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Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture
Issue 3 (2009)
ART GOES ON
We'll always be eager to find or create a new experience, a new source of
exhilaration. But whatever you arrive at will very soon no longer be there.
And so you will need to move on, or you will need to move up. And this will
have to be your perpetual practice.
Ai Weiwei (Artforum, May 2008)
The editors of Reading Room invite contributors to reflect on the
momentum of which Ai Weiwei speaks, to address a range of questions his
statement evocatively raises. 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? If artists are caught in the
effervescence of the now, how do they negotiate the historical legacies within
which they are embedded? Is perpetual motion an antidote to history and its
teleological ambitions or an impossible fantasy that is itself historically
conditioned? Is such optimism a product of a buoyant and expanding art world or
a symptom of its amnesia-inducing effects?
Reading Room encourages contributors to explore how art practice is
shaped by and shapes current conditions. Equally, we invite submissions which
consider the character of our moment to offer diagnoses of the situation for
critical discourse.
Expressions of interest or short abstracts relating to this topic are sought
by 30 June 2008.
Reading Room is a refereed journal of art and culture published annually
by the E.H. McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The
journal publishes essays of around 5000 words, artists' projects, and shorter
articles of around 1000 words for its archive section.
The editors of Reading Room are Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and
Wystan Curnow. Correspondence should be sent by email to the managing editor,
Catherine Hammond:
catherine.hammond@aucklandcity.govt.nz
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