the feminist movement with the burgeoning provocations of the underground comics movement.
From the third issue on, each issue had a special topic, some of which were controversial, including issues devoted to Nazism, incest, and Homosexuality and Transgender Issues, and Sado-Masochism. Both the comics (with contributions from France, Italy, US, et al) and the articles also explored women artists in other mediums, including an illustrated article on Patti Smith in the first issue, and a Roman Photo by Agnes Varda in the third. Articles on the herstory of comic art by women were also included.
After only nine issues the journal folded after falling foul of strict censorship laws, however, as the only journal in French history providing an unprecedented vehicle both for semi-established and previously unpublished female creators to present their work it constituted an innovative development in the very male-dominated bande dessinée scene of the 1970s, and an important chapter in comic history.
Some damage to spine and general wear/age, otherwise a good copy throughout.
2003, English
Softcover, 154 pages, 25.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Eros Comix / Seattle
$180.00 - Out of stock
Rare early English-language collection of the cult classic eromanga Bondage Fairies, "the first hit translated adult manga" — Manga: The Complete Guide. This is the first edition of The New Bondage Fairies : "Fairie Fetish" by Eros Comix in 2003, collecting stories from the late 1990s. These English editions are super hard to come by.
Created by manga artist Teruo Kakuta under the pen name "Kondom", a multilingual pun, meaning "little insect" in Japanese and "condom" in English, Bondage Fairies is an erotic series about highly sexual female forest fairies, who work as police officers protecting the forest, whilst engaging in a wild array of anthropomorphized, inter-species sexual acts. The series began in Japan in 1990 as Insect Hunter, but it was quickly banned from sale by the Tokyo Metropolitan Ordinance. Under a new title, the manga was serialized in manga magazine Lemon Kids. The series is among the earliest sexually explicit manga (eromanga) commercially translated and published uncensored in the United States where the earliest editions date from 1994 (Venus Press). Eros Comix subsequently published a multi-volume series of the collected Bondage Fairies, and subsequent stories, now all very collectible. Translated to Swedish, German, French, and Italian, Bondage Fairies is one of the most popular underground adult Japanese comics outside Japan.
Very Good copy.
2021, English / German
Softcover, 286 pages, 23 x 16.5 cm
Published by
Texte Zur Kunst / Berlin
$38.00 - Out of stock
This June issue of Texte zur Kunst undertakes a wide-ranging inquiry into the figurative in art. The human body, and the figure more generally, is undoubtedly among the most widely depicted subjects in the history of art. Browsing the exhibition programs of museums and galleries today, one cannot fail to notice that figurative art and rhetoric are experiencing a renaissance. In cooperation with TzK’s publisher Isabelle Graw and artist Jutta Koether, the editors have conceived an issue that takes up figuration both literally – as the subject of figurative representation in painting, literature, performance, theater, and social media – and in the broader sense, as the materialization and apprehension of social phenomena. Traditional figure-ground relationships in painting are examined, as well as the mass-mediated production of the celebrity through identity politics and questions of representation in Black figuration.
Includes a conversation between editor Isabelle Graw and artist Kerry James Marshall, essays by art theoreticians Amelia Jones and Robert Slifkin, as well as writings by artists: “Figuring,” by Jutta Koether; an essay by Annette Weisser about Alina Szapocznikow; a text by Amy Sillman on Elizabeth Murray, curator Mahret Ifeoma Kupka in conversation with Bani Abidi, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Anta Helena Recke, plus reviews of Hal Foster's "Brutal Aesthetics : Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg", "Seth Siegelaub. : Better Read Than Dead. Writings and Interviews 1964–2013", exhibitions by Amelie von Wulffen, Lorraine O'Grady, Alice Neel, Loretta Fahrenholz, Michaela Eichwald, Rindon Johnson, Julie Mehretu, "Cybernetics of the Poor", and much more.
2021, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 64 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Sternberg Press / Berlin
$29.00 - Out of stock
This book contains three case studies on very different artists, analyzing their work through their respective historical contexts: the writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988) and his seminal text on Jean Fautrier's "Hostage Paintings" from 1943; visual artist Jack Whitten's (1939-2018) Memorial Paintings and Banksy's notorious auction stunt Love is in the Bin from 2018.
In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. She argues that an artwork can actually reflect on its value despite being defined by it. This book focuses on the artistic production of three individuals—writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy—and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work. Graw distinguishes between an explicit (Ponge), immanent (Whitten), and seemingly destructive (Banksy) approach to value.
Three Cases of Value Reflection extends the themes found in Graw’s seminal book High Price, in which she questioned the dichotomy between art and the market as well as the notion that market value is equal to artistic value. By carefully combining a contextual, sociohistorical approach with close readings of the work of each case study, Graw demonstrates how art-historical and theoretical ambitions can, and must, go hand in hand.
Isabelle Graw is the publisher of the journal Texte zur Kunst, which she cofounded with Stefan Germer (1958–1998) in 1990, and professor of art history and art theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Her previous books include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (2020), The Love of Painting: Genealogy of a Success Medium (2018), High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (2010), and Die bessere Hälfte: Künstlerinnen des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (2003). Graw lives in Berlin.
2006, English / Japanese
Hardcove (in padded, silver foiled cover), 156 pages, 19 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) / Victoria
$67.00 - Out of stock
First out of print edition of Tezuka - The Marvel of Manga, catalogue published on the occasion of a major exhibition curated by Australian artist Philip Brophy for the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne in 2006. The exhibition profiled the Postwar manga of Japan's leading and most historically important manga artist, Osamu Tezuka. It toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Edited by Philip Brophy with translations by Tetsuro Shimauchi, the book is profusely illustrated throughout, accompanied by a set of 6 critical essays written by English and Japanese writers, dealing with various aspects of Osamu Tezuka’s manga (with some reference to his anime). Also includes a complete checklist of all 234 works exhibited in the exhibition, biography and more.
Fine copy.
2013, English
Softcover (plus CD), 135 pages, 17 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
IMA / Brisbane
$39.00 - Out of stock
Those who follow Australian art, music, or film will have come across Melbourne’s Philip Brophy. Over the last thirty years, he has produced important work in all three scenes. He is also a critic and curator. And it is impossible to extricate his work as a commentator from his own work, because, as he admits, his own work is always a commentary on existing forms; it’s always art-about-art, music-about-music, film-about-film, or, indeed, art-about-music-about-film.
Brophy’s works might initially appear disparate. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he led the group Tsk-tsk-tsk, which operated on the art/music fringe, generating performances, recordings, videos, and writings. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the filmmaker obsessed with body fluids, directing Salt, Saliva, Sperm, and Sweat and Body Melt. In the 2000s, he was a new-media artist (making The Body Malleable), a manga/anime maven (making Vox and curating Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga), and a sound designer (composing soundtracks for films, his own and others’).
Despite their variety, everything Brophy does is underpinned by three connected lines of enquiry: music/pop (pop music, popular culture, manga and anime), body/sex (body-horror films, sex and violence, and gender), and sound/image (the unsung role of sound in cinema). A book surveying Brophy’s whole project seemed long overdue.
This generously illustrated monographic volume also includes a CD of Brophy's music. Now out-of-print.
Contributors Lara Travis, Darren Tofts, Shihoko Iida, Chris Chang, a selection of Brophy's own writings
Edited by Robert Leonard & Alexie Glass-Kantor
As New copy.
1978, English
Softcover, 94 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Crown / New York
Barre Publishing / Massachusetts
$70.00 - Out of stock
First edition cult classic 1978 photobook on the folk art phenomenon of Scarecrows, and incidentally one of the best fashion photobooks ever published. Profusely illustrated throughout with wonderful portraits of scarecrows in fields and gardens across America and further afield (Portugal, Japan, France...) spanning the changing seasons of the late 1970s and immortalizing the ephemeral lives of these enchanting, melancholic, weather-worn rural custodians. The photography of Ann Parker (contributor to Art in America, the Smithsonian, Life, et al) pays special homage to the varying designs and character of the traditional folk art form.
Here to make a statement, not to make friends!
2021, English
Hardcover, 632 pages, 19.8 x 28.2 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$135.00 - Out of stock
Forty years of catwalk photography featuring seventy groundbreaking collections from the inimitable Vivienne Westwood – over 1,000 looks as they originally appeared in Westwood's iconic shows.
"The only reason I'm in fashion is to destroy the word 'conformity,'" Vivienne Westwood (b. 1941) declared early in her career. With her provocative synthesis of historic British fashion, classic painting aesthetics, and punk culture, the British designer has continuously revolutionized the fashion industry since her first catwalk collection, "Pirate," debuted in 1981. Opening with a concise history of the house and brief biographical profiles of Westwood and her longtime collaborator Andreas Kronthaler, this spectacular volume--the seventh in the celebrated Catwalk series--documents all of Westwood's catwalk collections from 1981 to today. Short texts illuminating each collection's highlights and influences are accompanied by carefully curated catwalk photographs showcasing hundreds of clothing ensembles, accessories, beauty looks, and set designs, along with the top fashion models who walked the runway, including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. With an extensive reference section, this lavishly illustrated volume provides unrivalled insight into one of the most thought-provoking and influential fashion designers in the world.
2011, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 15 x 22 cm
Published by
Badlands Unlimited / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
Poems is a collection of never before published poems by choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Full of wit and candor, they offer a window into the life and mind of one of America’s greatest living artists. Accompanying the poems is a selection of images curated by Rainer and an introduction by poet and critic Tim Griffin.
Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. She trained as a modern dancer in New York and began to choreograph her own work in l960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater in l962, a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern art and dance in the following decades. Since 1972, Rainer has completed seven feature-length films, beginning with Lives of Performers(1972) and more recently The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder(1996). A memoir, Feelings are Facts: a Life, was published by MIT Press in 2006.
2019, English
Softcover, 184 Pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
New Documents / Los Angeles
$36.00 - Out of stock
The Halifax Conference presents a transcript of a conference held at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design on October 5–6, 1970, transcribed and adapted by artist Craig Leonard. Organized by Seth Siegelaub, the Conference was conceived as a means of bringing about a “meeting of artists…[from] diverse art making experiences and art positions…in as general a situation as possible.” Infamously, the conference was held in the college’s boardroom, while students and other interested parties watched the proceedings on a video monitor in a separate space. The result was a conversation that devolved—technologically and ideologically—into a quasi-tragicomic farce, punctuated by remarkable moments of rupture initiated by activist resistance to the Conference from the outside and dissenting voices from within. Attendees at the Conference included Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Ronald Bladen, Daniel Buren, Gene Davis, Jan Dibbets, Al Held, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Robert Murray, N.E.Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Richard Serra, Richard Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, and Lawrence Weiner.
Edited by Jeff Khonsary