Acting Ordinarily

The work of this Chicago-based collaborative, established in 2003, consists primarily of actions and their residual artifacts. Like Nauman, who gave privilege to the everyday in his early performance pieces in which he would simply record the mundane activities of, for example, pacing in his studio, Industry of the Ordinary “challenge pejorative notions of the ordinary,” as proclaimed in their manifesto, in order to reveal the unexpected in both art and life. Their meditations on the quotidian take the form of subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, performances and interventions in public spaces, as well as physical alterations to everyday objects, ranging from newspapers and bibles to facial hair. These seemingly simple acts have political and moral resonance, yet shun didacticism for dialogues that are open ended.

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