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 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
info@worldfoodbooks.com
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Australian Art
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Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
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Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
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Protest / Revolt
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Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
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Fetishism / BDSM
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Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
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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.
"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.
2017, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 12.8 x 20.4 cm
Published by
The New York Review of Books / New York
$32.00 - Out of stock
A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism’s most compelling figures
In 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.
This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.
2013, English
Hardcover, 348 pages, 27.5 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Walther König / Köln
$500.00 - Out of stock
Now exceptionally rare and collectible, Phenotype is the first comprehensive monograph on the biologist Jochen Lempert, who has worked as a photographer since the early 1990s.
Since the early 1990s, the German photographer and biologist Jochen Lempert (born 1958) has used analogue, black-and-white photography to convey his gently reverential vision of nature and sentience—whether that of animals, plants or humans. Often grainy, sometimes verging on abstraction, and sometimes focusing minutely on the activity of some tiny creature, his photographs exude a simple pleasure in fleeting tranquility. Lempert has also taken a quietly particular stance on the presentation of his work: in exhibitions, his images are presented unframed and tacked up on walls, and his books (among them Recent Field Work and Coevolution) are always immediately identifiable for their modest but exquisite design, printing and paper. Continuing this tradition of gorgeous bookmaking, Jochen Lempert: Phenotype reproduces 450 of his works, most of them arranged in groups and sequences, from more than 20 years of artistic production.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Hamburger Kunsthalle Gallery of Contemporary Art, 22 June – 29 September 2013.
Very Good copy, light tanning to spine.
2021, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 16 x 23 cm
Published by
Camden Art Centre / UK
$98.00 - Out of stock
Humanity’s place in the natural order is under scrutiny as never before, held in a precarious balance between visible and invisible forces: from the microscopic threat of a virus to the monumental power of climate change.
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, The Botanical Mind investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree was conceived as a trans-generational group exhibition by Gina Buenfeld and Matt Williams for the Camden Art Centre, bringing together surrealist, modernist, visionary, outsider, indigenous Amazonian, and contemporary works alongside historical and ethnographic artefacts, textiles and manuscripts spanning more than 500 years. Through the symbolism of diverse cultural artefacts and the works of mystics, artists and thinkers around the world, 'The Botanical Mind' reveals how the vegetal kingdom has metaphysical importance to the development of consciousness and spirituality.
This richly illustrated 224-page companion publication includes essays by the curators and contributions from scholars on the key themes of the exhibition – alchemy, art history, plant ontology, Gaian ecology, anthropology and ethnobotany – unifying philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic approaches to meditate on the cosmic significance of plants in different worldviews.
Edited by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark
Designed by Sara De Bondt studio.
Artists and Writers
Eileen Agar / Anni Albers / Josef Albers / Sarah Angliss / Consuelo "Chelo" González Amézcua / Gemma Anderson with Wakefield Lab and John Dupré / Anna Atkins / Kirk Barley / Jordan Belson / Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater / Karl Blossfeldt / Carol Bove / Jagadish Chandra Bose / Kerstin Brätsch / Bernd Brabec De Mori / Hildegarde von Bingen / Andrea Büttner / Adam Chodzko / Ithell Colquhoun / Bruce Conner / Brenda Danilowitz / Das Institut / Mirtha Dermisache / Minnie Evans / Cerith Wyn Evans / Charles Filiger / Robert Fludd / Monica Gagliano / Giorgio Griffa / Brion Gysin / Friedrich Wilhelm Heine / Ernst Haeckel / Dr Stephan Harding / Anna Haskel / Tamara Henderson / Channa Horwitz / Textiles from the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa) people / C.G. Jung / Joachim Koester / Rachid Koraïchi / Hilma af Klint / Emma Kunz / Yves Laloy / Ghislaine Leung / Linder / Simon Ling / Michael Marder / Agnes Martin / André Masson / John McCracken / Terence McKenna / Henri Michaux / Matt Mullican / Wolfgang Paalen / Paul Păun / Stefan A. Pedersen / Santiago Ramón y Cajal / Steve Reinke and James Richards / Edith Rimmington / Adele Röder / Daniel Rios Rodriguez / Rupert Sheldrake / Textiles and ceramics from the Shipibo-Conibo people / Penny Slinger / F. Percy Smith / Janet Sobel / Philip Taaffe / Priscilla Telmon and Vincent Moon / Fred Tomaselli / Delfina Muñoz de Toro / Alexander Tovborg / David Tudor / Lee Ufan / Scottie Wilson / Terry Winters / Adolf Wölfli / Bryan Wynter / Henriette Zéphir / Anna Zemánková / Unica Zürn / artists from the Yawanawá community
2017, English
Softcover, 44 pages, 22 x 23 cm
Edition of 500
Published by
Robert Heald Gallery / Wellington
$30.00 - Out of stock
Catalogue published by Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, on the occasion of the exhibition 'Miroslav Tichý', Robert Heald Gallery, 14 September 2017 - 14 October 2017. Illustrated throughout in colour with a beautiful selection of Tichý's photographs featured in the exhibition, accompanied by a new text by Serena Bentley.
Miroslav Tichy (1926-2011)
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Prague (1945-48), Miroslav Tichy withdrew to a life in isolation in his hometown of Kyjov, Moravia, Czech Republic. In the late 1950s he quit painting and became a distinctive Diogenes-like figure. From the end of the 1960s he began to take photographs mainly of local women, in part with cameras he made by hand. He later mounted them on hand-made frames, added finishing touches with pencil, and thus moved them from photography in the direction of drawing. The result are works of strikingly unusual formal qualities, which disregard the rules of conventional photography. They constitute a large oeuvre of poetic, dreamlike views of feminine beauty in a small town under the Czechoslovak Communist regime.
1980, French
Softcover, 122 pages, 23 x 39 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Editions Parenthèses / Marseille
$150.00 - Out of stock
First French edition of this visionary book by Italian architect Paolo Soleri (1919 Turin — 2013 Scottsdale, Arizona), published by Editions Parenthèses, Marseille, in 1980. This stunning over-sized landscape book reads like a manifesto/blue-print/scrap-book of Soleri's Arcology (Architecture+Ecology), through his own words (here in French) and 120 pages of his intricate and fantastic architectural drawings.
"I am advocating a Lean Hypothesis about reality and a Lean Alternative to our materialistic culture. With the lean urban development I put tangibility to my conjecturing. Years ago I declared that Leanness is frugality fraught with sophistication. The gazelle is lean, i.e. frugality wrapped in grace. Can anyone imagine a frozen tundra or a scorching Sahara colonized by millions of hermitages, single homes? A nightmarish American Dream incapable of supporting any kind of dignified life, let alone the evolution of a civilization. Is the exurban (ever-expanding suburban) metastasis a bejeweled dream? Of food and shelter, the two indispensable needs of life, shelter is the direct responsibility of planners; architects, urban planners, builders, developers, speculators, politicians, students ... time to wake up!" — Paolo Soleri, Arcosanti, Arizona
Through his work as architect, urban designer, artist, craftsman and philosopher, Paolo Soleri has been exploring the countless possibilities of human aspiration. The envisioned future taking shape in his mind has been expressed in various media. One outstanding endeavor is Arcosanti, an urban laboratory, constructed in the high Arizona desert. It attempts to demonstrate an alternative human habitat much needed in this increasingly perplexing world. This project also exemplifies his steadfast devotion to creating an experiential space to "prototype" an environment in harmony with man. Through his articulated philosophy "Arcology (Architecture+Ecology)", Soleri formulates a path that may aid us on our evolutionary journey toward a state of aesthetic, equity and compassion. The half century work of his broad-ranging and coherent intellect (so scarce in the age of specialization) has influenced many in the field in search of a new paradigm for our built environment. — Tomiaki Tamura
Very Good copy with light bump to top-right cover corner, light tanning and ex-shop sticker mark.
2021, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 14 x 20 cm
Published by
Distanz / Berlin
$42.00 - In stock -
"Getting your disco act together."
"Guy Hocquenghem visited New York and stayed with me in my loft on Chambers Street, and one night while I was out, he read what I'd written. When I returned later, he said to me that such straightforward description of gay culture was just the sort of thing that gay activists should be writing." — Douglas Crimp
Douglas Crimp (b. Coeur d'Alene, USA, 1944; d. 2019) was one of the most influential art critics, curators, and AIDS activists of his time. His writings on representation and critique remain uncontested milestones in the debate over AIDS and queer aesthetics. The seminal essay Disss-co (A Fragment) reads as a primer to his pioneering studies of queer subcultures and New York's underground scene. In light of today's renewed repression of subcultural—sexual and ethnic—communities, the text has lost none of its relevance.
The art works of Henrik Olesen (b. 1967) often focus on sexual politics. In this publication he shows excerpts from the project Lack of Information, 2001. Arranged as a grid, the work presents a map of different laws worldwide that are directed against gays, lesbians and transsexuals. Among other topics, the work examines anti-gay and sodomy laws, migration and adoption rights, and statistics on hate crimes. It also contains information on the frequency Disss-co (A Fragment) of same-sex behaviour among animal species.
2021, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 14.5 x 21 cm
Published by
Whitechapel / London
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$40.00 - Out of stock
From the hexing of presidents to a renewed interest in herbalism and atavistic forms of self-care, magic has furnished the contemporary imagination with mysterious and complex bodies of arcane thought and practice. This volume brings together writings by artists, magicians, historians, and theorists that illuminate the vibrant correspondences animating contemporary art's varied encounters with magical culture, inspiring a reconsideration of the relationship between the symbolic and the pragmatic.
Dispensing with simple narratives of re-enchantment, Magic illustrates the intricate ways in which we have to some extent always been captivated by the allure of the numinous. It demonstrates how magical culture's tendencies toward secrecy, occlusion, and encryption might provide contemporary artists with strategies of remedial communality, a renewed faith in the invocational power of personal testimony, and a poetics of practice that could boldly question our political circumstances, from the crisis of climate collapse to the strictures of socially sanctioned techniques of medical and psychiatric care.
Tracing its various emergences through the shadows of modernity, the circuitries of ritual media, and declarations of psychic self-defence, Magic deciphers the evolution of a 'magical-critical' thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present.
Artists surveyed:
Holly Pester, Katrina Palmer, Ithell Colquhoun, Anna Zett, Monica Sjoeo, Sofia Al-Maria, Jack Burnham, Jeremy Millar, Susan Hiller, Mike Kelley, Morehshin Allahyari, Center for Tactical Magic, David Steans, Porpentine, Travis Jeppesen, Linda Stupart, Caspar Heinemann, Elizabeth Mputu, Faith Wilding, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta, Henri Michaux, Kenneth Anger, Benedict Drew, Mark Leckey, Robert Morris, Jenna Sutela, Haroon Mirza, Zadie Xa, Saya Woolfalk, Ian Cheng, Tabita Rezaire, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Elijah Burgher, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sahej Rahal
Writers:
Charles Fort, Victoria Nelson, Gary Lachman, Yvonne P. Chireau, Randall Styers, Isabelle Stengers, Alan Moore, Simon O' Sullivan, Lucy Lippard, Louis Chude Sokei, Patricia MacCormack, Mark Pilkington, AE, Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Michel Leiris, Aime Cesaire, Austin Osman Spare, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Elaine Graham, Jeffrey Sconce, Giulia Smith, Esther Leslie, Alice Bucknell, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Hannah Gregory, Kristen Gallerneaux, Mahan Moalemi, Jamie Sutcliffe, Gregory Sholette, Aaron Gach, Eugene Thacker, Diane Di Prima, Allan Doyle, Aria Dean, Emily LaBarge, Lou Cornum, Joy KMT, Scott Wark, McKenzie Wark, Phil Hine, Jackie Wang, Sean Bonney
2021, English
Softcover (walnut cloth-bound), 50 pages, 31 x 20.5 cm
Ed. of 400,
Published by
Robert Heald Gallery / Wellington
$30.00 - In stock -
The first gallery catalogue dedicated entirely to the work of American artist Hawkins Bolden (1914—2005), published by Robert Heald Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Hawkins Bolden — Tongues, 25 June 2020 - 25 July, 2020. Hawkins Bolden was a self-taught artist who lived his entire life in Memphis, Tennessee. At the age of seven, Bolden was left completely blind following a baseball accident. Later in his life, utilizing only his sense of touch, Bolden began scavenging the alleyways and fields around his home in search of discarded materials, litter and other debris with which to work, creating a vast number of his astonishing "scarecrows", tall totems and mask-like objects made from pots, pans, leather belts, rubber hoses and other found materials.
Published in a limited edition of 400 copies, this large format, walnut cloth-bound publication is profusely illustrated throughout with Bolden's works, alongside installation views and text by William Arnett (Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Atlanta).
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 568 pages, 33 x 28.6 cm
Published by
The New York Public Library / New York
Tinwood Books / Burlington
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / New York
$275.00 - In stock -
The African American culture of the South has produced many of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms. Widely appreciated for its music—from the blues and jazz, to gospel, soul, rock ‘n’ roll—the region has also played host to a less visible but equally important visual art tradition. Working without significant formal training, often employing the most unpretentious and unlikely materials, these grassroots artists have created powerful statements that, like the music, are strongly influenced by the legacies of African belief systems, rooted in community, and committed to cultural continuity. At the same time, however, this quintessentially American art testifies to the originality and transformative force of individual imaginations.
Since the 1980s, popular and critical interest in this genre has grown dramatically and has given it many names: “self-taught,” “folk,” “outsider,” “visionary.” Souls Grown Deep: African AmericanVernacular Art is the opening work in a multi-volume study that offers the first comprehensive exploration of this art form’s development during the late twentieth century, an era shaped by the civil rights movement. Souls Grown Deep illuminates a remarkable spectrum of creativity: the media of painting, sculpture, and works on paper; the region’s outdoor art environments and art installations; historical examples from earlier eras; and relevant decorative arts and crafts.
With unprecedented thoroughness and scope, Souls Grown Deep takes readers inside these creators’ worlds. The book includes lavishly illustrated, full-color chapters on forty vernacular artists. Writing from diverse perspectives, thirty-seven contributing writers—including civil rights leaders, art historians, museum curators, and folklorists—present thematic, and historical overviews crucial to and understanding of the art’s origins.
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.
1988, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 388 pages, 25 x 2.5 x 25 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$160.00 - Out of stock
Rare first edition of the best, largest volume on visionary architect Bruce Goff, published by MIT in 1988! Distilled from years of research and friendship, this is the first comprehensive study to capture the essential Goff — the idiosyncratic and profoundly original designs, the erratic yet exuberant career that produced some of the most challenging and inventive architecture of this century. Bruce Goff spent most of his life (1904-1982) in the American heartland. In the seven decades of his practice he designed nearly 500 projects, of which some 140 were built. Although he loved to flaunt the novel use of found materials (steel pipe, coal, rope, plexiglas aircraft domes, cake pans) and flashy decorative surfaces including white goose feathers and egg crates Goff's central and abiding concern was with the mastery of space.
As David De Long shows in this engaging book, Goff's spatial creativity was unbounded, his diversity seemingly unlimited. De Long discusses the architect's development and early work in Tulsa, the formative influences that shaped his career, his first independent work in Chicago, the periods of working on speculation in Bartlesville and Kansas City, his withdrawal from active practice following charges of homosexuality, and Goffs triumphant resurgence with his design for the Japanese Wing of the Los Angeles County Museum. De Long devotes an entire chapter to Goff's major projects - the Ledbetter, Ford, Bavinger, and Wilson houses, the Hopewell Baptist Church, and Crystal Cathedral, whose complex geometries, spatial richness, and modified prefabricated elements set them radically apart from the conformity of small town America. The story is a fascinating one, incorporating significant design details with local reactions and sometimes devastating professional criticism.
Bruce Goff: Toward Absolute Architecture, contains a complete catalogue raisonné of buildings and projects; it is included in The Architectural History Foundation's American Monograph Series.
2021, English
Hardcover, 382 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, the sixth of seven volumes, about one of Sweden’s most fascinating collections of artistic output.
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Volume VI focuses on the time after her mother’s death in 1920 when Hilma af Klint gave up her geometrical works and began to paint with watercolours, as in the series On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees, from 1922.
Produced with the permission of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and featuring introductions by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist, a separate slip cased edition containing all seven volumes will be available in autumn 2021.
2006, English
Softcover, 70 pages, 20.8 x 29.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Pataphysics Books / Melbourne
$45.00 - Out of stock
Out of print 2006 issue of the great Pataphysics magazine from Melbourne, the Into-Gal issue.
Includes J.G. Ballard quotes and conversations, an interview with with Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson), “In Praise of the Jews” by Sylvère Lotringer, interview with John Geiger on Brion Gysin, interview with Brian Aldiss, an unpublished 1989 Abbie Hoffman interview, ancient Mesopotamian poetry, interview with Paul Violi, a project by Terry Winters, Judith Elliston, and more.
Published and edited by Leo Edelstein and Judith Elliston, 2006, and long out of print. Fine copy.
1991, French / Japanese
Softcover (2 volumes in cardboard slipcase), 112 pages / 112 pages, 19 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
PARCO / Tokyo
$160.00 - Out of stock
First two-volume box edition of this scarce publication on the work of Bernard Faucon, issued only in Japan in 1991 by PARCO and dedicated entirely to Faucon's major body of photographic work (accompanied by his writings) Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991). Beautifully printed and bound in Japan.
“Idols and Sacrifices mark the end of a long cycle of abstraction, idealisation, that had led from the first pleasant times on the beach to the gold haze of the Chambers. The end also of an innocence, a magic confidence in the power of the image, in that 'leibnitzian' idea that every image contains all others, contains the world.
Dressed up as a sort of back-to-basics of photography, back to the classic genres, 'the Portrait and the Landscape'. Idols and Sacrifices constitute a laying-bare, a radicalisation, a simplifying of the means that will take me to the End Of The Image. The wish to face, once at least, the body only, beauty without artifice. The wish to answer in my own way the question of the living: since the living cannot be photographed, we will try and photograph the gods!
The red landscapes imposed themselves later, because Idol and Sacrifice make up an inseparable couple, and also as a metaphor of the powerlessness of photography, of its incurable deficiency faced with the intensity of the living, the red of Sacrifices becomes the wound, the despair of photography itself.” - Bernard Faucon
Bernard Faucon (b. 1950 in Provence) is a French photographer and writer. Faucon was one of the first photographers in the second half of the 20th century to systematically create and master the constructed image, gaining fame worldwide in the late 1970s when he started a new trend of mise en scène photo. His photographic work has a love of youth and dreamy beauty, using saturated colour, natural settings, rooms and often tableaux of mannequins. For more than 20 years, his staged photographs have been exhibited in international galleries such as Leo Castelli in New York, and Agathe Gaillard and Yvon Lambert in Paris. Elsewhere, he has also been a part of collective exhibitions dedicated to staged photography. He has won numerous awards from his work, including the Grand Prix National (1989), and the Prix Leonard de Vinci (1991). His major photographic series are, in date-order: Les Grandes Vacances (1977–1981); Evolution probable du Temps (1981–1984); Les Chambres d'amour (1987–1989); Les Idoles et les Sacrifices (1989–1991); Les écritures (1991–1993); and La Fin de L'image (1993–1995).
Very Good—Fine copy (Fine pristine volumes in VG original cardboard slipcase, with small closed tear, minor wear and tear.
2021, English
Hardcover, 224 pages, 24 x 31 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
Hilma af Klint’s Catalogue Raisonné, the fourth of seven volumes, about one of Sweden’s most fascinating collections of artistic output.
Hilma af Klint is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Now, for the first time, af Klint’s works, some 1,600 in all, have been collected in a Catalogue Raisonné. Af Klint’s work should be seen and appreciated in the series of paintings often depicting specific themes and this ground-breaking publication, divided into seven volumes, allows for this. Volume IV, within the series Parsifal she explored her inward self through the journey of a boy and a girl and their various levels of consciousness. In her Atom series, af Klint explored the inner parts of our existence through what scientists then considered the smallest particles in the world.
Produced with the permission of the Hilma af Klint Foundation and featuring introductions by Daniel Birnbaum and Kurt Almqvist.
2021, English
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23 x 29 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - Out of stock
The long-awaited English translation of a pioneering account of af Klint’s oeuvre.
Text by Åke Fant. Translation by Ruth Urbom.
For the first time since its original publication in 1989, Åke Fant’s pioneering account of Hilma af Klint’s life and career is available to read in English. Following her training at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and 20 subsequent years of painting, Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) began working with an abstract visual language in 1906. She then dedicated the rest of her life to her magnum opus, a series of large-scale abstract paintings intended to be exhibited as part of an immense spiritual temple. Af Klint drew upon contemporaneous occult sources to develop her work, such as Spiritualism and the writings of Theosophical writers Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, as well as Rudolf Steiner, who claimed to be clairvoyant. This edition supplements Åke Fant’s original text and curator Lars Nittve’s foreword with a new preface by Kurt Almqvist (President, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit). An updated timeline, full-color reproductions of af Klint’s art and a beautiful cloth binding further emphasize the momentousness of Fant’s work, which remains vital even in the light of subsequent research, at a time when interest in Hilma af Klint and her work has never been greater.
2020, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 14.6 x 20.3 cm
Published by
Strange Attractor / London
$48.00 - Out of stock
This book offers the first in-depth biographical study of the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, situating her art within the magical contexts that shaped her imaginative life and work. After decades of neglect, Colquhoun's unique vision and hermetic life have become an object of great renewed interest, both for artists and for historians of magic.
Although her paintings are represented in such major collections as Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, Colquhoun's rejection of both avant-garde and occult orthodoxies resulted in a life of relative obscurity. Her visual and written works have only recently received adequate recognition as a precursor to contemporary experiments in magical autobiography and esoteric feminism.
After rejecting the hectic social expectations and magical orthodoxies of London's art and occult scenes, Colquhoun pursued a life of dedicated spiritual and artistic enquiry embodied in her retreat to Cornwall. Genius of the Fern Loved Gully balances engaging biography with art historical erudition and critical insight into the magical systems that underscored her art and writing.
2019, English
Hardcover, 248 pages, 26 x 30 cm
Published by
Hirmer / Münich
Phoenix Art Museum / Phoenix
$85.00 - Out of stock
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.
This lavishly illustrated hardcover publication seeks to clarify the artist's significance and role within the cannon of American Modernism but also against the legacy of European abstraction. It contextualizes her work against her contemporaries, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and their distinct versions of American spiritual modernism. Pelton's highly symbolic paintings were inspired by religious sources ranging from Theosophy and Agni Yoga to the spiritual teachings of Dane Rudhyar and Will Levington Comfort. Over three decades she devoted herself to painting spiritual abstractions, which conveyed her "light message to the world."
2021, English
Hardback, 252 pages, 22.9 x 30.5 cm
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$80.00 - In stock -
The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawings.
Much of Joseph Elmer Yoakum's story comes from the artist himself-and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891-1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a "spiritual unfoldment"? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities.
With hundreds of beautiful colour reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist's work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.
2001, English
Softcover, 166 pages, 25 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Museum of American Folk Art / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
The first monographic study on Joseph E. Yoakum (1890-1972), an African American-Native American self-taught master. Profusely illustrated, Traveling the Rainbow is a fitting tribute to this fascinating, yet little-known creator of visionary landscapes. What emerges herein fits an adventure novel. Yoakum traveled the oceans on steamliners working in their boiler rooms. He rode America's railways as an inspector. With an elite team of African American troops in World War I, he toured Europe. On the road with the Ringling Brothers Circus he posted circus flyers. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2,000 watercolour and pencil drawings during the last decade of his life, infused with the motion and energy of travel. Much of what he told about his life -- especially about his travels -- was thought to be invented, but here Derrel DePasse makes startling discoveries about the artist's landscapes and finds that much of his story of himself was grounded in fact. Part African American, part Native American, Yoakum drew on his dual background and conjured powerful forms of expression -- the blues and Native American symbolism -- to create dynamic cultural fusions.
This monograph remains the most comprehensive study on this great American artist, including a chronology, bibliography, list of collections, exhibition history, and index.
Very Good copy.
2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 296 pages, 19.1 x 26 cm
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
National Gallery of Art / Washington
$69.00 - Out of stock
How artists created an aesthetic of "positive barbarism" in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb.
In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a "brutal aesthetics" adequate to the destruction around them.
With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with "human animals"? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap?
A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own.
Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
2021, English
Softcover, 24 pages, 24.5 x 24.5 cm
Published by
Nieves / Zurich
$39.00 - Out of stock
The fascination with Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) has never been greater than it is today. Much that the researcher, healer and artist anticipated with her holistic way of thinking is now taken for granted in contemporary art. ‘My images are intended for the 21st century,’ Emma Kunz is once said to have predicted. The augury of the researcher, naturopath and artist from Brittnau in the Canton of Aargau seems to be coming true: Emma Kunz’s drawings, presented to the public for the first time in the Aargauer Kunsthaus in 1973, have been shown in such places as Venice, Munich, London, Tel Aviv and Hong Kong over the past few years, and are celebrated by an international audience.
Living a secluded life far removed from the art scene, eighty years ago she exemplified an expanded concept of art, rejected the idea of art versus non-art and instead opened it up to a wide range of aspects – research, medicine, nature study and the supernatural, the magical, the visionary.
Emma Kunz (1892 in Brittnau/CH – 1963 in Waldstatt/CH) was born into humble conditions in Brittnau in the Canton of Aargau. She never had any artistic training or higher education of any kind. Emma Kunz is said to have become aware of her special clairvoyant and radiaesthetic [radiation- reading] abilities at an early age. She began to heal her first patients and to work with the divining pendulum that she would use in her drawings from 1938 onwards. Until a few years before her death she produced some 500 characteristic drawings on graph paper, which she used as a tool for her healing activity. She also worked with numerology, researched in the field of herbalism and achieved a legendary series of healing successes. At this time she began to ask her acquaintances to call her ‘Penta’. In 1942 Emma Kunz is said to have discovered Aion A, the healing rock that is still available from Swiss pharmacies, in a quarry in Würenlos that had been used since Roman times – and is known today as the Emma Kunz Grotto.
2013, English
Hardcover, 104 pages, 25 x 20 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
San Jose State University / California
$150.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the immediately out of print, rare hardcover monograph on American artist Jon Serl, published in 2013 by San Jose State University. Heavily illustrated throughout with full-colour plates of Serl's paintings alongside in-depth illustrated essays by Jo Farb Hernandez, Randall Morris, Cara Zimmerman, and portrait, biography and exhibition history, "The Mutability of Being" is the most comprehensive book dedicated to the work of this remarkable painter.
Jon Serl (1894-1993) was a self-taught artist who lived in a ramshackle 25-room house he built in the California desert. He fed the birds and raised his own food, and created paintings that are compelling, enigmatic, and forceful: re-redolent of days and nights fighting the demons of the past and the harassments of the present, but also of the joy of color and the tension that releasing his stories in paint assuaged. Although Searle did not begin making art until late in life, he became consumed by it. His head was absorbed by his work 24/7 and he did not stop painting until his death.
His visual narratives resonate with a personal passion that evokes modernist modes of Symbolist depth, Surrealist fantasy, and Expressionist abstractions. Bold brushwork, a concentrated color palette, and an animated intermingling of the physical with the transcendent are eloquently important features of his work. Unapologetic and unforgettable, the paintings of John's Serl take us to a place that is both external and internal, the place where art should be.
Very Good - Fine copy.
2021, English
Hardcover (clothbound), 220 pages, 31 x 24 cm
Published by
Stolpe Publishing / Stockholm
$80.00 - In stock -
Foreword by Daniel Birnbaum, Kurt Almqvist.
The drawings in this first volume of a new catalogue raisonné represent an intense ten-year period of Hilma af Klint’s (1862-1944) life that would lay the foundation for her later achievements. In 1896, af Klint and four other women formed The Five, a group steeped in the spiritualist beliefs permeating Europe at that time, including theosophy, Rosicrucianism and other strains of liberal religious thought. From 1896 to 1907, The Five engaged in a daily systematic method of spiritual experimentation. During séances, Hilma af Klint drew automatic spiritual sketches based on the messages that the medium (not always the same member) communicated from the spirits the group summoned. The elaborate system of symbols, geometry and biological imagery that characterize her work all find their origin during this period.