The document discusses the emergence of "everyday art" in Britain in the 1990s. Artists during this period sought to engage directly with popular culture and the experiences of everyday life, rejecting the intellectual detachment of earlier postmodern art. Their work incorporated elements seen as lowbrow, vulgar or abject. This represented a critique of social structures and capitalist relations through a celebration of the ordinary and mundane. The work was also seen by some critics as "dumbing down" or being anti-intellectual through its embrace of popular culture.
3. • “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
3
4. • “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
4
5. ““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
Looking for moments of rupture rather than simply
confirming as
unalterable what already
happens to exist.”
Alex Law, Variant
6. 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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7. 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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8. 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) Barbara Kruger
• 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)..
8
Tracey Emin Sarah Lucas
9. 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
10. “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 Blue
edited by David Burrows
11. 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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13. 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,
14. “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/
17. “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
17
18. • 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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19. • 1993 exhibition featuring the work of
Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, Nan
Goldin, Rachel Evans, Sue Williams,
Nicole Eisenmann.
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20. Helter Skelter: LA Art in the '90s, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1992
Charles Ray
Raymond Pettibon
Lynn Foulkes
Jim Shaw
Paul McCarthy
Nancy Rubins
Mike Kelley
21. “They like yoga we like speed”
Paul McCarthy
21
Scatological, slacker aesthetic
22. “Signs of physical and
mental retardation and
congenital ‘stupidity’ cut an
abreactive line through the
official and intellectual
languages of dissent,
producing a grim
mockery of critical
Postmodernism's claims to
social intervention.’
John Roberts
Domestic Squabbles
In Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue edited by
David Burrows
Pg. 43
23. “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
24. “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 worst and trashiest stuff that the main culture abhors”
MIke Kelley
25. “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”
26. • “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
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27. Critique of....
“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
28. 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, )
29. Bank
“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!”
33. Thomas Hirschhorn
'Substitution 2 (The Unforgettable)' - Thomas Hirschhorn, 2007
Mixed media installation, Overall: 325 x 562 x 940cm (128 x 221 1/4 x
370in)
33
http://www.stephenfriedman.com/artwork/hirs_the_unforgettable_13.jpg
35. ʻLa Chica del Tiempoʼ - Thomas Hirschhorn, 2006 35
Paper, plastic foil, adhesive tape, adhesive sticker, prints, point ball pen, felt-marker, 89 x 84 cm (35 x 33 in)
