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Spotlight: Paul de Guzman: Extracts

Deconstruction is its own Architecture

On the patio outside Paul de Guzman’s Vancouver studio is a small bonsai garden, cultivated by the artist over the past 15 years. A testament to his sensibilities and methodology, it consists of eight painstakingly shaped and dwarfed trees, each in its requisite shallow pot. While musing on the structural appeal of bonsai—“It’s like landscape architecture in miniature form”—he confesses that the necessity for patience is also a significant attraction. “I have certain projects wherein I’ll have to wait about seven or eight years before I see exactly what I want to see,” de Guzman says. “That’s the thing I like about bonsai. I like long-term projects.”

Long-term clipping, shaping and cultivating, a fascination with structure and an almost religious advocacy of the creative rewards of patience—these phrases might just as accurately be applied to de Guzman’s art practice as to his bonsai. Add ideas around language and architecture, media and criticism, historical reconstruction and literary deconstruction, and you begin to understand how de Guzman makes art by excising words and images from the printed page. You understand how with precision and care he dismantles, displaces and deconstructs certain texts, the latter not just figuratively but literally. During the past five years, he has taken a surgeon’s scalpel to dozens of high-end art books, magazines, catalogues, literary journals and newspapers. He dissects each publication, removing its linguistic brains and visual guts and leaving behind only a fragile paper skeleton of horizontal and vertical bars, a network of superimposed grids behind the frame of the publication’s altered cover. These grids might consist of a succession of plain white margins and borders, or might have still adhering to them the odd word or glyph or image fragment, a slash of colour, a suggestive dot or dash of punctuation, a disruptive diagonal. Analogies and other correspondences inevitably arise: to modernist art and postmodernist criticism, to Mondrian and De Stijl, Le Corbusier and LeWitt, Cornell and Cage, minimalism and found poetry, construction sites and scaffolding—and the measured transparency of the International style. Many of de Guzman’s new works evoke endlessly overlapping windows and doors.

His latest series of cut-up books, “Invisible Cities,” borrows its title from Italo Calvino’s beautiful novel of language and meaning, memory and desire, airborne fancy and earthbound reality. Reading the novel, in which Marco Polo describes a succession of fantastical cities to Kublai Khan, launched the artist into a period of investigation into the relationship between language and architecture. “Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages,” Calvino intones. Architecture finds its structural and metaphorical equivalent in language, de Guzman insists.

A more prosaic inspiration to his project occurred a couple of years ago when de Guzman and his partner were undertaking renovations to their house. The number of city permits required to proceed led to a meditation on the vast volumes of writing and documentation—the architect’s proposals and the developer’s justifications, the city council minutes, the records of public hearings, the reports of planning commissions, the myriad bureaucratic approvals—behind any ambitious architectural project. “Before anything gets done in architecture, it goes through a whole slew of linguistic permissions,” de Guzman says. He could envision architectural supports—columns, pillars, girders—constructed of physical parcels of language piled one on top of the other and, in fact, has built just such a structure in his home, a ceiling-high stack of transparent plastic containers filled with excised texts.

Calvino and home renos led de Guzman to examine architectural histories, theories and criticisms. He read and dissected numerous books on historical and contemporary architects (Andrea Palladio, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Simon Véléz…), architectural surveys (of Paris, theme parks, the Baroque period in Europe...) and artists who work by claiming physical space or altering or occupying the built environment (Rachel Whiteread, Cildo Meireles, Doris Salcedo, Roni Horn...).

“Research” is a recurring word in de Guzman’s conversation and an essential component of his project; he reads the entire book before he subjects it to his precision cutting. Accommodating both the reading and the dissecting to evenings and weekends (around his computer-tech day job) means that any one artwork may take months. Patting the cover of the dense and immense history of Indian architecture he has just launched into, he says, “I don’t mind reading the same book for the next six months and then trying to decide whether I’m going to cut it up or not.” Then he adds, “The cutting-up process takes from two to four weeks—and I don’t mind that. If it takes that long, it takes that long. I’m not interested in the end, I’m interested in the process.” Although de Guzman’s series “Invisible Cities” is undeniably concept-based and process-oriented, the end is, nevertheless, an extremely elegant set of objects: the dissected book and its outtakes mounted in paired Plexiglas cases on the wall. The dimensions of the larger case are predicated on those of the original bound art book; the smaller is keyed to the dimensions of the Italian-language paperback version of Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

The sustained research at the core of de Guzman’s art seems to relate to his self-education in art and to his vast reading. Similarly, his preoccupation with language relates to crucial years spent bouncing between cultures, schools and disciplines. Born in Manila into a large family of mixed Filipino-Chinese-Spanish heritage, de Guzman grew up speaking Tagalog, supplemented by the formal English he learned at school. When he was twelve, his engineer father moved the family to Montreal. There, he was confronted with both French (an entirely new and structurally difficult language for him) and colloquial English (almost as foreign-seeming as French). Two years later, the family moved again, this time to Toronto, where de Guzman lost a year of schooling, after which his father, concerned for his youngest son’s sense of cultural identity, took him back to Manila. De Guzman studied hard to recover his lost fluency in Tagalog, completed his secondary-school education, and then enrolled in engineering in one of the city’s universities. Because of political tensions in the Philippines, however, he came back to Canada at age twenty—this time to Vancouver—a few courses short of finishing his degree.

Only after de Guzman was settled and employed did he undertake his study of art and, eventually, its practice. “When you’re looking at art, what you’re confronted with is the solution to a problem,” he says, adding that he realized he was as interested in solving visual problems himself as he was in looking at the end results of other people’s creative processes. De Guzman’s earliest works, first exhibited in a solo show in Vancouver in 1998, were collectively titled Building Blocks. Each consisted of overlapping photographs of an old house mounted behind a framework of snipped-out sections of newspaper, collaged with pieces of fabric, wallpaper, tissue paper, pages torn from books and magazines, splatters of black ink and verse in the form of a mesostic. The mesostics, similar to acrostics except that the chosen word is constructed out of middle rather than first letters of other words and phrases, were referenced to critical artspeak. Immediately, language and architecture—poetic structure and physical structure—were aligned in his art.

Building Blocks was the catalyst, he says, for all of his subsequent “investigations.” His next series, Subtracted Editions (1999), addressed the means and media by which knowledge is both disseminated and consumed. In these works, de Guzman stripped text and images out of art books, magazines and catalogues, and displayed the skeletal white structures—whose evocations again were architectural—in wall-mounted shadow boxes. (The cut-out text and images were stored, invisibly but accessibly, in nearby cases, also wall-mounted.) Dangling Propositions (2000) employed similar techniques, except that a selective word or two was left at the end of each paragraph, along with a few Constructivist-like angles and fragments of colour. The results riffed on the surreal poetics of chance while also evoking the unreliable workings of memory. De Guzman played on the viewer’s relationship to the original book by placing the dissected works in cheap plastic holders designed for retail display purposes. These transparent blisterpaks can be touched, held, turned over in the hand.

Extracting text from books—separating language from literature—de Guzman’s current practice proposes that we “read between the lines.” It asks that we look for an underlying physical presence or structure or architecture in language, and that we consider the possibilities for meaning in language’s absence—although absence is a word de Guzman is not fond of. He prefers ambience. “I am really interested in ambient qualities,” he says, “ambient as being something that is there but is not perceived.” Something present but invisible, he adds. Invisible towers and terraces, invisible houses and palaces, invisible schools, churches and office buildings.

Invisible cities.

Winter 2002

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