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Energy and overspill
Peter Suchin considers the motivations of artist-led spaces in London’s East End.
In his book The Savage Mind (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, pp 16-17) the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss discusses the concept and practice of the bricoleur. The bricoleur, notes Levi-Strauss, is “someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman”. While the craftsman or engineer utilises well-established methods to achieve a clearly defined end, the bricoleur “is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but... the rules of his game are always to make do with whatever is at hand”. The bricoleur’s solution is frequently a more inventive, but perhaps also a more desperate, response to the task at hand. The rise and development of the artist-led gallery or project space over the last fifteen or twenty years might well be seen as closer to the practice of the bricoleur than that of the engineer, and if Levi-Strauss refers to deviousness, a more apt term here would be ‘resourceful’ or ‘pragmatic’. In this comparison the commercial gallery is like a design or engineering operation whose aims are clearly defined from the start, with their working methods steeped in the safety of well-tried...
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