The Everyday (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)

Writings on the turn to the ordinary in contemporary art examine the various ways artists have engaged with the everyday since 1945. Numerous international exhibitions and biennials have borne witness to the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday and its antecedents in the work of Surrealists Situationists the Fluxus group and conceptual and feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s. This art 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 Als 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 Ondk Yoko Ono Gabriel Orozco Martha Rosler Allen Ruppersberg Daniel Spoerri Wolfgang Tillmans Mierle Laderman Ukeles Andy Warhol Richard Wentworth Stephen Willats. Writers include Paul Auster Maurice Blanchot Geoff Dyer Hal Foster Suzy Gablik Ben Highmore Henri Lefebvre Lucy R. Lippard Michel Maffesoli Ivone Margulies Helen Molesworth Nikos Papastergiadis Georges Perec John Roberts David Ross Nicholas Serota Michael Sheringham Alison and Peter Smithson Abigail Solomon-Godeau Jeff Wall Jonathan Watkins.