Edited by Stephen Johnstone

Part of the acclaimed Documents of Contemporary Art series of anthologies which collect writing on 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. Art’s 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.

Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, Vladimir Arkhipov, Ian Breakwell, Stanley Brouwn, Sophie Calle, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Mary Kelly, Lettrist International, Jonas Mekas, Annette Messager, Aleksandra Mir, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Daniel Spoerri, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Richard Wentworth and Stephen Willats.

Writers include Paul Auster, Maurice Blanchot, Geoff Dyer, Hal Foster, Suzy Gablik, Ben Highmore, Henri Lefebvre, Lucy R. Lippard, Michel Maffesoli, Helen Molesworth, Nikos Papastergiadis, Georges Perec, John Roberts, David Ross, Nicholas Serota, Michael Sheringham, Alison and Peter Smithson, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jeff Wall and Jonathan Watkins.

Stephen Johnstone is a London-based artist and filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Since 1993, he has worked collaboratively with Graham Ellard, and their film and video work has been exhibited in museums and galleries including the Centre Pompidou, Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Modern Art, Sydney, and the National Film Theatre, London.

Paperback, 240 pages, 210 x 145 mm

ISBN 978-0-85488-159-8

First published 2008

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