The Mundane
The banal and overlooked: ordinary streets, rooms, clutter and routines that artists single out precisely because no one notices them.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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Some art looks at what nobody else notices. Andy Warhol's film Empire (1964) fixes a camera on the Empire State Building for eight hours while little more than the light changes, and Ed Ruscha's fold-out book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) records a Los Angeles street without picking out a single highlight.
Colour photographers of the 1970s found beauty and unease in the ordinary. Stephen Shore's American Surfaces (1972) catalogued meals, motel beds and toilets on a road trip, and William Eggleston's The Red Ceiling (1973) looks up at a bare bulb on a blood-red ceiling. Richard Wentworth's series Making Do and Getting By records improvised fixes and chance arrangements in streets. Peter Fischli and David Weiss carved and painted exact replicas of workshop clutter, from paint pots to cigarette butts, and Susan Collis mimics drips, stains and stray screws with embroidery, inlay and precious materials.
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