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  • Spring 2025
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“Art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space”
— Marcel Duchamp

Avant-Guardian Musings is a curated space of ideas and information, resources, reviews and readings for undergraduate and graduate students studying modern and contemporary art history and visual art theory, film and photography studies, and the expanding field of visual culture and screen studies. For students currently enrolled in my courses or the field school, the blog and associated social media links also serve as a place of reflection and an extension of the ideas and visual material raised in lecture and seminar discussion.

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Blog
From the Archives | How (And Why) To Take Excellent Lecture Notes
From the Archives | How (And Why) To Take Excellent Lecture Notes
about 10 months ago
Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things
Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things
about 2 years ago
Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things
about 2 years ago
Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things
Weekly Musings + Round Up... And A Few More Things
about 2 years ago
Top 10 Modern and Contemporary Art Exhibitions Worth Visiting In 2023
Top 10 Modern and Contemporary Art Exhibitions Worth Visiting In 2023
about 2 years ago

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Delighted to find these iconic Tom Ford Whitney’s deep in my closet over the weekend ✨☀️🕶️Anyone else remember these sunglasses from back in the day? I want to say these are well over 15 years old and they were a very big splurge, but I loved
Delighted to find these iconic Tom Ford Whitney’s deep in my closet over the weekend ✨☀️🕶️Anyone else remember these sunglasses from back in the day? I want to say these are well over 15 years old and they were a very big splurge, but I loved rediscovering and wearing them today. Great design is timeless. Invest in things you love— your future self will thank you✨ . . . #tomford #sunglasses #tomfordwhitney #whatiwore #shamelessselfie
If Seoul was a colour, it would be neon and bright, and if it was a shape, it would be curved and post-structural.
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#artanddesign #odetoacity #urban #seoul #korea #design #contemporaryart #architecture
If Seoul was a colour, it would be neon and bright, and if it was a shape, it would be curved and post-structural. . . . #artanddesign #odetoacity #urban #seoul #korea #design #contemporaryart #architecture
Visited the stunning Leeum Museum of Art today and took in the spatial delights of Korean architecture married to modern art. What I love most is how the familiar European and American “masters” (i.e. Rodin, Giacometti, Rauschenberg, Hess
Visited the stunning Leeum Museum of Art today and took in the spatial delights of Korean architecture married to modern art. What I love most is how the familiar European and American “masters” (i.e. Rodin, Giacometti, Rauschenberg, Hesse, Flavin, Rothko, Andre, Lewitt, Stella, etc…) are curated both in dialogue with Korean modern artists such as Lee Ufan and Kim Chong-yung, but also in juxtaposition to the beautiful natural setting that is showcased through large windows throughout the complex. A must see gallery if you visit Seoul. . . . #seoul #korea #modernart #contemporaryart #koreanart #arthistory
Flaneur for the day in Seoul ✨🇰🇷 A global city of high contrast, beauty, and living history around every corner.
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#seoul #korea #flaneur #daytripping #streetart #contemporaryart #modernart #urbanart #arthistory #urban #globalcity
Flaneur for the day in Seoul ✨🇰🇷 A global city of high contrast, beauty, and living history around every corner. . . . #seoul #korea #flaneur #daytripping #streetart #contemporaryart #modernart #urbanart #arthistory #urban #globalcity
Hello Seoul! 🇰🇷🛬✨안녕하세요 서울 Lucky me, I am incredibly excited to have arrived in South Korea today and staying smack dab in the middle of the stylish Gangnam District at the COEX Conference Centre. It is my first time in this beautiful city and I ca
Hello Seoul! 🇰🇷🛬✨안녕하세요 서울 Lucky me, I am incredibly excited to have arrived in South Korea today and staying smack dab in the middle of the stylish Gangnam District at the COEX Conference Centre. It is my first time in this beautiful city and I cannot wait to begin exploring, especially the contemporary art and design scene. I am here to attend and give a paper at the #IPSA2025 International Political Science Association World Congress, the largest global gathering of researchers and academics working on all things political and international relations oriented. IPSA as an academic association was founded under the auspices of UNESCO in 1949 and is devoted to the advancement of political science in all parts of the world and promotes collaboration between scholars in both established and emerging democracies. The 2025 Conference theme is “Resisting Autocratization in Polarized Societies” and I was invited to present a paper on my ongoing work on Trumpism, the neo avante-garde, and visual culture on a panel examining the role of cultural actors during periods of democratic backsliding. I only had a few hours after I arrived to my hotel to check out COEX, but I had to see the world famous library housed inside the shopping complex. It was a very cool sight for a book nerd like me 🤓 . . . #seoul #korea #southkorea #politicalscience #arthistory #academiclife #conference @kpuarts @kwantlenu

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© Dorothy Barenscott, Avant-Guardian Musings, and dorothybarenscott.com, 2010-2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Dorothy Barenscott, Avant-Guardian Musings, and dorothybarenscott.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Ellar Coltrane stars as Mason Evans, Jr. in Richard Linklater's much buzzed about Boyhood (2014)

Ellar Coltrane stars as Mason Evans, Jr. in Richard Linklater's much buzzed about Boyhood (2014)

The Spectacle of Banality: Why We Are Drawn to Ordinariness

October 07, 2014

I’ve been thinking a lot about ordinariness lately, you know the stuff of life that makes up the majority of our experience. Maybe it’s because I had such an unremarkable and oh so relaxing summer—a much needed break from the relentless pace of work, travel, and a big move that had taken up much of my attention in the two years prior— or maybe it is a sense that I am finally settling into a knowable routine and set of daily patterns that I can comfortably count on. For that I am actually quite grateful. Whatever it is, my focus has shifted over the summer to really notice and pay attention to much of the buzz building around works of literature, film, and television that focus on banality as core content. It appears as if the everyday is having a real moment artistically, and the reasons may be as simple as something cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote in CTheory in 2001:

“What people deeply desire is a spectacle of banality. This spectacle of banality is today’s true pornography and obscenity…At a time when television and the media in general are less and less capable of accounting for (rendre compte) the world’s (unbearable) events, they rediscover daily life.”
— Jean Baudrillard

Take for example this past year’s celebrated Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author of a six-volume autobiography titled My Struggle that has become a global literary sensation and has earned Knausgaard the acclaim of being a modern day Proust. Each of the 500 page volumes of the series is a recollection of the author’s everyday life, beginning from childhood and moving to adulthood, and the minutiae of life is featured at every turn. Pages and pages of it. In fact, the reader is brought into such intimate contact with the author’s thoughts and everyday reflections that there seems to be a complete dismissal of the conventions of memoir, narrative, or logical transitions in storytelling that one would expect of a novel. The author Zadie Smith, in a review of the novels in NYRB, compared the feeling of reading Knausgaard to living “his life with him.”

The premise behind this year’s much anticipated Richard Linklater film Boyhood is very similar. Following up on the success of his film trilogy made over almost twenty years tracking one couple’s fictitious relationship as they moved from their twenties to their forties (Before Sunrise (1995); Before Sunset (2004); and Before Midnight (2013)), Linklater took up the challenge of selecting a cast and making a film over twelve years, shooting only for a few weeks each summer, to allow the camera to capture the subtleties of one boy’s coming of age story from childhood to young adulthood. The film itself is intentional in its banality—no melodrama or Hollywood plot turns— and for many audiences this is a relief as the enduring charm of the film has to do with recognizing the ordinary moments that we too share as part of our own coming of age experience. The distinction between the film’s central character, Mason Evans Jr., and the actor who plays him, Ellar Coltrane, almost slips away as we watch both boys (real and represented) age into young men before our eyes.

It is in the context of the pleasurable ordinariness and relatable moments of life that we also find the successful TV shows Louie, starring stand up comedian Louis C.K., and Girls, starring writer Lena Dunham. In both shows, we see the blurring of lines between the lives of C.K. and Dunham and their respective television characters. We see Louie and Hannah as mirrors reflecting the inner worlds of Louis and Lena. In both shows as well, there is an attempt to script and represent the lives, conversations, and worlds of the show’s characters as closely as possible to the way we would expect them to exist in the commonplace. In other words, the conversations are often boring, the sex is less than mindblowing (or pretty), the naked bodies are real ones, and the plots are slow-moving or non-existent.

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It is true that in the past several months we have been collectively witnessing major global upheavals, national conflicts, citizen protests (local and international), and news of environmental disasters and health epidemics on what seems like an unprecedented scale. I don’t need to list them here—you know what they are from your social media news feeds or you can turn on CNN to catch up quickly. It is difficult and exhausting to even know where to begin in terms of accounting for and making sense of it all, and the tendency is indeed to give up trying.

So is the everyday a kind of escape for us? Does the spectacle of banality, as Baudrillard suggests, provide a retreat from real world crises we would prefer to ignore? Perhaps. But it might be in the observation of banality that we recharge and rediscover something of ourselves once more. We appreciate those little moments that come to shape our life’s experience—the morning conversation with family, the chance encounter on the street, the time spent staring out a window or doing the laundry, a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. Maybe it is simply a reconnection with our own humanity that we crave, a much needed recharge to deal with life’s more extraordinary and unexpected moments. Or maybe this is all just a passing fad. Whatever it is, there is a comfort in ordinariness that we can all recognize. 

 Further Reading: 

Jean Baudrillard, “Dust Breeding.” Translated by Francois Debrix. CTHEORY, October 2001.

 

 

 

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© Dorothy Barenscott, 2010-2025