Noberto Nardi, an architect teaching at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, recently remarked that 'we will be devoured by other ways of building if we do not show more concern with the "
mundane" elements of architecture.
The effect, as with the Whitney piece, is to turn a
mundane subject into a disorienting spectacle.
But the book is not a recounting of farm chores, though she has to deal with the
mundane traumas the area has to offer: roundups, fire, accidents, early death.
Scottish artist Kenny Macleod's two-channel video Breaking Up, 2001, focused on such banalities, showing images of airplanes landing, a very ugly hotel room, and a suit of clothes, to a voice-over narrative of a business traveler's
mundane concerns.
Specifically, Petroski presents an enchanting glimpse of how the
mundane tasks associated with being a paperboy--folding the papers and learning how to repair a bicycle--fueled a lifelong fascination for how things work.
Yet his capacity for apparently wilful inventiveness serves to elevate and enliven the essentially
mundane act of catching a bus and even the smallest detail is subject to imaginative attention.
Knowledge is indeed power, but that power begins to take over when Streator finds that killing is becoming "a bad habit." Interwoven into this story that neatly blends the magical and horrific with the realistic and
mundane are compelling themes about free will; about the power of media, political theory and religious doctrine to shape thought; and about the danger and difficulty of trying to take control.
In her laconic sculpture and video installations, the British artist Marion Coutts mythologizes the
mundane. With the insouciance and economy of a professional magician, she makes the one-dimensional multidimensional and transforms stale habit into compelling ritual.
More than 30,000 different Internet newsgroups now exist, allowing members to send and receive messages on interests that range from the
mundane to the weird.
It looms over its more puny and
mundane neighhours, almost as a church dominates its village, or a nineteenth-century mill its town.
To quote him: "The reason I downloaded these files was very simple and
mundane: I wanted to protect them from loss in the event that LANL changed the computer operating system again or experienced a computer crash--both had occurred in the past, causing serious problems for me.
Last year Andrade painted geometric monochromes directly onto the tiled walls of an unassuming local bar--geometric abstraction abandoning its purist domains to land like a barfly in the most
mundane quarters.
Random noise, from a source that could be as
mundane as the jostling of stars and gas, would tend to be amplified by the highly curved shape of the galaxy's core, the researchers argue in the Aug.
Prefabricated timber components were used whenever appropriate, and the square-metre price of the scheme was lower than any of the other much more
mundane developers' developments in the demonstration area.
Personal photographs, scientific illustrations and humorous monotone watercolors all tie in with both the
mundane and technical sides of this work.
