The Everyday

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.Stephen Johnstone is a London-based artist and filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, London. Since 1993, he has worked collaboratively with Graham Ellard, and their film and video work has been exhibited in museums and galleries including the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Liverpool, the Museum of Modern Art, Sydney, and the National Film Theatre, London.