The origin of the “everyday:” community development, liberal government, contemporary art.

This paper argues that the emergence of a category called “the everyday” took place in contemporary art and liberal government in the same moment, at the onset of deindustrialization in the West. Where deindustrialization occurred across the globe, revisiting its effects in lower Manhattan circa 1960 – well known site of the U.S. based Avant Garde in that decade – allows for the isolation of “the everyday” as a shared category of administration between its canonical emergence in U.S. art after 1945 and its appearance in early community development schemes to discipline the poor. Community development was federally funded as part of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, with poverty services flooding American cities beginning in the late 1950s to combat both the effects of deindustrialization (unemployment, urban divestment) and the rebellions that had arisen in response. This process occurred alongside the heralded development of Happenings, participatory art, and other iterations of this decades’ “art into life” experiments, which remain ubiquitously summarized as a turn to “the everyday.” Anti-poverty’s “everyday” emerged in federal programs for black and brown majority inner cities, which rolled out work fare, educational services, art and cultural programs and paramilitary training in a bid to offer ‘life’ in place of uprising. By situating two early 60s works by Claes Oldenburg in relationship to the programs of the first anti-poverty initiative “Mobilization for Youth,” this paper explores how the two aligned in logic and form, coalescing around their shared deployment of “the everyday.”