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Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday

Life
Anna Dezeuze
Published online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Anna Dezeuze (2008) Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life, Art Journal, 67:1,
31-37, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2008.10791292

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 Certain art-historical terms, the French artist Jean Dubuffet explained to William
Seitz in 1961, are determined by a period- and context-specific "spirit" or "mood,"
While Dubuffet was in fact discussing the example of collage, it is tempting to
apply his insight to Seitz's 1961 Art ofAssemblage exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, which marked, in many ways, the simultaneous culmi-
nation and demise of a specific spirit of the late 1950S and early 1960s.The word
"assemblage" itself would be quickly superseded-by the
Anna Dezeuze end of the decade-by new terms such as environment,
performance, and Conceptual art, and this moment in the
Assemblage, Sricolage, and history of twentieth-century art remains to this day largely
eclipsed by these subsequent developments. In order to
the Practice of Everyday Life excavate this early history of the 1960s and to demonstrate
its relevance for our understanding of contemporary art,
this thematic cluster of essays will focus on Seitz's description of assemblage as an
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activity involving "the fitting together of parts and pieces."? This definition evokes
the do-it-yourself process of constructing objects from odds and ends, described
by the French word bricolage and most famously theorized in 1962 by the anthropol-
ogist Claude Levi-Strauss. Examining the relations between assemblage and bricolage
will bring to light a trajectory of process-based practices in contemporary art since
the late 195os,while demonstrating the value of conceiving assemblage as a model
of engagement with the world rather than as a formal category.This introductory
essay will address one feature of the assemblage-bricolage nexus in particular: its rela-
tion to the two opposing fields of work and leisure.

Process/Object

I. Jean Dubuffet, letter to William Seitz, April 21, In his correspondence about The Art ofAssemblage, Seitz emphasized that the works
1961, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #695, in the exhibition should not only juxtapose at least two different materials, but
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
(my translation).
that these materials should be "discarded or purloined" "rather than new"-just
2. Seitz's use of this definition is referred to in like the residues from which the bricoleur, according to Levi-Strauss, draws for his
Helen Franc, letter to Peter Selz and William Seitz,
constructions.! Seitz seemed insistent that these heterogeneous materials remain
March 30,1961, Rene d'Harnoncourt Papers,lV,
179, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. "identifiable." In a letter to David Smith, in which he sought to justify the inclu-
3. This was the wording of a standard letter that sion of only one of the American sculptor's works in the exhibition, he explained:
Seitz sent to a number of American museums
during the summer 1960, when he was looking "You so often obliterate the sources of the things you use, that I did not regard you
for works to include in the exhibition. See CUR, as essentially an assembler but as a sculptor.Yt The most interesting critical debates
Exh. #695, Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York. on assemblage practices in the early 1960s certainly hinged on this very nexus of
4. William Seitz, letter to David Smith, undated, recognizability and transformation, which related to more general discussions
Registrar Exhibition Files, Exh. #695, Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.
of the artists' approach to their materials.! Similarly, Levi-Strauss's definition of
5. 1develop this point in my "'Neo-dada,' 'Junk bricolage as a "science of the concrete" describes above all an attitude to the mate-
Aesthetic,' and Spectator Participation," in Neo-
rial world. For Levi-Strauss, the bricoleur '''speaks,' not only with things ... but also
Avant-Garde, ed. David Hopkins (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 200), 49-71. through things." 6 This dialogue with objects, in which assemblage artists were
6. Claude Levi-Strauss, LaPensee sauvage (Paris: also engaged, was interpreted at the time as a break from the autonomy ofAbstract
Pion, 1962), 32 (my translation).
7. Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" Expressionist painting. In his landmark essay "The legacy of Jackson Pollock,"
(1958), in Essays on the Blurring on Art and Ufe Allan Kaprow hailed the arrival of a "new concrete art" which would embrace
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),9.
On this "concrete" turn in early 1960s art, see everyday materials'? This "new concrete art," which would expand into assem-
also my forthcoming "'Open Work,' 'Do-it-your- blage, environments, and Happenings, calls to mind, of course, the bricoleur's "sci-
self Artwork,' and Bricolage," in TheDa-it-yourself
Artwork: Spectator Participation in Contemporary Art,
ence of the concrete."
ed. Anna Dezeuze. The fact that the bricoleur speaks through things, as well as with them, points,

3 I art journal
Downloaded by [University of Liverpool] at 16:53 04 October 2014

Robert Filliou, Permanent Playfulness, 1973, furthermore, to the sociopolitical ramifications of assemblage in early 1960s
wood, hooks, steel wire, pastel on tracing paper,
photograph, and pastel on cardboard box torn in
Europe and America. As [aimey Hamilton's essay on Arman (in this issue of Art
two, 13~ x 29X x IX in. (35 x 75 x 3 em) (art- Journal) demonstrates, assemblage presented itself as the privileged expression of
work © Marianne Filliou; photograph by Florian
a new consumer subject whose very identity was defined through an increasingly
Kleinefenn, Paris, provided by Galerie Nelson,
Paris) accelerated cycle of acquisition and disposal of objects. While the concrete nature
of assemblage allowed it to underscore the new dominance of the commodity, it
was its emphasis on process that suggested the ways in which subjects are formed
through this changing set of relations. Through suggestions of transformation,
loss, or reinvention, assemblage effected a temporalization of the object that artic-
ulated new forms of late-capitalist subjectivity.When Helen Franc, editorial con-
sultant to the MoMA director, complained to Seitz that the exhibition's title placed
"emphasis on the actrather than on the finished product," she in fact provided one of
the most lucid insights into the implicit performative dimension of assemblage-
a dimension that would be obscured by Seitz's own largely formalist reading,"
As Conceptual artists sought to dematerialize the art object as a commodity
in the later 1960s, assemblage's deliberate focus on objects was seen as regressive
at best and, at worst, complicit with the ever more dominant forces of capital-
ism. The figure of the bricoleur, however, did not disappear; rather, his tools
changed. Instead of glue or nails, the conceptual bricoleur used words and docu-
mentation in works privileging process, performance, and language over the
object. Lucy Lippard's 1969 distinction among different conceptual practices
according to their "acceptance or rejection"-and their "degree ofaccep-
tance" -"of the multiplicity of non-art subject-matter" points to different
approaches to concrete reality? While some Conceptual artists privileged self-
8. Franc, letter to Peter Selz and William Seitz, n. p. referential explorations of the definition of art, others turned to "non-art subject-
9. Lucy Lippard, "Interview with Ursula Meyer"
(1969), repro in Lippard, SixYears: The matter," like the bricoleur drawing on a stash of available odds and ends. Similarly,
Dematerialization of the Art Objea from /966 to Jack Burnham's 1968 analysis of a new "systems aesthetics" reflecting a "transition
/972 (London and New York: Studio Vista,
1973),7. from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture" revolves around the definition of

32 SPRING 2008
 the system as "a complex of components in interaction" reminiscent of the set of
artifacts assembled by the bricoleur. 10 Just as the bricoleur's means are not predeter-
mined by a specific project, Burnham points out that often in systems aesthetics
"the traditional priority of end results over technique breaks down."11 Thus, I
would suggest, it is above all among conceptual practic~s premised on an "accep-
tance of the multiplicity of non-art subject-matter," and on an emphasis on
processes as well as on finished objects, that the legacies of assemblage can be found.
Three examples, drawn from very different contexts, can point to the scope
of this conceptual bricolage. As is well known, the innovative premise of Bruce
Nauman's early work was that if he was an artist and he spent time in his studio,
then "whatever it was" that he was doing in the studio "must be art "-whether
it involved arranging flour in patterns on the floor, pacing around the room, or
Simply drinking coffee. I2 The way in which Nauman took stock of the remainders
of the failed traditions of sculpture and studio practice, only to redefine the very
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parameters of art, invokes one of the defining features of bricolage; the tension
between constraints and possibilities." Like Nauman, the French artist Robert
Filliou used bricolage to redefine the boundaries of art. A self-described bricoleur (one
of his passports apparently cited this as his profession), 14 Filliou created from the
late [960s a number of assemblages which consist of words and drawings scrib-
bled onto bits of cardboard roughly hung together with hooks and strings. The
casualness and slightness of his constructions embody his [968 "principle of
equivalence," which posited a mathematical equation between the "well-made,"
the "badly made," and the "not-made" in order to encourage a new conception of
I,
art as an activity in which anyone can engage. This liberatory discourse, with its
celebration of spontaneity, was also shared by the Brazilian artist Helie Oiticica.
10. jack Burnham, "Systems Aesthetics" His Parangole capes, begun in [964 and made from heterogeneous materials such
(1968), repro in Open Systems: Rethinking Art
c. 1970, exh. cat., ed. Donna de Salvo as cotton, plastic, or jute bags or squares loosely stitched together, 16 were inspired
(London: Tate Modern, 2005), 165-66. by the improvisatory styles of samba dancing as well the architecture of the Rio
I I. Ibid., 167.
12. Ian Wallace and Russel Keziere, "Bruce de Janeiro shantytowns, which, as Paola Berenstein Jacques has pointed out, is a
Nauman Interviewed, 1979 (October 1978)," spatialized form of bricolage. 17 Conceived as a means through which to awaken a
repro in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's
Words; Writings and Interviews, ed. janet Kraynak
new freedom in their wearers, the Parangole>, like Filliou's constructions, sought to
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 194. hand the bricoleur's tools directly over to the viewer-participant. 18
13. See Anne Wagner, "Nauman's Body of
Thus, on three different continents, and independently from each other, these
Sculpture," October 120 (Spring 2007): 53-70.
14. According to Pierre Tillman, Robert Fi/liou: highly original artists adopted a bricolage model to set up open systems in which
Nationalite poete (Dijon: Presses du reel, 2006), new relations between art and the everyday could be articulated. These conceptual
176.
15. Filliou's"principle of equivalence" and other practices took the temporalization of the object suggested by early [960s assem-
key terms of his theory of art can be found in his blage one step further, to the point where the boundaries between object and
Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (Cologne
and New York: Kasper Koenig, 1970). process, between artwork and viewer participation, became blurred. A third shift
16. See my "Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory in this trajectory of assemblage-bricolage, I would like to argue, occurred in the
Politics: Hello Oiticica's Parangoles," ArtJournal 63,
no. 2 (Summer 2004): 58--71.
[990S, as everyday life itself came to be conceived as a practice analogous to brico-
17. Paola Berenstein jacques, Estenco da ginga: lage. In his [980 book The Practice ofEveryday Life, Michel de Certeau used the verb
A arquitetura das favelas atraves da obra de Helio
bricoler to describe the ways in which we engage in the most common activities,
Oitidca (Rio de janeiro: Casa da Palavra and
Rioarte, 200 I), 24--26. including shopping, walking, or cooking. Through these activities, de Certeau
18. See Hello Oiticica, "Fundamental Bases for explains, people "tinker" (bricolent) "with and within the dominant cultural econ-
the Definition of the Parangole," in Helio Oitidca,
exh. cat. (Rio de janeiro: Centro de Arte Hello omy to obtain innumerable and infinitesimal metamorphoses of its law into their
Oiticica, 1997), 87-88. interests and their own rules." 19 Just as Levi-Strauss challenged the hierarchies
19. Michel de Certeau, L'lnvention du quotidien, vol.
I: Arts de faire, new edition, ed. Luce Giard (1980; between bricolage and scientific thought, de Certeau sought to define everyday life
Paris: Gallimard, 1990), xxxvii (my translation). as a complex field of study requiring new methodologies. It was precisely de

JJ art journal
 Certeau's elaboration of a new "science of the concrete" that appealed to the
French curator Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990S as he tried to theorize the preoc-
cupations of certain forms of contemporary art. Bourriaud posited a crucial dis-
tinction between 1960s practices and a 1990S "relational aesthetics" that "no
longer seeks to present utopias.":" Contemporary artists, according to Bourriaud,
are concerned instead with the construction of"concrete spaces," as well as the
"practice of everyday life" and "practices that tinker with and recycle cultural
givens" ("pratiques de bricolage et de recyclage du donne culturel"). 21
While 1960s works by Filliou and Oiticica clearly contradict Bourriaud's
recurrent opposition between utopia and bricolage practices, the basic assumption
of a shift away from utopian practices in the 1990S is justified, and de Certeau's
model accurately captures the methodological approach of contemporary bricoleurs.
While this turn to the concrete can be read as a general rejection of the semiotic
preoccupations with allegory and deconstruction that had preoccupied art in the
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1980s, it also reflects wider shifts in political thought as a whole. The guiding
model for the most political art of the last decade, according to Gregory Sholette,
can be found in nongovernmental organizations, "which stress pragmatic and
tactical action over ideology."22 Contemporary "interventionist" artists, accord-
ing to Nato Thompson, use tactics that" can be thought of as a set of tools. Like a
hammer, a glue gun, or a screwdriver, they are means for building and decon-
structing a given situation.T" The bricoleur, it seems, is back with a new tool kit,
which now includes street interventions, the internet, and product prototypes.
In a varied landscape ranging from relational aesthetics to interventionist
art, contemporary practices of bricolage tend to focus on one of two central
themes: bricolage as a studio practice for artists revisiting the failed utopias of past
avant-garde movements on the one hand and, on the other hand, bricolage as an
everyday model of activism, often closely related to the very concept of survival
in developing economies. 24 The former tendency, exemplified by the work ofTom
Friedman discussed by Io Applin in this issue, could be situated in the lineage of
Bruce Nauman's rethinking of the studio as a space of bricolage. The second direc-
tion can be more easily traced back to Oiticica's own work: the architectural pro-
jects discussed by Patricio del Real in this issue share with Oiticica an interest in
shantytown architecture as a space of resistance. These two tendencies represent
extreme polarities of the spectrum of bricolage practices, as one is resolutely
directed toward self-reflexive explorations, and the other is more obviously
20. Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthetique relationnelle
(Dijon: Presses du reel, 1998), 48 (my transla- engaged with wider social and political concerns.
tion). Both tendencies, however, also share a concern with the current situation of
21. Ibid., 14.
sculpture and with the subversive potential of everyday life, and the best bricolage
22. Gregory Sholette, "Interventionism and the
Historical Uncanny; or, Can There Be a today combines a rethinking of the ontological status of art with wider SOciopo-
Revolutionary Art without the Revolution?" in The litical questions of value and agency.Thomas Hirschhorn's work, which deliber-
Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative
Disruption of Everyday Life, exh. cat., ed. Nato ately weaves together the legacies of Filliou and Oiticica, among other artists,
Thompson and Gregory Sholette (North Adams: embodies a crucial synthesis of these different strands. Similarly, artists such as
Mass MoCA. 2004),139.
23. Nato Thompson, ''Trespassing Relevance," in Gabriel Orozco have transposed Nauman's explorations of the artistic process
TheInterventionists, 14. onto a globalized stage, in which the nomadic artist creates works out of remain-
24. On the latter trend, see my "Thriving on
Adversity: The Art of Precariousness," Mute 2,
ders found in the streets of the world's cities as well as in the studio. This relation
no. 3, special issue on "Naked Cities: Struggle in to the remainder, Applin suggests, establishes a set of fragmented and entropic
the Global Slums" (October 2006): 74-87, also
temporalities. Shantytown architecture also articulates complex temporalities, as
online at www.metamute.org/en/Thriving-On-
Adversity. it recycles remainders of modernity according to the nonlinear and repetitive

34 SPRING 2008
 processes of addition, expansion, and substitution characteristic of bricolage.
Because of its complex relations to objects, processes, and time, bricolage has been
the privileged site for the exploration of wider issues of materiality, commodi-
fication, and consumerism in capitalist-and increasingly globalized-societies.

Work/Leisure

More specifically, these concerns coalesce within bricolage around the opposition
between work and leisure, already suggested by Levi-Strauss, as he explained that
industrial societies only tolerate bricolage as a hobby. This very field of hobbies had
become a focus of '950S French sociology, in particular Henri Lefebvre's study of
leisure in the new postwar era of consumerism. 25 As long as leisure was conceived
as a set of compensatory activities which reinforced the centrality of work rather
than provide a true means of self-development, Lefebvre argued, this increasingly
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visible sphere of everyday life would remain subject to the same alienation as the
workplace. Passive forms of escapism and entertainment, according to Lefebvre,
only increase the dissatisfaction of the alienated worker by offering a momentary
satisfaction that always falls short of true fulfillment. These kinds of leisure gener-
ally shun any association with work or duty-"doing odd jobs around the house"
or engaging in educational activities is no longer deemed entertaining enough. 26
Other forms of leisure, however, may contain a critique of this alienating everyday
life even as they are embedded in it. One example suggested by Lefebvre was the
boom of Sunday painting, a form ofleisure that "involves an original search-
whether clumsy or skilful is unimportant-for a style of living."27 Discussions of
this form of leisure had taken a specific direction in the United States, as the new
craze for paint-by-numbers kits swept the country in the '95os. The debates about
this hobby, which appealed above all to would-be Sunday painters, hinged on
whether it constituted a democratization of high art or rather acted as a "stifling"
form of control over real expressivity.28 The relation between this duality and the
political climate of a '95os America characterized by stability, conformity, and
repression was compounded by the fact that the most prominent member of the
expanding group of enthusiastic paint-by-number hobbyists was none other than
the president of the United States himself, Dwight Eisenhower. Jasper Johns's take on
the paint-by-number theme, in his '96o Target (also known as Target (Do-it-yourself) or
Jasper Johns and ... ) should be interpreted within this context. By inviting the viewer
of this work to color in a target drawn in pencil, using the provided paintbrush
and three colors presented in a paint set, Johns seemed to suggest an unwilling-
25. Henri Lefebvre's monumental Critique de to vie ness or inability to "express" himself Yet at the same time, there is little for the
quotidienne was published in three volumes in viewer to fill in, and any desire to be "creative" will be as constrained as in a
1947. 1961.and 1981.
26. Henri Lefebvre. "Work and Leisure in
paint-by-number set. Target thus seems to reflect the "stifling" environment of
Everyday Life" (1958). repro in The Everyday Ufe '950S America, in which deviations from an increasingly restrictive sociopolitical
Reader. ed. Ben Highmore (London and New
norm were strictly monitored. AsJonathan D. Katz demonstrates in his essay, gay
York: Routledge. 2002). 229. This text is the
introduction to the second edition of Critique of artists such as Johns and Rauschenberg played a crucial role in '950S American
Everyday Ufe. vol. I. art because they explored contemporary conditions of expressivity and by
27. Ibid.• 235.
28. 5ee Arthur L. Guptill. "Amateur Page." extension the very definition of subjectivity at the time. Within a context where
American Artist. December 17. 1953. quoted by opposition began to be perceived as an illusion of freedom "within a system of
William L. Bird.Jr.. Paint by Number. exh. cat.
(Washington. DC: Smithsonian Institution and utter constraint," as Katz aptly describes it, Rauschenberg used assemblage as a
National Museum of American History. 200 I). 12. means to convey signifieds of his own sexual difference through signifiers whose

35 art journal
 matter-of-facmess and apparent randomness would discourage any symbolic
interpretation. In this sense, Rauschenberg's bricolage--like Johns's do-it-yourself
Target-operates within the boundaries of Lefebvre's conception ofleisure: it is
both a manifestation and a critique of alienation.
The reason the bricoleur in industrial societies inhabits this ambivalent sphere is
that he occupies what [aimey Hamilton describes as an ambiguous position between
production and consumption. Like Rauschenberg's combines, Arman's assemblages
dynamically oscillate between the two fields. Since consumption was traditionally
considered to be a feminine activity, the rise of the artist-as-consumer marked a
significant shift in the gendering of the artist in this period. As Katz's essay demon-
strates, bricolage, like assemblage, lends itself to a range of productive queering and
feminizing tactics. In the later 1960s, I would suggest, this ambivalence between
production and consumption became more closely identified with the figure of
the amateur, distinct from both the passive consumer and the professional special-
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ist. Nauman, FiIliou, and Oiticica each adopted the role of the amateur in a different
way, in order to question the limits of art (Nauman) or abolish the specialized
status of art altogether (Pillion, Oiticica). 29 Just as Lefebvre acknowledged that
certain forms of leisure contained the seeds of a revolutionary social change, Filliou
firmly believed that art, as "a form of organization of leisure," could become the
very site in which a new form of unalienated existence could develop. 3 0
De Certeau's study of everyday life, as Ben Highmore has suggested, also
invoked the figure of the amateur engaged in activities as diverse as cooking, gar-
dening, and making home movies." While Lefebvre brought to light what he
called the "work-leisure" unit, references to work are almost entirely absent from
de Certeau's account: the figure of the amateur has become the sole model for
understanding everyday life. The fact that many contemporary artists adopt a simi-
lar starting point is related both to a return to the concreteness of the everyday,
mentioned earlier, and to a shift away from the working class as the locus for rev-
olutionary change. Tactically, the figure of the amateur can serve two purposes in
this context. On the one hand, he or she embodies a form of love or passion no
longer present in the field of work. This is why Hirschhorn is drawn to the role
of the fan in his Monuments and Altars to major figures of modern art and thought.
The way fans can decide on their attachments and remain committed to their
adulation without having to justify it appeals to Hirschhorn as a form of resis-
tance in its demarcation of a shrinking realm of agency driven by something
other than market forces, a tiny kernel of autonomous subjectivity that is not
entirely reducible to flows of capital. Artists such as Hirschhorn and Friedman
invest their bricolage activities with an irreducibly personal drive, which lends their
29. I develop this discussion of Nauman's "ama- work a sense of inner necessity previously discredited by postmodern critiques of
teurism" in "'Bound to Fail': Constraints and authorship and autonomy. On the other hand, the amateur persona is adopted by
Constrictions in Bruce Nauman's Early Work," in
Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me, exh. cat., ed. artists who are more politically engaged in exploring the forces of global capital-
Laurence Sillars (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2006), ism. Del Real shows, for example, how the Slovenian artist Marjetica Petre has
46-55.
30. "Interview with Robert Filliou," in Robert
adopted the roles of both an ethnographer and an engineer in her work in the
Filliou: Commemor, exh. cat. (Aachen: Neue slums. In this context, the appeal of the amateur, as the Critical Art Ensemble has
Galerie im Alten Kurhaus, 1970), n. p.
3 J • See Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau:
explained, lies in the fact that "amateurs are not invested in institutionalized sys-
Analysing Culture (London and New York: tems of knowledge production and policy construction, and hence do not have
Continuum, 2006), 154-57. irresistible forces guiding the outcome of their efforts, such as maintaining a
32. Critical Art Ensemble, "The Amateur," in The
Interventionists, 147. place in the funding hierarchy or maintaining prestige-capital." 32

36 SPRING 2008
 If the amateur-as-fan is motivated by passion, the amateur-as-subverter
operates at times within contexts of necessity or urgency, like the fave/ado building
and restoring his house in response to basic needs for shelter and protection.
Both categories, however, are permeable, as Hirschhorn's precariously positioned
Altars suggest the urgency of street commemorations after an accident, while
Petre celebrates shantytown architecture as a triumph of human creativity against
adversity.This space between pleasure and necessity is perhaps where the true
potential of bricolage lies. It runs through the economies of desire and obsoles-
cence explored in Arman's assemblages, as well as Friedman's rereadings of early
avant-gardes through the everyday, and the tactics for "living on adversity" (to
use Oiticica's well-known phrase) explored by artists in the developing world.
It is precisely this productive ambivalence that fails to conform to traditional
political models of oppositionality. The relevance of assemblage today is that it
was the first medium to propose ways of operating outside this binary model,
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in response to a "system of utter constraint" (to use Katz's phrase again) similar
to the international framework of global capitalism today.As del Real demon-
strates in his essay, contemporary bricolage practices can only escape the totalizing
drive of capitalism by rejecting oppositional models of criticality in favor of a
Derridean "free-play" resisting productivity and homogenization.
Highmore has astutely pointed out that de Certeau's model of tactics, which
has often been mobilized by cultural critics eager to spot acts of subversion
within the field of consumption, offers only a one-sided view of the French
theorist's conception of everyday life's political potential. Terms indicating sub-
versive practices (such as "devious," "guileful," "tricky," "clandestine," or "cun-
ning") certainly figure in de Certeau's account of everyday life, but those imply-
ing stubbornness ("tenacious," "obstinate," "inert," or "persistent") are equally
if not more important to his perspective. 33 These two fields, I would argue, also
operate within bricolage, as the very act of "making do" analyzed by de Certeau
can be interpreted both as a fatalistic acceptance of the status quo and as a set of
ruses to defeat it. Just as Highmore situates the crux of de Certeau's analysis in
the "multiple speeds" and "varied rhythms" of everyday life, it is the inherent
performativity and layered temporalities of bricolage that hold the key to its com-
plex operations. The "stubbornness" of everyday life, according to de Certeau,
lies in its natural recalcitrance in the face of the ineluctable speed of progress and
modernization. Everyday life is "inert" in its slowness and repetitiveness, or in its
purposelessness and lack of efficiency; it is "persistent" in its repeated appeal to
ancient traditions, in the ways of doing and being that are mobilized for exam-
ple every time somebody cooks a meal. This is a kind of resistance that relies nei-
ther on a future utopian vision nor on a nostalgic primitivism. It is situated in
the specific rather than the general, and in an accumulated mass of collective
activities rather than in individual agency. Bricolage articulates these very tensions
through assemblage, process, and the concrete. As such, it acts as a seismograph
registering the forces that have been shaping art and society since the second half
of the twentieth century.

Anna Dezeuze is a postdoctoral research fellow in art history and visual studies at the University of
Manchester. She is currently editing two books: one on the topic of spectator participation in contempo-
rary art, and the other (with Julia Kelly) on the concept of "involuntary sculpture." Her own book project
33. Highmore, Michel de Certeau, 108-10. is entitled TheAlmostNothing: Dematerialisatian and the Politics of Precariousness.

37 art journal