Word: bricoleur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seen in downtown Manhattan this summer. Shields has been showing on the international circuit for years, and his arrays of irregular patches and ribbons of stained canvas, sewn together with an offhand and improvisatory air, misled some critics into thinking of him as a kind of craftsy '60s bricoleur fiddling with mandalas by the seaside. (The sight of Shields, 6 ft. 4 in., with his shaven bronze dome of a head, nautical beard and Queequeg-like mien, daintily stitching in a studio littered with harpoons and coot decoys, is one of the more striking images of role reversal...
...gargantuan bricoleur, a user-up of discarded things, a collagist in three dimensions. His work touched base with the fundamental modernist movements, seizing and transforming something from each of them. From cubism and constructivism came the planar organization of form and the abstract language; from surrealism, the sense of encounter with a "personage," as basic to his work as it was to Miró's. Given enough found metal, he could launch into runs of astonishing inventiveness, like a jazz virtuoso improvising on a phrase. This happened most notably in 1962, when he was invited to make a sculpture...
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