bricolage
noun
Did you know?
Bricolage Has French Roots
According to French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." Lévi-Strauss compared this artistic process to the work of a handyman who solves technical or mechanical problems with whatever materials are available. He referred to that process of making do as bricolage, a term derived from the French verb bricoler (meaning "to putter about") and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades. Bricolage made its way from French to English during the 1960s, and it is now used for everything from the creative uses of leftovers ("culinary bricolage") to the cobbling together of disparate computer parts ("technical bricolage").
Example Sentences
Wired, 14 July 2022 Brodsky/Baryshnikov was a bricolage of Brodsky poems. Joan Acocella, The New York Review of Books, 14 May 2020 Gigi’s kitchen, with its dyed-pasta-facade cabinetry, was just part of a larger bricolage motif that included a bathroom plastered with New Yorker magazine covers. Collier Schorr; Styling By Ludivine Poiblanc, Harper's BAZAAR, 14 July 2021 But her poetic bricolage took on a new urgency as the memory of war was reactivated. Sophie Pinkham, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2021 The whole house is an act of bricolage, from the surrealist staircase to the adobe embankment dripping with ferns against the neighboring plot. New York Times, 15 Feb. 2021 Just as Instagram’s nostalgic filters and the bricolage identity-curation platforms like Pinterest were catching on, here was someone gluing together disparate references using a Super 8 aesthetic. Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 15 Sep. 2019 How cities manage gentrification can yield an engaging and integrated bricolage, or not. Bruce Fuller, The Mercury News, 20 Aug. 2019 From the music to the movie stills, the restaurant seems like an exercise in pop culture bricolage, meant to pique one’s interest without sustaining it with anything meaningful. Soleil Ho, SFChronicle.com, 13 June 2019 See More Word History
French, from bricoler to putter about
1960, in the meaning defined above