Inaction Figure in Action
You have to be in your right mind NOT TO DO something, just as you have to be in your right mind to actually DO SOMETHING. Both not doing something and doing something are deeply political gestures.
I’m not yet of a mind of doing nothing by throwing everything I’ve made away, or by burning the past, as I seem to be collecting it, but I am coming closer and closer to that time. It’s not a thought or a feeling that nothing’s come of it, that nothing I’ve made is of value: I can plainly see what’s become of it, and what will become of it once I finally make up my mind not to do anything—it’s bricolage.
Bricolage is something that can be made of the past and present, but not the future. Claude Levi-Strauss* was a big believer in bricolage, thinking of bricolage, the anthropologist that he was, as being the creation of a work made from a diverse range of things that happen to be available. The native peoples Levi-Strauss loved to study were voracious bricolage-ist’s, though they weren’t aware of it at the time that they were making bricolage, things that would, sometime in the future, be classified as bricolage by an anthropologist, or an aesthetician* for that matter.I check my in box every day. I might find a magic toothbrush, or a loud wind, or a fall from a catastrophic height in there. A found poem is, of course, so obvious to made of words, to paraphrase the poem W.C. Williams*, that a found poem doesn’t qualify as bricolage.
Levi-Strauss drew a distinction between mythical thought and science, and often referred to the Neolithic Paradox, that period of time once thought of as The Stone Age (10,000 BC to 2,000BC) when a breathtaking set of developments seem to have arisen independently in several parts of the world—Europe, Asia, Mesopotamia, Africa—including farming, domestication of animals, and the change from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one of human settlement!
America! This wild and wooly continent! The past is established, but who knows what the future holds? That’s why is so much fun thinking about it! The present can only hold a candle for the future.
Meantime, I do less and less, something close to nothing and nothing close to something. I make a little bricolage now and the, decorating my studio from time to time in abstract expressionism.
*Claude Levi-Strauss, French anthropologist, 1908-2009, author of The Savage Mind, among many other books.
*Aesthetics, ‘concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty’. “Aesthetics is for artists like ornithology is for the birds“ —Barnett Newman, American Painter, 1905-1970.
*'“A poem is a machine made out of words.” William Carlos Williams, American poet, 1883-1963.
“Tomato”, part painting, part bricolage, work in progress, 10” X 10”, acrylic, oil stick, masking tape. Property of the artist, All rights reserved, 2024.