Issue 2, TRANSCENDENTAL POP
www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz
Reading Room, the Asia Pacific’s newest peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture, launches its second issue “Transcendental Pop”.
This issue explores a paradox within contemporary art’s absorption of Pop, identifying a current shift in the infamous fascination with the everyday. While arguably, it is Warhol’s defence of surface, flatness and blankness that has been absorbed and referenced by subsequent generations of artists, these characteristic qualities have become embedded in art’s relationship to the real. “Transcendental Pop” examines how this narrow absorption of Pop’s surface has allowed a paradox to occur when artists reinvest surface with depth, the unknown and unquantifiable. Throughout the issue writers have variously explored this contradiction, something which has the potential to shift the art/life nexus as we know it. However, like their artistic subjects, these writers invariably create room for speculation, without leaving the ground as it were.
The contents include Rex Butler writing on “Andy Warhol and the “Religious” Dimension”, Natasha Conland on the form of football in Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s Zidane and Harun Farocki’s Deep Play, David Craig on David Hatcher, Lars Bang Larsen’s extended discussion on the Occult “The Surface No Longer Holds”, Tan Lin on Eric Baudelaire’s Sugar Water, Aram Moshayedi on Kamrooz Aram’s “Painted Elsewhere”, Daniel Palmer on Darren Sylvester, and Morgan Thomas on Baroque inflection in 24 Hour Psycho.
The archive section includes a commissioned portfolio from artist Gavin Hipkins on Andy Warhol’s Index Book; and essays on the relationship of practice and criticism in the work of Giovanni Intra, and Ed Ruscha’s first solo exhibition outside America.
Reading Room is published annually by the E.H. McCormick Research Library at the Auckland Art Gallery, and is edited by Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow.
Issue 2 “Transcendental Pop”, 200 pp plus colour section.
Call for papers for Issue 3: 2009 coming soon. See our website for details and subscription information: www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/research/journal
