Everyday Worlding

I. THE NEW STAKES of the Everyday
Over the past several months, confined as we have been to our homes, a new concept of the everyday has come into view. This pandemic with all its horror and uncertainty has infused the lethal into the benign. Often regarded as a burden or a bore, everydayness has emerged as a high-stakes game under the conditions caused by COVID-19. Workplaces, public transport, schools, grocery aisles, restaurants — all have become exotic, dangerous terrain. As different economies consider opening in phased or “low-key” ways, many museums and cultural offerings will remain long-lost companions, whose absence is not made much less acute with the advent of online gallery spaces. With so many touchpoints erased, so too goes the possibility for chance encounters, the unanticipated, and the multisensorial that fixes experiences in memory.

II. A Space for the Unplanned
Visiting the Netherlands in my early 20s, I dedicated an afternoon to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In its snug corridors and chambers, I drifted from wall to wall with a steady kinetic bounce, taking in the pageantry of colors, smudges, and shapes. Moving from frame to frame, my impatient eye barely distinguished one screen of abstraction from another.

Until I came across the pregnant woman towering above a Russian countryside. I noticed, in the triangular facade of a barn, there was a pale hair a few centimeters long, half-buried in a swish of white-gray paint. The hair, unintended and out of place, launched my imagination. A curiosity. To whom did it belong? The artist, his wife, someone else? Or simply the brush?

This canvas stowaway found on Marc Chagall’s The Pregnant Woman/Maternity (1913) acted as a lever that paused my absentmindedly alighting here and departing there. Instead, the work prompted me to contemplate what motherhood in rural Russia on the cusp of the First World War might have entailed. The painting was an aperture that brought into view a space to contemplate something entirely foreign. And yet, the uncooperative hair felt prosaic, both poignant and banal.

The everyday materiality of the embedded hair also brought my attention back to the room with my fellow gallery-goers and to a detail in the neighboring The Fiddler (1912). It, too, was interlaced with everyday life, painted as it was on a tablecloth.

Here and there, the quotidian crept in and lent so much nearness to the creator of the work that a rendition on a screen couldn’t have conveyed. The commonplace found in an unexpected place.

The startling of senses can produce lasting, unshakeable impressions. Within artmaking, there is a gerund and an artifact, and the latter resides in a space best engaged by the unmediated eye. In mediated viewing, as we observe in pixels, the corrosion of immediacy and detail is complete. Gazing into Vantablack delivers a supernatural jolt. RGB (0,0,0) doesn’t do it justice. It is why Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple engage in such bitter feuds over the blackest black and the pinkest pink. This kind of hyperrealism is most impressive when conjured through the intensity of pigment. A screen, even at remarkably high resolution, can only deliver a fraction of this absolute darkness or this visceral vibrancy. 

Leaving the gallery, my friend and I decided it was safe to squeeze in one more exhibit before leaving for other commitments. We visited the Arlene Shechet solo exhibition on the second floor on the way down to street level.

In all forms of participation, there are experiences that can be navigated in terms of the already thought and known, and yet we cannot help but be derailed by the unexpected. Apollinaire likens thinking without conceptual constraints to being rendered helpless by a tickle.

III. Longing
Even though we long for the everyday poetics of togetherness, and cities and states are beginning to stress test the feasibility of opening the world again, it might be too much to ask for the immediate future to bring us together in enclosed galleries that — by virtue of their four walls —promote a pattern of crisscrossing that flouts the six-foot rule.

So how to encounter the errant hair, the at-hand tablecloth, the strange black of an otherworldly pigment, the materiality of sculpture? What would it take for life onscreen to offer this serendipity in the full haptic, experiential sense of the term? Can we find new artistic forms that can introduce error and serendipity into the technologies that otherwise allow us to access the world from the seclusion of home?

The challenge is not negligible, as technology and chance are often understood to be mutually exclusive.

Scent and the sensorium, their dominance over memory and meaning, have played central roles in the fecund work of Anicka Yi. As a ToftH artist, she has recently tended to the embodiment of AI, giving it a physical rooting in the botanical, not found anchored to a wall or in a confined space, but rather set free in the urban environs of the South Bank of London.

These artists are consciously introducing the unexpected, the biological, and the embodied into the nonliving, the rote, and the fixed. Much of their work moves from brick-and-mortar sites to screens, or to open spaces of freedom and possibility. They look for ways to consider all things — particularly those most taken for granted — in a new light.

COVID-19 has been a tremendous catalyst for rendering the everyday chance encounter rare and poetic. My hope lies in the artists and curators of these pages, that they might find ways to surprise. A hope for something unintended, unscripted to cross one’s path, a space, online or in the ether, where the incidental meets the deliberate. At least until we can once more embrace — with all its familiar chaos but none of its present-day virulence — the everyday.

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