(extra)ordinary
April 21 - May 15, 2016 | The Hollows, 151 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn NY
(extra)ordinary is a group exhibition organized by the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Art Marketing program, School of Graduate Studies, featuring the artwork of Angela Deane, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Larry Homolka, Tom McAnulty, Levan Mindiashvili, Hayley Silverman, and Ethan Tianxing Wang.
“Everyday life is a site of contradictions: a place of mundane routine and messy spontaneity, something pervasive yet overlooked, a world of familiarity that is never fully known. As such, many modern thinkers have theorized it as a space that can resist the controlling and assimilative forces of technocratic systems of power. Critical consideration of everyday life has been central to avant-garde practice since the beginning of modern art, but it was through the work of Dada and Surrealist artists that the quotidian came to be seen as a site of transgression and transfiguration. The artists explored the contradictions of everyday life to expose its hitherto unknown potential. René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928), who kiss with their faces shrouded in cloth, or Méret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), a cup and saucer covered in fur, both evoke a range of unsettling associations through simple yet strange juxtapositions. Works like these were part of a larger program to dismantle the boundary between art and everyday life, and they engage with the ordinary not to move beyond it to some “higher” realm of reflection, but to locate the potentially extraordinary within the everyday.
Dada and Surrealist theory and practice was extended throughout the 20th century by a range of thinkers who sought to analyze everyday life as a key site for both the reproduction and contestation of ideologies. In The Critique of Everyday Life (1947), Henri Lefebvre argues that it is through the concrete realm of the quotidian that we most acutely experience the contradictions of capitalism and how it holds out the promise of potential freedom while producing alienation. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) locates the possibility for tactical resistance to dominant ideologies within the sphere of everyday activities like everyday speech and moving through the city, which can become improvised, adaptive techniques that can never be wholly subsumed by the exercise of power. In the 1950s and 60s, the Situationist International proposed tactics like the dérive and détournement, through which spontaneous actions such as aimless wandering and “rerouting” the dominant imagery of capitalism toward unintended meanings could realize a “revolution of everyday life.”
What emerges out of these various thinkers and artists is a concept of everyday life not as some fixed element of existence, but a historically shifting terrain of power relations between dominant institutions and individuals. Though life under capitalism always threatens to impoverish quotidian experience through routine and alienation, the everyday also contains the possibility for social transformation and collective self-realization. The very ordinariness of everyday life allows for an extraordinary defamiliarization of the mundane, where different and better ways of living can be imagined and proposed not as a distant utopia but from within the very fabric of lived experience. This is the concrete yet ephemeral site of everyday life traversed by the artists in (extra)ordinary. Here in its layered complexity, the quotidian reveals its potential to articulate alternate forms of social life beyond the prescribed limitations of what already exists.”
Chad Laird is an adjunct assistant professor in the History of Art Department at FIT, where he specializes in modern and contemporary art, film, and museum studies. He was the recipient of the 2014-15 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Adjunct Teaching. He is a co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a community art space in Brooklyn.