THE EVERYDAY
(In)appropriate and current reflections
Marcus Vinícius, artist, researcher and independent curator.
Translated by Ludmila Porto.
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about/putting into practice activities and projects which put into question the peculiar relationship between the experience and the perception of daily life and what succeeds and surrounds us in the course of the most common and closest experiences and gestures of our lives. Consequently, the everyday reminds us of the prodigious diversity of daily and ordinary life: the moments and the events, the beings, the places and the objects. It’s a field that offers a huge scope of subjects, senses, forms, possible and recognizable acts. In this context, we can think about the everyday as the measure of all sorts of things: of the understanding, or better still, of the misunderstanding of social relationships, of the usage of time lived (banal, trivial, and repetitive). As Henri Lefebvre said in Critique of Everyday Life, “The human world is not simply defined by history, culture, totality or society as a whole, nor by political and ideological superstructures. It is defined by an intermediary and intermediate level: everyday life[i]”.
The everyday is a fertile field for reflection, perception and the imagination of ways and experiences of the real; a field full of microknowledge which enables us to distinguish political, cultural and social tendencies. The everyday consists of the level of reality where nature and culture, history and the present day dialectically confront each other. We can also say that it is the extent of transitions, resistances and fragmentations. To think about and to represent the everyday implies, then, to approach it as a complex and diverse extent which is open to all sorts of potentialities, weaknesses and opportunities. An extent of practices, combinations and (re)creations that tend to escape from the logic of categorization, and the comprehension of which demands a very particular analysis, because it implies knowledge and qualities found outside specialized and institutional contexts, pre-qualifications and standardized classifications.
By researching the everyday, it was possible to discover the (in)appropriate and current reflections of artists who produce convergent/divergent work on some of the most crucial issues of our times. Therefore, we present this text as a space open to sensibilities, motivations and behaviors, building a brief and current panorama of the practices of images. The interest in quotidianity requires you to adapt to the convocation of a series of visual proposals, which, for its aesthetic, perceptive and speculative qualities, allows us to define a particular way of representing and analyzing the real.
With the dossier THE EVERYDAY, we think about these images that reproduce and reconfigure daily life. In fact, over the last few years, it has been possible to identify in photography, in documentaries, in video art, a proliferation of proposals and of visual objects which focus on and explore the banal activity of day-to-day life situations. In a sense, we can say that we are dealing with the symptoms of a new attachment for something really trivial, recognizable and true.
In a world inevitably marked (and homogenized) by the effects of economic and cultural globalization, as well as by spectacular and advanced means of communication, it’s meaningful and revealing to watch the ever-growing presence of artists who choose to use simple and immediate languages to approach reality. It’s a strong discourse which is based on the single experience, on the competence of the artist in sharing concrete situations, experiences and relationships. Thus, that discourse can be approached as a privileged way of research or recreation, of alternatives of being and living. It’s about enlarging what Maurice Blanchot suggested in La parole quotidienne: “All human being carry out a series of reflections, intentions, that is, of reticence bringing them closer to an oblique existence[ii]”. The oblique is the space, the interval where individuals escape from the (self) controlled side of their lives.
The poetics studied here attempt to revisit the histories and to reconstruct them, in order to clearly get away from spectacular, heroic and extraordinary narratives, which are relentlessly disseminated by means of television, advertising and politics. In the same way, they lack the logic of contemporary culture, as they’re defined by virtual autonomy and the immateriality of digital technology. From this emerges a certain impulse of awaking a sensibility, actually an affectivity defined by the practices and ideas of the everyday, aiming to (re)present a common and accessible world, sometimes monotonous and trivial, but, despite all, profoundly impregnating. It means that the expressivity and the knowledge which come from the banal don’t inevitably produce banal works. On the contrary, this return to the basic and to the original seems to arise from the following challenge: the everyday is the primordial and genuine ground for the construction of an extraordinary imaginary which is necessarily built from the common. The images guide our attention to a subjectivity based on simple, common and familiar gestures which reflect impulses, idiosyncrasies and relations of proximity with the everyday that is to come.
Nowadays, it seems to be clear that, for many artists, the everyday is a sufficiently authentic and democratic field (besides it also frees), because it would provide the opportunity of spontaneous and genuine creativity, without institutional or disciplinary limitations. In this context, the everyday (re) constructs itself from the idea that art can be enlightening. It would also be able to reveal simpler and freer, although strongly meaningful, ways of living and living together. It is the everyday that offers us this basic level of original, intuitive effervescences and deviations, the reason for which it constitutes such an attractive and natural sphere for artists.
Daily life is a field open to every kind of incursion, into which it allows all sorts of gestures, susceptible to the analysis and reconversion of the meaning and role of the visual arts. Within this context, our incursion here attempts to gather together authors and images from different generations, geographical origins, aesthetic and conceptual tendencies. An open platform about daily images, by means of a heterogeneous set of practices branching off in different identities and forms: the poetics close to critical realism; the reformulation and updating of documental strategies and styles; from confession modes to informal aesthetics; film/video works, emphasizing the resources of sequence shot and real time images.
Artists involved in the everyday are implied in the reformulation and (re)creation of poetics, and their works can be inserted in a context of a renewed faith in contemporary art reflecting reality and be compromised with that. It’s about practices of images that examine the conventions of the history of art, whilst opening a space and directing the attention of the public to the individual experience, ratifying their differences, singularities and idiosyncrasies.
In the everyday, everything is expressed and recreated, even daily life itself.
[i]Henri Lefebvre, Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté, in Critique de la vie quotidienne, II, París, L’Arche, 1961; Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, in Critique of Everyday Life, II (John Moore, trad.), Londres / Nueva York, Verso, 2002, p. 45 [Fundamentos de una sociología de la cotidianidad, en Crítica de la vida cotidiana, Barcelona, Anagrama, 1973].
[ii] Maurice Blanchot, «La parole quotidienne», La Nouvelle Revue Française, n.º 114, París, 1969; later published in English: «The Everyday Speech» (Susan Hanson, trad.), in Yale French Studies, n.º 73, Yale University Press, 1987, p. 12.
