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Article Excerpt
Georges Perec's epic novel LaVie mode d' emploi (Life:A User's Manual) opens with a preamble about the "art of jigsaw puzzles" in which he documents the peculiarities of the process of assembling a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of keeping in mind the finished image when putting the puzzle together, connecting the parts to the whole, one must negotiate a series of part-to-part relationships in which "the only thing that counts is the ability to link this piece to other pieces." The jigsaw pieces, Perec continues, "are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing-just an impossible question, an opaque challenge."(1) The mode of making Perec invokes here, in which the bigger picture makes sense only through careful attention to the piecemeal and fragmented puzzle pieces, is a small, playful entry in his own bigger picture, a novel composed of short vignettes that narrate the story of a Parisian apartment block.
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Perec's logic of linking and part-by-part construction is inadvertently echoed din the work of the contemporary American artist Tom Friedman. Friedman's eclectic range of (usually untitled) drawings, photographs, and sculptures take as their base materials the bric-a-brac that he finds lying around, the mundane and ordinary stuff of everyday life. From an entire pencil laboriously sharpened into one long, fragile shaving, to a boiled box of spaghctti hardened into a brittle object that sits awkwardly between abstract gestural tangle and rogorous scientific model, Friedman puts ordinary materials and boring activities to exaggerated and absurdly overblown ends. In an early work from 1990 Friedman took the readymade from of a jigsaw puzzle and arranged it on the floor with the individual pieces spaced exactly two centimeters apart,as if to emphasize the straightforward yet painstaking and monotonous process of jigsaw making-a grid of Perec's "opaque challenges" that Friedman describes as "a metaphor for what I was trying to do: to piece something together."(2) Friedman cranks up the intensity of banal activities, of sharpening a pencil, cooking pasta, or assembling a jigsaw puzzle, rendering the ordinary neither extraordinary, nor spectacular, but worthy nonetheless of sustained critical attention.
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On graduating in 1990 with an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the first decisions Friedman made was to completely empty his windowless studio and to paint it white, leaving himself as the only itme in the room. Like Bruce Nauman twenty-five years earlier, Friedman took his own position as artist as the starting point for his investigation into how and from what a work of art might be constituted. After emptying his studio, Friedman began to reintriduce obejcts back into its sphere: jigsaw puzzles, pillow stuffing, wire, soap, toilet toll, sugar. The first object Friedman brought back into his studio was a metronome, which he placed on the floor and watched as "it just clicked back and forth."(3) Like the ticking of the metronome, in which time is marked not by linear to the past as much as the present. In fact, it is precisely the complex nexus of neo-and post-, past and present, recycling and return, that circumscribes both the structural logic of Friedman's work and the model his work tentatively offers for thinking about contemporary art's relationship to art history. In what follows, I argue that Friedman's process of making and making do, draws on the twin strategies of bricolage ("do-it-yourself") and braconnage ("poaching"), terms which I, in turn, pouch respectively from Claude Levi-Strauss's 1962 work La Pensee sauvege (The Savage Mind) and Michel de Certeau's 1980 book L'Invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life).(4)
The significance of Friedman's work lies in the conceptual strategies of assemblage and bricolage that he employs.(5) For all their playfulness and apparent slickness of execution and conception, Fridman's works and the stock of art-historical motifs he frequently (if obliquely) exploits through various strategies of recycling and appropriation or borrowing articulate a model for thinking about art's relationship with its past. While Friedman does not use junk or throwaway materials, his works do address the impoverished conditions under which the object qua object now operates.
A continual procedure of recycling lies at the core of many of Friedman's works, a circuit of exchange in which the leftover remnant of one work provides the building blocks to generate another, suggesting a process less of renewal than of making do. In a work from 1990, for example, he made a monochrome from a Playboy centerfold by erasing the ink to leave a fine, worn-down sheet of paper. For another work the artist collected these eraser rubbings and placed them in a circular pile on the floor, the photographed centerfold's body reduced to the abstract and dispersed fragment in a gesture redolent of Robert Rauschenberg's iconoclastic gesture Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). Rather than an exploration of the binaries of presence and absence, removal or loss, which works such as the spaghetti tangle or Playboy centerfold at first seem to suggest, these works instead redefine the parameters of the object as something less akin to a finished sculpture or monument and more like what Briony Fer has recently described as the contemporary condition of "sculpture as leftover." (6)
When asked in 1966 what he thought the "sensibility of the sixties" had been, the artist Robert Smithson...
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