Page 38 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

BRICOLAGE

bits and pieces. Le ´vi-Strauss used the term to denote the creative
practices of traditional societies using magical rather than scientific
thought systems. However, bricolage enjoyed a vogue and gained wide
currency in the 1970s and 1980s when applied to various aspects of
Western culture. These included avant-garde artistic productions,
using collage, pastiche, found objects, and installations that re-
assembled the detritus of everyday consumerism. They also included
aspects of everyday life itself, especially those taken to be evidence of
postmodernism (see Hebdige, 1988: 195).
Western consumer society was taken to be a society of bricoleurs.
For example, youth subcultures became notorious for the appropria-
tion of icons originating in the parent or straight culture, and the
improvisation of newmeanings, often directly and provocatively
subversive in terms of the meanings communicated by the same items
in mainstream settings. The hyper-neat zoot suit of the mods in the
1960s was an early example of this trend. Mods took the respectable
business suit and turned its ‘meaning’ almost into its own opposite by
reassembling its buttons (too many at the cuff), collars (removed
altogether), line (too straight), cut (exaggerated tightness, slits),
material (too shiny-modern, mohair-nylon), colour (too electric).
The garb of the gentleman and businessman was made rude,
confrontational and sartorially desirable among disaffected but affluent
youth. Bricolage was made ‘spectacular’ in the 1970s by punk, under
the influence of Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren and others in
the fashion/music interface such as Zandra Rhodes. Punk took
bricolage seriously, and put ubiquitous ‘profane’ items such as the
safety pin, the Union Jack, dustbin bags and swastikas to highly
charged new‘sacred’ or ritualised purposes (see Hall and Jefferson,
1976; Hebdige, 1979).
Architecture also used bricolage as it went through a postmodern
phase. Buildings began to quote bits and pieces from incommensurate
styles, mixing classical with vernacular, modernist with suburban,
shopping mall with public institution, and delighting in materials and
colours that made banks look like beachfront hotels, or museums look
like unfinished kit-houses (from different kits). Much of this was in
reaction to the over-engineered precision and non-human scale of
‘international style’ modernist towers. Bricolage was seen as active
criticism, much in the manner of jazz, which took existing tunes and
improvised, syncopated and re-assembled them until they were the
opposite of what they had been. Borrowing, mixture, hybridity, even
plagiarism – all ‘despised’ practices in high modernist science and

23