Rivane Neuenschwander

a day like any other

New Museum of Contemporary Art

New York

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

The everyday is a term that can cover a lot of ground but its expansiveness indicates a paradox. When used to denote anything that doesn’t ordinarily fall within the purview of art, the everyday, at this point in the history of modernism, can seem pretty small indeed. MIT’s Documents of Contemporary Art series’ eponymously titled volume tracked the term’s provenance through surrealism, situationism, fluxus, feminism, conceptualism and beyond, emphasising its oppositional potential. But thinking of what’s outside art—a problem announced by Duchamp in the middle of World War I—isn’t necessarily best served by an oppositional rhetoric. In the work of Brazilian-born Rivane Neuenschwander, recently the subject of a mid-career survey at the New Museum, the quotidian serves as a source of poetry and wonder, a passed-over possibility for the miraculous, for something that is missed or otherwise failed, and a gap between the ideal and reality. Neuenschwander works across painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, collaborative actions, and participatory events—a range that features in a lot of contemporary practice and which she compounds by working in the different roles of commissioning agent, collaborator, social organiser, curator and editor.

The variable degree of control that results from Neuenschwander’s manner of working can result in a body of work that looks, at least to some critics of the New Museum’s ‘A Day Like Any Other’, incoherent. But what looks like incoherence might be nothing more than Neuenschwander’s fondness for things that would otherwise slip by. (Tenuousness in fact might be the principle holding things together here.) In First Love (2010), a police department sketch artist, hired by Neuenschwander, worked with visitors to produce a pencil image of their first loves, and the resulting

Rivane Neuenschwander, Eu desejo o seu desejo/I wish your wish, 2003. Silkscreen on fabric ribbons, dimensions variable. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Juan and Pat Vergex Collection. Courtesy New Museum. Photography by Benoit Pailley.