Everyday• Lumpen, abject, dingy, ugly, lo fi, trashy, anti-

idealistic, everyday, scatalogical, shitty, bits and bobs, vulgar, grotesque, regressive, infantile, dissaffirmative, negative, pathetic, uncanny, shocking, transgressive, the return of the repressed, formless.....

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‘another wasted twenty four hours?’

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• “The Situationist's agreed that consumption was assuming an unprecedented significance in the post war period, but they used this position to argue for an extension of the notion of the proletariat to include all those who experienced a loss of control over their lives, whether as consumers or producers of commodities. They applied the marxist conception of alienation to every area of everyday life and argued that the development of capitalism entailed the extension of the means, the objects, and the intensity of alienated experiences. For the situationists, no area of experience is free from the permeation of capitalist relations of production and consumption; the members of capitalist societies are reduced to the level of spectators of a world which precludes their participation.’

• Sadie Plant, ‘What is Situationism? A reader’ editor Stewart Home

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• “What prevents what we say on the construction of everyday life from being recuperated by the cultural establishment…is the fact that all situationist ideas are nothing other than faithful developments of acts attempted constantly by thousands of people to try and prevent another day from being no more than twenty four hours of wasted time’.

• Raoul Vaneigem • From ‘Basic Banalities’ in Situationist

International Anthology

““Critique for Lefebvre does not celebrate everyday life, banality or ordinariness in their own terms. Critique for Lefebvre means identifying the possibilities that are present in everyday life rather than simply confirming as unalterable what already happens to exist.”

Alex Law, Variant

Looking for moments of rupture

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Everyday Art (?)• From the mid 90’s onwards there was an

obvious desire amongst many artists (specifically in Britain) to transform the conditions of arts consumption, production and display -specifically in relation to the experiences, pleasures and pains of the everyday.

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Reasons for this shift• Extended 1980’s postmodernist leveling of old

cultural hierarchies (high art and low culture) • A reaction against the academic, over

intellectualised, distanced role art and the artist had come to adopt in 1980’s culture. A belief that artists had become detached from everyday culture (their own and others).

• New times. In Britain the economic recession of the early nineties made the big budget slickness of ‘serious art’ appear ridiculous . Museum orientated work was out. Informal, lo-fi, trashy work and collective activity, was in.

• Popular culture boom - intellectually, popularly and technically. Popular culture becomes ‘respectable’ (Professors of Pop) , Cool Britannia ‘renaissance’ in music, fashion etc. New technologies like the video camera and computer become ‘domestic’.

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Artists -’Everyday People’• During the 90’s a different kind of identity for the

artist appeared -fans rather than ‘critics’. Instead of subjecting their ‘guilty’ pleasures to a theoretical mauling, artists began to publicly admit their love of everyday pop and pap .

• “The new art incorporates the commercialised pleasures of the popular without embarrassment or intellectual distance” (John Roberts)

• The product of heavily theoretical art school education these questioned the role of theory in art. Theory was tested in the everyday.

• ‘Meaning it’ replaced irony and camp

• The work was often far more inclusive view of popular modes of culture and popular modes of attention (see the appearance of humour in art during this period)..

Barbara Kruger

Tracey Emin Sarah Lucas

Everyday artists Unapologetic, guiltless ‘fans’

of ‘trash’.

“So much contemporary British art can’t take

seriously the seriousness of serious art”

Dave Beech

Everything magazine

“The high theoretical demands of post conceptual art rewritten by critical postmodernism out of French post structuralism seemed to prevent any effective engagement with the alienated boredom's, frustrations and pleasures of the culture that artists experienced on a daily basis”

John Roberts‘Domestic Squabbles’in Who’s Afraid of Red. White and Blueedited by David Burrows

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Criticisms of -’dumbing down’ celebratory’ • Dumbing down. British art specifically

during the 90’s is guilty in its ‘playful romps’ with ‘everyday, popular culture’ of dumbing itself down in order to become one more product within the global entertainment, spectacle led culture.

• Crucially for Stallabrass and others, this ‘attitude’ was deeply anti intellectual - that by becoming ‘fans’ of the popular, artists were betraying their role as distanced critics and observers of society

• Inverted snobbery -this was a nothing more than shallow anti-intellectual posturing- a dose of slumming it -see ‘Common People’ by Pulp.

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• Abjection and the Everyday

Abjection - “a condition in which subjecthood is troubled, where meaning collapses”

• The abject is a complex psychological, philosophical and linguistic concept developed by Julia Kristeva in her 1980 book ʻPowers of Horrorʼ.

• The abject consists of those elements, particularly of the body, that transgress and threaten our sense of cleanliness and propriety. Kristeva herself commented 'refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live'.

• In practice the abject covers all the bodily functions, or aspects of the body, that are deemed impure or inappropriate for public display or discussion. Originally the abject had a strong feminist context, in that female bodily functions in particular are 'abjected' by a patriarchal social order. In the 1980s and 1990s many artists became aware of this theory and reflected it in their work. In 1993 the Whitney Museum, New York, staged an exhibition titled Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art,

“it is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. “

Julie Kristeva “The Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection”

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/julia_kristeva/

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• Modernist• Purity• Transcendence• Rationalism

• Postmodernist• Hybridity• Grounded / embodied• Irrational - return of the

repressed

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Jacques-André Boiffard (1903-61): Big Toe, 30-Year-Old Male Subject (Gros Orteil, Sujet Masculin 30 ans), 1929; Silver gelatin print; 31 x 23.9 cm; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d'art moderne – Centre de création industrielle. Gift of Mme Denise Boiffard (Paris) in 1986. Photo © Bertrand Prévost, CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN

Anti idealist / Carnivalesque Tradition

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“The resulting trajectory of Acconciʼs compulsive ejaculations effected a literal cum-shot in the face of the transcendent cleanliness and geometric order of the then ascendant aesthetic of minimalism, tainting the purity of its precious bodily fluids with his venereal discharge. “

Douglas Fogle“A Scatological Aesthetics for the Tired of Seeing”Chapmanworld catalogue

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• Abject art• In the 1990’s many artists staged

regression as an expression of protest and defiance.

• In works which were often grotesque, dysfunctional and ‘deviant’ they parodied and mocked the values and figures of ‘straight’ authority / the ‘civilised’ world.

• Art in the nineties was full of the dejected and rejected, mess and scatter, dirt and shit.

• A ‘rearactive’ assault on classic dualism (mind body split) and the unhealthy repression and sublimation endemic in society.

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• 1993 exhibition featuring the work of Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, Nan Goldin, Rachel Evans, Sue Williams, Nicole Eisenmann.

Helter Skelter: LA Art in the '90s, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1992

Charles RayRaymond PettibonLynn FoulkesJim ShawPaul McCarthyNancy RubinsMike Kelley

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“They like yoga we like speed”Paul McCarthy

Scatological, slacker aesthetic

“Signs of physical and mental retardation and congenital ‘stupidity’ cut an abreactive line through the official and intellectual languages of dissent, producing a grimmockery of critical Postmodernism's claims to social intervention.’

John RobertsDomestic SquabblesIn Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue edited by David BurrowsPg. 43

“I think an adolescent attitude is the attitude of the humorist, like somebody who knows the rules but doesn’t see any reason to be involved in them. The adolescent period interests me the most. Modernism usually valorizes childhood, childishness or insanity – something that’s supposedly pre adult. But then adult art has to get involved in questions of faith and belief, and I don’t have any faith or belief, so I don’t want to make adult art. I’d rather make adolescent art”.

Mike Kelley

“the worst and trashiest stuff that the main culture abhors”MIke Kelley

“The result is an art of lumpen forms (dingy toy animals stitched together in ugly masses), lumpen subjects (pictures of dirt and trash) and lumpen personae (dysfunctional men). Most of these things resist formal shaping [..] or social redeeming.”

Hal Foster ‘Return of the Real’ pg. 164

“the sense of modern masculinity as an extended adolescence draws on what might be called the feminisation of masculinity. In this work it is as if the link between hysteria and powerlessness in women’s art of the 80’s has shifted to that of the experience of men”

John Roberts “Domestic Squabbles”

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• “I knew I wanted to appropriate Disneyland in some way, the park , the sculptures and landscapes. The fake Matterhorrn, it was so American, an all-white sterile environment and promotion of colonial purity.”

• Paul McCarthy

“Kelley and McCarthy are presumably pointing to American social pathology – the absurdity, even lunacy of American behaviour – but to perform it, to project oneself into it is not exactly to gain perspective on it to perform is not to work through it, but to let oneself be worked over by it”.

Donald Kuspit

Critique of....

The Philistine - The 'counter-intuitive' philistine, returns the cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of power, privilege and symbolic violence

• Anti professional “to unsettle the bureaucratic smoothness of critical postmodernism, particularly now it has become the official ideology of our wider digital culture” (Roberts, J)

• Anti decorum “the use of popular cultural forms, expressions and emblems as gestures of proletarian and philistine disaffirmation. “(Roberts, J)

• Guiltless immersion in the everyday pleasures of popular culture..…”Unlike the American and British media art of the early '80s and the Goldsmiths generation of the late '80s, these artists see the everyday and its representations as something they inhabit and work from as a matter of course.” - the ordinariness of culture - “a refusal on the part of artists to feel shame about engaging in the everyday through the abject.”

• An embodied viewer “Talking dirty and showing your bottom for the sheer delight of it, has become a proletarian-philistine reflex against '80s feminist propriety” (Roberts, J, )

“The zombies in "Zombie Golf" are not aliens but the avatars of class dissidence and the philistine refusal to separate the cognitive categories of the everyday (Does this pleasure me? What function does it serve?) from the experiences of art. This, however, does not mean the zombie installation mocks the pretensions of the work on display (Dave Beech, Maria Cook, Peter Doig, Sivan Lewin, Adam Chodzko, Martin Creed, Matthew Higgs and John Stezaker), but that it questions its right to exist untroubled by the realities of social division which produces the separation between art and aesthetics, bodily needs and experiences.”

John Roberts “Mad for it!”

Bank

Chapman Brothers

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Wim Delvoye

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'Substitution 2 (The Unforgettable)' - Thomas Hirschhorn, 2007Mixed media installation, Overall: 325 x 562 x 940cm (128 x 221 1/4 x 370in)

http://www.stephenfriedman.com/artwork/hirs_the_unforgettable_13.jpg

Thomas Hirschhorn

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35ʻLa Chica del Tiempoʼ - Thomas Hirschhorn, 2006Paper, plastic foil, adhesive tape, adhesive sticker, prints, point ball pen, felt-marker, 89 x 84 cm (35 x 33 in)

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Erwin Wurm

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Olaf Breuningfrom abysmal to promising

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http://web.mac.com/olafbreuning/photos/Photos.html

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