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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how artistic bricolage shapes the doing and undoing of mythistorical national narratives. Focusing on an artistic reworking of a Greek Junta-era propaganda reel, it explores how the medium’s recombinatory potential underlies both propaganda and acts of artistic sabotage.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how bricolage participates in the doing and undoing of mythistorical national narratives. Drawing on an example of contemporary artistic practice in Greece, I harken back to the ancillary figure of the bricoleur-as-artist. Through ethnographic and art-historical materials, I explore the work of Marina Gioti, who engages the materiality and mediality of a found Junta-era propaganda reel that bears a mythistorical narrative of national rebirth and political polarisation. Rather than attempting to overwrite the material, she plays with the reel’s recombinatory potential, sabotaging it and revealing its artifactuality. Lévi-Strauss held that bricolage underlies mythical thought, reversing diachrony and synchrony by playing with the order of structure and event. Yet he also acknowledged that bricolage is not pure open-ended play, but a mode of making constrained by available materials. Read through his account of thinking with “odds and ends,” the paper asks what kind of work flotsam lends itself to: what agency resides in residual materials, and what agency remains available to the artist as she navigates a medium burdened by historical overdetermination. In exploring these questions, the paper considers how history comes to feel real—and why some reels appear more real than others. Attending to moments when the “shitness” of history becomes apparent, the paper contributes to debates on the media and forms of history and the afterlives of political propaganda. I argue that bricolage and sabotage should be understood as twin strategies for dealing with the compromised materials of historical narratives.