slum bricolage
Anthony Burdin’s installation (pictured left) for the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, once again opened the question of using building practices found in slums as part of art installations in museum and art gallery spaces. I addressed this question by examining the work of Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc and that of Spanish artists Jesús Palomino through theories of bricolage. At the same time I was in contact with Judith Rodenbeck, who had recently been made editor of Art Journal. I worked on a piece for a theme issue on Assemblage and Bricolage, which was eventually published in Art Journal in 2008.
As a symptom of a heterogeneous world, the term bricolagc suffers from semantic instability. Simply stated, however, bricolage is the construction of something from whatever comes at hand. Since its introduction by Claude Levi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind) in 1962, it has appeared across disciplines and discourses as part of the revolution that structuralism posed for critical and creative projects, from poetry to architecture. Levi-Strauss’s examination of bricolage is an attempt to challenge the generalized notion of the “intellectual poverty of Savages,” their lack of conceptual thinking, their “ineptitude for abstract thought.” Abstraction, as he further states, “is not the monopoly of civilization.” However, Levi Stratiss goes a step further, since with bricolage he is not only presenting the “thinking of the savages,” but more importantly “savage thinking” or, better yet, to use Dan Sperber’s term, “untamed thinking,” a thinking other than science—analogic, perhaps, rather than analytic—that, in our contemporary experience, grows out of the void spaces of capital.