Writings on the “turn to the ordinary” in contemporary art examine the various ways artists have engaged with the everyday since 1945.
Numerous international exhibitions and biennials have borne witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in the work of Surrealists, Situationists, the Fluxus group, and conceptual and feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s. This art shows a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous, an engagement with a new kind of anthropology, an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture, or a meditation on what happens when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. This collection of writings by artists, theorists, and critics assembles for the first time a comprehensive anthology on the everyday in the world of contemporary art.
Artists surveyed include
Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, Vladimir Arkhipov, Ian Breakwell, Stanley Brouwn, Sophie Calle, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Mary Kelly, Lettrist International, Jonas Mekas, Annette Messager, Aleksandra Mir, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Daniel Spoerri, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Richard Wentworth, Stephen Willats.
Writers include
Paul Auster, Maurice Blanchot, Geoff Dyer, Hal Foster, Suzy Gablik, Ben Highmore, Henri Lefebvre, Lucy R. Lippard, Michel Maffesoli, Ivone Margulies, Helen Molesworth, Nikos Papastergiadis, Georges Perec, John Roberts, David Ross, Nicholas Serota, Michael Sheringham, Alison and Peter Smithson, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jeff Wall, Jonathan Watkins.
Stephen Johnstone is a London-based artist and filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Since 1993, he has worked collaboratively with Graham Ellard, and their film and video work has been exhibited in museums and galleries including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Modern Art, Sydney, and the National Film Theatre, London.
Stephen Johnstone is a London-based artist and filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Since 1993, he has worked collaboratively with Graham Ellard, and their film and video work has been exhibited in museums and galleries including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Modern Art, Sydney, and the National Film Theatre, London.
Henri Lefebvre, born in 1959 in Salon-de-Provence, lives and works in Paris. He founded and directs Les Cahiers de la Seine, a publishing house devoted to contemporary poetry.
Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of
The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.
Martha Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught and lectured on photography since the mid-1970s. Her work was the subject of a major retrospective, "Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World," in 2000. She is the author of 14 books and numerous essays.
Paul Virilio was born in 1932 and has published a wide range of books, essays, and interviews grappling with the question of speed and technology, including
Speed and Politics,
The Aesthetics of Disappearance, and
The Accident of Art, all published by Semiotext(e).
Alison Smithson was a prominent architect in the modern movement.
Gabriel Orozco is an internationally renowned contemporary artist. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including Musée d'art moderne de la Ville Paris, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the Guggenheim in New York. Traveling retrospectives have been presented at Kunsthalle Zürich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; and elsewhere. He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, 2005), the Whitney Biennial (1997), and Documenta X (1997) and XI (2002).
Tom McDonough is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of
&;The Beautiful Language of My Century&;: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945&;1968 (MIT Press).
Helen Molesworth is Chief Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston. She edited Louise Lawler's
Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back), published by the Wexner Center for the Arts and distributed by the MIT Press.
Joseph Kosuth is one of the pioneers of conceptual art and installation art. His more than forty-year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions, and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, including seven Documentas and eight Venice Biennales. Awards include the Brandeis Award, 1990; Frederick Wiseman Award, 1991; the Menzione d'Onore at the Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1993.
Born 1967 in Lubin, Poland, a citizen of Sweden and the United States, and based in London, the artist Aleksandra Mir has an international practice of twenty-five years, with numerous exhibitions worldwide, including The Space Age, a retrospective at M-Museum, Leuven, 2013, and the 34m mural Drawing Room, London, 2014. She has developed many large-scale collaborative projects on space exploration. Her most well-known project, First Woman on the Moon (1999), has been touring for seventeen years and is included in the collections of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Tate.
Martha Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has taught and lectured on photography since the mid-1970s. Her work was the subject of a major retrospective, "Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World," in 2000. She is the author of 14 books and numerous essays.
