The Journal

Journal Of Art

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, Australasia’s principal DEST-accredited refereed art-history journal, has come to Queensland. The IMA will publish three issues in association with the Art Association, Australasia's professional body for art historians. They will be edited by a team of Queensland art historians: Rex Butler and Sally Butler from the University of Queensland, Andrew McNamara and Mark Pennings from Queensland University of Technology, Rosemary Hawker from Queensland College of Art, and Robert Leonard from the IMA. Angela Goddard from Queensland Art Gallery and Courtney Pedersen from Queensland University of Technology are reviews editors. Ben Wilson is our editorial assistant.

Recently published, our first issue investigates the role of the medium today, when artists routinely work in and across different media. References to our current 'post-medium condition' have become ubiquitous, and the old ideal of medium-specificity is firmly identified with high modernism. Do today’s post-medium practices demonstrate the redundancy of medium as a category for understanding art, or is medium still crucial to aesthetic judgement? Do post-medium practices mark a return to an earlier form of modernism? This issue of the Journal examines a wide range of critical positions and artistic practices that focus on the question of the medium in art. It features essays by Diarmuid Costello on Jeff Wall and Gerhard Richter, by Rosemary Hawker on Gerhard Richter, by Donna McColm on Morris Louis, and by Toni Ross on Andrea Zittel, an interview with French philosopher Jacques Rancière, a pictorial by Berlin painter Katharina Grosse, and a swag of book and exhibition reviews.

Here are synopses of upcoming issues:

21ST CENTURY ART HISTORY: What will the discipline of art history look like in the 21st Century? What will the subject matter of 21st Century art history be? With the end of Eurocentric models of art history and even the end of post-colonialism, which still remained parasitic on the Eurocentrism it opposed, what ways of writing art history will be possible in the 21st Century? What would a transnational, international or even non-national art history look like? How is one to conceive of a global art history? Is it a 'global' art history that we should be aiming for? This issue invites contributions attempting to visualise the future face of art historiography.

ART AND ENTERTAINMENT: What relation does art have with entertainment today? Are they simply antithetical? The new Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, with its screen-based presentations, interactive exhibits, and emphasis on children’s activities, effectively implies a new visual economy for art. As well, within the academy, there is an increased insistence on seeing art as part of a wider spectrum of 'visual culture' or 'creative industries'. What are the assumptions behind these various moves? What would it mean to see art as a form of infotainment or even entertainment? And what does this say about the possibility of art criticism? Are we headed into a new 'post-critical' realm for the plastic arts? And where, within the realm of the 'high' arts themselves, can we see the early signs of such tendencies? Can we go back to Pop Art, or even further, to see this merging of art with mass culture? Expressions of interest for this issue should be made by August 2008, and final submissions are due December 2008.

The editors can be contacted on anzjournal@ima.org.au

Books for review can be submitted to: Reviews Editors, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art,
PO Box 2176, Fortitude Valley BC QLD 4006, Brisbane, Australia.