Malevich - Black Circle

The Everyday in Art

The presence in contemporary art of everyday, domestic objects such as a bed is now a commonplace of contemporary art, even if contemporary critics rarely ask whose everyday domesticity might be re/presented. Many of life's key experiences and rites of passage — being born, sleeping, dreaming, having sex, giving birth, and dying — happen in bed.

Rachel Whiteread made numerous bed pieces which she placed on the floor, inviting yet denying rest, cots by Permindar Kaur or Mona Hatoum, Richard Hamilton's brutal Treatment Room of 1984 (Arts Council Collection, London, recently exhibited in Protest and Survive at the Whitechapel Art Gallery) or Bill Viola's Science of the Heart of 1983 (shown in Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery) play on, prey on, the oscillations between life and death, the body's presence and absence. None have the comforts usually associated with the bed in consumer culture of the 1980s and 1990s with its boom in home decoration and plethora of styles from the minimalist to the ornate. One of Sarah Lucas's most complex pieces about sexuality and sexual difference is Au Naturel of 1994 in which a sagging, stained mattress is propped up against a wall. Impossible to sleep or rest upon, its surface is interrupted the objects placed upon it: a bucket, melons and a cucumber. So long a stage for the performance of the female nude, upturned the mattress becomes the site for the play of fantasies and cultural representations as the artist's trades with her audiences the crude sexual stereotypes in circulation in contemporary culture.