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:
Thu–Fri 12–6
Sat 12–5
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
<a href=http://wfb.public-office.info/artist/john-nixon>All titles by John Nixon
"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.
Published by World Food Books / Melbourne
$20.00 - In stock -
A World Food Books gift voucher is redeemable in our Melbourne bookshop or via our webshop (here). An e-voucher (printable pdf) will be sent to your purchase email address (please notify us if you wish to have the voucher sent to an alternate address and wish us to fill in the receiver's details on the card).
Gift vouchers can be purchased in increments of $20 (Australian Dollars) and the total amount can simply be added to by increasing the quantity in your shopping cart. eg. A quantity of 5 gift vouchers will result in an item total of $100 - a $100 gift voucher. Simply click "ADD TO CART" 5 times, or update your quantity in the shopping cart.
If you wish to purchase multiple, separate gift vouchers in one go, please just email us and we can personally prepare and email you a payment request.
Please note: Please select Pick-Up on gift voucher purchse to avoid any postage charges. Accidental postage charges will be refunded right away!
Thank you.
For any questions, please don't hesitate to email: [email protected]
1993, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 74 pages, 26.7 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Grassfield Press / Florida
$280.00 - In stock -
Rare first edition of Ana Mendieta's posthumous artist's book, A Book of Works, beautifully produced in an edition of 2,400 copies, edited by Bonnie Clearwater, and long out-of-print.
Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta was working on many important projects that were left incomplete at the time of her tragic death in 1985 at age 36. Among these was a beautiful book of photo etchings of her carvings of female figures in remote caves on the outskirts of Havana, Cuba. These sculptures were inspired by the myths and beliefs of the Tainos, pre-Columbian inhabitants of the West Indies. This publication reproduces in facsimile Mendieta's unfinished book of photo etchings and related works and publishes, for the first time, her notes and writings for this important project.
Mencdieta's work crosses the categories of earth art, body art, performance and conceptual photography. As her works generally were site specific and ephemeral, they became know primarily through the photographic documentation she exhibited in galleries and museums. She intended her intimate book of photo etchings to capture the experience of viewing her elusive life-size sculptures in the close quarters of the caves.
Illustrated with many never-before published photographs, this book is an important contribution to the understanding of his extraordinary artist.
"...the authors have honored (Mendieta's) desires by crating a book that speaks softly an genuinely in the artist's voice."
by Alexandra Tager --Art & Auction magazine
"When Ana Mendieta died in 1983, she was working on a book similar to this one, a slim volume of photo etchings of the life-size figures she carved into the stone walls of caves in Cuba's Jaruco State Park. The artist, a "Pedro Pan" child who was sent out of Cuba in the early days of Castro's reign, spent her short art life seeking expression for her personal exile. Inspired by Taino mythology, these pre-Columbian islanders believed the first humans emerged from a cave-Mendieta identified the Cuban caves with birth,including her own. Her entire body of work, largely a collection of photographs documenting such ephemeral art forms as earth works, performance pieces and body art, was spun on this theme of self-identity, a return to her roots, to mother earth. Unlike her other photographic artifacts, however, these photo etchings were destined for a book, of which this is a facsimile. Her montes on the Taino myths appear as if in her own hand on these pages, along with her thoughts about how the book should be arranged. The result is an intimate experience with the artist's hand and mind and a unique act of closure for a career that ended in a still-unexplained fall from a New york high-rise."—Helen L. Kohen—Miami Herald (1993)
Bonnie Clearwater is the Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, and the former curator of the Mark Rothko Foundation, New York. Among her publications are "Frank Stella at 2000: Changing the Rules"; "Defining the Nineties: New York,Los Angeles,Miami"; "Mark Rothko: Works on Paper"; "Edward Ruscha: Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go"; and "David Smith: Stop/Action".
Fine copy in VG—NF dust jacket with sunning to spine.
1995, English
Softcover, 179 pages, 20.2 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Third Woman Press / Berkeley
$120.00 - In stock -
First printing of the Third Woman Press re-publication of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, the classic 1982 experimental autobiography first published by Tanam Press in 1982. Founded by Norma Alarcón, which primarily centered Chicana and Latina literature but expanded in 1994 and 1995 to publish works by other women of colour, notably reissuing Cha's masterpiece.
Dictée is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
"Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee is both the ancestor and the future of all attempts to remember and rewrite--against the force of being dismembered and rewritten by--colonial/imperial histories and their reiterative, disfiguring shadows. I have, for that reason, the feeling, maybe also the fear, that neither the experience nor the revelation of it will ever come to an end."–Brandon Shimoda, PEN America Literary Award winner and author of The Grave on the Wall
"You think you know what a book can do, then you read Dictee. A life is split by it. A text of multiple modes and languages, moving in a staccato accumulation through histories of war and displacement, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's postcolonial classic created ways and privacies where there were none. Unimaginable what literature would be today without it."–Solmaz Sharif, author of Customs
"Dictee is part memoir, part history, part experimental meditation; a challenging, innovative exploration of Cha's life, her mother's difficult immigrant journey across East Asia and to the United States, the fractured immigrant experience, women warriors, and language itself. . . . An essential work for feminist writers, conceptual artists and Asian American authors and scholars."–New York Times
VG–NF copy.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 180 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Herder and Herder / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1971 hardcover edition of Rexroth's major study of modern American poetry. "An iconoclastic, gossipy, yet judicious book."—Library Journal
"Poetry has been both personally and professionally the central concern in Kenneth Rexroth's life and art. He is now recognized as one of America's leading poets and critics. A man of sharp and discriminating tastes, supported by keen sensibility and a wide erudition, he here offers a major interpretation of the poetry and poets of modern America, from the radical bohemians at the turn of the century through the leftist poets of the twenties, the reactionaries of the thirties and forties, the gradual emergence of the San Francisco school after the Second World War, to the more recent poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder.
For Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century is a work of re-experiencing the poems themselves, and in the process he provides a controversial new look at a number of the more unimpeachable standard authors—Stevens, Sandburg, Frost, Williams, Jarrell—and boldly redefines the value of such poets as Levertov, Moore, and Robert Lowell.
Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1905, and grew up in Chicago, New York, and various towns throughout the Midwest. His erudition and range of interests have marked him as both a uniquely individual yet universal man: poet, painter, critic, linguist, guru. Mr. Rexroth now lives in Santa Barbara, California."
Very Good copy in G—VG dust jacket with some light wear to extremities and price clip to inner flap. 1975 previous owner inscription to title page.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 278 pages, 24 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Something Else Press / New York
$70.00 - In stock -
First 1972 US hardcover edition of this 1933 collection featuring descriptive artist essays alongside two major experimental pieces, A Long Gay Book and Many Many Women (often grouped under G.M.P.).
"This is the unmentionable book in the mature Stein canon. For one thing, it's about homosexuality, and for another thing, it's written in her most difficult, "cubist" style. For both reasons it has utterly baffled her (mostly male) critics.
A discreet title it has. But the title shows its sham immediately: each of the two "shorter" stories is longer than the title story. The first, "A Long Gay Book," can pretty well speak for itself.
It opens with a powerful statement of how a very mature person feels on entering into a life in which her style and her sexuality will not be geared towards having babies. Many people know, from the Autobiography and elsewhere, that as a medical student she delivered a number of babies, that she wrote the book by watching couples and groups on the street and imagining about them But until one has read the book, the fantasies sound abstract when one tries to describe them.
The myth about "A Long Gay Book" is that it's a cerebral spin-off of The Making of Americans, uneven and unsustained. The fact is that it contains much of Stein's most fascinating writing and observation, and that only resistance to the subject matter has prevented people from seeing what a self-contained masterpiece it is.
The second story, Many Many Women," is a sort of sequel to "A Long Gay Book." It is purely about days and women. And identity, which is the touchstone of Stein's special cosmology. There are no men, other than by reference or implication, in the entire 80 + page novella. None of the personae have names-they are simply and exclusively women. To see how positive her statement is, try the final two pages of the story. It's like brushing out your hair.
The third, "G.M.P.," is rather more bizzare. In it she tries to fantasize a love between Matisse and Picasso, including a very uncharacteristic string of symbols (for Stein) whenever she wants to avoid explicit sexual descriptions (as on page 264), and to draw a connection between this and the different kind of love that was shared among herself, Matisse and Picasso. It is an unusual work in the corpus of Stein works: another well-known piece with symbols is Four Saints in Three Acts. But there are only a very few others. As a work it registers as comparatively awkward, but it provides the beard for the book, and that has its place too in Steinian humor.
In this book we're spared the tiresome tea-party self-interrogations of the early novel, Things As They Are (Q.E.D.), and we don't get the full-fledged eroticism of "Lifting Belly" the later poem cycle. What we get instead in this volume is frank exposition and joy, the view of things from inside things (as good cubism ought to be). It is not an easy book, but it is a very human one and today there is absolutely no excuse for not recognizing it as one of the very great ones."–dust jacket
Gertrude Stein was a titan of early feminism and one of the great pioneers of the modernist world. Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, Stein lived through a period of global upheaval, writing groundbreaking literature and supporting emerging poets and artists. Luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regular visitors at her famous Paris salon, where she lived with her life partner of forty years, Alice B. Toklas. Her complex personal beliefs and politics still defy easy categorisation, inspiring controversy to this day. Stein was a one-woman renegade literary movement, and her body of work - including Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - broke a long succession of moulds. When she died in 1946, Gertrude Stein was a transcontinental literary icon, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
VG in VG dust jacket, light age/wear. Well preserved copy now in mylar wrap.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 207 pages, 24 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Station Hill Press / Barrytown
$50.00 - In stock -
First hardcover 1988 Station Hill edition of Useful Knowledge by Gertrude Stein, a 1928 collection of experimental prose pieces, portraits, and linguistic investigations that serves as a tender, humorous, and satirical paean to America, here with new material including a foreword by Edward Burns and introduction by Keith Waldrop.
"Useful Knowledge is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed," writes Gertrude Stein in her Advertisement for this book-an apt characterization of the experience of reading it sixty years after its disappearance from print. This rare yet quintessential Stein supplies an indispensable link in her rich serial portrait of America and its inhabitants. Despite her long expatriation, she "always remained," in her words, "firmly born in Allegheny Pennsylvania." Indeed physical detachment from her homeland seems only to have deepened her love for the country, a passion very nearly erotic, that blossomed in this private remembrance that is both tender and humorous. War, Woodrow Wilson, Chicago, Sherwood Anderson— such is the range of her intimate concerns. As for the significant questions to which her writing responds: "Wherein Iowa Differs from Kansas and Indiana" and "Wherein the South Differs from the North," useful knowledge indeed, when the thought, along with the word, is opened up in these extraordinary prose inventions.
Keith Waldrop's Introduction furnishes new insight into the process and development of Stein's infamous style always more intricately evolving than is recognized. And Edward Burns provides "useful knowledge about Useful Knowledge," the kind of close-up, detailed information about Stein's text that we rarely find when we most want it. All of which makes this a useful book.
Gertrude Stein was a titan of early feminism and one of the great pioneers of the modernist world. Born in Pennsylvania in 1874, Stein lived through a period of global upheaval, writing groundbreaking literature and supporting emerging poets and artists. Luminaries like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were regular visitors at her famous Paris salon, where she lived with her life partner of forty years, Alice B. Toklas. Her complex personal beliefs and politics still defy easy categorisation, inspiring controversy to this day. Stein was a one-woman renegade literary movement, and her body of work - including Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas - broke a long succession of moulds. When she died in 1946, Gertrude Stein was a transcontinental literary icon, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
VG in VG dust jacket, some light knocking to edges, light wear/dustiness to extremities.
1989, English / Italian
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 126 pages, 31 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Glittering Images / Florence
$90.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1989 edition of The Art of John Willie: Sophisticated Bondage, 1946-1961. This oversized volume edited by Riccardo Morrocchi and Stefano Piselli, in collaboration with Marco Giovannini and Eric Stanton, was published by the mighty Glittering Images, Florence, and filled cover–to–cover with hundreds of bondage photographs and iconic illustrations by the pioneering underground fetish artist John Willie. Text in Italian and English.
John Alexander Scott Coutts (1902–1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was an artist, fetish photographer, cartoonist, specialty shoe designer, and the publisher and editor of the first 20 issues of the trail–blazing fetish magazine Bizarre. John Willie was not just a pivotal underground artist; he was a visionary who redefined the cultural boundaries of his time. Through Bizarre magazine and his creation of Sweet Gwendoline, he provided a space for people with unconventional desires to find community, expression, and acceptance in a society that often sought to repress them. His work balanced humor, fantasy, and artistry, pushing fetish culture into the limelight in a way that was both daring and sophisticated. His work has inspired countless artists ever since.
VG copy in G–VG gloss dust jacket, wear/age to extremities. First edition, second print.
1979, French
Softcover (2 volumes, french folds), 112 + 120 pages, 27 x 21.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Delta Plus / Montpellier
$220.00 - In stock -
Very rare complete set of both Volume I & II of Nuits de Chine, a two-volume erotic graphic novel published in 1979 by Delta Plus in Montpellier, France. First edition.
Illustrated anonymously throughout with explicit imagery, Nuits de Chine is an adult graphic story depicting the abduction and sexual adventures—including bondage, sadomasochism, and lesbianism—of a Marie-Laure, a young member of the Auxiliaires Féminines de l'Armée de Terre (Women's Army Auxiliaries) during the Indochina War, who goes missing in Cholon, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and held by female and male Chinese captors.
Both volumes VG–NF.
1977, French
Softcover, 60 pages, 28 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Éditions Dominique Leroy / Paris
$55.00 - In stock -
First edition of Ericia: Bizarre School, illustrated by Michaël Carm and published by Éditions Dominique Leroy, Paris, in 1977. Part of the Vertiges Graphiques Collection. French language fetish graphic novel with great illustration.
Very Good copy.
1965, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 196 pages, 21.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Coward-McCann Inc. / New York
$50.00 - In stock -
First US hardcover edition, 1965.
Based on a hitherto secret U.S. Army document made available to the authors, The Rape of Art adds an exciting and significant chapter to World War II history.
Here, for the first time, is the complete story of Hitler's massive plunder of Europe's great art treasures and his egomaniacal plans to make Linz, the provincial Austrian city of his child-hood, the cultural center of the world.
Contrary to popular belief it was Hitler, not Goering, who was the greatest Nazi plunderer of art treasures. In seven years, by direct confiscation or by forced sale, he systematically amassed 100,000 works of art worth an estimated $300,000,000—an accumulation of paintings, sculpture, books and objets dart greater than the collections of the Louvre, the Metropolitan, the British Museum and Moscow's Tretiakov.
But unlike Goering, who had a genuine love of art, Hitler had little interest in great masterpieces beyond the fact of possessing them. He had a long-range plan in mind, a dream conceived many years before the war, to show the people of his hometown visible proof that he had made good.
Besides planning collections of paintings, sculpture, coins and armor, he intended to build a great library and a vast theatre in Linz, and he had detailed plans drawn up for the layout of the city that would transform it from a drab industrial community to the cultural capital of the Nazi order. He set up a secret looting organization, the Linz Special Mission, that until now has passed unnoticed by war historians.
Michelangelo's "Madonna and Child," the Ghent altarpiece by the van Eycks, Breughel's "The Hay Harvest," the celebrated Czernin Vermeer, and works by da Vinci, Goya, Rem-brandt, and Tintoretto were swept up in history's greatest art robbery.
With the end in sight, Hitler clung to the dream of Linz and issued orders to have works of art moved to places of safety. The most valuable-10,000 paintings, 5,350 of which were old masters-had already been stored in the Alt Aussee salt mines. When American forces got word of the Alt Aussee cache they accelerated their push to beat the Russians there. The account of the Allies' painstaking efforts to locate the treasures and make restitution provides an exciting climax to a narrative that will take its place among the important books about the last war.
David Roxan and Ken Wanstall are well-known English journalists. Through their untiring efforts, they managed to convince the U.S. Army Archives to give them access to a document known as the Consolidated Interrogation Report No. 4, without which this complete story of Hitler's thefts of the great masters would not have been possible.
VG copy in VG dust jacket with some rubbing wear. Preserved in mylar wrap.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 24.7 x 17 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
D.A.P. / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of the first comprehensive title on the artwork of Wallace Berman (outside of an exhibition catalogue published in 1978), and includes insights from people close to him, Walter Hopps, Tosh Berman, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, and others. Profusely illustrated throughout with B&W and colour images of his work.
Wallace "Wally" Berman (1926–1976) was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in postwar California art. A biting and prescient critic of American visual culture, associated with the Beat Generation and known for his magnetic personality and aversion to publicity, Wallace Berman is considered to be one of the most innovative artists to have worked with photography. With his Verifax (an early copying machine) collages, record covers, Polaroid transfers, art and poetry journal, and filmmaking, Berman was among the first artists to appropriate mass, popular, and advertising imagery. His use of appropriation, and his keen critique of the Modernist ideal of originality, places him alongside the first generation of Pop artists as a major innovator. He was among the first L.A.-based artists who developed the potential of the photograph as an object that could be used as raw material for making art.
NF copy in VG dust jacket with light wear to extremities.
1979 / 1982, English
Softcover (staple–bound), 24 pages, 21 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Libertarian Workers for a Self–Managed Society / Melbourne
Libertarian Socialist Organisation / Brisbane
$65.00 - In stock -
Rare 1982 print of the original pamphlet published by the Libertarian Socialist Organisation, Brisbane and the Libertarian Workers for a Self–Managed Society, Parkville, Melbourne. It was also printed up by Monash Anarchist Society, Adelaide Libertarian Socialists, Black Cat Press, Anarchist Communist Federation, and Acrata Press in San Francisco in various editions. First printed in 1978/1979, this original pamphlet was published in the aftermath of the Sydney Hilton Bombing, a domestic terrorist attack that marked a major turning point in Australia's security history. The black humour of the time around the anarchist movement was that the police and security forces framed socio-spiritual sect Ananda Marga because they came before Anarchism in the alphabet. Essay chapters: Terrorism by The State; The Urban Guerilla Strategy of Revolution; Nothing Radicalizes Like Pigs in the Park; Headline Hunters; Military Madness; Minimise Violence by Emphasising Politics.
The arguments in this pamphlet are still as valid today as when they were written 30 years ago.
Average-Good copy with tanning/foxing/light wear to edges, some old tape residue to bottom of cover. Interior well preserved.
2026, English
Softcover, 110 pages + supplement, 26.5 x 17.5 cm
Published by
Ex Film / Melbourne
$25.00 - In stock -
"New book from ExFilm/ExTract! Another in the series of historical stories recontextualised from their original sources, this one is very special.
I first came upon the name John Charles Dixon-Jenkins a few years ago when I was researching news items from 1989. That this project would take me to meet the staff at a school in Kuala Lumpur as it did a few weeks ago is both a mystery and a gift from the universe. Years in the making, this one is finally ready.
I could write multiple posts about who this man was and it would still not adequately cover the truth. In some ways, we will never really know the truth. First, the facts: Dixon-Jenkins served in the Vietnam War and returned vowing to help society, studying child psychology and introducing new teaching methods to schools across the United States. Anxious about the threat of nuclear war, he moved back to his birthplace of Australia where in the 1980s he became known as the Anti-Nuclear Warrior after a series of bomb threats to draw attention to his campaign of nuclear disarmament. He wrote his first philosophy book, The Unified Theory of Existence, from a prison cell; self published and distributed by his friends and allies in Melbourne. He also took 9 people hostage in Bendigo. Cue Pentridge, the Jika Jika riot, Chopper Read, Australia's longest hunger strike, fleeing the country while on bail and conversion to Islam. There's also the CIA and the impending cloud of doom that the Cold War of the 1980s cast over the world. Dixon-Jenkins' experiences in prison partially inspired John Hillcoat's Ghosts of the Civil Dead. He lived a life that is hard to believe and yet he is largely forgotten. This book aims to correct that error and ultimately, tell the story of a man who wanted to leave the world a better place."
First printing includes a bonus A5 supplementary booklet featuring a comic strip and court transcripts.
1997, English
Softcover, 184 pages, 18.8 x 13.72 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$15.00 - In stock -
How Star Trek came to represent both scientific perfection and sexual experimentation in modern-day America.
This wry and highly readable investigation of the role of space travel in popular imagination looks at the way NASA has openly borrowed from the TV show Star Trek to reinforce its public standing. It also celebrates the work of a group of the show’s fans who rewrite its storylines in porno-romance fanzines. Constance Penley advocates that scientific experimentation be accompanied by social and sexual experimentation, and devoted to exploring inner as well as outer space.
"Going into space with NASA/TREK is a good read and a good ride into uncharted regions of technoculture. In Penley’s hands, popular science is a place to launch an inquiry into moral, cultural and political stakes in a world ‘where no man has gone before.'"–Donna Haraway
"NASA/TREK is happily both enjoyable and insightful, and explores some intricate correspondences between science and sex. Among other things it offers a new and persuasive analysis of a populist subgenre: ‘slash’ fiction."–Samuel R. Delany
Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura and the author of The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis.
2011, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 416 pages, 23.5 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$45.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition.
A critical and comprehensive account of the emergence of electronic arts in Australia.
New technologies continually arise, offering repeated opportunities to artists in search of the technologically novel. Stephen Jones calls this phenomenon the "rolling new," and in Synthetics he describes how artists in Australia used new technologies in their art, from the early days of digital computing in the 1950s to a landmark exhibition in 1975. Jones looks at not only the artists and the artworks they produced but also at the evolution of computing technologies and video displays as these new forms of media developed into tools that artists could use. He also examines the collaborations that sprang up between artists and the technologists who taught them how to use these new devices. The process, he finds, was reciprocal: the offerings of the engineer could inspire the artist as much as the needs of the artist could inspire the engineer.
Jones discusses the constraints imposed by the limitations of new technologies as they developed and shows that different types of output and display technologies made for the production of very different kinds of images. He explores the development of computer graphics, the use by artists of such new conceptual paradigms as post-object art, and the emergence of video art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By 1975, the art and technology movement in Australia reached something of a watershed. The work itself became established as an art form just as funding dwindled and a popular and supportive left-wing government left office. And yet, Jones writes, the early electronic artists laid the foundation for today's burgeoning culture of new media art in Australia.
VG copy in VG DJ.
1980, French
Softcover, unpaginated, 29.5 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Chez l'auteur / Paris
$140.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first edition of Herman Puig's Yang, the prized first photo book collection by the Cuban pioneer of male nude photography, published in 1980 by Chez l'auteur, Paris. Cover-to-cover stunning artistic males nudes shot in stark b/w. No texts. Herman Puig (1928—2021) was the founder of the first Cinemateca de Cuba and a ground-breaking photographer of the male nude. Born in Havana, Cuba, where he began his early work, his ascendance comes from Catalonia. It was in Madrid that he first started experimenting with male nudes but was arrested and charged as a pornographer under the climate of the socialist government. It was at this point that he moved to Paris in an attempt to prove to Spain and the world that he was not a pornographer but an artist and was accepted with almost universal acclaim. It was in France that Puig rose to fame, before settling in Barcelona for the remainder of his life.
Good—VG copy, light tanning and wear to extremities of cover laminate and light foxing to inside of covers.
1982, French
Softcover, 88 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Herman Puig Editeur / Paris
$120.00 - In stock -
Very rare first edition of Michel Guillot's Cuir & Fantasmes, the prized first photo book collection of male nude photography by French model, photographer and STRAP contributor Michel Guillot, published in 1982 by fellow photographer Herman Puig's own imprint, Herman Puig Editeur, Paris. Cover-to-cover sensuous artistic male nudes in b/w. No texts.
Herman Puig (1928—2021) was the founder of the first Cinemateca de Cuba and a ground-breaking photographer of the male nude. Born in Havana, Cuba, where he began his early work, his ascendance comes from Catalonia. It was in Madrid that he first started experimenting with male nudes but was arrested and charged as a pornographer under the climate of the socialist government. It was at this point that he moved to Paris in an attempt to prove to Spain and the world that he was not a pornographer but an artist and was accepted with almost universal acclaim. It was in France that Puig rose to fame, before settling in Barcelona for the remainder of his life.
Very Good copy, small closed tear to cover spine edge, light wear.
1974, English
Softcover, 100 pages, 27.5 x 12 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Playboy / Los Angeles
$35.00 - In stock -
Published by Playboy, Los Angeles, 1974, this first collector's volume of Playgirl collects the first 12 months of Playgirl's Men of the Month with 12 fold–outs, plus Playgirl Discoveries, Playgirl Fantasies, and Playgirl's Man of The Year featured as a giant blow–up poster!
Very good copy, all contents present, minor edge wear to covers.
1995, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 28 x 21 cm
Published by
Dover / New York
$38.00 - In stock -
In a number of his early compositions, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) expressed the strong emotions stirred in him by the poetry of Richard Dehmel. Among these seminal works, Verklärte Nacht (1899) stands out for the beauty and strength of its chromatic language, drawing on Wagner's advances in Tristan und Isolde for its emotional impact.
The program of Verklärte Nacht is a love story. Yet, in both its content and psychology, the work clearly anticipates the innovative twentieth-century music Schoenberg himself helped to forge.
Pierrot Lunaire, one of Schoenberg's best-known and most striking works, was composed in 1912. It is a music setting for solo voice and chamber ensemble of 21 poems by Albert Giraud, translated into German by the Expressionist poet Otto Erich Hartleben. In this satiric work, evoking moods that are by turns ironic, melodramatic, and sinister, Schoenberg incorporates a highly specialized use of the speaking voice, the singing-speech delivery call Sprechstimme, within an instrumental framework of jolting atonality.
Both Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire deeply influenced the development of the Second Viennese School and, in time, the course of twentieth-century music. They are reprinted here from authoritative editions.
1970, German
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 118 pages, 21 x 17 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Studio 69 / Cologne
$100.00 - Out of stock
First edition, edited and designed by Galerie Sydow's Heinrich Sydow-Zirkwitz, this beautiful book of Hans Bellmer's graphic works was published as a special project between Studio 69 in Cologne and Galerie Sydow in Frankfurt to accompany the exhibition "Ars Erotica" in 1970. Handsomely printed with spot-colour over-printing and illustrated throughout with Bellmer's graphic famous graphic series' "Bellmer à Sade" (1961), "Petite Traité de Morale" (1965) and illustrations for Georges Bataille's "Madame Edwarda" (1965). Includes text by Horst Albert Glaser. A very handsome collection and one of the nicest Bellmer books.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with light tanning to spine/edges, dustiness.
1994, English
Post card, 22.2 x 15.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Comme des Garçons / Tokyo
$70.00 - In stock -
Rare original 1994 Comme des Garçons advertising campaign postcard from the iconic collaboration with American artist Cindy Sherman, famous for her raw and direct representations of women roles in media, in which Sherman employed dolls and prosthetics to create dark, subversive fashion imagery. The 1994 campaign, reflecting the Comme des Garçons aura, destabilizes the beauty and communication standards of the classical polished fashion campaign that were (and still are) flooding the luxury industry. According to curator Jessica Glasscock, “If Sherman’s take on Kawakubo’s designs is difficult to discuss as fashion photography, that difficulty is mirrored in the fashion press’s attempts to come to terms with Comme des Garçons clothes.”
Large format postcard (C5): 22.2 x 15.8 cm
Good copy with some light creasing.
2019, English
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
Ed. of 2500,
Published by
Primary Information / New York
$65.00 - In 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.
1989, English / German / French
Softcover (w. flexi-disc), 280 pages, 26 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Daadgalerie / Berlin
Gelbe Musik / Berlin
$180.00 - In stock -
Rare first 1989 edition of Broken Music, an essential compendium for records created by visual artists. Complete with original flexi-disc. The publication was edited by Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier and published in 1989 by DAAD and Gelbe Musik, Berlin. 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. She was married to curator René Block.
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.
Very Good copy all-round, light cover/corner wear.
2025, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$37.00 - In stock -
From the Golden Fly to the Wounded Lion, animal tales of decadence, mystery, and the uncanny.
An original collection of animal stories and poems from fin-de-siècle England and France, selected, translated, and introduced by Jessica Gossling and Sam Kunkel. Bringing together works by forty writers including Michael Field, Remy de Gourmont, Lafcadio Hearn, J. K. Huysmans, Rachilde, and Eric Count Stenbock, this timely anthology explores the inexorable connection between human and animal, from the lion to the ant. Bringing together tales both familiar and largely unknown, some of them translated into English for the first time, The Decadent Bestiary opens a new chapter in the complex story of our relationship with the natural world, showcasing the beasts of beauty and burden that recur in decadent and symbolist writing.