Everyday Life

THE FUTURE OF THE IMAGE

Everyday Life – concrete worlds and elusive experiences

Constructing the Everyday

Enculturating Seeing Living

enculturating

“Make a Salad”

“It’s fairly well known that for the last thirty years my main work as an artist has been located in activities and contexts that don’t suggest art in any way. Brushing my teeth, for example, in the morning when I’m barely awake; watching in the mirror the rhythm of my elbow moving up and down...”

(Kaprow 1986)

“Art is what makes Life more Interesting than Art”Robert Filiou (1970)

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Club Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to even ask herself the silent question: ‘Is this all?’”

(Friedan 1991 [1963], p.13)

Enculturating the Everyday has been (and remains?) a source of great tension and instability.

Seeing

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1826) View from the Window at Le Gras

In order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, the first need to be recognised as art. That is to say that they first need to be put into practice as something other than techniques of reproduction and transmission...

(1856)

“For his subject Flaubert took the unheroic, mediocre, provincial, everyday heart of petit bourgeois village life. He listened intently to the language of his class. He mimicked unerringly the pompous rhythms of paternal cliché as they sounded benignly from the lips of the doctor, the lawyer, the journalist and the priest... He kept a scrap-book, entitled The Dictionary of Received Ideas, in which he collected and classified the choicest specimens.”

(Wall 2003 [1992], p.xviii)

George Perec (1936 – 1982)

Andre Malraux (1947) Museum Without Walls

Mike Figgis (2000) Timecode

Everyday life is made seeable in cultural forms because a particular relationship between representation and the appropriate subjects for that representation has been established.

Everyday life, can in part be seen as the construction of a particular mode of viewing and a specific relationship to time. This relationship is based upon the privileging of mass accumulation of descriptive information over significant events or narrative elements.

Living

“… the city in a film, one in a state of continuous metamorphosis, one in which not only is everything animated but everything is also incessantly accelerated. Everything passes by, everything is always in the process of unreeling. And you cannot see this film if you stand still – walking is the tete de lecture [playback] of this film…”

(Virilio 2008, p. 110)

‘Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink From Trinidad’

Daniel Miller (1998 [1997])

‘Making Love in Supermarkets’

Daniel Miller (2002 [1998])

References Certeau, M. De (1988[1984]), Steven Rendell (trans.) The Practice of Everyday Life.

London, University of California Press. Debord, G. (2002 ). Donald Nicholson Smith (trans.) The Society of the Spectacle. New

York, Zone Books. Highmore, B. (ed) (2007 [2002]) The Everyday Life Reader. Oxon, Routledge. Johnstone, S. (ed) (2008) The Everyday. London, Whitechapel. Kaprow, A. (1986) Art Which Can’t be Art and Kaprow, A (1971) The Education of the

Un-Artist, Part I. In Kaprow, A (2007). Jeff Kelly (ed) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. London, University of California Press.

Miller, Daniel (2002 [1998]) Making Love in Supermarkets in Highmore, B. (ed) (2007 [2002]) The Everyday Life Reader. Oxon, Routledge.

Miller, D (1997) Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet Drink From Trinidad. In Miller, D (ed) (1998) Material Cultures: Why some things Matter. London, UCL Press. Pp. 169-188.

Miller, D (2008) The Comfort of Things. Cambridge, Polity Press. Perec, G. (2008) Species of Space and Other Pieces. London, Penguin Books. Perec, G. (1973) Approaches to What? In Highmore, B. (ed) (2007 [2002]) The

Everyday Life Reader. Oxon, Routledge. Perec, G. (1974) The Steet in Johnstone, S. (ed) (2008) The Everyday. London,

Whitechapel. Saito, Y. (2007) Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Stern, L. (2004 [1759]) The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. New

York, The Modern Library. Vaneigem, R. (1983) The Revolution of Everyday Life. London, Aldgate Press.