The initial plans were to take in a visit to the Toledo Glass Pavilion on Christmas Eve, but my arrival time meant we’d have to pass. The drive by was thrilling none the less, and I asked my host to “go around the block again”.
Across the street, attached to the main building of the Toledo Museum of Art is an addition by Frank Gehry which houses the University of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts. In it’s design, one can see the beginning stages of Gehry’s plunge into deconstructivism.
My host, a historic preservationist from Chicago, stated that he had no idea what deconstructivism was and that even after reading multiple definitions, he finds himself left with the feeling that its nothing more than a word used to elevate conversation, or rather the social status of those using the word, and that even those who use it can’t define it. While I understand the deconstructivist concepts, I too had a difficult getting my point across. This lead to a question that permeated the entire weekend:
“If I were a fly on the wall in a room where one of two people were ‘deconstructing’, what actions might I witness?”
Because that question has rendered me (and a couple of my friends) speechless, I’m extending an invitation to whomever may be reading to weigh in on a possible answer.
I haven’t wrestled with that term since grad school. I’ll take a stab at it. I find that what one means by this term depends on the discipline they are in.
My experience was in media studies. Deconstruction had to do with laying bare the ideological underpinnings of one’s perceptions and experience. One could ask questions about why something “means” something and not something else. For instance, what identity or “subjectivity” does a commercial message assume about me? To what degree do I accept or resist that assumption? To what degree does the prevailing culture permit me to have a divergent understanding of that experience? This can lead to creative work that attempts to challenge us to confront these ideologies.
This might make for some interesting conversation for a while but, in the end, it doesn’t put bread on the table or stop a war.