The Everyday

Front Cover
Stephen Johnstone
Whitechapel, 2008 - Art and society - 239 pages

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 Al˙s, 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.

From inside the book

Contents

ART AND THE EVERYDAY024
2004
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES224
224
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS240
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

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.

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