I've been thinking about this word, deconstruct, because it's coming up in reference to my current paintings. In my art, I divide the human figure into shapes of color and value in a way that artists often have in mosaic, stained glass, batik, collage, and quilting not to mention vorticism, futurism, constructivism, cubism, and orphism. It's nothing new, though I am trying to make it fresh.
And the word deconstruct comes up, sometimes, when people describe the work. Ah, deconstruct, the New York Times word of the year from somewhere in the 90s that will not go away. In the spirit of postmodernism, the word is, itself, a construct (we can call this irony heterological, I discovered). In the spirit of human nature, we forget that, or worse, fixate on it. So I thought that I would clarify my understanding of the term and how I use it.
The key, for me, lies in understanding what a construct is. In our work-obsessed culture, we often focus on the verb, "construct," which means to build. We think of building as "construction." In our scientific-method-based way of thinking, we also think of natural things as constructions of nature. Thus, in a positivist, reductionist way, we like the idea of deconstructing things to find out their inner workings. And in our tradition of dissidence, we like the idea of deconstructing things to dismantle them.
But we should remember that the action to construct can also mean to form a construct, which is a psychological or sociological concept or idea. Regardless of its basis in nature or the human-made world, a construct is conceptual and not physically real. In my paintings, the painted figure is not physically real, it is the idea of the human body. It is a sign or symbol that I divide into swatches of color, which some people take as deconstructing the figure.
Now, if we think like deconstruction workers, we might consider that I am pulling nails and unscrewing screws and taking the sacred, visual language of this figure apart, or we might even think of me as doing demolition. The problem is, when we focus on tearing something apart, at best we are reducing it to its smallest constituent parts to study its pieces and see how it works. At worst, we value destroying it. In these senses, when I am deconstructing the figure, either I am taking someone's sacred language, in the first case, and parsing it out, or I am, in the second, sabotaging it or freeing us from it. Neither is without value, but my way of thinking about deconstruction is different.
I think of deconstruction as revealing the construct. In the best sense of deconstruction, I think, we are asking people to hear their own words and see their own images. We are, in a sense, reconstructing.
The best example I can think of is the way Shakespeare changes the order of words so we hear them for the first time. He also places incongruous words together to give us new perspective on meaning. And he is a master of the pun—a nearly lost art form. He is not simply parsing the language. He is doing the same service as breaking our words into their etymological root parts. But he's using our words. He's reconstructing our language so that it is fresh again. He's putting meaning back into our language after it has become, in Mark Twain's words, petrified custom.
I try to do something similar with the language of the figure. It's called poetry, and there are different ways to do it. Warhol repeats a familiar physiognomy with variations until we see it as strange. It is no longer the sociological and psychological construct that it had been. Similarly, Duchamp, in his Nude Descending a Staircase, reveals the figure in its physical action, its place in space and time, its basic geometry and form, and its mechanics. Again, we see it, like a Cezanne apple, for the first time.
These artists shatter our preconceptions—our lazy, stagnant knowledge—and get to root meaning. They reveal the origin. They are not tearing the model apart for the sake of the pieces. After they do their magic, they leave the construction of the figure evident.
Jacques Derrida tried to replace the word deconstruction with the word desedimentation. But the first word had already gone the way of language and become part of the sediment of our social minds. You can see the word in use all through our collective chatter and we take it for granted that we all know and agree upon what we are talking about. I wonder, however, when I hear it used in reference to my work, how accurate it is. How accurate is our understanding of the process when we label it with a fifty-cent buzzword that, heterologically, is probably in sore need itself of being deconstructed?
