Debating Pros and Cons of the Deconstructivists

There is nothing more risible, confusing and silly than finding yourself in the middle of somebody else’s family argument. There they are yelling and you can’t even figure out what the problem is, much less who might be in the right. If you are foolish enough to play peacemaker and try to make sense of it, the opponents gang up on you.

At the moment, the big megillah in the world of architecture surrounds the exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 30. It is devoted to the designs of an international group of seven architects. At first glance it scarcely seems to warrant the agitated ink that is being spilled over it--just three quiet galleries, one devoted to paintings and other artworks by pioneering Russian Constructivists like Malevich, El Lissitzky and Rodchenko plus two rooms displaying models, drawings and fragments by the seven putative subjects of the show.

Well, that’s nice. So what is all the fuss about?

If you ask the organizers, there isn’t any fuss. Just an attempt to “raise certain questions.” Just an exercise demonstrating an “interesting phenomenon.” Here are seven architects as various as New York’s Bernard Tschumi and Rotterdam’s Rem Koolhaus, who do not necessarily know one another or share any conscious theoretical position, all doing work that has common ground. Instead of designing buildings that create a sense of order, comfort and beauty, they concoct structures that look disorderly, uneasy and--by some standards--ugly.

Aha! We get it. Something in the Zeitgeist-- the spirit of the times--causes all of them to spontaneously make buildings reflecting the fracture of the age, modern anomie, contemporary dislocation. All that.

No, no. They just all happen to have a common formal approach. All deal in ideas basic to modernist architecture as it shaped up in the work of, say, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but where those great designers used honed-down geometries to express purity and restraint, these designers found qualities of imperfection and excess. In short, they just discovered an unexploited facet of a modernist approach so widely believed to be mined out that recent art and architecture has been reflagged under the rubric Post-Modern. Purely formal. No argument.

The worst sort of fight to be stuck in the middle of is one where the combatants pretend it’s not happening. No, we’re just fine, say the seething couple as they needle and carp at each other through dinner. You want to see a really malicious battle? Just attend a departmental meeting where competitive bureaucrats make out like they are having a conference, or where academics hold a “theoretical discussion.” It’s like being eaten alive by fire ants.

Let’s step out in the hall for a breath of air.

Denials notwithstanding, the architectural community is abuzz about “Deconstructivist Architecture” because of its organizer, Philip Johnson. For decades the 82-year-old architect, art collector and former head of MOMA’s architecture department has been regarded as the single most influential American figure in the field.

Back in the ‘30s he started promoting modernist architecture with exhibitions and a string of distinguished buildings, including his own throw-no-stones glass house. In recent years he startled everybody by defecting to Post-Modernism, the anti-modern revivalist style that has become the darling of the corporate and museum establishment, merrily building awesome structures like Manhattan’s AT&T; tower, which looks like something out of a “Superman” movie.

When Johnson, highly respected for his aesthetic sense, pulls a stunt like the Decon show, insiders sit up and nervously take notice. Is Johnson positioning the banana peel to create a Post-Modernist pratfall?

He smiles secretly and claims he is just plain fascinated by the aesthetic bite of the Decons (the architects, not the roach powder) and their resemblance to the Russian Constructivists.

The visual resemblance is certainly there. When the Viennese group called Coop Himmelblau (Blue-Sky Co-op) builds a site model called “Skyline,” it bears a generic resemblance to sculpture that evolved from Vladimir Tatlin’s “Monument to the Third International.” Plan views of Peter Eisenman’s Biocenter for the University of Frankfurt carry the dynamic displacement of Malevich’s absolutist geometries even further, and there is more than a whiff of late Kandinsky in the way long bars float and cross in the design for a Hong Kong club by London-based Zaha Hadid.

There are less obvious and more telling overlaps between the Cons and the Decons. The Russian avant-garde was intensely theoretical. Legendary stories tell of how they fought and drummed each other out of their various movements for ideological reasons.

This exhibition is so dominated by theory it threatens to squeeze out consideration of the participating artists. The intellectual formulation of the show is credited to Johnson’s unindicted co-conspirator, a young New Zealander, Mark Wigley--an architect, Princeton lecturer and expert on Jacques Derrida, a founder of the esoteric philosophical and literary theory called deconstruction.

Overly simplified, the deconstructionists believe that language has no fixed meaning and is subject to an infinite number of interpretations. They see their job as analyzing whatever “text,” taking it apart to show various meanings that are not immediately apparent.

(In Alfred Doblin’s novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” a cynical character asks a girl to walk across the room. He then asks onlookers to say what she was doing and gets answers from “walking” to “dancing” to “marching.” The cynic says everybody was right. His hidden point is to prove that a hot watch he is wearing was not “stolen” but “taken.”)

Taken to its logical point, deconstruction seems to say that anything can mean anything. That seems to leave us in a Mad Hatter world, but there is more. The way the deconstructionists see it--especially Jean Foucault--language derives meaning mainly from the way it is interpreted by the social authority that gives language “privileged” meanings to serve its ends. This lends deconstruction a strong whiff of subversion and makes an apparent academic exercise into a game of theory-as-politics.

Remember the famous story about Malevich maneuvering Marc Chagall out of an academic post so he could have it himself? High-minded ideology curdled into political sleaze.

The Russian avant-garde regarded itself as an instrument of the revolution until it was drummed out as elitist by Stalin. It is hard to escape the feeling that a show like “Deconstructivist Architecture” is a refined and mannered parody of Constructivist ideology pitting brave Bolshevik guerrilla Decons against ornamental Post-Modernist capitalist running dogs.

(Some of the work here has real political overtones. A West Berlin project by Daniel Libeskind uses a tipped-up, bar-shaped apartment-house to give the raspberry to the nearby Berlin Wall. Generally, however, there are no real politics involved, folks, just the appropriations of fashion borrowed to lend excitement and bite to the art.

The exhibition is redolent with sophisticated wit and in-group needling. Even its portmanteau title is a bit of a gag to epater les Post-Mods. (If I were they, I would counter that Deconstructionism is a revivalist style and therefore itself Post-Modernist.)

As original as “Deconstructive Architecture” appears, it is both curiously trendy and oddly familiar. Where have we heard this before?

In the art galleries.

In recent years the language of deconstruction has become an irritating commonplace in art criticism. Thanks to glasnost , the Soviet connection has lately congealed into a media cliche, but the link goes back further than that. Oddly enough, the trail leads us straight home to Los Angeles.

In 1980, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an epochal and original exhibition, “The Avant-Garde in Russia,” virtually the first look at this important movement in the half-century since its suppression. The designer of the exhibition installation was L.A. architect Frank Gehry, whose slangy design was full of open wooden framing that reflected ideas he had started building into his own Santa Monica house in 1978. Today Gehry and his strangely beautiful intransigent house are the virtual centerpiece of the MOMA show. What is going on here?

The Russian avant-garde was fundamentally impatient with pure aesthetics. It evolved the modernist idea that art is pan-disciplinary with social responsibilities and takes in everything from theater to architecture, from design to decor. It had a moral and utilitarian attitude to art that eventually evolved into the German Bauhaus.

I think that when LACMA’s exhibition came along, L.A. art people simply recognized a soul-brother in it. Los Angeles has a long history of casual intransigence toward artistic conventions and great impatience about the notion of artistic borders.

Back in the ‘60s, Billy Al Bengston not only made spray-paintings on crumpled metal, he built furniture and decorated screens. Robert Irwin and James Turrell took the notion of art out into the environment, until today their work deals with large questions of perception and big chunks of nature.

Gehry, the most art-influenced of architects, was in the midst of all that. The aesthetic has been so pervasive here that--to us airheads on the West Coast--”Deconstructivist Architecture” looks a bit like New York filling itself in on what we take for granted.

If there is a constructive point to the Decon show--and there is--it does not have to do with the practicality of these designs or the specific polemic embedded in them by the curators. It has to do with the realization that for at least two decades the increasing energy and success of architecture has come from that segment of it most closely in touch with advanced gallery art--the research and development lab of man’s visual environment.