A paper I submitted this term on 'The art of the Everyday'
Q: “Mostly, I believe an artist doesn't create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to point out
what already exists, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it.”
(Annette Messager, Word for Word, 2006)
Discuss Messager’s sentiment with
reference to the art of the everyday.
A:
The everyday surrounds us; we are inside it
and outside it. The everyday includes the ordinary, the mundane routines that
we take part in each day and each week, even the observations and reflections
of our day to day actions are part of the everyday. All of us take part in
repetitive actions, rhythms and cyclic time schedules that organise and dictate
our daily lives. But the everyday is not the same for all us; the everyday in
Paris is different from the everyday in Milan, Mumbai or Sweden, in 1950 and in
1990. It is also different for you and me. Factories, schools, work places and
relations between colleagues also have their own everyday experience. Yet all
the different ‘everyday’ co-exists in the same space and world. The
overwhelming everyday which includes everything and everyone we interact with
on day to day bases changes when put in the context of art. The concept of
everyday is then found in the “in between space, the interstices, the margins
and the distinctive zones of the social”[1].Where
there is a possibility of understanding the everyday interactions, instead of
studying them, to find opportunities for social transformations. The ‘art of
the everyday’ is not searching for the deeper understanding of the society or a
system of escape from the usual but it is interested in the relationship
between the individual and the overall. As Nikos Papastergiadis writes in ‘Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the
Everyday’, the ‘art of the everyday’ recognises “the way workers seize the
moments that brakes their drudging routines…the transformation of a foreign
space into private place called home, or even the deep embrace of a pop song as
the personal anthem”[2].
‘Art of the everyday’ focuses on the everyday realm to find opportunities for
adaption and alteration in the everyday through the use of art. As Henri
Lefebvre believed, the everyday provides us with opportunities, perceptions
into the weak points and gaps through which social transformation is possible.
A theory that was previously ignored by the structuralist theorist of social
and cultural studies.
This
new concept of the everyday encouraged new starting points and intrigued the
creative minds to consider how it may fit into the context of art. Before the
1980s art, mainly paintings, were generally used as a medium for propaganda. By
using art the government wanted to alter the social, Soviet Realism is an
example of how the government can approve a type of art to serve the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Due to this practice of art artist were concentrating
on understanding the link between art and political struggle. But the new
understanding of the art of the everyday brought into focus the politics of
representation, with better understanding of “the local and the global, the
materiality and location of art as well as a new framework of interpreting the
so called popular art forms like video and photography”[3].
This new understanding also meant that art no longer had to be read in the
classical form of paintings and the process and concept of the art work was
appreciated more than the technical execution. Art work by artists such as
Tracy Emin, Sophie Calle, Richard Billingham and Garry Winogrand were no longer
seen as trying to represent political struggle but were recognized as pieces
that were trying to create art work that changed the rules of representing
cultural identity and social studies by engaging the everyday.
Annette Messager’s believes that the
role of an artist is to ‘sort through, to show, to point out what already
exist, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate’. Tracy Emin, for example
is an artist who sorts through everyday objects and forms them in a gallery
space, she does so by using mediums such as neon
signs, drawings, notes, video appearances, installation/sculptures and
photographs. The installation that brought her to public attention, and is her
signature piece, is ‘Everyone I Have
Slept With’ (c.1995). This piece consisted of a tent inside which Emin had
carefully sewn and embroidered the names of everyone she had ever “slept” with.
Another one of her famous installation was ‘My
Bed’ (c.1999). This installation shows Emin’s bed after a nervous
breakdown, there are empty alcohol bottles, cigarette butts, the sheets are
stained with worn panties on the bed. By using materials that she has
interacted with every day and by reformulating these materials and private,
intimate experience in a gallery context – a public space Emin’s shocks the
viewers. By placing objects such as cigarette butts – an object that she has
had an intimate connection she allows he audience value their own interaction
with everyday objects as souvenirs, showing they hold as much value as
something else that is considered as important.
As Tracy Emin said about ‘Everyone I Have Slept With’ “It’s about
conception, sleeping in the womb with my twin brother, up to my last friend or
lover that I slept with in 1994. That’s what the tent’s about. It’s about
sleep, intimacy, and moments” (Tracey Emin)[4].
Emin collects, sorts out and reformulates objects of her every day and ask
viewers to recognize the everyday objects that we invaluable and moments that
we do not consider, in this case sleep and intimacy.
Sophie Calle, like Emin, sorts
through the everyday interactions and reformulates them in a photographic
documentation. For example ‘Suite
Venitienne’ (1979) was a photographic documentary of a stranger – “Henri B”
she followed travelling to Venice. She followed this stranger for fourteen
days, during this period she photographed him walking, taking photos, sitting
in a café and other normal interactions. She observed the city from his
perspective; this resulted in a collection of black and white photographs and a
narrative that resembles “Henri B’s” itinerary. By documenting these daily
movements Calle had sorted through and recreated a stranger’s everyday away
from the original context. Similarly Richard Billingham used photography as a
way of documenting other’s everyday. Billingham spent six years from 1990 to 1996,
while he was a student at Sunderland, photographing his family. First he only
photographed his alcoholic father. Later, when his parents re-united he
photographed both of them. These photographs are not staged, they are not the
generic family photos that one would take, and they are more of a documentation
of his parent’s day to day routine. He captured intimate moments, emotions and
poverty of his family. He captured his father Ray and mother Liz doing mundane
boring things in a council flat with menagerie of pets. Billingham did not have
an agenda for taking such intimate photographs, as he said “'it's not my intention to shock, to offend,
sensationalize, be political or
whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it…I just
used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just
trying to make order out of chaos”[5].
Another
photographer of the everyday is Garry Winogrand. From 1960 to 1965 Winogrand
photographed women walking on the streets of California. One of the famous
photographs from this period is ‘Los
Angeles,California’ (1969). This photograph captures people and their
surrounding so we are put in context. The focus is on three young, beautiful
women who are taking a quick glance at a man in a wheelchair with a begging cup
between his knees. The way Winogrand captures the momentary glance the women
give the man makes it the focus of the photograph. We immediately notice the
contrast between the women’s youth and well-being and the man’s poverty. This
makes the photograph thought provoking. It captures an everyday incident that
happens on the streets almost everywhere in most cities. The contrast and the
activities of this photograph convey and reconstruct an everyday incident into something
meaningful.
The
artists mentioned above worked under the influence of modernism, the time when
‘the everyday’ was beginning to redefining itself in the context of art. Thus
the artists’ works discussed above are generic of that era, making it easy to
justify their work as pieces that observe “in between spaces, the interstices,
the margins and the distinctive zones of the social”[6].
However, their work does not necessarily justify Annette Messager’s belief;
“artist doesn’t create something, but is there to sort through, to show, to
point out what already exist, to put it into form and sometimes reformulate it”[7].
What Messager describes is part of the artistic process, it helps artist to
opinionate, but putting into form and reformation in my opinion is to merely
re-create or represent an incident. Therefore I consider Tracy Emin as one of
the few artists of the time who prove Messager right. She sort through and
showed us the objective and use materials that she directly interacted with,
sort through them and reformulated - recreated it in an odd, unexpected for the
context, environment. Even Richard Billingham’s and Sophie Calle’s photographs
can be considered to be true to Messager’s words as they documented people they
were directly interacting with everyday and most importantly they photographed
these people interacting with everyday objects and people. However, other artists although they sort
through and point out what already exist, have an agenda. They do not simply
remake an everyday interaction as they experienced it and leave it to the
audience to take whatever they want to, they add their agenda to it. Barbara
Kruger’s ‘Your Body is a Battleground’
is an example of how artists remake everyday experiences and hide their thought
behind it. Kruger’s ‘Your Body is a
Battleground’ plays on a topic that most females deal with everyday by
layering the found photograph from existing sources with aggressive text makes
the beholder see the right thing, not what the mass-consumerist society wants
the society to see.
I
take Messager’s belief to be one of the many perspectives of analysing modern
and contemporary artists and their work. Her belief, to me, seems to be an
indefinable generalisation of the artistic process. We live in the everyday, it
surrounds us, we are besieged in it therefore it only seems apt that artists
are influenced by the everyday. To sort out and reformulate the everyday, as I
comprehend it, means to simply re-present it not analyses it or create a new
meaning. However, most artists are trying to achieve an awareness of a
situation amongst the public. “meaning and sense are the outcome of an
interaction between artist and beholder”[8],
the viewer’s always take away opinions and thoughts from art exhibitions
therefore an artist always does more than sorting through the chaos of the
everyday The artistic process may include Messager’s idea of the role of artist
but I believe artist do more than just sort through and “point out what already
exist”[9].
They convey something bigger than that, “artistic practice is always a
relationship with the other, at the same time it represents a relationship with
the world”[10].
[1] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.22. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on
1/03/2012 at 15:23)
[2]Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.23-24. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012 at 15:23)
[3] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.31. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012
at 17:00)
[4] Adrian Gargett. “Going Down” the Art of Tracy Emin for 3
A.M Magazine. Taken from an electronic document, URL: http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/oct2001/going_down.html
Last accessed on 12/03/2012 at 18:00)
[6] Nikos
Papastergiadis, Spatial
Aesthetics: Art, Place, and the Everyday, pg.28. Taken from an electronic
document,
(Last accessed on 1/03/2012 at 18:23)
[7] Annette
Messager, Word for Word, 2006. Taken from the essay question above.
[8]
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,
(Les presses du reel, France, 2002) pg.80.
[9]
Annette Messager, Word for Word, 2006.
Taken from the essay question above.
[10]
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,
(Les presses du reel, France,2002) pg.80
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