Ben Highmore - 'THE EVERYDAY LIFE READER' Intro: questioning everyday life
- a vague and problematic phrase
- normalises/universalises values/world-views
- addresses the everyday as a problematic/contested/opaque terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made
- perhaps presents us with a recalcitrant object that does not give up its secrets too readily
Ben Highmore - 'EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY' Ch.1: figuring the everyday
- no escape: to investigate it requires attention to everyday 'itself'
- 'everyday life' signifies ambivalently...
~ repeated actions. most travelled journeys, inhabited spaces that make up day to day (landscape closest to us, world most immediately met)
~the every day as a value and quality- everydayness ***HERE the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine*** HERE the everydayness of everyday life might be experienced as a sanctuary, or it may bewilder or give pleasure, it may delight or depress - its special quality might be its LACK of qualities. it might be, precisely, the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive
- this ambivalence vividly registers the effects of MODERNITY
if the everyday is that which is most familiar and most recognisable, then what happens when that world is disturbed and disrupted by the UNFAMILIAR?
if the SHOCK OF THE NEW sets tremors to the core of the everyday, then what happens to the sense of the everyday as familiar and recognisable?
IN MODERNITY the everyday becomes a setting for the dynamic process:
- making the unfamiliar familiar
- getting accustomed to the disruption of custom
- struggling to incorporate the new
- adjusting to different ways of living
the everyday marks the SUCCESS AND FAILURE of this process. ^^^^
(witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane)
(the new becomes traditional, the residues of the past become outmoded and available to fashion renewal)
(but signs of failure can be noticed everywhere: the language of the everyday is not an upbeat endorsement of the new, it echoes with frustrations, disappointment of broken promises)
the everyday is also the home for the bizarre and mysterious. the COMMON PLACES OF EXISTENCE are filled with strange occurrences:
'life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on...' (Doyle, quoted in Langbauer 1993: 94)
The NON-EVERYDAY (the exceptional) is there to be found in the HEART OF THE EVERYDAY
core of Holmes' relationship to the everyday: however much he loves the strange and bizarre, dedicated to puncturing its mystery. his power to solve cases to bring the bizarre firmly down to earth: seemingly magical/ghostly events turn out to be ORDINARY acts of greed, spite, love, jealousy, and other manifestations of HUMAN NATURE. demystifying the bizarre and returning events to the everyday. when Holmes explains his reasoning it appears banal, elementary. what appeared to be a gift of foresight is merely the systematic application of method. his approach to the everyday generates mystery at the same time as it demystifies it.
BOREDOM, MYSTERY, and RATIONALISM - figuring the everyday
https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
Whereas in photography, as in the ongoing series Making Do and Getting By, Wentworth documents the everyday, paying attention to objects, occasional and involuntary geometries as well as uncanny situations that often go unnoticed.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-wentworth-2132/views-city-richard-wentworth
I think that’s the… it’s much more to do with its inseparableness. I mean, I really enjoy the wilfulness of the city, and of course that wilfulness can be a plant that says, ‘I want to be there’, it can be these puddles that say, ‘I’m going to leave a mark’, it can be the weather saying, ‘I chip your paint.’ The argument, with something which in fact, in a city, we’re trying to deny all the time…
http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-richard-wentworth/
Wentworth’s sculpture takes as its subject the semantics of the everyday world, taking readymade and frequently incongruous objects and arranging them in a fashion that forces us to recognise the drama inherent in that which we too easily dismiss as routine. His photography captures the unusual or counter-intuitive behaviour of things, treating the (generally urban) landscape as consisting of readymade works that merit the same attention as more traditional art objects. The effect might be compared to having a film of dirt removed from one’s eyes: it is often said by his students that, after talking to him, one begins to ‘see the world as a Wentworth’, meaning that one suddenly has a heightened awareness of the position of objects in one’s environment, and a refreshed curiosity in how they came to be there and how we might interpret them.
I’m very interested in whether people think through text, or how they use text. I’m not a good reader, for instance. I seldom read a whole book. I read parts of lots of books.
That’s something of what an image is — it has to have a component which is unaccountable, which sweeps over you. That seems to be beyond translation.
I become more and more interested in organisational imagery, which is a kind of text. Everything can be read. Floorboards can be ‘read’. The fact that you’re sitting comfortably in this room suggests that you’ve ‘read’ from the surroundings that the ceiling is unlikely to cave in. A lot of these things you can test by reversing them, by finding those times when you read things wrong. You can become alert to misperception. You have to work hard at it though because the whole point of misperception is that you correct it. So, just as you start to trip or misjudge the height of a step, you correct yourself. What I’ve enjoyed doing is trying to collect up those moments, those milliseconds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/11401173/Richard-Wentworth-interview.html
Wentworth is continually distracted by quirky details, visual anomalies in the urban fabric: a crushed box with a wineglass symbol indicating this-way-up (“incredible how that image has endured”); a gap in the double yellow lines on the road where someone clearly drove while the wet paint was still wet;
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/fischli-and-weiss-way-things-go-excerpt
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/entropic-liberating-power-of-fischli-weiss.html
The Way Things Go is all about systems forming and breaking down, inertia and structure, perpetual motion, decay, growth, and the Swiss obsession with time. Most of all, it’s about how order comes from chaos and chaos from order, and how this harnessed right creates art
- a vague and problematic phrase
- normalises/universalises values/world-views
- addresses the everyday as a problematic/contested/opaque terrain, where meanings are not to be found ready-made
- perhaps presents us with a recalcitrant object that does not give up its secrets too readily
Ben Highmore - 'EVERYDAY LIFE AND CULTURAL THEORY' Ch.1: figuring the everyday
- no escape: to investigate it requires attention to everyday 'itself'
- 'everyday life' signifies ambivalently...
~ repeated actions. most travelled journeys, inhabited spaces that make up day to day (landscape closest to us, world most immediately met)
~the every day as a value and quality- everydayness ***HERE the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine*** HERE the everydayness of everyday life might be experienced as a sanctuary, or it may bewilder or give pleasure, it may delight or depress - its special quality might be its LACK of qualities. it might be, precisely, the unnoticed, the inconspicuous, the unobtrusive
- this ambivalence vividly registers the effects of MODERNITY
if the everyday is that which is most familiar and most recognisable, then what happens when that world is disturbed and disrupted by the UNFAMILIAR?
if the SHOCK OF THE NEW sets tremors to the core of the everyday, then what happens to the sense of the everyday as familiar and recognisable?
IN MODERNITY the everyday becomes a setting for the dynamic process:
- making the unfamiliar familiar
- getting accustomed to the disruption of custom
- struggling to incorporate the new
- adjusting to different ways of living
the everyday marks the SUCCESS AND FAILURE of this process. ^^^^
(witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane)
(the new becomes traditional, the residues of the past become outmoded and available to fashion renewal)
(but signs of failure can be noticed everywhere: the language of the everyday is not an upbeat endorsement of the new, it echoes with frustrations, disappointment of broken promises)
the everyday is also the home for the bizarre and mysterious. the COMMON PLACES OF EXISTENCE are filled with strange occurrences:
'life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We could not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on...' (Doyle, quoted in Langbauer 1993: 94)
The NON-EVERYDAY (the exceptional) is there to be found in the HEART OF THE EVERYDAY
core of Holmes' relationship to the everyday: however much he loves the strange and bizarre, dedicated to puncturing its mystery. his power to solve cases to bring the bizarre firmly down to earth: seemingly magical/ghostly events turn out to be ORDINARY acts of greed, spite, love, jealousy, and other manifestations of HUMAN NATURE. demystifying the bizarre and returning events to the everyday. when Holmes explains his reasoning it appears banal, elementary. what appeared to be a gift of foresight is merely the systematic application of method. his approach to the everyday generates mystery at the same time as it demystifies it.
BOREDOM, MYSTERY, and RATIONALISM - figuring the everyday
https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/richard-wentworth
Whereas in photography, as in the ongoing series Making Do and Getting By, Wentworth documents the everyday, paying attention to objects, occasional and involuntary geometries as well as uncanny situations that often go unnoticed.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-wentworth-2132/views-city-richard-wentworth
I think that’s the… it’s much more to do with its inseparableness. I mean, I really enjoy the wilfulness of the city, and of course that wilfulness can be a plant that says, ‘I want to be there’, it can be these puddles that say, ‘I’m going to leave a mark’, it can be the weather saying, ‘I chip your paint.’ The argument, with something which in fact, in a city, we’re trying to deny all the time…
http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-richard-wentworth/
Wentworth’s sculpture takes as its subject the semantics of the everyday world, taking readymade and frequently incongruous objects and arranging them in a fashion that forces us to recognise the drama inherent in that which we too easily dismiss as routine. His photography captures the unusual or counter-intuitive behaviour of things, treating the (generally urban) landscape as consisting of readymade works that merit the same attention as more traditional art objects. The effect might be compared to having a film of dirt removed from one’s eyes: it is often said by his students that, after talking to him, one begins to ‘see the world as a Wentworth’, meaning that one suddenly has a heightened awareness of the position of objects in one’s environment, and a refreshed curiosity in how they came to be there and how we might interpret them.
I’m very interested in whether people think through text, or how they use text. I’m not a good reader, for instance. I seldom read a whole book. I read parts of lots of books.
That’s something of what an image is — it has to have a component which is unaccountable, which sweeps over you. That seems to be beyond translation.
I become more and more interested in organisational imagery, which is a kind of text. Everything can be read. Floorboards can be ‘read’. The fact that you’re sitting comfortably in this room suggests that you’ve ‘read’ from the surroundings that the ceiling is unlikely to cave in. A lot of these things you can test by reversing them, by finding those times when you read things wrong. You can become alert to misperception. You have to work hard at it though because the whole point of misperception is that you correct it. So, just as you start to trip or misjudge the height of a step, you correct yourself. What I’ve enjoyed doing is trying to collect up those moments, those milliseconds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/11401173/Richard-Wentworth-interview.html
Wentworth is continually distracted by quirky details, visual anomalies in the urban fabric: a crushed box with a wineglass symbol indicating this-way-up (“incredible how that image has endured”); a gap in the double yellow lines on the road where someone clearly drove while the wet paint was still wet;
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/fischli-and-weiss-way-things-go-excerpt
http://www.vulture.com/2016/02/entropic-liberating-power-of-fischli-weiss.html
The Way Things Go is all about systems forming and breaking down, inertia and structure, perpetual motion, decay, growth, and the Swiss obsession with time. Most of all, it’s about how order comes from chaos and chaos from order, and how this harnessed right creates art