noun: bricolage; plural noun: bricolage; plural noun: bricolages
(in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.
"the chaotic bricolage of the novel is brought together in a unifying gesture"
something constructed or created from a diverse range of things.
"bricolages of painted junk"
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").
Bricolage Has French Roots
