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:
CLOSED FOR SUMMER.
RE-OPENING 01.02.24
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
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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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.
1970, English
Softcover, 168 pages, 18.5 x 12.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Studio Vista / London
E P Dutton / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the Dada volume of Studio Vista / Dutton's great paperback series. Published in 1970 and written by Kenneth Coutts-Smith, this heavily illustrated overview spans Dada's activities via central locations and protagonists such as Picabia, Janco, Duchamp, Schwitters, Ernst, Grosz, Man Ray, Arp, etc.
Chapters : "Zürich - the beginning", "Anti-art and the irrational", "The roots of Dada", "New York - Duchamp and philosophical irony", "Berlin - political commitment", "Cologne - Ernst and the hallucinatory vision", "Hanover - Schwitters, freedom through lyricism", "Paris - last fling and obsequies", "Dada is dead-long live Dada", "Book list", "Index".
1990, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 512 pages, 29.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Biennale of Sydney / Sydney
$120.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible (huge) catalogue published to accompany the 8th Biennale of Sydney 1990 "The Readymade Boomerang: Certain Relations in 20th Century Art", held 11 April-3 June 1990 in Sydney across various venues. The eighth Biennale began from ‘a trio of Dada originators’: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. A large number of artists across generations joined these key figures in Artistic Director René Block’s exploration of the ‘readymade’ in twentieth-century art, which aimed to highlight ‘its invention and pure use by Duchamp, to its resurgence in Nouveau Realism, Pop Art, and Fluxus of the 60s, all the way to new versions by young contemporary artists’. Pop, fluxus and conceptual artists such as Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton, Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Alison Knowles, César, George Brecht, Nam Jun Paik and Piero Manzoni were shown alongside Rosemarie Trockel, John Nixon, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Janet Burchill, Peter Tyndall, Robert Rooney, Rosalie Gascoigne, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman, Hans Haacke, Rebecca Horn, Sophie Calle, Jeff Koons, Allan Kaprow, Jenny Holzer, Robert Gober, Jill Scott, Bill Culbert, Stanley Brouwn, Peter Cripps, Terry Fox, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fischli & Weiss, KP Brehmer, Sigmar Polke, Dieter Rot, Hanne Darboven, Robert MacPherson, Jackie Redgate, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Bloom, Oyvind Fahlstrom, amongst so many others. The industrial Bond Store at Millers Point featured site-specific works by artists such as Olaf Metzel and Simone Mangos, and several works were created on-site in Sydney, amplifying Block’s notion of the Biennale as a ‘workshop’. A comprehensive satellite program of music, performance, lectures, symposia, workshops and exhibitions at various Sydney venues complemented the exhibition, with Carles Santos’ piano recital on a barge in Sydney Harbour a highlight. Five satellite exhibitions included On Kawara, Joseph Beuys, Alain Fleischer, Fluxus and Broken Record, which featured artist’s experimentations with audio recordings, vinyl and album artwork – from John Cage’s 33 1/3 composition for 12 record players to Milan Knížák’s record-collages.
An incredible Sydney biennale, captured here across over 500 pages conceived and realised by René Block and Jennifer Cook - profusely illustrated with examples of all artists works and accompanying texts throughout by Lynne Cooke, Bernice Murphy, Anne Marie Freybourg, Dick Higgins, René Block and Jennifer Cook. Very Good copy with only general wear/ageing. Bright and clean, includes tanned original dust jacket now preserved under plastic wrap.
Having represented Beuys, Richter and Polke, German gallery owner, art publisher, art collector and curator René Block (born 1942) ranks among the central figures of the 1960s avant-garde.
Very Good copy with original dust jacket. Common tanning to dust jacket spine, now preserved under mylar wrap.
1993, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Sonsbeek / Arnhem
$580.00 - Out of stock
First 1993 edition of one of the great art books, by one of the great artists. This provocative, copiously illustrated catalogue by renowned American artist Mike Kelley is a meditation on Sigmund Freud's "Uncanny", and its relation to the grotesque in art and everyday life. Published to accompany the exhibition curated by Kelley as part of the "Sonsbeek 93" exhibition in Arnhem, The Netherlands, June 5 - September 26, 1993, Kelley presents (like a photo scrapbook) an arresting mix of modern and contemporary artists alongside bizarre figurative, prosthesis, animatronic, and mannequin-related imagery throughout history. Artists included : Hans Bellmer, Robert Gober, Tetsumi Kudo, Zoe Leonard, Paul McCarthy, Nayland Blake, John Miller, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Duane Hanson, Man Ray, Guillaume Bijl, Dennis Oppenheim, Edgar Degas, Piero Manzoni, Marcel Broodthaers, Goya, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Dorothea Lange, Thom Puckey, Charles Ray, Edward Kienholz, Martin Kippenberger, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, Paul Thek, Mike Kelley himself, and many more. Includes Kelley's accompanying essay, "Playing with Dead Things". The exhibition took on mythical status and was re-staged in Liverpool in 2004. The Uncanny has become one of the most desired of Kelley's books.
Very Good copy with only light cover wear.
2018, English
Softcover, 64 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
Published by
David Zwirner Books / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s death, Duchamp’s Last Day offers a radical reading of the artist’s final hours.
Just moments after Duchamp died, his closest friend Man Ray took a photograph of him. His face is wan; his eyes are closed; he appears calm. Taking this image as a point of departure, Donald Shambroom begins to examine the surrounding context—the dinner with Man Ray and another friend, Robert Lebel, the night Duchamp died, the conversations about his own death at that dinner and elsewhere, and the larger question of whether this radical artist’s death can be read as an extension of his work.
Shambroom’s in-depth research into this final night, and his analysis of the photograph, feeds into larger questions about the very nature of artworks and authorship which Duchamp raised in his lifetime. In the case of this mysterious and once long-lost photograph, who is the author? Man Ray or Duchamp? Is it an artwork or merely a record? Has the artist himself turned into one of his own readymades?
A fascinating essay that is both intimate and steeped in art history, Duchamp’s Last Day is filled with intricate details from decades of research into this peculiar encounter between art, life, and death. Shambroom’s book is a wonderful study of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
1986, English
Softcover, 116 pages, 27 x 18 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
ICA / Boston
$65.00 - Out of stock
Scarce copy of this long out-of-print seminal catalogue published by MIT Press on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the ICA Boston in 1986, curated by Yve-Alain Bois and Elisabeth Sussman.
The six illustrated essays by some of today's most noted art historians and critics which comprise Endgame provide the first comprehensive discussion of reference in contemporary art and the commodification of the art object. The interrrelated concerns of painters Sherry Levine, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe — who ironically adapt the visual strategies of earlier modern artists—and those of sculptors Jon Kessler, General Idea, Jeff Koons, Joel Otterson, and Haim Steinbach—who use consumer objects and their mode of representation as the raw material of their sculpture—are the sources of the authors' varied and acute arguments on this theme of the political and social economy of the image.
Contents: The return of Hank Herron / by Thomas Crow; Painting, the task of mourning / by Yve-Alain Bois; The last picture show / by Elisabeth Sussman; Modern leisure / by David Joselit; The future of an illusion, or, The contemporary artist as cargo cultist / by Hal Foster; Notes on new media theater / by Bob Riley. Includes an exhibition checklist. Preface by David A. Ross
Good copy, with some tanning to cover, light wear/marking.
2006, English
Softcover, 376 pages, 15.5 x 23 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First edition.
The Lyotard Reader and Guide is a one-stop companion to Lyotard's thought. It covers the full range of his works, from his three main books (Discours, figure; Libidinal Economy; and The Differend) and up to his influential essays in The Inhuman and Postmodern Fables.
The readings are organized into sections on philosophy, politics, art, and literature. Several have never before been translated into English. Detailed introductions to each section by two leading Lyotard scholars explain the philosopher's key ideas and provide crucial social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical context. As a sourcebook and guide, this is the most up-to-date and comprehensive volume on Lyotard. It is indispensable to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the arts, and politics.
Keith Crome is lecturer in philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry.
James Williams is a leading Lyotard scholar. He is senior lecturer and head of philosophy at the University of Dundee and is the author of Understanding Poststructuralism and The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influence.
Very Good copy.
2015, English
Softcover (french-folds), 608 pages, 24 x 17 cm
Published by
Ridinghouse / London
$65.00 - In stock -
Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. Ades addresses themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde, across time periods and art movements, from Europe to the Americas. She offers alternative readings and investigates the particular dynamics that affect the ways images and objects are produced, presented and received.
With topics ranging from close-up photography to the female subject in Mexico, and from automatism to photomontage, as well as monographic essays on artists such as Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Hannah Hoch, this collection explores major figures of the twentieth century as well as art beyond the canon. The selected writings are divided into sections that correspond to the overarching concerns of gender, identity, the impact of new mediums and the enduring significance of the materials of art.
2022, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket in hard cloth-covered slipcase w. softcover supplement), 252 pages, 34 x 25 cm
Published by
Hauser & Wirth / Zurich
$190.00 - In stock -
Duchamp’s historic 1959 catalogue raisonné-cum-artist's book now back in print in a facsimile English edition. ‘Marcel Duchamp’ became the go-to book on the artist for many decades following its publication in late 1959, when exclusive grand-deluxe and deluxe editions in French, along with trade editions in French and English, were simultaneously released. While Trianon Press’s French trade edition was reprinted numerous times, the Grove Press English edition languished out of print for the better part of two generations—until now, with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ fully authorized facsimile re-edition.
By Robert Lebel. Edited by Jean-Jacques Lebel and Association Marcel Duchamp. Foreword by Harald Falckenberg. Introduction by Michaela Unterdörfer. Text by Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Henri-Pierre Roché, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Man Ray, Michael Taylor.
Marcel Duchamp, the artist’s first legendary monograph and draft catalogue raisonné, was written by art historian and novelist Robert Lebel and published in French in 1959; later that same year, it was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton for Grove Press. The book was a cooperation between Lebel and Duchamp, and beyond Lebel’s extensive writing and bibliography, additional chapters were authored by Duchamp, H.P. Roché and André Breton. The coupling of these texts with diverse archival photographs and an illustrated compendium of Duchamp’s artworks delivered a complex and personal rendering of the artist’s life and inner circle. For the first time since its release more than 60 years ago, this landmark publication is back in circulation with Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ meticulous facsimile of the English edition, reflecting everything from its hand-tipped images to its recto-verso dust jacket appearing as close to the original as possible.
Fully authorized by artist Jean-Jacques Lebel—Robert Lebel’s son—and the Association Marcel Duchamp, the facsimile is accompanied by a supplement volume of essays and archival material that tells the story of Duchamp and Lebel’s close collaboration, and, as contributor Michael Taylor writes, how the original publication signified a "sea change in the artist’s receptivity to critical interpretation." The supplement includes texts by both Robert and Jean-Jacques Lebel and a newly discovered note by Man Ray, among a bevy of photographs from the Lebel and Duchamp archives, extending the story presented in the 1959 edition.
Robert Lebel’s analysis of Duchamp’s oeuvre remains fresh to this day, as does the book’s design, which was personally supervised by the artist. Hauser & Wirth Publishers reanimated Marcel Duchamp with the curatorial-design firm fluid, who recast the original typefaces as digital fonts, positioning each letter and image exactly as it was in the original. To achieve a near-exact facsimile, fluid consulted with paper conservators and printers to recreate the book with modern materials that match those available in 1959. This precise production quality assures that today’s readers will experience this historic book as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel intended.
1989, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Da Capo Press / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
In the twenties, Surrealists proclaimed that words had stopped playing around and had begun to make love. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the writings of Marcel Duchamp, who fashioned some of the more joyous and ingenious couplings and uncouplings in modern art. This collection beings together two essential interviews and two statements about his art that underscore the serious side of Duchamp. But most of the book is made up of his experimental writings, which he called "Texticles," the long and extraordinary notes he wrote for The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Eben (also known as The Large Glass ), and the outrageous puns and alter-ego he constructed for his female self, Rrose Selavy ("Eros, c'est la vie" or arouser la vie", drink it up" celebrate life"). Wacky, perverse, deliberately frustrating, these entertaining notes are basic for understanding one of the twentieth century's most provocative artists, a figure whose influence on the contemporary scene has never been stronger.
2019, English
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
Broken Music is an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and originally published in 1989 by DAAD. Broken Music focuses on recordings, record-objects, artwork for records, and record installations made by thousands of artists between WWII and 1989.
It also includes essays by both editors as well as Theodor W. Adorno, René Block, Jean Dubuffet, Milan Knizak, László Moholy-Nagy, Christiane Seiffert, and Hans Rudolf Zeller, as well as a flexi disc of the Arditti Quartet performing Knizak’s “Broken Music.” The centerpiece of the publication is a nearly 200-page bibliography of artists’ records.
Works chosen for the publication revolved around four criteria: (1) record covers created as original work by visual artists; (2) record or sound-producing objects (multiples/editions/sculptures); (3) books and publications that contain a record or recorded-media object; and (4) records or recorded media that have sound by visual artists.
Artists documented in the volume include Vito Acconci, albrecht/d., Laurie Anderson, Guillaume Apollinaire, Karel Appel, Arman, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, John Baldessari, Hugo Ball, Claus van Bebber, John Bender, Harry Bertoia, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Claus Böhmler, Christian Boltanski, KP Brehmer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Henri Chopin, Henning Christiansen, Jean Cocteau, William Copley, Philip Corner, Merce Cunningham, Hanne Darboven, Jim Dine, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fischli and Weiss, R. Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Peter Gordon, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Bernard Heidsieck, Holger Hiller, Richard Huelsenbeck, Isidore Isou, Marcel Janco, Servie Janssen, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Thomas Kapielski, Allan Kaprow, Martin Kippenberger, Per Kirkeby, Cheri Knight, Milan Knizak, Richard Kriesche, Christina Kubisch, Laibach, John Lennon, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Annea Lockwood, Paul McCarthy, Meredith Monk, Josef Felix Müller, Piotr Nathan, Hermann Nitsch, Albert Oehlen, Frank O’Hara, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, A.R. Penck, Tom Phillips, Robert Rauschenberg, The Red Crayola, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Gerhard Richter, Jim Rosenquist, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Robert Rutman, Sarkis, Thomas Schmit, Conrad Schnitzler, Kurt Schwitters, Selten Gehörte Musik, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Strafe für Rebellion, Jean Tinguely, Moniek Toebosch, Tristan Tzara, Ben Vautier, Yoshi Wada, Emmett Walsh, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, and Lawrence Weiner.
Ursula Block is a curator living in Berlin, Germany. From 1981 until 2014, she ran gelbe Musik, a gallery and record shop in Berlin that featured work by artists at the crossroads between music and art.
Michael Glasmeier is a professor, writer, and editor living in Berlin, Germany. Since the early 1980s, he has curated dozens of shows that explore the intersection between the visual arts, music, film, and language.
1970, Dutch
Hardcover, unpaginated, 27.5 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Nederlandse Stichting Openbaar Kunstbezit / Netherlands
$45.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1970 by Dutch art historian and critic Carel Blotkamp (b. 1945), Na de beeldenstorm: drie opstellen over recente beeldende kunst (3 essays on recent visual art) surveys developments in art at the height of one of the most innovative periods in art history, the 1960s. Blotkamp traces the influence of historical avant gardes (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, Duchamp...) into new abstraction, hard-edge, Color Field, Minimalism, Pop, Op Art, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Art Povera, Land Art, et al. Illustrated throughout in colour and black and white with fine examples of work by Barnett Newman, Josef Albers, Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Daan Van Golden, Richard Serra, Kenneth Nolan, Morris Louis, Jo Baer, Frank Stella, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Walter de Maria, Yves Klein, Robert Morris, Bridget Riley, Jasper Johns, Lawrence Weiner, Jan Dibbets, Armando, Panamarenko, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Poons, Barry Flanagan, JCJ Vanderheyden, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Richard Long, Wim T. Schippers, Marcel Duchamp, Michael Heizer, Ger van Elk, Mario Merz, Carl Andre, Pieter Engels, Andy Warhol, Edward Rushca, Jesús Rafael Soto, Peter Struycken, and many more...
Very Good copy without dust jacket (as issued), light tanning/wear to glossy, foiled boards.
1984, Japanese
Softcover, 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Night Vision / Japan
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1984 edition of cult Japanese underground magazine Night Vision, a special edition dedicated to Surrealism. Packed with content, including many important Surrealist texts translated to Japanese, this heavily illustrated book includes features on Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn, Yves Tanguy, Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Belgian Surrealism, female Surrealist artists and poets (Remedios Varo, Mimi Parent, Valentine Penrose, Gisèle Prassinos, Dorothea Tanning, Bona de Mandiargues, Isabelle Walberg, Lise Deharme, Leonora Carrington, Dora Maar, Aube Elléouët, Jane Graverol, Nelly Kaplan (Belen), Joyce Mansour, Nora Mitrani, Unica Zürn, Valentine Hugo, Marianne Van Hirtum, Leonora Fini, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Kay Sage, Toyen, Annie Le Brun, Meret Oppenheim), Latin American Surrealism and Frida Kahlo-Diego Rivera, Surrealist literature and activities (Artaud, Picabia, Apollinaire, Bataille, Duchamp, Satie, Breton, etc.) plus much more, text contributions by Georges Bataille, Paul Eluard, Midori Wakakuwa, Kuniharu Akiyama, Takashi Tanyuya, Shigeo Goto, Takahiko Okada, Octavio Paz, André Breton, Kunio Iwaya, Gonzalo Cerorio, Yuichi Konno, Satoshi Takamura, and much more. Illustrated in b/w throughout (with many more artists than mentioned above) in that great Night Vision semi-fanzine/cheap reader quality.
Very Good - Fine copy.
1981, Japanese
Hardcover (in foil-printed cardboard slipcase) 31 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Asahi Shimbun / Japan
$160.00 - Out of stock
Exquisite and scarce Japanese volume on the (mostly) photographic work of Man Ray, published in 1981 by Asahi Shimbun. Issued only in Japan in hardcover form, wrapped in a foil-stamped/printed black cardboard sleeve, this beautifully designed book features 165 stunningly gravure reproduced images honest to the original photographic works of Man Ray, including his abstract work, portraits, photographs of fellow artists, artworks, studios and living spaces (including many collaborations with Marcel Duchamp). Many of these photographs are rarely documented in other Man Ray publications. Text is entirely in Japanese, although there is very little of it as this is primarily a photo book, and one of the most beautiful on the work of Man Ray.
Very Good in Good slipcase with some wear.
1981, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$64.00 - Out of stock
Rosalind E. Krauss, editor and cofounder of October magazine, is University Professor at Columbia University. She is the author of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, and Perpetual Inventory, all published by the MIT Press.
"...Krauss's book is undoubtedly the best treatment of its subject yet written. As a textbook, it ought to raise the level of discourse in art history classes, for it is the meaning, not the chronology, of sculpture since Rodin that is the book's central concern. Krauss avoids the conventional plodding survey and divides the book into a sequence of 'case studies' that permit sustained attention to specific works and artists. In so doing, she attempts to trace a 'tradition' to stand behind that portion of American sculpture of the past 15 years which she espouses critically."
—Art in America
"Distinguished art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss analyzes with exceptional clarity and insight the major works that have led 20th century sculpture from the traditional and figurative to the revolutionary conceptual art of the 1970s—an art which has developed a new 'syntax' that discards 'narrative' for instantaneous impact and boldly breaks new ground. Beginning with a penetrating study of Rodin's modernity in rejecting 'narrative' in his 'The Gates of Hell,' she moves successively through detailed examinations of futurism, constructivism, Duchamps' 'readymades,' Brancusi, David Smith's 'Tanktotem,' sculptural realism, and the introduction of light, motion, and theatrical elements into sculpture by Picabia, Calder, Oldenburg, and others right up to younger sculptors like Carl Andre, Blochner, and others [including Robert Morris, Don Judd, Richard Serra, Sol Le Witt, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer]. As critic and theorist, Krauss makes demands that will challenge even the most sophisticated."
—Publishers Weekly
"The book is well illustrated in black and white and is, for an art book, of a convenient and manageable size. The text is rigorously formalistic and analytical and organized around specific sculptural considerations such as the treatment of narrative time, the handling of space, and the game strategies of surrealist sculpture. It is an approach that pays off particularly well in the author's discussions of Rodin and David Smith."
—Saturday Review
2019, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 17 x 24 cm
Published by
Valiz / Amsterdam
$58.00 - Out of stock
Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective: Between Dematerialization and Documentation focuses on the curatorial practice of exhibiting conceptual art. The fact that conceptual works are not object-based, creates challenges in exhibiting or re-exhibiting them. This book offers various perspectives on how to handle conceptual art in the context of the museum, based on three detailed case studies and an extensive introduction in which the paradox of conceptual art is analyzed. It also elaborates on the history of exhibiting conceptual artworks, and on the influence of curators in their canonization.
The aim of the book is not to offer clear-cut practical solutions, but to raise awareness of the issue and the different ways of dealing with it within the traditional curatorial field. It is relevant for students of art and culture (particularly in museum and curatorial studies), art and museum professionals, and everyone interested in the art of the 1960s and 1970s.
Nathalie Zonnenberg is an art historian and curator. She holds a PhD in Art History from Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (NL). Zonnenberg regularly writes on contemporary art, and she lectures at the post-graduate Curatorial Studies programme at KASK/the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (BE).
2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 18 x 23 cm
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - Out of stock
The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years’ worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.
This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp’s film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell’s filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson’s pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field.
The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.
About the Author
Annette Michelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. A founding editor of the journal October, she has written on art and cinema for more than five decades.
“Annette Michelson is one of the most brilliant minds that has ever turned its focus on the art of cinema. It's a blessing to have her illuminating, inspiring, and informative pieces available in this volume.”
—Jonas Mekas, filmmaker and writer
“When many of these texts first appeared, they were undergroundbreaking. Now, as history, they continue to be impressive for their subtle insights and nuanced style. Annette Michelson’s writing is as avant-garde and of-the-moment as that of a critic/historian can be.”
—Michael Snow, filmmaker, musician, visual artist
“Written with enviable precision and grace, these essays remain the most compelling chronicle of the radical impact that film would have on the other arts in the twentieth century. Through her writings, Annette Michelson defined a field of critical inquiry where others saw only boundaries.”
—Bruce Jenkins, Chair, Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
2002, Japanese
Softcover, 307 pages, 259 x 180 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tokyo Shimbun / Tokyo
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition of this scarce, visually generous Japanese catalogue that takes a deep look into the photographic work of Man Ray. Published on the occasion the exhbition 'Photographies de Man Ray' that opened at the Bunkamura Museum and then traveled to three other museums in Japan in 2002-03. Densely packed with 559 beautifully reproduced photographs, the well known and the seldom seen, catalogued into major subjects, often thematically sequenced. From his prolific, experimental portraiture, nudes, fashion, still-life, landscapes, and work within the Surrealist and Dada movements, this heavy volume provides an exhaustive study of this great photographer. Man Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs," and many other experimental processes he brought into the photographic studio, all featured herein. Includes an illustrated biography, bibliography, catalogue listing and texts in Japanese and French.
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Man Ray was a renowned representative of avant-garde photography in the 20th century and is considered as the pioneer of Surrealist photography. A major contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal, Man Ray produced major works in a variety of media including drawings, objects and films, but considered himself a painter above all. one of the most significant contributors to the Dada and Surrealist movements, and to modern art in general.
Very Good-Fine copy.
2017, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$44.00 $10.00 - Out of stock
In Liquidation World, Alexi Kukuljevic examines a distinctive form of subjectivity animating the avant-garde: that of the darkly humorous and utterly disoriented subject of modernity, a dissolute figure that makes an art of its own vacancy, an object of its absence. Shorn of the truly rotten illusion that the world is a fulfilling and meaningful place, these subjects identify themselves by a paradoxical disidentification—through the objects that take their places. They have mastered the art of living absently, of making something with nothing. Traversing their own morbid obsessions, they substitute the nonsensical for sense, the ridiculous for the meaningful.
Kukuljevic analyzes a series of artistic practices that illuminate this subjectivity, ranging from Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages to Charles Baudelaire’s melancholia. He considers the paradox of Duchamp’s apparatus in the Stoppages and the strange comedy of Marcel Broodthaers’s relation to the readymade; the comic subject in Jacques Vaché and the ridiculous subject in Alfred Jarry; the nihilist in Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste; Oswald Wiener’s interpretation of the dandy; and Charles Baudelaire as a happy melancholic. Along the way, he also touches on the work of Thomas Bernhard, Andy Kaufman, Buster Keaton, and others. Finally, he offers an extended analysis of Danny’s escape from his demented father in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Each of these subjects is, in Freud’s terms, sick—sick in the specific sense that they assume the absence of meaning and the liquidation of value in the world. They concern themselves with art, without assuming its value or meaning. Utterly debased, fundamentally disoriented, they take the void as their medium.
Alexi Kukuljevic is an artist and Lecturer in Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
“With exuberantly mordant humor, Alexi Kukuljevic leads us to that place—Liquidation World—where we already are. This world turns out to be an atopia in which dissolute impersonators, caught between the first and third person, never find themselves a second, and where the epitome of happiness is to make oneself an object of absence from melancholic despair. It’s not so much that everything must go—just that everything does go. And, when it does, so do we. But we don’t go well. Thankfully, Kukuljevic is here to show us the pistols and the ropes.”
—Justin Clemens, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne; author of Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
“Liquidation World is a shockingly clever but very kind book, treating its readers as well as its clumsy, incomplete, damaged, but well-meaning subjects as partners in a series of arty, thoughtful adventures in humor and absence. Embracing innumerable paradoxes, Kukuljevic nevertheless steers a steely course through ridiculousnesses of all kinds. It is the rigor of the madhouse, and what absurd fun.”
—Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Roehampton; author of One Dimensional Woman
2013, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 203 x 130mm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$32.00 - Out of stock
In 1964, Calvin Tomkins spent a number of afternoons interviewing Marcel Duchamp in his apartment on West 10th Street in New York City. Casual yet insightful, Duchamp mused on everything from paying taxes to his feelings about art dealers to his influence on younger generations of artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage.
Those interviews became the source material for Tomkins’ profile of the iconic artist in The New Yorker, and later in his definitive 1996 biography, Duchamp. But they have never been edited and made public, until now.
In striking contrast to the mythic image established by decades of Duchampian scholarship, The Afternoon Interviews reveals him to be a man and an artist whose playful principles toward living freed him to make art that was as unpredictable, complex, and surprising as life itself.
This book includes never before published portraits of Duchamp recently discovered in the Philadelphia Museum of Art archive and an introductory interview with Tomkins reflecting on Duchamp as an artist, guide and friend.
2011, Japanese / French
Softcover (w. printed plastic jacket over reflective cover), 296 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
National Art Centre / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First printing of this great exhibition catalogue from the National Art Centre Tokyo via Centre Pompidou Paris, on occasion of the most comprehensive Surrealist exhibition ever staged in Japan, “Le Surrealism: Exposition organisee par Le Pompidou a partir de sa Collection” at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2011.
Housed in mirrored cover and profusely illustrated in colour with the work of André Breton, Victor Brauner, Rene Magritte, Joan Miro, Andre Masson, Francis Picabia, Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer, Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Toyen, Guilaume Apollinaire, Meret Oppenheim, Luis Buñuel, Jindrich Heisler, Andre Masson, Yves Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Wilhelm Freddie, and many others, alongside comprehensive documentation of major historical Surrealist exhibitions and documents/publications.
Very Good copy.
1968, Japanese / German
Softcover, 80 pages, 21 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Goethe-Instituts / Japan
Staalichen Museums für Moderne Kunst / Tokyo
$70.00 - Out of stock
1st pinting of this publication on Dada, published in Japan in 1968. Features the work of Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Höch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Josef Albers, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Peter Agostini, Jean Tinguely, Karl Gerstner, and more reproduced alongside a collaged history of Dada across the globe (New York, Zürich, Cologne, Italy, Paris, Berlin, Hannover) w. reproductions of texts, illustrations, publications and ephemera.
Very Good copy.
1974, German
Softcover, 169 page, 20 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Städtisches Museum / Leverkusen
$65.00 $45.00 - In stock -
"Medium Fotografie" was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name held at Städtisches Museum, Leverkusen, 18 May - 5 August 1973.
Foreword by Rolf Wedewer; Artists featured include Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Anton Giulio, Marcel Duchamp, Theodor Fraenkel, Hannah Höch, Layos Kalsas, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, George Mucha, Man Ray, Luigi Veronesi, Stuart Wiese, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Hamish Fulton, Christoph Kohlhöfer, Ingrid Kohlhöfer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Johannes Theodor Baargeld, Tristan Tzara, El Lissitzky, John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Jörg Immendorff, A.R. Penck, Edward Ruscha, Pablo Picasso,Gilbert & George, Walter de Maria, and many more. Heavily illustrated throughout, texts in German.
2010, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 15.2 x 21.6 cm
Published by
Afterall / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$49.00 - Out of stock
Duchamp's famous last artwork, seen not as a summation of his work but as an invitation to endless interpretation.
Following Marcel Duchamp's death in 1968, the Philadelphia Museum of Art stunned the art world by unveiling a project on which he had been working secretly for twenty years, long after he had supposedly given up art for chess. Installed by the museum curators with the assistance of Duchamp's widow Teeny and stepson Paul Matisse, Étant donnés (known in English as Given, or, literally, “being given”) consists of a small room with a locked wooden door; through a peephole can be seen a landscape of trees, with a naked female figure at the front, her arm outstretched, holding a lamp. In this illustrated study, Julian Haladyn argues that Duchamp's intention in this final piece was similar to Raymond Roussel's in How I Wrote Certain of My Books: not, as many have maintained, to provide a neat summation of his career, but the opposite—to open his artwork (which he had made sure was fully represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection) to endless interpretation and reinterpretation. Duchamp's engagement with his legacy (by orchestrating first the purchase of his work and then the donation of those purchases to the museum) is a significant historical development in the critical relationship between artists and the institution of art—a relationship that would later be further explored by such artists as Andrea Fraser and Michael Asher. Additionally, Haladyn sees that the staging of Étant donnés—especially the way that Duchamp forces viewers to become aware of the act of looking and their bodily presence in the gallery space—foreshadowed strategies used by Minimalism as well as installation, spectatorship, and institutional critique.
About the author:
Julian Jason Haladyn is a writer and artist based in Canada. He teaches at the University of Western Ontario.
2018, English
Hardcover (die-cut linen-bound), 64 pages, 22.9 x 29.9 cm
Ed. of 500,
Published by
Small Press / New York
$115.00 - In stock -
Limited to 500 copies, Litterature pairs excerpts from Francis Picabia’s (1879–1953) novel Caravanserail with nine drawings and seventeen studies he created for the cover of André Breton’s Litterature journal between 1922 and 1924. This beautifully produced linen-bound book—whose front cover features circular die-cuts derived from one of Picabia’s dice drawings—offers a celebration of subversive play and fluid forms.
Originally produced as potential covers for André Breton's 1920s Surrealist literary journal, Littérature, the twenty-six subversive—at the time, even scandalous—Francis Picabia drawings that are collected in this remarkable new limited edition from Small Press Books had been sealed in an envelope (dated August 8, 1923) and forgotten for decades until Breton's daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët, unearthed and exhibited them in 2008. Of the original group, only nine of these playfully insurgent works were actually published by Breton. According to a 1922 letter from fellow Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to Breton, American retailers considered Picabia's cover graphics far too salacious to be displayed on their newsstands. Thus Duchamp was forced to become the journal's only American micro-distributor, circulating it among likeminded friends until its demise in 1924.
Edited by Stephanie LaCava. Translated by Lauren Elkin. Design by Eric Wrenn Office.