Deconstruction Deconstructed
by John Griffiths
'The archeology of our thinking demonstrates clearly that
man is a recent invention. Perhaps also his approaching end'.
(M. Foucault,
Les mots et les choses).
'I do not believe in things but in relations between things'(Braque).
Braque's and Picasso's Cubist wrestling with form to the point where it
so predominates that the illusion of artist's and observer's existence
is all but cancelled, and the work itself seems self-sufficent as an interactivity
of elements whose kinship to anything real has long been systematically
eroded.
The Deconstructor scrutinises the paradoxes of 'parergonal logic'.
He or she detects 'frame slippage': those moments when aspects of the
signified move over to become parts of the signifier; when content fragments
into form;and so on.
Gaham's work is "Deconstructionist' because it deliberately presents
then complicates and fracturesa meaning or set of meanings. It does this
to disclose the possibility of a desirable basic meaning, but one which
is never reached in the creation or 'active contemplation' of the work...
The Deconstructionist avant la lettre is therefore Marcel Duchamp,
whose The Bride Stripped Bare by ner Bachelors Even (1915-23).
Duchamp's enigmatic retirement from art has been vastly dangerous to all
clean-cut Modernism.
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