Section 4: Everyday Resistance

Resistance, as a concept, has a way of feeling weighty, important, and maybe a touch dangerous. The word conjures up images of tea thrown in harbors, noisy pickets blocking streets, or effigies being burned. Such framing, however, can make it all feel rather distant from us in our regular lives and can make it easy to overlook all the small ways resistance is deeply embedded in our simple day-to-day experiences. Sometimes we’re not looking to reshape deep injustices but just the environment immediately surrounding us. The items in this case spotlight these mundane efforts, with an eye to how art and resistance have a long history of arising in playful, everyday ways.

By its nature, resistance operates against something — an expectation, a boundary, or, say, a classroom rule. Consider the 33 regulations laid out by the Springfield Female Seminary in 1831 which addressed where the students could hang their bonnets, forbade “boisterous talking and laughing,” and warned that “No pupil may speak with her fingers, or have any communication, written or symbolical, with another out of her own seat.”

Resistance is so powerful and hard to quell precisely because of the many forms it can take. Perhaps it isn’t the rule itself you intentionally challenge, but how it is embodied in front of you. Look closely at the section headers in this 1869 edition of The Elements of the English Language, and you’ll see where George Brondige, in a fit of boredom or rebelliousness, reworked the word “RULES” into his own creation. Arms and legs sprout, a jaunty hat sits atop a head, and the rules now serve his bidding. 

Or look at how playful hands took up pen and pencil to embellish the photographs shown here — a mustache grows on a young face, a crown and scepter bedeck a woman, and a different version of reality comes into being. Authority is bestowed or challenged with just a touch of humor. Art allows us to reclaim spaces, either on the page, in the image, or in the world.

[Portrait of Unidentified Boy], carte-de-visite, by James A. Brush, Detroit, [ca. 1860s]. David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography.

Artistic vision also enables us to look at something with new eyes and play with the constraints expected of us and our environments. Here you see rote classroom handwriting exercises and printed ephemera transformed into templates for vibrant painted stencils and the humble postage stamp reworked to create a colorful sea voyage. By necessity, aspects of daily life are routine and measured, controlled, and rule-bound. Art, though, offers up a window to assert ourselves and imagine different possibilities, just like these creators did in the past when they approached objects intended for one use and subverted them for an entirely different purpose.

Harry A. Simmons, [Postal stamp collage], ca. 1860s. Harry A. Simmons Journal and Sketchbook, 1861-1862.