Tuesday 3 December 2013

We went to Ikea

We went to Ikea because it feels like the mecca of our sociological view on the every day.
Our intention was to look at it as if it were a museum and analyse the objects that we see around us every day. It actually proved quite difficult to adjust our mindsets, but it was very fun. We ate meatballs and each accumulated a pile of things with an intention to buy them but dropped them due to the hefty queue. The tram from West Croydon was miserable. Hannah got fined £40.

Monday 25 November 2013

Every Day and Popular Culture

So we've began our territories of practice adventure. Although there seemed to be many groups in which my practice would fit nicely, The Every Day and Pop Culture seemed instantly like the perfect one for me. My practice largely concerns itself with presenting the mundanity of the everyday into a banal joke. I like to create a caricature of the stillness of life which could almost be described as a sigh of acceptance.

Popular culture is integral to the way I look at the world, I spend more time watching TV than I do with my eyes on the world, and television references essentially make up about 30% of my conversational material.

I think the pinnacle example of 'every day and pop culture' is Seinfeld, the wonderful 9-season sitcom from Jerry Seinfeld that ruled television in the 1990's. The show institutionalises every day scenarios (usually with a prefacing 'the' like 'the pick' or 'the snub') and becomes so self referential that it even has a series about its own hypothetical creation.