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Kitoba.Com >>> The Arts >>> Art Essays >>> Reconstructivist Art >>> Deconstructionism (index)

November, 1st, 2008
last updated September, 2nd, 2010

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Entry #17 Rating: 2.2/5 (9 votes cast)

Reconstructivist Art:

Deconstructionism

by Chris Sunami

The deconstructionist trend in art was to question and to violate every convention and structure of classic art, to decontextualize meaning, and to discard or distort all the recognizable elements of classic art, such as form and perspective in the visual arts, melody and harmony in the auditory arts, plot and character in novels and plays, and rhyme and meter in poetry. Instead, these were replaced with irony and self-awareness, as novels referred to themselves as works of fiction, and paintings labeled themselves as works of art.

Deconstructionism provided a much needed jolt of energy and creativity into an artworld that had become stagnant and lackluster. But audiences often found deconstructionist art to be distancing and unfriendly, heartless and confusing.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, deconstructionist art mutated and became more audience-friendly, as the post-modernist sensibility entered popular culture in forms such as:

  1. collage, where photographs and preexisting artworks are taken out of context and reassembled in surprising ways
  2. rap music, where the samples function as a sonic collage and the lyrics often refer to themselves and to other songs in a self-aware fashion
  3. Postmodern_literature, where the lines between autobiography and fiction are deliberately blurred, and the narrator comments on his own existence as an unreliable narrator.



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