Reading Room Journal

Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture

Reading Room is a peer reviewed journal of art and culture published annually by the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery. The journal publishes essays of around 5000 words, artists' projects, and shorter articles of around 1000 words for its archive section.

The journal was established in 2007 through the generosity of Dr John Mayo of Queensland in memory of his late wife Marylyn Mayo and her mother Mavis Mason. Reading Room's managing editor is Catherine Hammond  and its editors are Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow.

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Reading Room

Reading Room 6

Read more about Elective Proximity, the new issue due to be published in September 2013.

  • Reading Room (Issue one)

    Issue 1 (2007) Autobiography in the Wake of Conceptualism

    In the 1960s and 1970s the idea of art as a mode of self-expression was categorically disavowed.

  • Reading Room (Issue 2)

    Issue 2 (2008) Transcendental Pop

    Issue 2 of Reading Room explores a paradox within contemporary art and culture's absorption of Pop.

  • Reading Room (issue 2)

    Issue 3 (2009) Art Goes On

    What is the relation between the contemporary artist's desire to move on and the appetite of the market for newness? Where does this leave the project of historical reckoning that has traditionally been the task of the critic or art historian?

  • Reading Room (issue 4)

    Issue 4 (2010) Liquid State

    From Zygmunt Baumann's 'liquid modernity' to Epeli Hau‛ofa's 'ocean within us' to Allan Sekula's 'ocean swimmer', there is another way of thinking the present that treats liquidity as our current condition.

  • Reading Room

    Issue 5 (2012) The Space of Reading

    Although pervasive and multifarious, the role reading plays in creative, curatorial and critical practice is commonly taken for granted.

  • Reading Room

    Issue 6 (2013) Elective Proximity: New Zealand and the World

    While globalisation may govern the discourse of contemporary art, how does a small culture like New Zealand operate within its terms? Must it be absorbed as more of the same or succumb to invisibility due to the logistics of scale? Indeed, is there a way in which it can set its own agenda in creating platforms upon which art can be seen and circulated?

  • Guidelines for Contributors

  • Editorial Board and Advisors

  • Reading Room 5

    Order

    Reading Room 5, "The Space of Reading", is now available. Back issues where available may also be ordered here.