Learning from the bricoleur in times of crisis
The nature of collage is that it is likely to be unstable. What do I mean by this?
Collage is a rupture, whether it is a simple tear in an image to transform its meaning, a combination of things that shouldn't go together, or simply a piece of paper that isn’t glued properly to its support - it never suggests solidity. Its birth into life is often spontaneous, like a chance meeting with someone you haven't seen in ages. It takes on a life of its own that was never its life to own. It can come into existence and disappear again in the flash of an eye. It can also hang around in one's mind for years after it first showed itself to the viewer. It takes its meaning from a multitude of voices, it does not imply certainty.
I first came to see collage through my grandfather. He would send us cards made from cut out magazines, every year on a birthday or christmas, from his home country of Belgium. He was a sculptor, working with stone. The contrast between the materials struck me as incompatible. Now that I am an artist too, I can understand the relief he must have felt, cutting and tearing paper after a day chiselling marble.
I later found collage resurfaced again when I needed to design promotional material and menus for the community arts cafe I was managing. Collage represented collaboration, a design solution that somehow involved everyone and yet could be, at first glance, artistically assigned to noone in particular.
Collage is really an act of arrangement. It can be small and contained- within a page and a few pieces of paper, it can expand to include three dimensional forms, becoming assemblage or sculpture, it can be a splicing of words together into a piece of writing, It could be a film, or it could in fact be a way of living.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss constructed and defined a character he calls the bricoleur - a ‘handyman/inventor who improvises to remake old things to serve new purposes’. The bricoleur is a way of being (and materially dealing) with the world. The bricoleur first studies the materials and situation at hand, engaging with things not as inert objects, but as active entities, each with a specific history, character, and inexhaustible potential for the future.
Recently I wrote my own defence of the bricoleur. I’m not sure why, it wasn’t from a direct attack, but from the place of realisation that the way I work, which often seems to go against the world's desire for efficiency and predictability, might actually just be a different way of seeing the world and its resources.
“The bricoleur works quickly. The decision process is rapid. The act of bricolage is an act of working within self imposed limitations - ‘what do I have to hand’. There is a lot of freedom in knowing that what is not useful for now, might come in useful later. It is the ‘go to’ in an emergency. It is the full embodiment of intuitive thought and action that instinctively knows that ‘this goes with that’ and ‘this will make that better’. It is an act of humanity and care, not an act of power, to ‘get in front’ of others. I see it as an acknowledgement of others in this world of possibilities, and the ones that present themselves in the moment, are the right ones, for that moment. It is not about stealing. It is the art of cobbling together, it doesn't present itself as dominant. There is always a new purpose to serve. “
So if one applies this bricoleur methodology to practice, there is going to be a fair amount of material experimentation. And it is haphazard, not scientific, as sometimes great things can happen but they are rarely repeatable. That is, the conditions of their happening were not recorded. Their moment, was of a moment. Most of my better work came through an accident, but this praise of mistake is tricky to get right. It requires a feeling that it somehow works. For me, to arrive at this place of attention to this feeling can come through the act of arrangement itself. Whether it be placement of furniture in the studio to catch the light in the right way, or a more focussed organisation of materials in a work, it is a conversation with the objects to hand, that occurs in a specific moment, to answer a specific problem. This act is really about processing a sensation within a place and time. It is harder to communicate at a later date because the piece requires not only an explanation of its substance but one of its conditions of birth.
The significant aspects of lockdown that affected my work was primarily the physical space I had at my disposal, the lack of direct contact with other artists that I was accustomed to, as well as the materials available for me to choose from. I went from working in a fairly generous sized studio to finding a spot on the kitchen table in between meal times. I had just hung my largest work to date ready for a show, which coincided with the exact day we were told to stay at home. The outer environment became internalised and heavily fragmented through social media and the news.
Going inward immediately takes me back to the fierce self containment of childhood… drawing, playing, and making things from cardboard boxes. So the bricoleur steps in again. Not only were materials suddenly difficult to buy, the studio was out of bounds and magazines were what I had to hand. I have often found that if I focus the work within the constraints implicated in any given situation, it develops quicker and with greater conviction.
This work is one of the results of this inward processing, an active searching for meaning during a time of uncertainty. Instead of arranging my studio or arranging objects I had to arrange my time. Habits and rituals became fundamental for my day to operate effectively. The work also came out daily. I created around 6 in a period of a week or so, It's difficult to remember. I was working alongside a kitchen placemat for a while before it struck me one day to use it as a template. The whole process of construction of the pieces changed after that. There is a movement generated through the circular shape - I had to turn the work around and around to finish it. I didn't use a paper support for this work, it grew, fragment upon fragment, from the edges, inward.. Domestic in their size, to me they contain an expansive thought process held within miniature form. I honoured the clean restriction of the placemats border. This may have related somehow to the imposed restrictions on our civil liberties, travel, contact etc - it felt we were always rubbing against some kind of edge.
I was once again dealing with image, and specifically images from glossy magazines that were selling me furniture, lifestyle, and other projected dreams and illusions - An intensification of nervous stimulation that characterises ‘the modern experience’.
As the world opened up again, the series began to cross the boundaries of the circular shape. Some took the form of solid wooden discs, using found wooden circles from my studio, their paper fragments spilling off the edge of their solid structures suggesting something organic, alive, shrinking and growing. Others had empty centres. They mostly grew larger, although some smaller too, firmer, created from paper maché made from the egg boxes saved during lockdown.
The work took on a momentum that was abruptly shattered by another outward event, something even more unexpected than a global pandemic, at least for my neighbourhood.
On dec 20th 2020 I awoke pinned to my bed by a piece of ceiling. The room had rearranged itself around us, I could hear multiple sirens, it seemed the ground was actually unstable. We climbed out of the bedroom to find the front of our house had gone. There had been an explosion on the first floor of our fourth floor apartment. We were on floor three. Without giving you every detail, we managed to climb precariously out of the building before the rest of it caught fire and eventually burned to the ground.
The subsequent days, weeks and months have their own stories, and it's been a year of retelling them and rewriting them into my own, to eventually allow it to sit, somewhat uncomfortably, like a huge elephant, in a room. How this event intersects with the path of work is unavoidable. Everything had changed.
I always approached watercolour from a self taught manner. Unencumbered by the traditions of the medium, I find it soothing, unexpected, quick. I re-took to painting in the spring of 2021 as a repairative act. Perhaps we can call this work a drawing, to lighten it of its burden as a ‘painting’ - for it was a more or less a spontaneous reaction to the previous series of collages, searching for closure perhaps. Sometimes, the fluidity of a brushstroke can be, in a way, a healing gesture. Watercolour has its own spiritual dimension, deeply connected to eastern philosophy and ritual. Like breathing in and out. A way to make the imagery my own, to try to understand what collage had previously evoked in me. And yet, the work resisted completion. Resolution finally came when I stopped thinking of them as some kind of continuation, as a series of sorts. A new kind of work finally appeared, resulting from a frustrated day in the studio wrestling with delicate rice paper, beeswax and a domestic iron. It slid onto the floor, showing me its underside, and the territory became clear.
Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation, writes;
“By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable… Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all”
The process of circularity is playing out in my greater life, as pieces of a jigsaw slowly fit together again. As we try to resolve the practical implications of our home exploding, my work begins to fit together again in a timeline that is not tied to time. Resolution can also come through writing.
Without beginning or end, the circle is not a straight line. Or rather, it is a never ending line, balanced, a symbolic answer to our search for meaning and understanding of time.
The bricoleur works best within a centre of physical action. It finds value in things that have already been used, studies them to answer how they might resolve the situation at hand. We lost everything inside that house, but my artworks, safely stashed in my studio across town, were untouched. They became the basis of my own restructuring - selling drawings and collages to create funds to move forward, as well as revisiting old work to understand what was happening at that time, and how I had moved on. Art became currency, as well as language, a way to fill the silence that post trauma can open up. To be vulnerable is difficult.
After a pause, we can emerge stronger. What are the implications of taking time out to review work from a distance? The pause opens up space for clarity and revitalization. Disruption and financial anxiety have become regular colours tainting my daily life, but alongside this, a growing sense of conviction that we do, of course, live in cycles. As an artist, it often feels like we are on a treadmill - an instagram-fuelled frenzy that creates a gap between reality and illusion, and gives us an impending and real fear of being forgotten. It also drives us to think in statements, conclusive, in their nature one-sided.
When there is no other space but to transform, and no other way but to move forward, how do we tread? And what can we learn from the bricoleur in times of crisis?
From Artist Talk “From body to earth; mini implosions and sometimes the opposite” - Historias de boudoir, O Gabinete de Madame Thao, Lisbon, 2022