Shannon Goff: The Work of Art After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In fall 2015, Shannon Goff had a solo exhibition of recent work at Susanne Hilberry Gallery. In November of that year, I wrote an essay about the work for a publication Shannon is putting together. Thought I would publish it here in the meantime, though certainly buy the book when it comes out.

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Shannon Goff, Miles to Empty, 2015, cut cardboard (all photos: PD Rearick; courtesy of the artist).

In what many believe is his most important work, the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, the Marxist philosopher and critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno takes note of what he terms "Art's double character as both autonomous and fait social [social fact]." Art—that is, human expression worthy of being so designated—is autonomous, Adorno holds, in that it stands apart from the system of means-end rationality characteristic of modernity, especially under capitalism. And yet, he goes on to say in a brain pretzel that is typical of his thought, art is marked by the "sedimentation" of the sociohistorical conditions from which it arises. It is "the melancholy of art," Adorno concludes, to bear witness to truth it is powerless to do anything about. I can't help thinking about Adorno and his dialectical approach to art as I ponder Shannon Goff's recent work.

Dualities permeate Goff's exhibition at Susanne Hilberry Gallery. At the most elemental level is the gallery space itself, which is bisected through the center by a wall creating two separate rooms housing two seemingly different bodies of work. The southern gallery is empty save for a full-size, highly detailed construction of a 1979 Lincoln Continental Mark V fabricated entirely out of white cardboard. The northern gallery is filled with three simple unpainted wooden tables upon which are set 19 abstract ceramic sculptures, most of which are glazed in a riot of color.

Shannon Goff, ceramic sculptures at Susanne Hilberry Gallery, installation view.

On the one hand, there is the austere minimalism of the Mark V installation, titled Miles to Empty (all works 2015). On the other is the maximalism of the ceramic tabletop sculptures, each constructed of short clay coils that are bent, twisted, and connected to form various complex accumulations of shape, volume, and space. Where the Mark V articulates the industrial, the ceramic sculptures convey a sense of the organic; taken together they form the two sides of what Adorno understands as the dialectic of Enlightenment, the split between the objective and the subjective that has sent Western civilization down the road to perdition.

In another apparent twist of logic, Adorno asserts that although art is completely embedded within the sociohistorical, the way in which that is disclosed is not so simple (alas, with Adorno nothing ever is) as to be conveyed denotatively, that is, in the form of illustration. Instead, Adorno asserts, the mimetic in art "wants to make facts eloquent by letting them speak for themselves." This is the dialectic of form and content, or as Adorno has it, "semblance" and "expression."

The flimsy cardboard structure of Miles to Empty reflects the ephemeral nature of technology in the creation of value under capitalism. As Marx writes in Volume I of Capital, value creation is connected to the amount of human labor involved in production. What he terms "absolute" surplus value is a result of labor directly applied to the transformation of matter into use. "Relative" surplus value is derived from technological innovation that multiplies labor power exponentially. Craft production is primarily absolute whereas mechanical production (and more importantly, reproduction) is in essence relative.

The moving assembly line pioneered under auto baron, and owner of the Lincoln Motor Company, Henry Ford is a prime example of relative surplus value. The technological innovation of bringing work to the worker via a system of conveyors enabled Ford to increase productivity by a factor of ten. As a result, he could cut car prices in half and at the same time double the wages of his workers, and still become one of the richest men in world history. The unprecedented largesse of the production process bearing his name, Fordism, also laid the foundation for the social and political system that drove mass consumption and the welfare state for most of the twentieth century, allowing, among other things, Detroit workers to enjoy a standard of living that was the envy of the world.

One of those workers was Goff's grandfather, a Sicilian immigrant who in 1979 purchased the Lincoln Continental Mark V upon which Miles to Empty is based as a reward for a lifetime of work under the Fordist regime. Ironically, at the very moment Goff's grandfather was enjoying the fruits of his labor from that regime, it was collapsing, taking the city of Detroit and its residents, down along with it. As Marx further notes with respect to the value of labor, relative surplus value provides only temporary productivity gains until competitors catch up. Capitalism must then revert to absolute surplus value in order to continue the ever-more accumulation of capital. In the 1970s in response to diminishing returns and the pressures of foreign competition, the Detroit auto industry reclaimed absolute surplus value in part by outsourcing production to the lower-cost labor pools of the southern United States and the maquiladoras of Mexico. The bone-white cardboard hulk of Miles to Empty is a manifestation of all that was once solid which has now melted into air with the failure of the Fordist utopia; it is a specter, a ghost of what was, haunting the social imaginary of the erstwhile Motor City.

Miles to Empty, detail.

"Art is the ever broken promise of happiness," Adorno writes. And so it is that the melancholy of the art in Miles to Empty is the "unreal reconciliation" in registering the loss of relative surplus value and the sedimented residue of Goff's own many hours of labor in making, the absolute surplus value inherent in the modeling, cutting, and assembling by hand of the phantom installed in the Susanne Hilberry Gallery. The virtuosity with a knife blade, straight edge, and other modeling implements on display in Miles to Empty is a true tour-de-force, which as Adorno notes is essential to art in its quest, paradoxically of course (this is Adorno after all), to realize the unrealizable.

Treasure Island, ceramic.

Majesty, ceramic.

The notion of tour-de-force connects Goff's ceramic sculptures on view in the other gallery with Miles to Empty. In their prodigious exploration of the other of mechanical reproduction, the dialectical obverse of relative surplus value, the ceramic sculptures are equally virtuosic. Where the Mark V renders the universal stamping process of mechanical reproduction particular, the ceramic sculptures extend their particulars to a universal, in this case a narrative of assembly made palpable by the accretion of elements used in their manufacture. (The dialectic of universal and particular is another key element of Adorno's aesthetic theory.) Each ceramic sculpture conjures up associations in the signifying play between their form and their title, the denotation of the object and connotation of its referent. Treasure Island contains an orange "X" marking the spot on a green ceramic latticework that from a distance resembles a mountainscape, the whole in turn supported by an irregularly cut pedestal that when viewed from above is shaped like an island. Majesty is a web of purple pyramidal structures, which resolve at the top in another mountainscape, in this case "majestic mountains" from "America the Beautiful."

Doyenne, ceramic, installation view.

In the alcove at the back of the gallery connecting the two larger spaces that house Miles to Empty and the tabletop sculptures, is the tour-de-force of the ceramic works, Doyenne. Constructed in situ, the work is an assembly of bone-dry greenware that stands nearly seven-feet tall and three-and-a-half feet in diameter at its base. It is a miracle of production, an assembly of hundreds, maybe thousands, of clay coils, which builds up from the earth—the ground from which the material originally came—to reach toward the heavens, representing four full days of the artist's labor and thus absolute surplus value. How it has stood up to its own weight is a wonder. Given the fragility of the unfired clay, it is fated in the end to be reduced to a broken pile of shards, a potlatch of creative destruction. Originally intended as an homage to Goff's grandfather, over the course of its construction it came to represent the doyenne who for just short of four decades presided over the space, first in Birmingham and later in its present location, that bears her name.

On Art and Gentrification

The online journal ∞ Mile has embarked on a six-month series of articles on the subject of art and gentrification. Besides publishing articles, they are working with the University of Michigan Penney Stamps School of Art and Design to also present a panel discussion on March 21, 2015, at the Carr Center in downtown Detroit. My article on art and gentrification appears in the January 2015 issue now available. (Click here to read it.) The other essay is by the redoubtable (and fellow Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow) Marsha Music. It's titled "Just Say HI! (The Gentrification Blues)," and it provides an excellent counterpoint to my more academic piece. Where my essay traces external conditions, Marsha's reveals the internal experience. So much collective memory embedded in her piece. Thanks to stephen garrett dewyer, Jennifer Junkermeier, Ryan Harte, and Nick Tobier for putting it all together. The schedule of upcoming contributors looks really good.

To Be or Not to Be in Detroit City

Abandoned home in the Delray section of Detroit, an ethnic enclave on the city's southwest side whose current population is one-tenth its 1930s level (Photo: Notorious4life, public domain.)

For decades now, Detroit has been one of America’s most notorious clusterfucks. Once the nation’s fourth-largest city, its current population of just over 700,000 is less than 40 percent of its postwar peak of 1.8 million, and it’s predicted to fall even further. More than a third, over 124,000 parcels, of the city’s residential properties are either vacant or completely abandoned. Millions of square feet of commercial property lay empty and moldering. In some sections of town, nature has totally reclaimed its domain and now wildlife freely roam. The poverty rate of 35.5 percent is more than three times the national level, and at $25,193 the city's median household income is half the national average. The municipal government operates under the authority of a State-appointed Emergency Financial Manager. And on July 18, 2013, it became the largest US municipality to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection. Small wonder Detroit has been named "America's Most Miserable City" for 2013 by Forbes.

And yet, Detroit has also recently been perceived as a land of opportunity. Artists and other members of what Richard Florida terms the "Creative Class" are said to be hard at work, transforming the troubled city into a postindustrial Elysium, fueled in part by rock-bottom real estate prices and a seemingly unrestricted do-it-yourself social and political environment. (See, for example, here, here, here, and here.)

A few years ago, erstwhile native son Mark Binelli, who grew up in Motown's suburbs and then moved to New York City to make good, currently as a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, returned to his hometown to take stock of the situation. The result was Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, now out in paperback.

Binelli surveys many of the usual suspects and familiar haunts that have been featured in the national and international media. He reports on the enduring and embittered polarization between the inner city and the suburbs, fought for decades on the battlegrounds of race and class. (Detroit is among America's most segregated cities.) He takes stock of the high crime rate, urban blight, and the virtual collapse of municipal services. He visits the abandoned factories and burned-out neighborhoods.

He also interviews various denizens of the post-Apocalyptic landscape who have dug in and plan to stick it out come what may. Many of these interviews exhibit what feminist literary theorist Lauren Berlant terms "cruel optimism," the continued hope for a return of the good old days that have been inexorably washed away by the shifting tides of global capitalism. Others, like the urban farmers, DIY art folk, community watch volunteers, and other postmodern bricoleurs, are content to make the most out of what they've got, however meagre. The former are in denial; the latter at least in recovery, though I'm not sure there's much to be more optimistic about when it comes to the long-term prospects. Along the way, Binelli reminisces about his youth growing up on the outskirts of the city with forays into it as a member of the family business and aspiring hipster. It's part Blade-Runner travelogue; part Gen-X memoir.

The history Binelli recounts is actually quite good. He makes effective use of some of the classic literature on Detroit, including Clarence Burton's history of the city's first two centuries, originally published in 1922, and Robert Conot's 1974 American Odyssey, which as Binelli notes has shamefully been out of print for nearly 30 years. And he has a way of compressing this research into some really well-turned phrases. He sums up in a few sentences the twisted collective memory of the city's demise in the wake of white flight as understood from one side of the racial divide. In writing about suburban white perceptions of Detroit's first black mayor Coleman A. Young, who left office 20 years ago and died in 1997, he observes:

[T]he wild, disproportionate hatred of Young by white suburbanites was telling in ways that had nothing to do with the mayor's alleged malfeasances. With hindsight, it's difficult to understand how he managed to become so fearsome, with his cotton-mouthed, almost courtly speaking style and jowly stuffed-animal features, the twinkle in his eye perpetually giving his game away. (Like Bill Clinton, he was the sort of politician who brought to the class struggle the same skills he'd developed for years in the ass struggle.) Even today, there's an unsettling fervency to the hatred of Young among certain white ex-Detroiters, who will tell you Coleman Young ruined this city with such venom it's impossible not to see Young as a proxy for every black Detroiter who walks the halls of their old high schools or sleeps in the bedrooms of their childhood homes. (original emphasis)

I got a personal kick out of reading Detroit City is the Place to Be because Binelli and I share some background, however serendipitous. As a longtime Detroiter myself, I know many of the subjects Binelli interviewed, especially in the arts and culture. We  grew up nearby one another in the working-class suburbs of the northeast side, both first-generation sons of Italian immigrants. My blue-eyed soul band, The Delray Blues, played a homecoming gig at the Catholic high school Binelli attended (although it was slightly before his time). My dad, a meat cutter, was a customer of Binelli's Uncle Dave, who owned a knife-sharpening business. In fact, my father still uses a carving knife he got from Dave Binelli decades ago; I cut my index finger deeply on it when I was a kid and still have the scar. In Detroit, there are only two degrees of separation, not the six made famous by the play and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

While the book for the most part is very well researched, there are a few factual errors that need to be corrected. Community activist, social theorist, and local legend Grace Lee Boggs got her PhD in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1940, not Yale, which although it had allowed women to take certain graduate-level classes over the years didn't officially go co-ed until 1969. The vehicle fished from the water at the confluence of the Rouge and Detroit Rivers as part of international art star (and Bjork partner) Matthew Barney's performance project KHU, based on Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, wasn't the Pontiac Trans Am driven off the Belle Isle Bridge earlier in the piece but a 1967 Chrysler Imperial. (A third vehicle, a Ford Crown Victoria, was featured in the final act of the performance so that all the Big Three car makers could be represented. For my Brooklyn Rail review of Barney's performance, click here.) The reference to Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd with regard to the garish neon light installation on the exterior of the Motor City Casino is surely meant to be Dan Flavin. Those inaccuracies say more about the current state of copyediting than they do authorial oversight.

The book is great on reportage but falls short on providing insight into the larger context. That's not really Binelli's fault per se but rather a function of journalism in general. Journalism privileges the first-person testimonial above all. ("Who" is the first term in the journalist's mantra.) Structural analysis only comes in here and there if at all. ("Why" is the last of the five "W's". "How" is tacked onto the mantra as kind of an afterthought.) While Detroit City is the Place to Be excels at providing a street-level snapshot of the D in its latter-day manifestation, the topic still warrants more thoughtful consideration. Binelli does cite one of the best histories out there, Thomas Sugrue's award-winning Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, which sees the city's current travails as an outcome of race relations and the attendant housing and job discrimination that, among other things, helped foster disinvestment in the city and its ultimate abandonment by industry seeking to diminish union influence in no small measure by using race as its cover. (For more background on that strategy in American business history, see David R. Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.) But to really understand how Detroit got to its present state, you need to know about the change from what's called the Fordist to the post-Fordist economy.

River Rouge tool and die works, 1941. (Photo: Library of Congress, public domain.)

Fordism, as the term implies, is named for auto pioneer Henry Ford. Founded on the productive capacity of mass manufacturing, the Fordist system pays high wages in return for high output, allowing workers to share in the rising tide of goods and services of the modern factory system. In the early days, it helped Ford increase productivity some ten times while reducing employee turnover and at the same time halving car prices, all the while enabling him to become one of the richest men in world history. It relies on vertical integration, the direct control of the mechanisms of value creation at every step. (Ford's River Rouge Plant saw raw materials -- iron ore, rubber, fabric, etc. -- come in at one end and completed Model A's come out the other. He owned every aspect of the process, including selling the waste material in the form of Kingsford Charcoal.) Ford hated the unions but eventually made peace with them as did the other major American automobile manufacturers. The period of what's known as High Fordism comes after the Second World War as a result of the Treaty of Detroit when unions agreed to halt annual strikes and give up certain bargaining rights in exchange for management's promise to provide secure employment, good wages, and benefits, including pensions. For decades, Detroit blue-collar workers enjoyed the highest living standards in the nation for their class.

Post-Fordism, by contrast, relies on flexible production and a disaggregated value chain, the ability of companies to shift work, and more importantly investment capital, around quickly in response to market opportunity. Technological innovations in information-processing and communications systems have enabled producers to manage operations in far-flung corners of the world in order to maximize profit under what we now call globalization. A response to the falling profit rates of Fordism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, post-Fordism relies on freeing capital from all restraints, including national borders and virtually anything else that might get in the way of making the most return on investment. If the colossal moving assembly lines of Henry Ford are the epitome of the system named for him, the representative environment of post-Fordism is the outsourced sweatshop and now the 24/7 work cycle. Part and parcel of the spread of the post-Fordist system has been the dismantling of its predecessor's Ground Zero, the city of Detroit.

The paperback edition of Detroit City is the Place to Be includes a new afterword written by the author in mid-2013 after the city filed for bankruptcy protection. Binelli moved back to the Big Apple after finishing the book and, one presumes, on to bigger and better things. Perhaps he found that Detroit city isn't the place to be after all, just the place to write about. No matter. The book is a pretty good read, especially if you know the backstory.

The long abandoned 3.5-million square foot Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, production site of one of America's premier automotive luxury brands, which went out of business in 1958. (Photo: Albert Duce. Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA 3.0.)

Update January 8, 2014: This post was revised to reflect Samuel Pope's note that completed Model T's were not produced at the Rouge Plant, only parts. The Rouge wasn't finished until 1928 at which point the Model T was no longer in production. The Model A was the first vehicle to be manufactured from raw materials to finished product at the Rouge. Thank you, Sam, for the correction.

Washed in Dirt: Steve Hughes's Stupor

Quite often when I read mainstream American social science, especially of the "quantoid" variety, I'm reminded as to how much I appreciate literature. While acknowledging the importance of objective data collection and analysis in distinguishing social facts from all-too-fallible everyday perceptions, I also can't help thinking that deeper, perhaps more significant meaning goes missing in the process. This occurred to me again recently as I perused the latest issue of the zine called Stupor, which for more than 15 years has surveyed the inner terrains of the shell-shocked victims of the class war known as neoliberalism.

Stupor was started in New Orleans in the spring of 1995 by writer and construction-business sole proprietor Steve Hughes and his friend Bill Rohde. It was originally supposed to be a vehicle for authors to publish experimental, confessional material. Not not longer after, Hughes relocated to Hamtramck, Michigan, a mostly Eastern European enclave almost completely surrounded by the city of Detroit and once home to the now-demolished Dodge Main Plant, a massive automotive manufacturing facility that competed with Henry Ford's River Rouge Complex as a paragon of vertically integrated mass production.

With the move, came the conversion of Stupor into Hughes's solo project. Instead of publishing stories written by others, he began writing all of the stories himself, using anecdotes he collected from people he met or conversations he overheard in working-class bars, construction worksites, and elsewhere he came upon people talking.

As is typical of the genre, the early issues of Stupor are crude cut-and-paste affairs, produced in small quantities using one-color quick-printers and extremely low budgets. (According to the "History" section of the zine's website, the first four issues of 1000 each were all published for the cost of two cases of beer.) With experience and the capabilities afforded by newer improvements in desktop publishing technology, the production values have been raised somewhat, but not to the level where one would call them slick. More recent issues have been done in collaboration with visual artists who interact with the author to create thematic mashups of image and text, form and content. The narrow, vertical format (the common letter-size sheet folded in half lengthwise) is intended to make the publication suitable for display on top of the toilet tank.

By the same token, the subject matter revels in all manners of abjection, chronicling the usually humiliating misadventures of those some might label a clueless pack of losers, but who I interpret as merely hapless unfortunates trying to cobble together some semblance of a life in an age of severely diminished expectations. (And there's arguably no more iconic place for these hardscrabble social bricoleurs to do it in than among the ruins of the modernist utopia that is latter-day Detroit. One of my favorite Stupor lines that perfectly encapsulates the situation: "How can I jump, when I'm already falling?") Rendered in the first person, each story is identified only by the gender and hometown of the putative narrator.

The newest issue carries the theme "Washed in Dirt" and it was done in collaboration with international art star Matthew Barney, who Hughes had met when the artist was in Detroit two years ago to work on a performance piece titled KHU, the second of a seven-part performance cycle inspired by Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings. (For my review of the event published in the Brooklyn Rail, click here.) With its consistently typeset font, neat, unbroken text columns, and color images throughout, the package seems a little un-Stuporish to me, a little too tidy and professional, especially given the theme. But the stories don't disappoint, especially "Male, Clinton Township," an episode about a young man "spiraling into a pit of impurity" with his Bible-study partner. The centerpiece drawing by Barney, part of the KHU performance documentation, depicts the effluence of the City of Detroit sewage system at the intersection of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers, spreading out at the foot of the ecologically challenged Zug Island, to form a shitty brown triangle of eddying water current that also reads as a thatch of pubic hair, is another nice element.

Many statistics can be and have been compiled to represent the ebb and tide of various flows -- of capital, of population, jobs, home occupancy rates, etc. -- on Detroit, patterns of what these days free-marketers call "creative destruction." Stupor limns what it feels like to be left floundering in the wake of that process.

Click here to listen to an interview with Steve Hughes on the "Washed in Dirt" issue of Stupor done in collaboration with Matthew Barney, which originally aired on public radio.

Grace Lee Boggs on the Next American Revolution

Above: Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige discuss The Next American Revolution at the Brecht Forum in NYC

Grace Lee Boggs has been part of pretty much every progressive movement of the modern age. At 95, she shows little sign of slowing down. In her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, she lays out how we can make real that other world the slogans tells us is possible. My review of it is posted on the current events blog Deliberately Considered. (Click here to read it.) The book is required reading for anyone interested in the future of Detroit in the age of late capital and especially for cultural producers (some of whom go by the appellation "artists") who want to engage the public sphere.







Other useful links:
Grace Lee Boggs and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster discussing the financial meltdown of 2008 on Demcracy Now! (September 17, 2009)

Grace Lee Boggs on Bill Moyers Journal (June 15, 2007)

Not DIY, but DIO

Community orchard in Detroit (Photo by aur2899, downloaded from Flickr, Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike 2.0 license)

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran an article by food editor Christine Muhlke about urban farming that included coverage of what's happening these days in the D, AKA the town formerly known as the Motor City. The article dealt primarily with the idea of food communities of which Detroit was cited as the premier example. In fact, the article was illustrated with a photo of a vegetable garden being tended in an inner-city Detroit neighborhood with the requisite vista of ruin porn in the background.

Food communities rely on reciprocal, and in many respects mutually obligated, relationships among producers, distributors, consumers, and everyone else associated with bringing nature's bounty to the table. It's the opposite of the system of alienated transactions that occurs under commodity capitalism where exchange is anonymous, self-interested, and contingent. English historian E.P. Thompson terms this other way of circulating goods and services "the moral economy," which actually was what prevailed in the premodern era. And as Muhlke notes, it's not about the individual  but the group -- Do It Ourselves rather than Do It Yourself. (You don't really do anything yourself; we're all embedded in this thing called society for better or worse.)

It's also important to recognize that the urban agriculture movement isn't a utopian escape into the past. Rather it's more properly related to the alternatives that have arisen in response to modernity as it's currently unfolding under the global regime of neoliberalism, or what Tony Negri and Michael Hardt in their book Commonwealth term "altermodernity." Altermodernity seeks to reclaim the commons, that space that is neither public nor private but collectively shared, something I've noted as a significant factor in recent Detroit art. (I won't rehearse those ideas again in this post but click here, here, and here if you're interested in more on the topic.)

To this idea of food community, I'd like to add a similar notion, namely, aesthetic community. It's an idea put forth by French philosopher Jacques Ranciere, for one. As he notes in a 2006 lecture, the aesthetic community isn't a community of aesthetes but a community of sense, that is, a network of relationships of people and things that anticipates new forms of socialization, of being-together, in this case where there isn't a separation between something called art and something called life, a vision of the possibilities of existence after the fall of the Fordist system of mass manufacturing and commodity consumption.

Aesthetic community is something my second-year seminar students in the CCS MFA program are mapping out in the research they're conducting this term at The Russell Industrial Center. As they negotiate the cavernous 2.2 million square foot facility surveying the various artists, designers, crafts persons, artisans, and other cultural producers at work there, the term they encounter time again and again is "community." A woodworker offers framing solutions for the seemingly odd installation needs of a graphic artist down the hall, an illustrator hooks up a fashion designer with a photographer on another floor, a documentary filmmaker provides performance space for an otherwise homeless underground theater group, the whole motley crew gets together to put on a public showcase whatever wackiness they're up to, and so on. One informant terms it "functional anarchy," and it's an apt description of the way things work in art and culture in Detroit.

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Click here to view a video posted this summer on The Guardian's website on urban agriculture in Detroit. Also, below is a 2008 interview with Jeanette Pierce of Inside Detroit that really stresses the community aspect of urban farming:



Here is a clip of Nicolas Bourriand, curator of 2009 Triennial at the Tate Gallery in London and also the guy who gave us the concept of relational aesthetics, talking about altermodernity in art.

Matthew Barney's Heart of Darkness

Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler; KHU, October 2nd, 2010; performance still (Photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York)

Back when I was a suit guy I was the client of a local ad agency that toward the end of our relationship sold out to Omnicom, the global holding company that is parent to BBDO, DDB Needham, and a host of other Madison Avenue powerhouses. As typically happens with a change in control, the new management brought in its own team, in this case from Chicago, to manage the creative department. We were given the requisite dog-and-pony show to demonstrate the new regime's creative chops. The two-man team had worked on a number of big brands, including Budweiser, Pepsi, and GE. As I watched a set of spots shilling beer, shot in Jamaica and featuring a bevy of bikini-clad women getting soaked in a waterfall, I remember thinking that what made it big-time advertising wasn't the creative direction so much as the size of the production budget. I couldn't help thinking about that as I watched Matthew Barney's all-day endurance test, "Khu," act two of his work in progress Ancient Evenings, based on Norman Mailer's 1983 novel of the same title.

Of course, it feels premature to be called upon to render an opinion on a work that isn't finished. What's more, what we witnessed this past Saturday was only a small aspect of the piece, three segments of what will become a feature-length film in a larger series of productions. As opposed to conventional commercial filmmaking, the Barney performance, created in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, was high risk: there was no opportunity for retakes no matter what disaster might befall it on location. But even in its admittedly fragmented state, "Khu" was a testament in some measure to the aesthetic power of money and along with it celebrity.

It's been rumored that the budget for "Khu" was $5 million, raised from private sources, and certainly a good portion of it was on display last Saturday. Dozens of people came from across the country and from Europe, though the majority were denizens of the New York artworld. The day started at 11 am with brunch for 200 in the DIA Great Hall after a bit of schmoozing in the Rivera Court. We then moved on to the Auditorium where we saw a rough cut of the first part of the film, which deals with the passage, taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, of the deceased into the underworld as part of the journey over to the afterlife. It also riffs on two of Barney's thematic characters, artist James Lee Byars who was born in Detroit and Harry Houdini who died here. The film features some breathtaking images of postindustrial Motown in winter. And I found myself thinking of Scott Hocking's photographs of the same subject and wondering what wonders he could perform if blessed with a Barney-type budget. (What he does with stuff he finds just lying around is amazing enough.)

We were herded into charter buses to make our own journey to the Western Lands, if in much-less jazzier digs than the classic gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Barney had driven off the Belle Isle Bridge in the film in homage to one of Houdini's most famous escape tricks, to arrive at an abandoned factory downriver. We took a serpentine route to get there, winding around the central business district and then on through Southwest Detroit. I sat next to Whitney Museum curator Chrissie Iles and was able to give her a bit of history of the city and its place in the rise and fall of the Fordist capitalist system. A Brit, she took pause at the idea that a culture could and did consider a major metropolis, and all its inhabitants and infrastructure, a disposable commodity. (Wasn't it the Motor City that came up with the idea of planned obsolescence?) We also touched on what I've been calling the art of the commons, the work being done these days by Detroit artists who are appropriating the city's abandoned space and materials and refashioning them into the constructs of an aesthetic community based on the pure will to art and a lot of sweat equity.

Belitta Woods in KHU by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, October 2nd, 2010; performance still (Photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York)

The factory was the site of a performance that heralded good things to come. As we walked in, a group of workers were stationed at a bench constructing stringed instruments out of sheet metal, which were handed over to musicians as they were finished. A soloist became part of a duet, then a trio, then a quartet, quintet, and so on up to a chamber orchestra of 15, all the time droning over an arythmic background of percussion emanating from the hammering of the assembly of more instruments. I thought of my FKF (fellow Kresge Fellow) Frank Pahl, whose compositions use similar bootstrapping techniques. (Part of the local musical contingent Barney and Bepler contracted with to help with the project, Pahl at least got a check out of it.) The factory itself was spectacular: moldering gray brick and steel girders, sooty cracked windows covered with years of grime, a boiler in the back corner oozing who knows what toxic effluent, and a large pulley suspended above us with its metal hook dangling down from the two-story high ceiling like the Sword of Damocles. With the wind and rain that were starting to well up, the chilly atmosphere was the perfect foil for a soulful aria performed by P-Funk vocalist Belita Woods that lit up the room.

The next leg required us to cross a muddy brownfield and go down a riverbank to board a concrete barge for what turned out to be a kind of Conradesque journey into hell. The weather reports predicting clearing skies later in the day were wrong, and there's nothing like sitting on a makeshift wet steel-girder bleacher for a few hours while slowly coursing down a river in the bone-chilling rain. The real-life boat workers piloting us along must have thought we were nuts, especially when the barge made its stop in the middle of the channel near the Ford Rouge complex for the second performance segment where we were surrounded by water rescue craft commandeered from Homeland Security upon which stood sections of sax players honking away while a large crane pulled the wreckage of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial out of the water and placed it on deck to be pulled apart by a keening female chorus dressed as FBI agents, one of whom straddled the engine block with her trousers down after having inserted snakes into the cylinder holes and rubbed slimy water on her inner thighs. (And we wonder why the average person balks at public financing for the arts.)

Seriously though, this is where the narrative action actually began to unfold, with the Chrysler representing Osiris, God of the Afterlife, who is also associated with the cycles of nature, especially the annual flooding of the Nile, the lifeblood of ancient Egyptian civilization. The FBI agent, played by Aimee Mullins, represented Isis, who according to later mythology retrieved Osiris's dead body from the Nile, revived it, fitted it out with a magic phallus, and conceived Horus, a deity with many associations in the Egyptian pantheon. Certainly one might interpret this segment as referring to the creative process, where the shamanistic figure known as an "Artist" conjures dead matter and transforms it into sometimes baffling sacred objects (Barney's primary among them) to be worshiped by the adepts of modern secular-humanist society. The music in this segment evoked none other than legendary Detroit jazz saxophonist Faruq Z. Bey, who was listed in the credits for "Khu" as simply "himself" (and who if there's any justice in this world will be among the 2012 Kresge Fellows for the performing arts).

Eugene Perry and Herbert Perry as Set in KHU by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, October 2nd, 2010; performance still (Photo: Hugo Glendinning, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York)

The final segment took the longest to get to both in terms of travel time and the wait once we arrived on site, a decommissioned steel mill on the river in Trenton across from Grosse Ile. By then the temperature had dropped and the wind coming off the water had picked up as had the rain. We left the Chrysler in a heap on the landing behind us when we debarked. A group of workers set to cutting it up with blowtorches as we followed a 2001 Crown Victoria up a graded-earth incline to a viewing area. We had been issued disposable ponchos as part of our tour bags, as the invitation email said "in case of light rain." Basically oversized Baggies, they weren't much help out on the Detroit River or standing atop the platforms that overlooked the scene of musicians, singers, foundry workers, and various extras inhabiting a postindustrial inferno that might be described as a mashup of Heronymus Bosch, Cecil B. De Mille, and Sun Ra.

Before us stood a large pit that had been fashioned into an open-air mold for a bas-relief sculpture. Trenches led from the mold up a hill to connect with five furnaces, spewing fire and sending glowing embers into the air, being stoked top and bottom by attendants either clad in silver suits or more conventional foundry wear. The intention obviously appeared to be to feed the Chrysler bit by bit into the furnaces and recycle its material for use in creating a new sculpture, another instance of creative transmutation, turning base metal into artistic gold. Somewhere down there was another FKF and my colleague at College for Creative Studies, the sculptor Chido Johnson, though I couldn't pick him out among those scurrying about. Towering behind and above it all were five 10-story steel silos on top of which stood individual figures dressed in gold lame', another reference to Byars who used gold leaf in his installation and performance work. Stationary sentinels over the scene, how they survived up there, I don't know.

Attached to each silo was a cable that ran down to 55-gallon-drum anchors at the foot of the hill. The entire apparatus was wired for sound into a kind of enormous Aeolian harp. It emitted a vibrating drone, augmented by performers who bowed and plucked the cables or battered the drums into a relentless demonic cacophony. FKF Joel Peterson was listed in the credits but again couldn't be picked out among players.

After what seemed an eternity, though I'm told it was about an hour and 15 minutes or so, the furnaces reached a temperature that allowed the pieces of cut-up Chrysler that had been fed into them to finally melt and the molten metal to be released in a flash of smoke and fire into the trenches, sending yellow hot streams down toward the mold. As the molten metal flowed into the mold, the guy next to me remarked, "That sculpture is going to pay for this whole day." The rush of heat from below was a blessed relief against the elements but the rain meeting hot metal caused flare ups that were considered dangerous, and so we were quickly escorted away back down the slippery slope, in total darkness now, to wait for the buses that would take us to the gigantic factory shed that loomed in the background where tables had been set up and dinner and drinks were being served.

Another CCS colleague who was present, Michael Stone Richards, recently formed a critical theory study group at the school whose first order of business has been to discuss Herbert Marcuse's last book The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. I felt the imperative to get this blog entry out (sorry for the delay, BTW!) so I missed this week's meeting. But it seems to me that Marcuse's ideas have some relevance in thinking about Barney and the performance.

For Marcuse, art is authentic and revolutionary not based on its content, as early orthodox Marxists like Georg Lukacs believed, or "pure" form, as later formalists like Clement Greenberg held. Instead it is tied to the way content is given form through what Marcuse terms "the redeeming character of catharsis." Art is radical where it transcends social determination and frees itself from established reality, where it then can be recognized as embodying truth that has otherwise been suppressed. An example he uses midway through the book is the soup can of Andy Warhol (who strikes me as more and more important with every passing day).

Warhol's soup can, especially in its serial iteration, announces art as the commodity it has always been in modern Western culture. But more than that it reveals the heart of a reality deracinated by capitalist relations at every level, from the most prosaic practices of everyday life such as family food preparation to the most rarified experiences of high culture like individual aesthetic contemplation. It also supplants the "natural genius" at the center of Romantic ideology and replaces it with the artist as a kind of commodity-sign, an effect of a productive semiotic system, the "artworld" as longtime Warhol interpreter Arthur Danto would have it. ("Andy Warhol" is a registered trademark, USPTO Reg. No. 3707078.)

Similarly, Barney's work, arguably more than that of any other, reveals contemporary art as the potlatch of what Leslie Sklair of the London School of Economics calls "the transnational capitalist class." And like the often ruinous ritual gift-giving among tribal chieftains of the Pacific Northwest, Barney's art grows in stature the more conspicuous its waste. It challenges all comers to a epic game of liar's poker with ever-increasing stakes. (It's no accident that many of today's biggest art collectors are hedge fund managers and other financial speculators.) The guiding light to understanding this is apostate surrealist, armchair ethnographer, and philosophical pornographer Georges Bataille. In the introduction to volume I of The Accursed Share he writes:

The living organism...ordinarily receives more energy than necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth,...it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

The international regime of neoliberal economics, politics, and culture has driven more and more concentrations of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the excess accumulations of which Barney's art then gives vent. It's an amazing spectacle all in all, and whether it's glorious or catastrophic depends on your point of view. In any event, "Khu" has come and gone and the big chiefs have folded up their tents and moved on to the next festival. It'll be interesting to see what ritual of expenditure Barney can come up with to top this one.

Coda

Two other takes on the event are worth checking out: Mark Stryker of The Detroit Free Press was first out the gate, publishing his piece on Monday, October 4. New York-based writer Linda Yablonsky posted her story on Thursday, October 7, on Artforum's website. A bunch of people kvetched about Stryker's piece as it circulated around Facebook at the beginning of the week. Quite frankly, I thought a lot of that criticism was misguided. Given the deadline and word count he was given, he gave a pretty accurate reading of the experience and folks are tripping if they think we're ever going to get "big think" criticism published in either of the Detroit dailies. Stryker is certainly capable, but the editors just don't think that the average reader is interested, and looking at it from their perspective I can kind of see their point (which doesn't make it any less loathsome). It was on the front page for chrissakes, so get over it. On the other hand, folks seemed more forgiving of Yablonsky and I thought her piece was a classic example of the we-don't-get-out-much-west-of-the-Hudson-River myopia which characterizes that most provincial of people, your average Manhattanite. One of the more amusing things she said was to identify the small cadre of Detroiters on the scene as being present to provide "local color" for the visiting cosmopolitans. What's especially funny about that is that all three of the people mentioned in that very sentence, Michelle Perron, John Corbin, and Rick Rogers, had been Manhattanites at different points in their lives before settling down in the D. (And you can count me in that bunch, too, for that matter, though a couple of my years were spent in God's country AKA Brooklyn.)

David Byrne Does Detroit

David Byrne at the Future of Music Conference in 2006. (Photo: Fred von Lohman, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

Former Talking Heads frontman (and current Cindy Sherman boyfriend) David Byrne was in Detroit last week working on a film being directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Byrne's blog entry describing his experiences in the D "Don't Forget the Motor City" is well worth checking out. In contrast to some of the recent reporting on the city's arts scene, Byrne really did his homework. He gives some excellent history, makes some pretty astute comments on contemporary politics and culture, and posts some really nice pictures, many of which he took. My favorite shot is the one of pheasants grazing on an empty lot near downtown. Another striking image is a Google Maps download showing a piece of the city grid with the infrastructure pretty much intact but with the cleared sites where buildings once stood mostly reverted to open field.

One thing that helps give Byrne's post the detail that others have lacked is something anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls "thick description," a field research technique that stresses not only observable activity but context as well. Byrne was here for the better part of a week and spent a good bit of time tooling around the city using what's become a major mode of transportation here, a bike. (An avid cycling advocate, Byrne's recent book Bicycle Diaries is just out in paperback.) He took in the city in slo-mo working from a street-level view. He was one of some 3200 people who took part in Tour De Troit last Saturday.

One of Byrne's projects for Sorrentino's film was an installation of his piece Playing the Building, which in this case used the old Michigan Theater to capture atmospheric and architectural vibrations and convert them into ambient music by hooking up sound feeds from various parts of the structure into a keyboard apparatus. While it bears obvious reference to the work of avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage as channeled through Brian Eno, Playing the Building has a site-specific aspect and musical genealogy that is strictly Byrne. Click here to download a free podcast from iTunes of Byrne's TED Talk on the influence of architecture on music.

"Through African Eyes" from a Different Perspective

After the perceived bashing he gave the Detroit Institute of Art's remodeling in 2007, New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Holland Cotter was pretty much Public Enemy #1 among the local cultural community. (Although I thought the review was fairly balanced and that those who didn't were thin skinned.) Cotter redeemed himself with what amounted to a rave review of the Detroit Institutes of Arts exhibition "Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 to the Present," published on the front page of the Times Weekend Arts section on the eve of the opening. In his conclusion, Cotter notes:

Who would have imagined, even just a few years ago, that such histories and energies could have been found in art that most of us never knew existed? Enough to say that if you get a thrill from seeing things you’ve never seen and thinking thoughts you’ve never thought, Detroit is a good place to be these days.

While I appreciate the kudos as much as anyone, I wonder where Cotter has been?

In 1984 (of all years), the Museum of Modern Art created a furor with its exhibition looking at things through the other end of the telescope, "'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," which made a stop at the DIA. The show was savaged by both art historians, among them Hal Foster, Thomas McEvilley, and Lucy Lippard, and anthropologists such as James Clifford. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur C. Danto (a Detroiter and Wayne State alum) also weighed in at the time against the show's concept in The Nation.

The groundwork for this critique was set a decade previous by the poststructuralist thinking emanating out of France, which had begun to be translated into English in the 1970s. Mining similar philosophical sources, postcolonialism provided another set of tools, in particular Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism as well the legacy of African writing, dating back into the 1950s, of authors such as Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. Published not long after the dust-up over the MOMA show had sort of settled, Clifford's important book The Predicament of Culture: 20th-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art features on its cover a mirror-image photograph of a male performer wearing a "white man" costume as part of a 1982 Igbo masquerade in southwest Nigeria. (See cover picture detail above.)

I couldn't help but think of all this as I walked through "From African Eyes" the other day.

First, I kept going back to something that came up during a job talk for the Africanist art history search at Wayne State last year. We had listened to an excellent presentation on East African architecture but I kept wondering what made it art history as opposed to say visual anthropology. My colleague at CCS, Michael Stone Richards, apparently had the same thought and beat to me to the punch in posing the question. I don't think it was adequately answered but I think the uncertainty characterizes what goes on in the disciplines these days and is embodied in this show.

To be sure, the installation of "Through African Eyes" could have just as easily been found in a natural history museum. For the most part, the works were installed often in groups in vitrines set against the walls, which were painted in earth tones. Most of the wall labels and the narration of the acoustic guide mainly addressed questions of social context rather than aesthetics. Interestingly, I also recalled the installation of craft in the contemporary galleries of the museum, as if craft artists were similarly "close to the earth," working manually as opposed to photographers, who for the most part still find themselves kept in the basement, regardless of time period.

I was further reminded of another comment MSR made as part of the aforementioned encounter, to wit that "art is an 18-century German philosophical concept whose usefulness may have run its course." (Detroit graphic designer Ed Fella made a similar observation years back in a bumper sticker riffing off the DIA's then slogan: "Art is an ethnocentric cultural construct that you don't gotta have.") Many theorists, again Danto, Regis Debray, and others working in the area now known as visual culture studies, see us as being in a period after the end of art. Indeed, Esther Pasztory in her 2005 book Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art notes that only a very small amount of what human creativity has produced around the globe and across the millennia is technically "art."

That doesn't make the show less interesting or valid. In fact, that we now may be living under "the regime of the visual" as opposed to "the regime of art," to use Debray's terminology, isn't necessarily a bad thing.

More intriguing perhaps is to think about what else might be going on with this show.

One thing that struck me as odd was that the primary voice on the acoustic guide was that of DIA Director Graham Beal. With his mellifluous British-accented voice, straight out of Masterpiece Theater, Beale was a somewhat incongruous guide to 500 years of colonial exploitation and indigenous resistance as represented in the objects on display.

This led me to another Brit, the sociologist John B. Thompson, whose work on ideology is useful in this regard. One of the primary ways that ideology filters information is through dissimulation, in particular using displacement to move thinking from the present situation to the safely distant, physical and chronological. In the here and now, in Detroit and elsewhere in America, we're shredding the social fabric, rolling back the progress made by the hard-earned efforts of decades of social movements, and clawing back the wealth distributed to the broader levels of society, but in the there and then, we're sorry and, hey, we feel your pain. Our bad! And by the way, don't forget to exit through the gift shop.