THE EVERYDAY
JOHNSTONE, STEPHEN
The Everyday, edited by Stephen Johnstone, is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art. Numerous international exhibitions and biennales have born witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus. Arts turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art. It 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.
