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This work examines the concept of the everyday in modernity

Susik, Abigail

St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 81Vol. 13        2009
Considerations on the Everyday as 
an Aesthetic CategoryAbigail Susik
“The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity,” wrote Henri Lefe-
bvre in an article of 1972 which summarised in crystalline fashion many of 
the concepts he had laboriously forged over a twenty year period.1 Accord-
ing to Lefebvre, both here and elsewhere in his voluminous work on this 
topic, the concept of the everyday is born specifically of the widespread 
changes ushered in by the onslaught of the modern era in occidental na-
tions. The surging populations that gradually imploded congested urban 
centers in Europe during the nineteenth century necessarily resulted in a 
systemisation and homogenisation of life down to the smallest particulars 
of existence, he argues. This process resulted in a predictable regularity of 
living that we have come to know as la vie quotidienne. 
Even while he insists that it is only within the periodisation of mo-
dernity that an experience of the everyday can be said to evolve for the first 
time, Lefebvre also admits that those same forces of temporal change like-
wise render the concept of the everyday a frustratingly mercurial notion. 
Later in the same article, he ponders, “The days follow one after another 
and resemble one another, and yet - here lies the contradiction at the heart 
of everydayness - everything changes.”2
Indeed, following Lefebvre’s lead, it can be said that the everyday 
is a highly unstable and contradictory category when viewed through the 
lens of the cultural construction of modernity from whence it stems. It 
is arguable that the reception of the everyday has been characterised by 
a profound ambiguity within the aesthetic dialogues of the avant-gardes 
and neo-avant-gardes over the last century, as well as within the crop of 
debates that arose simultaneously within the realms of critical thought 
during this historical period. Placed under the extraordinary pressures of 
modernity, the notion of the “everyday” takes on a manifestly paradoxical 
character, resulting in what Lefebvre calls in the aforementioned article a 
“deep structure” of simultaneous conflict and complimentarity.3 
St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies
Abigail Susik
If we take as our starting point a basic working definition of the 
everyday - necessarily reduced here in nuance for the sake of brevity - as 
that which has become exceedingly familiar and unexceptional as a result 
of repeated exposure, it can readily be perceived that such a concept runs 
counter to many themes that were central to an avant-garde understand-
ing of the radical cultural transformation termed modernity. While cer-
tainly we can still agree with Peter Bürger that the avant-garde sought a 
rapprochement of the artistic sphere with the “praxis of life” - a dissolution 
of the boundaries carefully guarded by academicism - both the pre- and 
post-War avant-gardes also collectively underlined the way in which every-
day life had been profoundly altered under the influence of modernity.4 
Indeed, if the avant-garde can be characterised as a conscious flooding of 
the visual plane with both readymade and depicted reflections of everyday 
existence contra the hermeticism of hegemonic aesthetic discourses, this 
trend must also be attributed to the deeply contested nature of the cat-
egory of the everyday itself in the early twentieth-century context. 
Modernity poses an unmistakable challenge to notions of the ba-
nal, the familiar, the average, the comfortable, what could be termed the 
most overlooked aspects of the fabric of living. In the standard narrative 
employed in current cultural histories to describe the gestation of a capi-
talist economic structure in society, it is precisely the boredom of the daily 
life of bourgeois consumers that is targeted and seized as a valuable oppor-
tunity by increasingly ravenous production cycles. Novelty, then, becomes 
the commercial panacea to the monotony of everyday work routines. As 
culture becomes more ensconced in the framework of industrialism over 
time, this mantra of novelty infiltrates quotidian existence in such a thor-
ough manner that even the familiar itself often appears alien in various 
capacities. 
In an essay surveying the development of the concept of the every-
day in French post-War philosophy, Kristin Ross points out that in Henri 
Lefebvre’s first volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne in 1947, the experi-
ence of the everyday only arises with the formation of the bourgeoisie and 
the decline in power of the aristocracy and the church in the nineteenth 
century. She explains that in Lefebvre’s reading, the routines and patterns 
that characterise the everyday result from the flooding of the urban space 
with masses of individuals, who in turn seek labor that subjects them to 
a preeminently quantifiable existence, which equates the passage of time 
with the accruement of value.5 
A later incarnation of industrial capitalism must also be taken into 83Vol. 13        2009
Considerations on the Everyday as an Aesthetic Category
consideration when scrutinising the everyday and its impact as a modern 
aesthetic concept: that of the years immediately preceding and postdat-
ing World War I, when a newfound commercialism sought to provide the 
masses with various forms of consumption that might distract them from 
the oppressive banality of the daily work schedule. Thus, it can be said that 
the very formation of an experience of the everyday in early modernity re-
sults in the opposing desire to evade the everyday through the excesses of 
total commercialism in later decades.
Hence, one is reminded of Charles Baudelaire’s rather strained 
search for the eternal within the humble framework of the contempo-
rary everyday, and his ultimate capitulation to the vagaries of ephemeral-
ity, which he finally crowned as the sovereign concept of his modernité 
in his analysis of the work of artist Constantin Guys.6 Yet, the idealised 
notion of the eternal was not solely questioned by the productive thrust of 
modernity. On the contrary, society’s growing material mania challenged 
the dependability of the most mundane of routine habits. As modernity 
progressed, the everyday was no longer the predictable confrontation of 
individuals with a limited series of objects, activities, and social mores. 
Instead, at least by the commencement of the twentieth century, common-
place existence was flooded with a ceaseless parade of machinic inventions, 
advertisements, media sensations, fashion crazes, data transmissions, and 
so on. Indeed, in a paradoxical turn of events, novelty itself had become 
everyday within twentieth-century modernity.
In Lefebvre’s reassessment of the everyday in the 1960’s, the conun-
drum presented by the concept of the everyday was due in part to the radi-
cal shifts in patterns of daily life across broad historical periods - the way 
in which many aspects of modern life were simply too new to yet become 
prosaic.7 As mentioned above, however, Lefebvre likewise noted that the 
evasive nature of the everyday in modernity resulted from the continu-
ously morphing character of the quotidian. Indeed, in the modern era the 
fundamental nature of duration, continuity, and repetition are subject to 
highly unique conditions, even on a daily basis. Where comfortably con-
ventional circadian rhythms dissolve in the hectic pace of modern life, the 
contrasting experiences of commercial sameness and linear progress dog-
gedly arise in parallel fashion. 
Acknowledging this last point during the same immediate post-
War period in which Lefebvre’s first critique of the everyday was published, 
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer lambasted the oppressively mo-
notonous structure of infinite repetition through product standardization 
St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies
Abigail Susik
as a primary consequence of the culture industry in their Dialectic of En-
lightenment.8 Their searing invective against consumer society underlined 
the way in which experiencing repetition in the everyday had been fun-
damentally altered from cyclical recurrence to the endless tautology of a 
society inundated by the assembly line principles of Fordism. Given these 
tensions, an uncomfortable dialectic between the poles of the new and the 
old, repetition and diversion, variation and sameness, and boredom and 
distraction, soon formed in the critical arena of everyday modernity that 
still has not been resolved. As Maurice Blanchot aptly said in a 1959 article 
devoted to the quotidian, “…one…is henceforth incapable of deciding if 
there is a lack of the everyday, or if one has too much of it.”9
It is arguable that all the European avant-gardes of the first half of 
the twentieth century were preoccupied with the radical transformation of 
everyday reality in modernity, although they each heralded these changes 
through the filters of myriad attitudes, political views and aesthetic aims. 
From the outset then, the fascination with the everyday in Modernism 
must be understood as based largely in the widespread upheaval in plati-
tudinous patterns of being, which in themselves were fairly new on the 
horizon of cultural memory. In this light, the appearance of the theme 
of the everyday in avant-garde visual arts is not merely a question of the 
subversive alteration of the mimetic languages of Realism and Naturalism 
through the tactics of collage and the Duchampian readymade, as has re-
cently been suggested by J. Watkins in his essay of 2000, ‘The Continuity of 
Realism and the Everyday.’10 Rather, avant-garde culture in general, includ-
ing cubism, futurism, Apollinarian orphism, and so on, can be said to re-
flect upon the way in which the baseline understanding of the natural and 
the real have been altered within the modern era. In such a reading, the 
revolution of the aesthetic sphere in modernity is instead directly contin-
gent upon changes within cultural life itself, therefore eclipsing in impor-
tance the notion of art as an entirely autonomous sphere transgressively 
pierced by the vulgar patina of the everyday. The everyday thus becomes 
not so much a low culture that invades high culture. Instead, the everyday 
is a comparably destabilised category that reflects the same fragmentation 
and decomposition plaguing the societal notion of an autonomous aes-
thetic sphere itself.
1 H. Lefebvre, ‘The Everyday and Everdayness’, C. Levich, K. Ross, and A. Kaplan (trans.), 
Yale French Studies, No.73, 1987, 10. This article was originally published as “Quotidien 
et Quotidienneté” in Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1972. 
85Vol. 13        2009
Considerations on the Everyday as an Aesthetic Category
2 Ibid.3 Ibid., 11.4 P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, M. Shaw (trans.), (Minneapolis: 1984), 22 and in 
passim. This text was first published as Theorie der Avantgarde in 1974. 5 K. Ross, ‘French Quotidian’, in L. Gumpert (ed.), The Art of the Everyday: The Quotid-
ian in Postwar French Culture, (New York: 1997), 21.6 Baudelaire called the eternal the “other half” of the ephemeral in his essay, ‘The Paint-
er of Modern Life’, written in the last months of 1859 and the beginning of 1860. This 
essay was first published in Le Figaro in a series of installments in 1863. C. Baudelaire, 
‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in J. Mayne (trans.), The Painter of Modern Life and 
Other Essays, (London: 2005), 1-41. See in particular, 12-13.7 I refer to Lefebvre’s 1947 text, Critique de la vie quotidienne, and his reconsideration 
of some of these themes in, La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, published in 
1968. This last book has been translated as: H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern 
World, S. Rabinovitch (trans.), (New York: 1971). See in particular, 24-6. Also relevant 
here are Lefebvre’s second and third volumes of Critique de la vie quotidienne, pub-
lished in 1961 and 1981. 8 M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass De-
ception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, J. Cumming (trans.), New York, 1972, 120-67. 
This book was first published as Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente 
in 1944.9 M. Blanchot, ‘Everyday Speech’, S. Hanson, (trans.), Yale French Studies, no.73, 1987, 
16. This article was originally published as ‘La Parole quotidienne’, in L’Entretien infini 
of 1959.10 J. Watkins, ‘The Continuity of Realism and the Everyday’, in Quotidiana: immagini 
della vita di ogni giorno nell’arte del XX secolo = The Continuity of the Everyday in 
20th Century Art (Rivoli: Charta, 2000) 53-56.


Considerations on the everyday as an aesthetic category

This article explores the pressures facing post-war buildings through an in-depth case study of the re-design of 2 Columbus Circle, New York now the Museum of Arts and Design. While the re-design of 2 Columbus Circle has yet to stand the test of time, the initiation, implementation and controversy surrounding the project brings forward some of the major issues in American modern architectural preservation

Vollono, Lauren

Perception and the problem with preserving modernist architecture: 2 Columbus Circle

This work aims to highlight response strategies that may curb iconoclastic crime.

Scott, Helen E.

Crime or creation?: Iconoclasm in the name of art

Editor, Journal

St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies 107Vol. 13        2009
Contributors
Nicole De Armendi has just completed her doctorate in art history at Virginia Com-
monwealth University, specializing in art since 1945 with an emphasis on art of the 
United States and Latin America.  Her research interests include new modes of per-
ception in late-modern and contemporary art; dynamic and in-between spaces; and 
the intersection of personal, cultural and global identities. This article builds upon 
issues examined in her Masters’ thesis on Gerardo Suter’s TranSitus.  
Anne de Stecher is in the third year of the Cultural Mediations PhD program at the 
Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton Univer-
sity, Canada. Her dissertation research explores issues of representation in historical 
Aboriginal Canadian artworks, focusing on the story of the Huron-Wendat commu-
nity at Wendake (Jeune-Lorette) in the nineteenth century. Her work explores how 
the community negotiated the development of a highly successful souvenir arts busi-
ness, a source of economic security and cultural continuity through the pressures of 
modernity, industrialization, and acculturation. 
Amy Erica Digout is a graduate of McGill University, Montreal, having obtained a 
Master of Arts in Art History in 2006. Presently, she is completing doctoral studies 
in the Department of History of Art, Cambridge. Amy’s dissertation examines the 
development of public museums in the nineteenth century, with specific focus on 
the construction and opening of the New Hermitage Museum (1839-1852) in St Pe-
tersburg, Russia. Her research activities have taken her across Europe, and have been 
supported by the Canadian Women’s Club of London, Worts Travelling Scholars, the 
Scottish Society for Art History and the Kettle’s Yard Travel Fund.
Michelle Ying-Ling Huang completed her BBA (Marketing) and MA in Humanities 
at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  She then obtained her M. 
Litt. in Art History at the University of St Andrews where she is completing her PhD 
research on Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) and the British reception of Chinese paint-
ing in the early twentieth century.
Chloe Kroeter grew up in New York City and received her bachelor’s degree from 
Barnard College at Columbia University. She is currently completing an MPhil in the 
history of art at King’s College, Cambridge; her dissertation explores the political 
cartoons of Alexander McGregor, a deaf artist active in the late nineteenth century. 
Chloe will begin her PhD at Cambridge in October 2009 and intends to continue 
researching deaf visual culture. However, she will never cease to be enthralled by 
ancient Egyptian art. 
St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies
Helen E. Scott is currently completing her PhD in the School of Art History at 
the University of St Andrews. She graduated with a First Class MA Honours in Art 
History in 2004, and stayed in St Andrews to undertake a year-long Postgraduate 
Diploma in Museum and Gallery Studies. Her doctoral research examines the phe-
nomenon of iconoclasm perpetrated by visitors in Western museums and galler-
ies, with an emphasis on how these institutions respond to the problem. Her aim 
is to highlight response strategies that may curb iconoclastic crime. This study has 
been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Abigail Susik recently received her doctorate in 20th Century Art History from 
Columbia University. Her interdisciplinary dissertation, “The Vertigo of the Mod-
ern: Surrealism and the Outmoded,” analyzes the work of Louis Aragon, André 
Breton, and Max Ernst in relation to Walter Benjamin’s criticism. She has pre-
sented material related to this project at the University of Pennsylvania, the CAA 
Conference 2008, the Tate Modern, and elsewhere. Articles related to her disserta-
tion will appear in 2009 in the journals, Wreck (University of British Columbia), 
and Thresholds (MIT). She is the 2009-2010 Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at 
Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. 
Nicholas Uglow was awarded a 1st class honours degree from the University of 
Edinburgh in 2008, where he is currently pursuing an MSc by Research on the 
recently discovered inventories of Sir Robert Walpole. This work aims to take an 
integrated approach to architectural spaces by examining them as settings for the 
fine and applied arts. He has a broad range of interests in eighteenth century ar-
chitecture and the applied arts including production and consumption of ceram-
ics, the influence of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux on Sir John Soane, Sir John Clerk of 
Penicuik and Mavisbank House, and has worked for Simpson & Brown Architects, 
Edinburgh.
Lauren Vollono is pursuing her Masters in Historic Preservation at the School of 
Design, University of Pennsylvania. Interested in the theoretical considerations 
behind the preservation of modern architecture, her article explores the pressures 
facing post-war buildings through an in-depth case study of the re-design of 2 
Columbus Circle, New York now the Museum of Arts and Design. The study is 
divided into several considerations, which include political tensions, design con-
siderations, advocacy and social perception. While the re-design of 2 Columbus 
Circle has yet to stand the test of time, the initiation, implementation and contro-
versy surrounding the project brings forward some of the major issues in Ameri-
can modern preservation.
Anik Waldeck is a final year PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University 
of Cambridge. The subject of her research is Vincenzo Catena (c.1470/80 – 1531), 
a Venetian painter who has received little attention in the critical literature.  Re-
cently, however, a growing interest in his oeuvre has highlighted the need for a re-
assessment of his life and work. Anik’s dissertation will therefore consider Catena 
within the social and artistic contexts of early sixteenth-century Venice, as well as 
present an updated catalogue raisonné, in order to more clearly define his artistic 
personality and contribution to Venetian painting of the early Cinquecento.


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Considerations on the everyday as an aesthetic category

Perception and the problem with preserving modernist architecture: 2 Columbus Circle

Crime or creation?: Iconoclasm in the name of art

Contributors

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