Personal websites work us into new combinations. They enable us to live a life apart from our bodies. They provide a medium for us to express a fragmented, decentered and recycled condition, while maintaining the illusion of a unified self. We fashion this self by cycling through many selves, reusing bits and pieces from the debris and signs of the past; an action that can best be called bricolage. And, as engineers of identity, we draft a blueprint for an efficient and predictable character.
In 1962, Claude Levi-Strauss published The Savage Mind, a book which held the possibility for an irreversible transformation in the way its readers interpreted the world’s inhabitants. His study is concerned about the methods in which primitive man uses elements from his perceptual experience to construct symbolic systems, particularly systems of classification. Opposing accepted anthropological theory, which tended to portray the savage mind as the primitive expression of emotions, Levi-Strauss argued that this mind is logical in the same sense as ours.
The issue at stake here is specifically that of mythic thought as a particular aspect of the savage mind. According to Levi-Strauss, primitive man constructs its edifices and mythologies directly out of the data of sense perception – a complex form of analogical reasoning fueled by an ongoing combination of concrete images. It selects from these images or sensory experiences certain distinct features which it renders operative within a given system. In order to explain how this operation of concrete logic makes sense of the world in a way quite remote from the logical and regimented habits of civilized thought, Levi-Strauss evokes the dichotic image of the bricoleur versus the engineer.
Levi-Strauss maintains that the concrete logic employed by primitive man in the creation of myth is the mental equivalent of bricolage. Roughly speaking, bricolage is the ad hoc assemblage of miscellaneous materials and signifying structures. One who engages in this combinatory endeavor is a bricoleur, a jack of all trades or handyman character known for working with debris or residue from other projects, or whatever materials are at hand. Because the bricoleur enters into a project without a framework, and with no specific materials in mind, there is always an element of chance. Exploiting a diverse assortment of materials, perceptions, mythemes – random combinatory elements – in order to create a working hypothesis about this or that feature of social life.
The opposite approach is that of the engineer. The engineer begins a project with a well defined concept, an efficient methodology, and yields a precise and reproducible result. And like the modern scientist, the engineer tries to go beyond what is already known to expand the boundaries of debate and understanding.
Given this bricoleur/engineer opposition, Levi-Strauss establishes the following analogies: mythic thought is to science what the activity of the bricoleur is to the engineer; science proceeds by concepts, mythic thought proceeds by signs; science is not limited by materials, mythic thought returns to and reuses elements that are known and established.
The concept of the bricoleur is well demonstrated by the painter Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had always engaged in acts of bricolage, but not in the way Levi-Strauss observed and described until he began working with silkscreens sometime in the fall of 1962. The option to reuse images, which is made possible by the silkscreen, lends itself to the type of concrete logic employed by the primitive culture Levi-Strauss depicts.
The earliest work for which Rauschenberg was recognized is his White Painting (1951), and even then, elements of the bricoleur revealed themselves. White Painting, which many thought of as a practical joke, contained no images, just white house paint applied with a roller. He planned to paint over it, but thought the work so “hypersensitive”, that he could not. “One could look at them,” he said, “and see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.” His friend, John Cage, famously called them “airports for lights, shadows, and particles.” In this work, chance operations were at play. The experience of the work differed depending on where, when and how its white reflective surface was viewed. When he began the piece, he was merely priming the canvas with the intention of doing something else. The use of materials at hand (the canvas and white paint), the lack of a predetermined framework, and the element of chance are all necessary components of bricolage.
Bed (1955) is a painting that began as a quilt that Rauschenberg stretched over a board. He chose the quilt, which had been given to him several years prior, one day when he had run out of canvas and money. When the paint didn’t adhere to the quilt in a satisfactory way, he added a pillow, part of a sheet and more paint. The result is one of Rauschenberg’s most famous works. Again, he begins without a framework and the chance pouring of paint. And add the combinatory elements of the pillow, sheet and paint, all debris/residue found in his loft, and we are closer to Levi-Strauss’ version of mythical thinking.
Later that year, Rauschenberg began creating what he called combines: collages made from found objects, images and ordinary materials placed in a freestanding, painted environment. They are hybrids: part painting, part sculpture. The combines involve the relocation of an object or image from the real world to the picture surface. Rauschenberg’s picture frame became something onto which any material substance could be placed.
The combine that he is most associated with is Monogram (1955-59), which consists of a life sized, stuffed Angora goat mounted on a platform of paint and collage - which Rauschenberg has called a pictorial “pasture” - with an automobile tire encircling its midsection. Rauschenberg saw the goat in the display window of an office furniture store and bought it from the owner for thirty-five dollars. He worked with the goat for three years before finding that the ordinary object of a tire balanced its exotic nature to his satisfaction.
In a 1987 interview with Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg elaborated on his relationship with found materials: “I come to terms with my materials. They know and I know that we are going to try something. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I would substitute anything for preconceptions or deliberateness. If that moment can’t be fresh, strange and unpredictable as what’s going on around you, then it’s false.” Rauschenberg’s combines begin without an agenda, and slowly develop into personal relationships with diverse sets of materials resulting in works that are indicative of an inner monologue transforming the external world from debris into myth.
In 1962, Rauschenberg abandoned the use of actual objects in his collages and turned to silkscreening images onto the canvas, a process that he appropriated from commercial art. The transition to the silkscreen was due in part to the negative impression he had of a new generation of artists using banal objects collaged for its own sake. Rauschenberg utilized images from print media and his own photography, and had a commercial company transform them to silkscreens in any size he wanted by photographic processing.
A silkscreen consists of finely woven silk stretched across a wooden frame. After the cloth is treated with a light sensitive emulsion, a transparency of the photograph is projected onto it. When the screen is developed with hot water, the unexposed areas dissolve leaving the weave open. Ink is then pushed through the opening in the screen with a squeegee onto a canvas, allowing the image to be transferred. Like the photographic negative, the screen can be reused and the image reproduced any number of times.
The capacity to transform any concrete object into a sign to be used and reused in any combination brings Rauschenberg into the fullness of Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur concept. The elements of bricolage that were present in Rauschenberg’s earlier works – chance, open framework, combinatory elements, symbolic debris/residue – are still in play with the silkscreen paintings. But without the option of using and reusing any object of symbolic importance to the human experience, Rauschenberg’s earlier works fall short of the silkscreens in replicating the myth making power of the “savage mind.”
If the concept of the bricoleur is exemplified by Rauschenberg, then the engineer is best represented in the work of Robert Morris. During the 1960s and 1970s, Morris played a vital role in defining the movements of the period: minimalist art, conceptual and process art, and earthworks. In addition to being a very talented artist, Morris is also an influential aesthetician, penning essays that unremittingly challenged prevailing ideas about art and culture. In his career as an artist, Morris valued the idea over the artwork itself, and his self referential piece Card File, created toward the end of 1962, is widely cited as the first work of the Conceptual art movement.
Card File is an industrially made library card file that lists on each tab the abstract operations involved in the production of the object itself. These forty-four operations are filed alphabetically, with each index card containing notations that document the social, economic, historical, and biographical details involved in the production of the work.
Among the operations filed and their notations are:
Conception: “While drinking coffee in the New York public library.”
Decision: Contains a list of the files pages and the dates they were created.
Dissatisfactions: “That everything relevant will not be included.”
Errors: Lists spelling errors and word misuses found in the work.
Signature: Contains the artist’s signature.
Title: Lists the work’s title.
Morris approaches Card File with a clearly defined concept of the work and its explanatory theory, and followed this administrative blueprint thru to its logical conclusion. All the elements are specific and organized into an understandable order. The results are limited and reproducible. The blueprint for Card File can be followed over and over with the same predictable result. The work is economical and conveys its meaning in the simplest possible way. The operations used and described in Card File are abstract, and not concrete.
Morris is an artist who, like the engineer (and the scientist), expands the boundaries of debate within his field. He sees art as a form of art history, it is theoretical and deals with concepts rather than signs. He says, “Language is not plastic art but both are forms of human behavior and the structures of one can be compared to the structures of the other.” Morris makes philosophical objects that need not have any concrete logic. He has created a body of questions and concerns that are more likely to generate dialogue than provide visual pleasure. He turns objects into procedures.
If the social uses of the internet – blogging, podcasting, social networking accounts, etc. -are observed with the same approach that Levi-Strauss used to study preliterate man, one could say that we have resolved the dichotomy of the bricoleur/engineer. Like Rauschenberg, internet users turn objects, the symbolic debris at hand, into images and use and reuse them to create meaning and patch together stories about our world on the canvas of the webpage. Chance meetings connect one user to another, providing an open framework for friend and stranger to comment and contribute to one’s portrait. And like Morris, we turn objects, in this case ourselves, into concepts. We create a blueprint for who we are, and leave abstract and self referential definitions in an attempt to portray an organized and desired persona, which whether asleep or awake, is always identical to itself.
1962 was the year Levi-Strauss published The Savage Mind, Rauschenberg made the transition to the silkscreen, and Morris created the first work of the Conceptual Art movement. Coincidentally, it was in August of 1962 that J.C.R Licklider formulated the initial thoughts about a global computer network in a series of memos, which contained just about everything that the internet has become. In a groundbreaking memo titled “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network” Licklider encouraged universities to link their computers together so as to benefit from the software tools that had already been developed on other campuses. He went on to make the visionary statement: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through machine than face to face.”
Like all historical narratives, this one is a myth, full of half-truths and oversimplifications that nonetheless has the power to frame our use of the computer as a tool in the production of identity. The internet has become an artist’s studio and momentous social laboratory for experimenting with the creations and re-creations of self that characterize 21st century life. The collages we create of ourselves are seductive, and may be more compelling than the real life around us. Indeed, we could find ourselves imprisoned by the web and the memories of the past that it is well designed to hold.
However, we may be moving toward a new morality whereby our multiple and fragmented selves become integrated, leading to a sense of certainty, the result of access to these many selves. Having written our online personae into life we may become more aware and in better control of the ultimate self we project in real life. Creating a web presence can be a type of self-analysis for the individual. Each blog or Facebook page represents a self encounter, that is, an analytic session in which the creator re-experiences and re-orders his feeling through the materials available. These webpages could become a clinic used in the pursuit of self-cure, where transference occurs between the author and the website, instead of between the patient and the analyst. Or, all we may end up with is self-mimicry, blurring or avoiding reality by simulating aspects of it.
