Ouvrage

In fact, this is precisely where the bricolage really begins, beyond our initial metaphor. Although Bujold skilfully incorporates a scholarly artistic legacy, she casts her net much wider; her borrowings come from forms and practices that are traditional, domestic and vernacular, popular and quotidian. “Les ouvrages de dames”⁶ (literally, ladies’ work) begin to figure prominently, as she regularly incorporates knitting, embroidery and tapestry, sewing, and darning into her work. In a citation-based approach, she combines resources both intrinsic and extrinsic to art; she sees them as heteronomous, anchored in a social and cultural reality that goes far beyond simple academic, formal, and aesthetic issues. The modesty of these media also bespeaks the discretion that seems to characterize many of her works, in terms of format, duration, or materiology. A perfect match for her production methods and content, they are also an antidote to grandiloquence, emphasis, and logorrhea – in other words, the generalized spectacularization to which much of today’s art falls prey. Here, the volume control never exceeds the necessary and sufficient.

So, this is where the bricolage begins. But even once we have these details about the heterogeneity of Bujold’s resources, one question remains unanswered: why is “bricolage” such an appropriate description of Bujold’s work? Although one or another of its definitions could provide an answer, let us turn to the one supplied by ethnologist and anthropologist Claude Lévis-Strauss, who uses the word in a way that is so complex and complete that it becomes, in his writing, a uniquely fertile concept. He reminds us that “in its earlier sense, the French verb bricoler is applied to ball games and billiards, hunting and horseback riding, but always to indicate a movement off the expected path: that of a rebounding ball, of a dog that strays, or of a horse swerving off the straight course to avoid an obstacle.”⁷ Beyond these examples, he is interested in incidental movement; he wants to consider more generally what occurs by happenstance, what breaks the normal course of a thing. So, bricolage would consist of making do with what is found without looking for it, leading to unpremeditated effects.

Although it is already tempting, at this stage, to associate Bujold’s work with bricolage, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological account takes a subtler turn that is worth further consideration, for he sees bricolage as flowing from a foundational distinction: “In our own day, the bricoleur [is] someone who works with his hands, using means that are skewed in comparison with those of the professional craftsman.”⁸ It goes without saying that Lévi-Strauss is here describing the activity of the scientist or engineer rather than that of the artist, art lover, or art critic. In short, his “man of art” is, rather, a “man of science.” The “hard” and “natural” sciences – we leave aside the awkward case of the human sciences – are said to be exact, obeying fixed laws and models, proceeding from a reality that can be described, and using predictable processes that can be mathematically defined. Conversely, Lévi-Strauss views bricolage as an approach inherited from a “primitive” science – though neither less technical nor less scientific – the results of which, he notes, are no less real on its own terms:

The comparison is worth pursuing, since it gives us better access to the real relations between the two types of scientific knowledge that I have distinguished. The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks, but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each one to the availability of raw materials and tools designed and acquired to fit his project. His universe of instruments is closed, and the rule of his game is always to make do with “whatever is at hand” – that is to say, a set of tools and materials that is finite at each moment, as well as heterogeneous, because the composition of the set is not related to the current project, nor indeed to any given project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions that have presented themselves for renewing or enriching his stock, or for maintaining it with leftovers from earlier constructions and destructions. Thus the bricoleur’s set of potentially useful elements cannot be defined by a project ... it is defined solely by its instrumentality, or, to use the bricoleur’s own language, by the fact that the elements are collected or kept on the principle that “this could always come in handy.”⁹

Bujold’s actions clearly demonstrate such an aptitude for diversification – for the execution of projects in which bricoleurs have free rein because fate limits their possibilities, although these expand as other opportunities emerge – opportunities that are unexpected, eclectic, measureless, and disordered. The parallel holds again in the sense that her “bricolages” are subjected to the accumulation of reserves, made of bits of string, and to a recycling practice that provides ad hoc enhancement, making use of elements that are nevertheless inadequate:

Such elements are thus halfway specialized: enough for the bricoleur not to require the equipment and knowledge of all the building trades, but not enough for each element to be restricted to a precise and determined use. Each element represents a sense of relations that are both concrete and virtual.¹⁰

Artefacts, an assemblage of scattered resources brought together between 1988 and 2016, notably taken from a previous ensemble titled En wing en hein (1998–2000), is exemplary of this so-unmethodical method, as is the temporal back-and-forth that it allows between that which has been made, is being made, and may yet be made. This empirical behaviour, presciently termed “itinerant” in 1998 by Patrice Duhamel¹¹ with regard to Bujold’s work, is based, among other things, on having experience and maturity and on the pre-existence of a patiently gathered and inventoried set of materials, whether collected or constructed.

For artists who adopt bricolage, time invariably plays in their favour and is undoubtedly their ally. Like do-it-yourselfers and although excited by their own project, their “first practical move is retrospective”¹²: they explore the treasure that they’ve collected and engage in a dialogue with it full of permutations and substitutions, remorse and additions, hesitations and decisions. Then, given the problem they pose themselves – in other words, the problem posed by what they have at their disposal – they turn to us, the viewers and users of their art, to propose an answer or provide a result – one that will never be anything other than a flexible accommodation, a compromise between the initial or ideal intention and the contingent and immanent necessities that they must grapple with. This condition might seem frustrating at first, but it is fertile ground for a doubly liberating form of expression:

The poetry of bricolage also, and above all, comes from the fact that it does not limit itself to accomplishment or execution; it “speaks,” not only with things, as has already been shown, but also by means of things: recounting, through the choices it makes among limited possibilities, the character and life of its author. Even if he never completes his project, the bricoleur always puts something of himself into it.¹³

Just as bricolage allows for a form of self-quotation, because it is both retrospective and prospective, it also encourages autobiography, as Lévi-Strauss reminds us. Although delivered with reserve and modesty, or at any rate with the necessary discernment, the labour performed by Bujold indeed displays this autobiographical trait.

Bujold’s references, sometimes intermixed, have always abounded: references to her condition, her domestic environment, her appliances, her plants, or her food, and to other humble conjunctures that she conjures up in the form of dachshund, snail, flower, or insect. This is evident in many of her videos, including Emporium (1999), Onelie de l’Oneli (2002), Jeu vidéo (2008), Cabaret (2009), Seize danses brèves (2009), and Ruchée (2016). Similarly, she makes use of her family and friends, her local surroundings, encounters, friendships, and other, more tenuous relationships. Bonjour (2003) and OK Gérard (2009) are examples of this in her videos, and they also pop up in other, varied forms of expression, such as Annick et James à Saint-Iréné (jacquard weaving, 2013), Personne (inkjet print, 2013), and the portraits that are part of Pixels et petits points (cotton-thread embroideries on Aida canvas, 2004). Infiltrated into her work in a similar way are her trips (Les trains où vont les choses, video installation, 2006; La montagne Sainte-Victoire, video, 2005; 6 km, video, 2007) and her musical pantheon: inserted here and there, it is more deliberately highlighted in what she calls her “anti-MTV” series of music videos (These Days, Some Velvet Morning, All the Good Things, and Permanent Smile, 2008).

Playground

In light of my interpretation and with the appropriate tools provided by Lévi-Strauss, the apparatus that makes up the HIT series (2009–21) is worth a closer look. First, it is remarkable for the longevity of its deployment over time, which Bujold induced through multiple arrangements and rearrangements that helped, in turn, to extend its life. Again, given this duration, it is also understood that the autobiographical dimension of the work, as mentioned above, is more obvious here than elsewhere. But above all, HIT represents the accomplishment and precision of an approach that had been intuitive up to then.

During the 2000s, Bujold developed in parallel two visual programs that were relatively distinct, although they fed into, borrowed from, and inspired each other. In one, she used traditional textile supports and their related techniques; in the other, she explored digital video, the devices for which were just then becoming widely available to the general public. The confrontation of the two bodies of work, which also displayed the understated penchant for zany humour, jokes, and mockery – even self-mockery – that has always characterized her work, is based on her bias essentially toward analogue and metaphor: dots refer to pixels and vice versa, but insects also occasionally appear, in a reflective and metaphoric way, to stand in for those most common denominators of the image. More generally, this close relationship summons a lexicon composed of textures, wefts, interlacing, samples, sequences, repetitions, variations, and motifs – all expressions that can apply equally to textiles and to videos, and even to music. In fact, they designate phenomena, processes, or objects that are closely related – or, more precisely, analogous – in one or another of these disciplines.

The associations that form HIT largely transcend this connection, however, to attain a different order of contiguity, one that is obviously structural and conceptual. Once again combining video sequences and textile works, the corpus, composed over more than a decade, stands out from Bujold’s previous attempts to bring the two together for its coherence and for the relevance and complexity of its articulations and pairings. First and foremost, a single motif traverses the series: that of an instrumentalist,¹⁴ in this case a drummer, accompanied by his instrument. As often happens in her work, the simplicity of a motif allows for recurrence, ornamentation, and multiple transformations. It makes play possible. After a few scattered preliminary experiments, Bujold turns repeatedly to jacquard, highlighting an already fertile approach commensurate with the historical and technical information that it contains. Her exploration brings to light a scientific narrative and refinements to the equipment over time, from Basile Bouchon’s first weaving loom (fitted with a perforated tape inspired by the clockwork mechanisms used in music boxes) to Jean-Baptiste Falcon’s punch-card looms, then to the Jacquard loom (apparently invented by Lady Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, said to be the first programmer in history). Above all, Bujold’s tour de force arises from her ability to incorporate a figure – and just one, we should remember – into her digital video recording and to tangibly translate it into fabric. Although the images in the jacquards are taken from videograms pulled from video recordings, they show different variations of the motif (by repetition, mirroring, and so on) reminiscent, in turn, of the variations incorporated into certain kinds of textile production, especially quilting. In addition, the drummer’s doubled movements (involving cadenced sounds and silences) have a response in the loom’s (alternating threads lifted or lowered, warps and wefts, black or white threads), and they also echo the 0s and 1s in the numerical sequences that form the contemporary digital image. Ultimately, the work’s reflexivity lies precisely in the intrinsic nature of these three elements, which serve Bujold’s singular focus on the comparable binarity of the operations performed (whether human, mechanical, or computerized) and on the countless combinations that they engender, if not the play that they encourage.

In fact, here’s the truth: Bujold intends to play, and she has always done so! In HIT, the playful dimension of the work takes a different turn as she advances her white and black pieces, navigating the full and empty spaces, as one would do in a game of chess, checkers, or go.

With this in mind, we then have to agree on a definition of “play” applicable to the situation – in this case, an artistic one. The popular approaches from the fields of education, cognitive science, and pedagogy, which associate play with children’s activity, don’t help much. Aside from the misguided and possibly pejorative interpretation to which they lend themselves, they do not refer in any way to the specifically human activity of practising art. Indeed, as the philosopher Johan Huizinga reminds us, “animals play just like men”¹⁵:

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing ... We have only to watch young dogs to see that all the essentials of human play are present in their merry gambols. They invite one another to play by a certain ceremoniousness of attitude and gesture ... And – what is most important – in all these doings they plainly experience tremendous fun and enjoyment. Such rompings of young dogs are only one of the simpler forms of animal play.¹⁶

Such play is apparently not the prerogative of art, as it is neither cultural nor human, nor even performed by adults. Furthermore, the sometimes-fertile recourse to etymology is not enlightening here: the French word jeu, we learn, comes from the Latin jucus, which means “joke” or “banter,” and from it the French word jouet (toy) is also derived.¹⁷ Yet, the laughter and underlying wellspring of humour associated with these definitions, perfectly conveying the unserious, can be in no way be confused with or seen as equivalent to play, as experienced even at a very young age. Although laughter is not systematically excluded, children, for instance, play with great seriousness, as do adults playing chess or rugby, among other games. From this point of view, the notion of play defies oppositional categories and the hierarchies that they induce. The liberties that it takes with reality in no way preclude the extreme seriousness with which such licence is ultimately exercised.

In general, it is common to consider play, whether intellectual or physical, an activity with no short-term productive purpose;¹⁸ essentially, it is intended to entertain and bring pleasure to those who engage in it. This is not, however, a satisfactory explanation for the case being discussed here, and it is unacceptable to limit it to the realm of leisure, as is customarily done.

So, I have to look elsewhere for ways to describe and analyze the dimension of Bujold’s work that is both playful and aesthetic; I would wager that it arises neither from childhood nor from entertainment or recreation in themselves – although it might incidentally refer to them, which is a different matter.

Here, Huizinga proposes a lexical avenue that is worth our attention. He considers art in light of the subtle nuances provided by ancient Greek in a way that qualifies it as something other than play, but without denying its playful aspect. If, he writes, artistic expression is intended to be pleasurable, “according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility”¹⁹  and “outside the norms of reason, duty, or truth,”²⁰ it arises in fact from play and from what the Hellenes called paideia. He points out that both Plato and Aristotle were dissatisfied with this reductive qualification because it passes over the fact that art, in their view, contained something superior to the basic enjoyment offered by play. Aristotle proposed that art makes a double and indivisible contribution to mental relaxation (diagôgè) and to knowledge (phronèsis). Focusing on the former word, he posited that this relationship is distinct from skholè (leisure), to which it might otherwise be connected, because this “relaxation” is expressly that of the mind. Above all, he provides us with the literal meaning of skholè (passing the time), salient in other ways in Bujold’s case.

Nonsense

Beyond the rather general nature of these comments, Bujold certainly devotes herself pointedly, even consummately, to the game of passing the time. And what better tool than video to accomplish this purpose? The pioneering video artist Gary Hill had this very idea in mind when he began to use the medium – its unique relationship with time – in 1973, as he remarked in retrospect:

Video allowed a kind of real time play, the possibility to “think out loud.” Here was a process immediately accessible and seemingly a much closer parallel to thinking ... Time, this is what is central to video; it is not seeing as its etymological roots imply. Video’s intrinsic principal [sic] is feedback. So it’s not linear time but a movement that is bound up in thinking – a topology of time that is accessible.²¹

For both Hill and Bujold, passing the time cannot – or not only – be interpreted in the sense of a pastime, as “play” implies. It is clearly of a different nature, as evidenced by Hill’s allusion to feedback: either the action of an effect on its own cause or, more generally, non-linear movement ultimately analogous to the workings of thought. All this to say that temporal dissipation, here, would be the product of entanglement and confusion and not of forgetfulness.

Bujold’s sprawling body of video works is replete with examples that confirm this hypothesis by testing the plasticity of time, from her earliest, intuitive experiments to her more recent methodical, meticulous works. The recurrent figures employed, such as departure, arrival, roads, strolling, travel, means of transportation, ferries, and housecleaning, are all temporal markers systematically troubled by the processes of stacking, modulation, transformation, or distortion, slowing, and acceleration. Similarly, she uses the image of a metronome or a drummer or other instrumentalists recurrently to challenge temporal logics, similar to how Johann Sebastian Bach composed using symmetry, inversion, and transposition on his “celestial sewing machine.” Sometimes her titles are paradoxical (Balade du refus de toute intention [Ballad of rejection of all intentions], 2019; Voyage des mystères objectifs [Voyage of objective mysteries], 2021; Partir/revenir [Leaving/Coming back], 2022; Aller-retour dans l’inconnu qui attend à pied d’œuvre [Round trip to the unknown that waits at the job site], 2018; Comptes à rebours [Countdown], 2002): drawn from the Refus Global manifesto,²²  they coincide opportunely with her blurring exercise, coming within an inch of absurdity – or, rather, nonsense.

There is a remarkable precedent for this approach, this one from the literary field. It comes from a master in the subject, the peerless Victorian logician Lewis Carroll – author, in his spare time, of books for children replete with codes and esoteric formulas, and underlain by “profound psychoanalytic content and an exemplary ... linguistic formalism.”²³ One of his stories contains a sequence that deserves our attention here. It appears in the middle of Alice Through the Looking Glass, which succeeded the ground-breaking Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In the chapter titled “Wool and Water,” which takes place on a chessboard, Alice is offered a job by the White Queen. Alice responds to the vague proposal made by her venerable interlocutor with impertinent frankness:

“I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!” the Queen said. “Twopence a week, and jam every other day.”

Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said, “I don’t want you to hire me – and I don’t care for jam.”

“It’s very good jam,” said the Queen.

“Well, I don’t want any to-day, at any rate.”

“You couldn’t have it if you did want it,” the Queen said. “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.”

“It must come sometimes to ‘jam to-day,’” Alice objected.

“No it can’t,” said the Queen. “It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.”²⁴

So, Alice refuses the jam offered to her, royal jelly or not! This ingenuous rejection happens to establish her virtue as a spokesperson; her talents as a Latinist seem to leave no doubt – along with other leanings, some of which were more photographic and guiltier.²⁵ Here, Carroll shows how skilful manipulation of a dead language may, in its turn, make a work that is very much alive. He has made a pun on the word “jam,” referring to the Latin adverb iam, often written and pronounced “jam.” This term can be translated as “in a moment,” “very soon,” or “right now,” thus designating the present, but from a unique angle. Unlike nunc – the conjugated expression of the present in the present – iam is paradoxically used only in the future or in the past: “I’ll keep you informed, at the moment when I’ve finished this essay” is one example (of course, a dubious proposition for the publisher concerned). Although Alice expresses successive reservations, the continuation of her conversation with the White Queen is, in fact, edifying on this subject:

“I don’t understand you,” said Alice. “It’s dreadfully confusing!”

“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first –”

“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

“– but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

“I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.

“Oh, things that happen the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”²⁶

Beyond his heroine’s incomprehension (and the first degree of the story), Carroll commits the crime of linguistic subterfuge by reflexively establishing a confusion of temporalities. In interfering symbolically with the game that is underway, he shows the disruption that Alice faces once she steps through the looking-glass: the world before her is nothing less than topsy-turvy pandemonium. And if space is under attack, so is time. The phenomena that she experiences, in the here and now, are no longer even barely intelligible to her, especially not with the tools of rationality at her disposal.

It is the kind of temporal imbroglio illustrated in Carroll’s tale that Deleuze seems to take as a first example in his The Logic of Sense. The theory of sense that he lays out leads him to paradoxical propositions, which he sees as inherent to the goal he is striving for, as they were to his Stoic sources. He points out the problematic dimension of sense, due to its paradoxical but paired relationship with nonsense; thus, he turns to Carroll, whom he sees as the first great accountant of the paradoxes of meaning, “sometimes collecting, sometimes renewing, sometimes inventing, and sometimes preparing them.”²⁷ By mingling the literal and literary interpretations of the words he assigns to his purpose – just as Carroll does – Deleuze here provides specifics of common sense, which would go from point A to point B in a determined (or, at least, determinable) direction from beginning to end, from past to future, of course via the present. But then he adds the option of an “affirmation of both senses ... at the same time,”²⁸ which he refutes as an aporia, since it is the manifestation – a fertile one, in fact – of paradox, an avoidance of the univocity that seems to bear the promise of constant semantic connections and disconnections, always reconfigured or reconfigurable:

When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes.²⁹

The concept of “becoming” – or, more precisely, of a becoming that always stops being so as to continue to change (without which it would freeze and stop becoming) – clearly articulates Deleuze’s reasoning around the Carollian material that he discusses. In effect, it is a property of that which becomes to come and go, infinitely and identically, in both directions at once (thus, to grow and shrink at the same time, making a mockery of what anyone might say), without ever worrying about the present – or, to paraphrase Deleuze, by avoiding it – mainly because becoming excludes “the distinction of before and after, of past and future,” as well as other associated differences (more and less, too much and not enough, and so on). This paradoxical becoming (which makes possible both identity and infinitude) now constitutes a refutation not only of good sense but also of common sense as it is defined, according to Deleuze, precisely by “the assignment of fixed identities.”³⁰ Pursuant to this analysis, and to the light that it sheds on Carroll’s fantasies and his tour de force (his use of language based on the limits that it is supposed to set and on his capacity to surpass those limits), all disorder is now permitted, whether it consists of “the reversal of cause and effect: to be punished before having committed a fault,” for example, or “the reversal of the day before and the day after, the present always being eluded,”³¹ most appropriately expressed in our case study of jam.

This is how Bujold proceeds, using a different medium and language, through her use of slow-motion or acceleration and her highly complex employment of changes of scale, pace, and cadence. Their consequences, which attenuate the overly explicit effects of steps backward or forward, are likened to a crisis or a temporal blurring that defies all logic and, therefore, to a project within which the “forwards” repudiate the “backwards” and vice versa: memory is always becoming, and the prospective becomes retrospective, and prospection becomes retrospection. Here, what happens next comes to us before it begins as well as after it ends. We get so lost that Bujold’s carefully orchestrated interferences conspire to provoke our uncertainty as we face, simultaneously, the reasonably incompatible outer aspects of strangeness and truth. Every possible means is used to skilfully thwart linearity in a structure that is nevertheless inevitably linear at the point when it is received, producing a staggering oscillation between continuity and discontinuity, a stuttering, as a barroom psychoanalyst would readily label the handicap from which Alice’s fictional father suffered. But Bujold doesn’t suffer from it; on the contrary, she explores it. The proof is in her work.