THE BRICOLEUSE: BRICOLAGE AS METHOD

In the ‘The Savage Mind’, Claude Levi Strauss uses the word bricolage to describe characteristic

patterns of mythological thought. Bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and recombining

them to create something new. Levi Strauss compares the working of the engineer and the bricoleur.

The Bricoleur who is the “savage mind” works with their hands in devious ways, puts preexisting

things together in new ways, and makes do with whatever is at hand. As opposed to the bricoleur is

the engineer, who is the ‘scientific mind’, the true craftsperson who deals with projects in their

entirety, considering the availability of materials, and creating new tools. Levi Strauss argues that

mythology works more like the Bricoleur whereas modern western rationality works more like the

engineer. He suggests that the engineer creates a totalizing system which has a degree of

permanence whereas the Bricoleur is more spontaneous and creates fragmented, more temporal,

impermanent systems.

In this studio, we will draw on the imaginary of the Bricoleur to build the contours of a deep practice

that engages in reading, acquaintance with works of art and architecture and making art. Five groups

will explore five tropes through which to engage with the idea of the Bricoleur. We will explore

different figures who embody the qualities of the Bricoleur and corresponding modes of thinking and

making. The course will explore the fluid relationships between art and architecture without

categorizing them as such. The intention is to engage with the idea of a long duree practice, where

the process is as engaging as the outcome. The course will collapse the boundaries between

art/architectural theory and studio, between reading, thinking and making. As we mine through

treasure troves of ideas and works, students will be encouraged to maintain a journal / blog / vlog to

collect their ideas and practices. Each student will put together five references of their own, which

will be intensely annotated like a Bricoleur’s notes. Each student will use the Bricoleur’s notes to

articulate one question around which they will produce a work of art/architecture. They will need to

find a field / archive to work with. The field/archive will be the playground / context of the Bricoleur.

These works can appropriate the various scales of architecture from drawing, to object, to space,

anything you can inhabit and occupy both physically and mentally. The process of archiving, making,

recording, will be the bricoleur’s practice.

Following are some of the tropes of the Bricolage/Bricoleur explored: 

1. Quilt-maker: Repair 

In 1960s China, during the cultural revolution, while the country was being cleansed of all preexisting art forms and embarking on a new world, a group of Chinese women were making textile paintings from scraps of shoe soles, pieces of cloth from shirt collars etc to gift to each other. Ge-ba is literally Textile Paintings. They were re-pairing material not to mend existing things but to mend the social life that was disrupted through the violence of modernity. While acquainting ourselves with works such as this and a collection of readings around the art and philosophy of repair, we build a series of works which contribute to Repair as practice. 

2. Pack rat: Lists 

Pack rats are large bushy tailed rodents. But the term is generally used to describe people who collect things indiscriminately. Mobilising the metaphor of the pack rat, this group mines texts and works around the idea of indiscriminate collections. In his book ‘Infinity of lists, an illustrated essay’ Umberto Eco (2009) takes us through lists from the pragmatic to the poetic from Homer to Salvador Dali and from James Joyce to Ravel’s Bolera. As Pack rats we look at the definitions and philosophical underpinnings of lists, their obsession, excesses as we wade through several works in art and architecture on the idea of lists. 

3. Bard: Sublime

Bards, minstrel poets often traveled from one destination to another. In many cases they were story tellers and chroniclers, at other times they were blistering satirists. Their works were poetic, sublime and transcendental. The Pardhan tribe of central India, served as bards for another tribe the Gonds, for whom they sang glorifying epics, which fuse together partly imaginary histories of the lost Gond kingdom (Jain, 2018). The artist Jangarh Singh Shyam, mentored by J. Swaminathan from Bharat Bhavan belonged to the Pardhan community. J. Swaminathan validated the works of Jangarh Singh as contemporary art alongside the urban works of other modern artists at Bharat Bhavan. Through a mythological rendering of the forest, Jangarh Singh Shyam evoked another transcendental way of inhabiting the world. From the writings of Edmund Burke to Kant, the Sublime evokes a transcendental space in the poetic imagination. This may be the space of desire, aspirations, urges.  The studio wanders through literature around the poetic, the sublime, the oneiric and the philosophical through works of art and architecture. The figure of the Bard is mobilized as a point of departure for the studio. 

4. Jester: Absurd 

The figure of the jester has been deployed in several texts as a device of humour or subversion to change the status quo of situations. Tenali Rama was the jester at the court of Krishnadevaraya, who through his wit solved challenging problems of the kingdom. The jester often employs the tools of the absurd, in the words of the art critic Victor Schlovsky in his seminal text ‘Art as Technique’, to defamiliarize the context so as to make things apparent by their inversion. The jester uses several tools such as parody, irony and subversion to challenge situations. In the 50s and 60s, the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ was deployed to point to the absurdities of the human condition. The studio introduces readers to several texts and works of art and architecture around the figure of the jester to fuel the design studio around it. 

5. Detective: Investigative

The figure of the detective /Spy is a metaphor around the ideas of stealth, secrecy, curiosity and the investigative. In the Urban Studies project at SEA a novel collectively written in an Allied Design Studio, ‘Just Another Day’ a murder mystery is mobilized to speak of the contemporary city of Mumbai. The detective in this scenario is a fixer who navigates the emergent spaces of urbanity as the story unfolds. Architectural research has deployed investigation to piece together complex facts to create new understandings. The studio will constitute a collective reading of texts, works of art and architecture around the figure of the detective to create provocations for a design studio.