Selected images from the 1949 Les Jeux de la poupée (The Game of the Doll) a landmark collaborative work by Hans Bellmer and poet Paul Éluard. Features the hand-coloured photographs of Bellmer’s mutated, jointed female dolls arranged in unsettling, dreamlike poses that blur the line between desire, control, and dismemberment. The images, both tender and disturbing, exemplify Bellmer’s obsession with the fragmented female form and reflect his resistance to the fascist ideal of bodily perfection. The photographs are a key surrealist exploration of eroticism, identity, and the unconscious. Les Jeux de la poupée remains one of Bellmer’s most significant and works.

Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) was a German artist best known for his provocative life-sized dolls and surrealist photography. Bellmer began constructing articulated female dolls in the 1930s, photographing them in unsettling, dreamlike scenes that explored themes of eroticism, control, and fragmentation. His work was condemned by the Nazi regime as “degenerate,” prompting his move to France in 1938, where he became associated with the Surrealists. After the war, Bellmer abandoned doll-making and focused on erotic drawings and prints. He lived in Paris with his partner Unica Zürn until her suicide in 1970, and continued working until his death in 1975.

Robert Ashton, born in Melbourne in 1950, is an Australian photographer known for his distinctive documentary style that emerged in the 1970s. After studying photography at Prahran College (1969–71), he became immersed in a creative community that included Carol Jerrems, Paul Cox, and cousin Rennie Ellis, with whom he shared a studio and worked at Brummels Gallery. His 1974 book Into the Hollow Mountains, documented everyday scenes in Fitzroy with striking intimacy. It was recently republished in an expanded edition. He has exhibited widely and is known for using hand-built large format cameras and traditional printing methods such as photogravure and the Collodion process to produce his work.

Conceived as a visual résumé, Installation Views provides both a comprehensive overview of Charlotte Posenenske’s solo exhibitions and a record of her numerous group shows.

In her Manifesto, Charlotte Posenenske stated: “I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems.” Developing her artistic practice throughout the 1960s, Posenenske produced a body of work that uniquely combined several strands of the art of the period: conceptualism, minimalism, and socially engaged participatory art. Her Manifesto, published in Art International in May 1968, lays out the social demands on art as well as the impossibility of fulfilling those demands. Shortly after its publication, Posenenske left the art world behind to pursue her studies in sociology, undertaking a new career in that field.

Produced on the occasion of Roman Ondák’s exhibition Spirit and Opportunity at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln from 1 May–27 June, 2004.

With texts by Frank Frangenberg, Georg Schöllhammer, Igor Zabel, and a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Roman Ondák.

Delivered at Harvard in 1988–89 as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, were more like performances, as the audience heard them. Cage calls them “mesostics,” a literary form generated by chance (in this case computerized I-Ching chance) operations. Using the computer as an oracle in conjunction with a large source text, he happens upon ideas, which produce more ideas. Chance, and not Cage, makes the choices and central decisions. Such a form is rooted, Cage tells us in his introduction, in the belief that “all answers answer all questions.”

You can hear an audio recording of the lecture here.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.

John Cage (1912–1992) is routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature.

Includes two texts by John Cage and the text On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and may have some traces of previous ownership.