In this issue: the Science of the Concrete

When the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss introduced the concept of bricolage in La Pensee Sauvuge, he noted that the verb form, bricoler, was traditionally used "with reference to some extraneous movement," as a kind of rebound or swerving; the bricoleur he wrote, "is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman." (1) Though counterposed to a rigorous science that develops tools from raw materials, the "heterogeneous repertoire" of bricolage nevertheless can allow for "brilliant unforeseen results" and potentially new forms of knowledge. Recent art and critical activities have renewed interest in these In This Issue: "devious means," in part as a way of revisiting the use-value of the readymade and, more pointedly, as a way of addressing a globalizing consumer culture.

In this issue we explore the topic of bricolage, this "science of the concrete," in three different contexts. Julia Kelly and Anna Dezeuze introduce a rich and provocative set of essays, generated from a reconsideration of William Seitz's 1961 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Art of Assemblage and ranging across a diverse topography, from Paris to Caracas, from shacks to snow angels. Kelly performs a genealogical examination of bricolage, tracing backwards from Levi-Strauss's formulations to the Parisian Surrealists' fascination with non-Western artifacts, while Dezeuze revises the anthropologist's text by examining the "making do" of bricolage since the 1960s through the twin motifs of subversive tactics and resistant stubbornness. Jaimey Hamilton takes us back to the Paris flea markets with Arman, theorizing his relation to specifically postwar modes of consumption. Jonathan Katz provides a careful reading of a destroyed work by Robert Rauschenberg, the fascinating 1951 collage Should Love Come First? In Jo Applin's essay on Tom Friedman's "bric-a-brac" projects, she finds a subtle set of deviations and swerves. Patricio del Real critically addresses several projects that insert informal architecture into the gallery space and suggests that the ethical dimensions of this growing tendency urgently need to be addressed.

The ongoing Debris Field project of the Chicago-based artist Heather Mekkelson addresses our topic from a slightly different perspective. Mekkelson has carefully parsed documentation of the manufactured debris left by contemporary natural calamities. In a delicate act of critical reconstruction, she replicates the debris and reassembles the field using Romantic-era images as visual templates. We profile the work here through a sequence of installation photos, a fragment of Mekkelson's "working vocabulary," and one of her source images. Lane Relyea introduces the project with a spirited essay that, like del Real's, takes on contemporary practices which reflectively make use of the iconography of precariousness for aesthetic purposes while dislocating it from the concrete social conditions that necessitate such "making do."

Our issue concludes with a forceful interview between the critic and art historian Marc Leger and the artist Oliver Ressler. The conversation specifically addresses activist artists' successes and failures in responding to the June 2007 G8 meeting in Heiligendamm, Germany--which exactly coincided with the first two legs of last summer's Grand Tour of art fairs in Venice, Basel, Kassel, and Munster. Ressler discusses with passion and pragmatism the "movement of movements" and the possible roles that artists may have within it.

(1.) Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (1962: London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). 16-17.

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