bright lights, big city: the everyday today

Art should be familiar and enigmatic, just as human beings themselves.
- Allen Ruppersberg[1]

Culture is determining.  In the context of the post-war era many different philosophies developed surrounding ideas of everyday life and how culture shapes us in both Europe and America.  According to French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, in modern society man is alienated and the experiences of everyday life and self-realization are transformed by capitalism.  For English cultural theorist Raymond Williams, culture is ordinary and only through experiences of everyday life can man find shared patterns of life, and thus become a more fully developed individual.  These philosophies seem to be searching for a way to understand how to bring man into a realm of shared experiences and personal fulfillment. 

In Stephen Johnstone’s essay “Recent Art and the Everyday” (2008) he addresses the recurring theme of everyday life in recent contemporary art.  Johnstone describes this new phenomenon as “drawing on the vast reservoir of normally unnoticed, trivial and repetitive actions comprising the common ground of daily life, as well as finding impetus in the realms of the popular and the demotic, the rise of the everyday in contemporary art is usually understood in terms of a desire to bring these uneventful and overlooked aspects of lived experience into visibility.”[2]  If as Raymond Williams insists, culture is in fact ordinary, and if culture is the determining thing that shapes us as a society as well as individuals, then what form do we take and what do we look like today?  In order to come to a proper conclusion I think it best to begin with an attempt at defining what would be considered “ordinary” in today’s everyday.  In a place like New York City individuals are desensitized to situations, sights and interactions that would in any other place be considered strange.  This city’s heterogeneous population and tendency to attract creative, inventive and artistic personalities from all over the world make for a never-ending supply of “strange” encounters – what might be strange somewhere else is quite ordinary here.

So, what does the ordinary look like?  Johnstone asks similar questions: “If the everyday is the realm of the unnoticed and the overlooked… it might be asked just how can we attend to it?  How do we drag the everyday into view?”[3]  For those inhabiting major metropolitan cities it looks like bright lights, soaring buildings, it sounds loud, cacophonous.  It is all-consuming, overwhelming at times.  In the age of globalization there is a new level of information exchange as the rate at which knowledge is transmitted is unprecedented in previous times.  Today the world is connected through tablets, cell phones, computers and other electronic devices, which we sometimes seem to live our lives through.  One might ask: does this light ever stop following us?  Or is it us who are following the light?  In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what it means to live without these devices, without a constant source of light and information.  The bright lights, the big city – this is our everyday, this is our “ordinary.”

In the world of contemporary art there are many attempts to address this feeling of displacement, this inability to escape the light.  In 2005 Claire Bishop published a critical history of Installation Art in which she discusses exactly this, terming it “mimetic engulfment.”  In a passage in which she discusses society’s inability to reach complete darkness she stresses that even when lying in bed at night, with eyes closed, streetlamps and car headlights slip through our curtains and into our realm of vision.[4]  Stuck in what Bishop calls this “pervasive electrical illumination,” it is made clear that the only moment when an individual is completely consumed in darkness is most likely within an art installation.

Since the industrial revolution and the rapid advancement of technology, our ability to find solace in darkness, or to find ourselves in complete darkness in any capacity, has been significantly depleted.  Technology runs our lives, it dictates our daily activities and every move.  According to Massimiliano Gioni, the practice of installation art has created immersive environments that pulverize any sense of unity.[5]  Gioni also acknowledges that the triumph of installation art has run parallel to that of an economy of spectacles and short attention spans: Installation art reflects the bombardment of data that shapes the mature phase of the information society. It describes the ecstasy of communication, the sublime realization of being just a knot in an ever-expanding flux of instant connections across the globe.[6]  Some contemporary artists working with installation actively seek to address this growing issue as it becomes more and more apparent and inescapable.

There is a sense of fragmentation in daily life, a disconnect between reality and fantasy, between the world we physically occupy and the pseudo-realm of the digital world.  Contemporary Installation Art has the capacity to create a similar effect, a similarly unbalancing of real and fake, here and there.  Bishop accurately describes the experience of installations as rather than heightening awareness of our perceiving body and its physical boundaries, these dark installations suggest our dissolution; they seem to dislodge or annihilate our sense of self – albeit only temporarily – by plunging us into darkness, saturated color, or refracting our image into an infinity of mirror reflections.[7]  Is this not the same effect that living our lives through technology has on our internal and projected image?  Do we not exist in multiple places/spaces at once, and are we not completely dislodged by this physically boundless environment?  It is like looking across the Grand Canyon, or looking up from the base of the Freedom Tower – it is something incomprehensible and completely disorienting.  This is our everyday, this is our ordinary, this is our culture.  Most of our time is consumed by starring into a monitor, looking at artificial light.  We all have this in common.  It is inescapable and it can make one feel physically unbound.

In his 1974 novel Species of Spaces, Georges Perec seems to be addressing this struggle of how to translate the ordinary aspects of everyday life into something meaningful:

The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?  How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they are mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, who we are.[8]

There are a number of contemporary installation artists who seek to bridge this gap, to use new and existing technologies to create immersive environments to bring people together.  One prime example is Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 installation at the Tate Modern in London.  The Weather Project seems to derive from Freud’s theory of the death drive, in which he discusses a human desire to return to our primary biological condition as inanimate objects.[9]  The viewers in this installation become just that – inanimate, passive and contemplative as their minds and bodies are given over to the light.  Representing the sun and the sky, The Weather Project is the outside environment permeating the interior, using artificial light to mimic the light of the world outside of ourselves to bring us closer to one another.  This powerful installation provides the social interaction that Lefebvre hoped to return to.  It bridges the gap between the divisions in society that Williams referred to as the “common” and the “teashop.”  It suggests that within a world dominated by artificial light perhaps we can find the same intimacy that we find in the darkness.  French psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski argued against this in his book Lived Time (1993) in which he insists that light takes us outside of ourselves, whereas darkness completes.  For Minkowski, darkness invades the body and is a shared characteristic of human experience.  However, in works such as The Weather Project we see that the same can be said about light – as it not only invades the body, but becomes a part of our shared human experience.

This is in direct contrast with Guy Debord’s ideas on alienation.  In his philosophical work Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord posits that spectacle is ubiquitous, and contributes to feelings of alienation.  According to Debord, the more an individual contemplates, the less he lives.  Although his ideas predate social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Debord touches on the precise idea that facets of society such as these, while they may be thought of as bringing one closer to ones self in the sense that they are tools for developing a distinctly individual identity, they in actuality drive a wedge between self realization and physical social interaction.  As he states, “though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power.  They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world.  The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded form that life.”[10]

Today, culture is permeated with light, be it from the lights of the big city or the devices we use to navigate our everyday.  The everyday that Lefebvre longed to reconnect to seems to be disappearing, if it hasn’t already.  For Williams culture has a dual nature, and he envisions a world where this duality comes together to produce a better society.  In his essay, Culture is Ordinary (1958), Williams prescribes a utopian vision of a society in which both the “common” and the “teashop” are equally important in a defintion of culture.  Both are valuable.  For Johnstone, the everyday is the site of a fundamental dual ambiguity: it is both where we become alienated and where we can realize our creativity.[11]  In short, culture, the ordinary, the everyday, has shifted from something that connected us to each other and to our inner selves into something that takes us further away.  This shift in focus form sincere personal interactions toward an unattainable perfection of our digital avatars, our digital image, has replaced the commonplace, the ordinary of the everyday.  If what Williams suggests is true, if through experiences of everyday life we are able to reach true self-realization, and if it is also true that art can save the world, then shouldn’t art employ elements of our everyday?  Through the use of this technology that distances us from so much, contemporary art installations have the potential to put the pieces back together, to reunite individuals not only with themselves but with the rest of society, and hopefully with the rest of the world.

SOURCES
Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Buchloh, Benjamin. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955-1975. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 1992.

Hall, Lane, A. Aneesh, and Patrice Petro. Beyond Globalization: Making New Worlds in Media Art, and Social Practices. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 2012.

Harris, Jonathan. Globalization and Contemporary Art. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Gioni, Massimiliano. “After the Dust.” Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, exh. cat. New York: Phaidon, 2007.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Johnstone, Stephen. The Everyday. London: Whitechapel; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary.” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. New York: Verso, 1989.

[1] Allen Ruppersberg, Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday in “The Secret of Life and Death”, exh. Cat (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1985).

[2] Stephen Johnstone, “Recent Art and the Everyday”, The Everyday (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 12.

[3] Stephen Johnstone, “Recent Art and the Everyday”, 13.

[4] Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 82.

[5] Massimiliano Gioni, “After the Dust,” Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, exh. cat. (New York: Phaidon, 2007), 65.

[6] Massimiliano Gioni, “After the Dust,” 65.

[7] Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, 82.

[8] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974.

[9] Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History, 84.

[10] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1992), 17.

[11] Stephen Johnstone, “Recent Art and the Everyday,” 15.