ABSTRACT
In his review of the 2005 Venice Biennale, critic Hal Foster argues that ethnopoetic bricolage is a major feature of the fair, and a practice that Jimmie Durham among others initiated. Ethnopoetics speaks to the work of poets and other creators who explore cultural traditions little known or undervalued in the West, and bricolage in art describes the combination of materials at hand evident in collage and assemblage. Durham’s Something … Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy resonates with Rosa Martínez’s ideas about art and fraught individual questioning in relation to Foster’s ideas about the structural conditions of contemporary art and life as globalization. Hal Foster’s review of the 2005 Venice Biennale reminds readers that the practices and results of bricolage are longstanding. Modern artists used bits and pieces of everyday life in their projects to reconfigure art’s relationships to traditional aesthetics, representational strategies, and social circumstances.
