Nathan, years ago I confronted the same question in a poetry class. I was a student then, and I wrote a poem in which Prince figured into the narrative (he was soundtracking my friendship with a friend who was moving away.) Other students argued that some people wouldn’t know who Prince was. Rita Dove, who was my teacher at the time, said that every reference in a poem had to have some meaning–even if the meaning wasn’t context-based. Prince, she argued, was a regal name, and offered a kind of dignity to the poem. In “At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop, the Lucky Strike offered to the speaker by a fisherman is a cigarette, but years in the future, some people won’t know that. They will know that it’s lucky, though, and a kind gift. And last week I taught my students that a Mangla sutra in a poem by A. K. Ramanujan is a necklace of beads, and often a gold pendant, given to a bride at her wedding in India. They didn’t know that, but they did know that the man in the poem sold it, and that it belonged to his wife, just by the context of the sentence.

I guess what I’m saying applies even more to art. A Campbell’s soup can is just a soup can until you see twenty of them in twenty almost-identical paintings by Warhol. At that point, it becomes a motif. It’s red and white, repetitive, visually bold. If we don’t know it’s for soup, well, we’re still going to know that it has meaning to Warhol, like a fetish. Every time we approach art from another culture, we arrive at the same problem–but there is a human visual language that we share, and art’s visual appeal is universal. That’s where Waters might argue that we’ve transposed the banal–it becomes, under the hand of the artist, another thing entirely.

John Waters, who I think would love this book, seems to be drawn toward the same sort of art. Using “ordinary” touchstones provides a very direct connection to the viewer (or reader) in a way that is often more difficult for abstraction. An “ordinary” or “banal” element is a doorway, an access point into art for anyone that shares that banality. The method is based on “ordinary-ness” but the sense of communion is extraordinary and can convey an amazement.

But here’s a question Susan. What happens when a person doesn’t share that banality? If a person (in the future or a remote part of the world) doesn’t know what Campbell’s soup or a urinal or an ice cream man are, does that mean the art doesn’t apply to them? Does it mean that, as a viewer, they are rendered illiterate?

Welcome to the online discussion of “Banal Details” in the Art=Text=Art exhibition. This topic is inspired by John Waters’s work, “35 Days,” (2003), and his quote in his essay “Roommates” in his book Role Models: “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal detail of our lives?” When I think about it, I certainly see a constant stream of banal details in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Joseph Cornell’s clay pipes, marbles, and astronomical maps, to Marcel Duchamp’s “fountain” (really a urinal mounted upside-down), to Andy Warhol’s reproductions of Campbell’s Soup cans, to Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills,” to Rachel Perry Welty’s recent work at the Zimmerli, which included her Twitter feed about the exhibition and an image of all the fruit stickers she’d peeled off the fruit she ate. John Waters, of course, is the king of the banal detail–who else can launch an entire film off of a thwarted desire for cha-cha heels?–and his assertion is certainly helpful in thinking about some of the pieces in this exhibition. Which are your favorite banal details at the Zimmerli this fall? What makes these details into art, in your opinion?

Welcome to the online discussion of “Banal Details” in the Art=Text=Art exhibition. The John Waters quotation that this phrase comes from is in Role Models, and poses a question: “Isn’t art supposed to transpose even the most banal details of our lives?” When I think about it, I certainly see a constant stream of banal details in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Joseph Cornell’s clay pipes, marbles, and astronomical maps, to Marcel Duchamp’s “fountain” (really a urinal mounted upside-down), to Andy Warhol’s reproductions of Campbell’s Soup cans, to Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills,” to Rachel Perry Welty’s recent work at the Zimmerli, which included her Twitter feed about the exhibition and an image of all the fruit stickers she’d peeled off the fruit she ate. John Waters, of course, is the king of the banal detail–who else can launch an entire film off of a thwarted desire for cha-cha heels?–and his assertion is certainly helpful in thinking about some of the pieces in this exhibition. Which are your favorite banal details at the Zimmerli this fall? What makes these details into art, in your opinion?