In a 1972 essay Henri Lefebvre posed the question"Why wouldn't the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?" In the prosaic details of life the French philosopher found the optimism to counter Sartre's existential nothingness, and "everydayness" is a wonderful word for the stuff that forms the background to our lives. Lefebvre's fellow Parisian, the novelist Georges Perec, was also fascinated by the mundane, and coined the word "infra-ordinary", in contrast to the "extraordinary", the stuff of headlines, which so bored him.
The new shows at Tate Modern reveal how the ordinary has become the universal currency of contemporary art. Rachel Whiteread casts the most banal building block of everyday life, the cardboard box, and piles them high in the vast turbine hall. Jeff Wall competes with the expansive canvases of Titian or Pollock through his wall-filling scenes of meticulously constructed ordinariness: rooms filled with junk, people on the street, scummy wash-basins. This is the everyday made epic through scale and painstaking choreography.
Contemporary British culture fetishises the ordinary, whether it's Tracey Emin or Coronation Street, Reality TV and its stream of pleb-celebs, or the slightly condescending, awkward glory of Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett and Martin Parr. This is a response partly to a cultural agenda of inclusiveness (we can all, apparently, relate to the ordinary), partly to Lefebvre's righteous indignation. The odd thing is that while other arts increasingly revel in everydayness, architecture, the art that touches our lives in the most practical and everyday ways, remains in thrall to the gravitational pull of the "icon".
The opening of perhaps the last big lottery scheme, the hideously overblown Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, provides the perfect cipher for the phenomenon. It is an attempt by a city to put itself on the map, to attract tourists to take in the view, to award itself an "icon" (picture those fingered inverted commas at the municipal meeting when the structure was being proposed). Perhaps the people of Pompey will forgive me for saying that theirs is not the most beautiful of cities, one perhaps best viewed from a glass platform from a point at which it is hard to see the actual fabric. The city's real problems, and those of all the country's cities, are not soluble through the erection of pointless towers, domes or big wheels. They need to be addressed at street level: poor housing, tacky, brutalised pavements, cloned high-streets, over-scaled pylons for intrusive CCTV cameras and bland commercial developments make our cities ever more faceless.
The most charming current exhibition in and about London is Francis Alÿs's Artangel-sponsored show, a paean to the music and choreography of the quotidian. It encompasses the recorded sounds of a stick beaten against iron railings, logging graffiti on long urban walks and observations on commuters. Even the way the deliciously scruffy show inhabits an exquisitely weary and faded Adam house in Portman Square adds to the charm. Alÿs, himself trained as an architect, reminds us that the sustained liveability of a city comes not from icons but from its details, from the barely registered elements that form the backdrop to our lives.
