Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’

Abstract

This essay addresses the ways in which the relation between art and the everyday life has been discussed by authors Arthur Danto (in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981), and Nicolas Bourriaud (in Relational Aesthetics, 1999). While both studies are significant attempts to grapple with the new relation between art and life explored by successive generations of artists (in the 1960s and the 1990s), I argue that neither are able to tackle the specificity of the everyday in art because they take definitions of the ‘everyday’ or ‘commonplace’ for granted. In contrast, I suggest ways in which reference to studies of everyday life such as Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life can help complement aesthetics' focus on definitions of art. Such a focus on everyday life, I argue, can shed light on 1960s works by Pop and Fluxus artists as well as contemporary ‘relational’ practices such as those by Rirkrit Tiravanija's.