It is with great sadness that I read of the death of the great French anthropologist. A founder of structuralism, his writings and thought remain vital to this day. As we are reemphasizing the patterns that connect us over the differences that divide us, Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of social, linguistic, and material forms across cultures and times provides a useful set of tools and metaphors. His landmark study “The Savage Mind” (1962) was influential in my early thinking about how ritual and art work together to create meaning in the everyday. I never formulated these thoughts for the catalogue, so record them here as a small tribute to a great mind.
“The Science of the Concrete,” the brilliant first chapter of Lévi-Strauss’s aforementioned book, introduces the concepts of two different types of scientific knowledge. First, the bricoleur who creates new ideas of objects from the materials at hand, thereby renewing or enriching the stock of available constructions. (This is the science of the concrete, which Lévi-Strauss observes in “primitive” societies and other cultures based on myth and ritual.) Second, the engineer who questions the universe and strives to think beyond the given constraints, thereby opening up new possibilities through technology. In other words, the former is reinvention, the latter is invention.
The main purpose of “The Savage Mind” is to elevate the status of the bricoleur to the cultural equivalent of the engineer. Certainly, the term has been seized on as a valid process by contemporary artists with a DIY attitude in the last decade, notably Tom Sachs.
For Lévi-Strauss, the artist operates between the bricoleur and the engineer: “art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought.” He focuses on a detail from François Clouet’s naturalistic portrait of Queen Elizabeth of Austria (1571) to investigate the “very profound aesthetic emotion” produced by a highly-detailed representation of a lace collar. The fascination of the lace collar, in its morphological verisimilitude seen through the artist’s unique perspective, fuses reinvention and invention.
Only on rereading these passages did I realize that coincidentally three artists in Reinventing Ritual looked at lace and represented its texture into new means: molded silicone, etched steel, and hand-worked silver. The latter, new Judaica by Lella Vignelli, was inspired precisely by Baroque costume similar to that described by Lévi-Strauss. There is a poignant aspect to the excess of labor and beauty in a lace collar, and the desire on the part of the artist—be it Clouet or Vignelli—to borrow its power to enchant a new work of art. The candlesticks by Vignelli are an unexpected tribute to the anthropologist who developed a highly complex but practical theory of the process of artistic reinvention.