Transformation Journal Entry - Bric-a-Brac: The Everday Work of Tom Friedman

While I’d never heard of bricolage and broconnage before, I had her the term bric-a-brac.  So it was interesting to me to find out exactly what they meant.  Bricolage means “do-it-yourself”, but it is also associated with recycling.  I didn’t quite understand how do-it-yourself could translated into recycling until I read the article titled Bric-a-Brac: The Everyday Work of Tom Friedman by Jo Applin.  Applin explained that Friedman uses everyday objects that are always available or on-hand, and recycles those objects into new and unusual way where the object moves from one piece into another.  She calls it “a continual procedure of recycling” and explains “…the leftover remnant of one work provides the building blocks to generate another, suggesting a process less of renewal than of making do”.  This is evident in in a lot of Friedman’s work, where he turns the boring recycled material into something extraordinary (here is where the do-it-yourself and recycling seem to coincide with each other).

Braconnage, on the other hand means “poaching”, or borrowing.  Basically, this translates into taking a piece of art from another time and place, and using the theory to establish your own work of art with your own interpretation.  Applin attributes this to Friedman where he “exploits through various strategies of recycling and appropriation or borrowing articulate a model for thinking about art’s relationship with it’s past”. 

Placing this all together gives you art that is recycled and borrowed, made from everyday objects based out of the past and placed into the future.  This is evident in the work Friedman comprised when he erased all the ink from a Playboy centerfold picture, and placed all the eraser shavings from the centerfold in a circular pile on the floor.  This redefined the object as a “sculpture as leftover”, rather than addressing the removal of the object.  In erasing the centerfold, Friedman was using an everyday object (Playboy magazine) and erasing it just like Robert Rauschenberg’s iconoclastic Erased de Kooning Drawing from 1953, poaching the idea of another artist from the past, but establishing the art in a new sense and time.  

Erased Playboy Centerfold

Eraser Shavings

Work Cited: 

Applin, Jo. Bric-a-Brac: The Everday Work of Tom Friedman. JSTOR Art Journal.  Received September 24, 2013.