Everyday, everywhere and the erasure of measure

Since the ‘readymade’, contemporary art practice has claimed for itself a space belonging to both art and the everyday and yet belonging completely to neither. It exists as a set that belongs only to itself. Barbara Formis (1) has characterised this incoherent doubling as the ‘intervallic’ nature of the readymade when considered in relation to Alain Badiou’s concept of the ‘event’. This intervallic or undecidable element of contemporary art practice in the 21stC encourages the emergence of new forms within the engorged image field of contemporary global culture.  This indiscernible state offered by the collapse of difference between the everyday and art creates a new context and the opportunity to open a portal of equivalence and the potential to influence both the everyday and art.

This paper will examine the ‘intervallic’ nature of contemporary art and its capacity to interfere with global culture. The paper will examine the digital photo-image artworks of New Zealand /Korean artist Jae Hoon Lee as a proposition which simultaneously addresses and then undermines our sense of conviction of what dimensionality represents, or indeed how it is represented at all. His work offers a critique of the utopian and idealised confections of global culture presented as a type of positive ‘nomadism’ and represents this state as an exemplar of the means by which we suppress the local in order to fabricate the global and erect a circumstance that facilitates exploitation within the instability of the space between art and the everyday.