For this research I intend to develop a theory of amateur practice with reference to specific chronological and geographical contexts within modernity. I will position the amateur as an explicit articulation of the ‘capitalist bricoleur’, a re-working of Levi-Strauss’s concept, which describes the activities of the ‘crafty’ consumer who uses materials readily available in capitalist society to fulfill contingent need.

Since the onset of industrialisation, craft and artisanal skills became increasingly democratised through self-help literature, pattern books, scholarly information and technologies, which swelled the ranks of consumers who were invited to manipulate and re-create objects befitting their particular environment. Post-purchase material manipulation subverts conventional static expectations of producer intention and endows the object with a dynamism and individualism that resists slavish acceptance of principles of ‘good’ taste espoused by critics like Arts & Crafts theorist William Morris, as well as passive acceptance of mass-produced design.

The thesis will begin with a deeper theoretical discussion of the amateur as 'capitalist bricoleur,' providing a more nuanced understanding of modern aesthetics as the linguistic and material appropriation of the object by the performing subject. Drawing on theories of aesthetic reception and social anthropology, the intention is to challenge dominant conceptions of modernity that concentrate on form and the finished object, rather than the continuing life of objects after initial exchange.

Chapters distinguish between the different types of amateur intervention on presumed ‘static’ commodities. I will start with the amateur’s artistic intervention on surfaces, ranging from the decoration of ceramic pots in late nineteenth-century France to paint-by-number kits in 1950s America. Essential to this type of intervention is the selling of paint boxes, art kits, or ready made paint tubes, invitations to art where the consumers’ future creative intervention is inherently contained within. I will then focus on architectural interventions of the amateur, seeing how the amateur not only manipulates space through ‘do-it-yourself’ projects but also creates workspaces – garages, workbenches and environments where future creativity can operate from. Attention will then turn towards amateur intervention in time and how amateur practice can be temporally classified. Devoted time, obsessed time, where the amateur is free to pursue detail for its own sake and hyper-teleological time where there is no end to specific tasks, are temporal classifications that can be explored in relation to non-pecuniary labour.

To place this work within historical contexts I will draw from manuals, pedagogic treatises, company records, advertisements, journals and literary sources. I will also study critical responses to amateur production that reveal the rearguard action to defend against the dilution of ‘correct’ taste as scholars, critics, artists and ministers all grapple with the actions of the savvy consumer.