Deconstructionism in Myers’ art

The philosophical/political movement known as “deconstruction” has had a far-reaching influence on culture since its advent in the mid-1960s, even on those who have never heard of it. The word has made its way into architecture, dance, design and even fashion. Its meaning in these contexts often seems to be reduced to something like “broken.”

Stating what deconstruction is in simple terms is like trying to describe relativity in one sentence, but here goes: Deconstruction digs into concepts, looking for origins, but constantly finds origins don’t exist; if you look hard enough, tracing any idea back to its beginnings, you soon discover the “source” is not there.

The simplest metaphor for this might be looking up a word you don’t know the meaning of in the dictionary and finding another word you don’t know the meaning of. You can keep looking, but you will only find words to define words. There’s no “reality” behind them, and it’s a closed system.

Deconstruction reveals this over and over again, in all arenas of life, from political systems (there is no “God-given right”) to social systems (women’s roles are not “natural” but cultural).

Artists have latched on to this philosophy with a vengeance, because it leads to any given art form to turn on itself and dismantle assumptions.

Andrew Myers is a multimedia artist who is strongly influenced by these ideas. His work may be familiar to you in the form of the mild-mannered bronze sculpture “The Shopper,” blandly gazing at you downtown.

More of his work is on view at the recently opened Diana Ferrone Gallery (1951 S. Coast Hwy). In addition to his sculpting, Myers is wicked with a charcoal pencil. He’s produced a series of mixed-media panels entitled “What We Hide Behind the Dress” (a title that is itself delightfully off-kilter).

In this triptych (each panel is 52 inches by 27 inches), the same woman appears in different positions relative to the viewer. She wears the same simple slip dress, but in each panel the dress is transparent, and we see the figure beneath the clothes. Each panel also has a line of text that wraps around the top right and down the left of the frame (a frame within a frame) that speaks sometimes in first person, sometimes in third (the artist’s point of view).

All three are done in a fascinating collage of materials: rice paper and pages from phone books torn in strips, creating an uneven and disconcertingly dimensional surface for Myers’ loosely rendered figures. The woman herself is executed with a sculptor’s awareness of form, but she is blurred ? a tinted sketch ? an effect heightened by the glue varnish Myers uses to keep the whole thing together.

What is Myers doing here? In one panel, the text along the side reads: “she has forgotten who she was, all she could see in the reflection was her dress.” This repeats, suggesting a refrain or closed loop. She stands before a pane of glass, gazing downward. But the dress is an absence. We see beneath the surface, to the body.

The implication here is a woman preoccupied with surface appearance, but at the same time constantly turning inward; she is self-absorbed, but unable to see through her own surfaces. This is reinforced by what is at her feet: She stands ankle-deep in water, but seems unaware of it. In spite of the text, she does not look at the reflection. Instead, she looks distantly at the ground, hands on hips, lost in a world of herself.

Myers pulls up short of a devastating blow, however. The woman wears a bra and panties under her dress in all three panels. I found this very puzzling, even evasive. Clothing is an old metaphor for the body (covering the soul); the nude underneath would have been far more provocative. Perhaps this is a surface even the artist isn’t allowed to see through. Or perhaps it is a surface the artist is using protectively against the viewer.

In any case, it is the same in all three compositions. The second panel suggests narrative, the same woman walking down a street in different moments in time, like Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase.” A ghostly version of her looms against the right side of the canvas. Time is linear but nothing changes, and the image never reveals the object it signifies because we can never get past the image. This is deconstruction. It is troubling, claustrophobic and alarmingly complex.

One of the most disturbing applications of deconstruction came in the field of psychology. You might already be able to see where this might go: If there is no “original,” no source, and the system of language is closed, individuals are trapped in a system of describing themselves only through this kind of constant reflection that never arrives at a person, a “me.”

This is certainly part of Myers’ work. You see it in two of his bronze busts, “Female Deconstruction Phase” and “Portrait of the Artist.” These are both approximately life-size, and both are (as the first title might suggest) “deconstructed.” Had they been whole, you would see a conventionally rendered sculpture, well-executed but rather dull. The sort of thing artists have been doing since ancient Rome.

But the “Portrait of the Artist” seems to be breaking apart in space: clean-edged, square fragments floating out away from the visage of the artist. The “Female Deconstructed” seems to actually have disintegrated; large portions of her face and the back of her head have disappeared. The busts, not surprisingly, are hollow, empty. The “illusion” of art, that there is a “soul” being represented here, is shattered.

The poet Robert Hass, in “Meditation at Lagunitas,” once speculated that this represented a tragic loss for us, that “because there is in this world no one thing / to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, / a word is elegy to what it signifies.” If this is so, then Myers’ work makes a dark and haunting statement about the truth of his subjects, something seen but never really known.