Stephen Johnstone, Lecturer in Fine Art, Goldsmiths and Editor of ‘The Everyday’, the latest edition in the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series, considers the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday, as well as its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus.

Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art, showing 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.

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