RIP Peter Williams

Peter Williams (1952-2021) Photo: Kathy F. Atkinson

On August 19, we lost one of the great Detroit painters, Peter Williams. He had been in and out of the hospital recently and this time he didn't make it.

I remember meeting Peter when first he came to Detroit. At the time he was doing abstract paintings, kind of in the manner of Sean Scully, and quite frankly I wasn't particularly interested in them. As time wore on and he became increasingly embedded in the city, his work took on a more soul-searching character. He began to question issues of identity, all the while slapping on the pigment with increasing mastery.

My intersection with Peter's work was heightened by a class I took in winter 2001 with cultural critics Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall at the New School for Social Research in New York on representations of race and gender in American culture. One of the books we read was Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character, published in 1931. (It remains a classic and everyone interested in American folkways needs to read it.) In it, Rourke discusses the three archetypes of American humor: the Yankee peddler, the backswoodsman, and the minstrel. 

It was this last archetype that resonated with me in relation to Peter's work. It's important to note that Rourke's understanding of minstrelsy predates its appropriation by white culture particularly after the Civil War. Minstrelsy, in Rourke's view, was originally a subversion, a mechanism for enslaved Blacks to "put Massah on," much like the Cakewalk that made fun of white body carriage only to then be picked up by whites who weren't hip to the dis. I saw the reclamation and reversal of the white minstrel trope to be key to what Peter was up to and my suspicion was confirmed in conversations we had during a solo exhibition he happened to be having at Revolution Gallery. The result was the essay published in the November/December 2001 issue of New Art Examiner titled "Peter Williams's Black Humor." (I have uploaded a scan to Google Drive, which can be viewed here.) 

"Peter Williams's Black Humor" remains one of the best things I have ever written, though the beginning and ending were fucked up by bad edits in part because I was communicating from Brooklyn via fax with NAE literally as the smoke was still billowing over the East River in the wake of September 11. I was thrilled when the next year a reference to the article was contained in the catalog for the 2002 Whitney Biennial in which two of Peter's works appeared.

One of the saddest things about Peter's passing is that he was still on an upward swing. In 2020, he won an Artists' Legacy Foundation Award and more recently a Guggenheim. He also had simultaneous shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Trinosophes, and Paul Kotula Gallery. 

There was some comfort in knowing he was out there in the world, working away (he once claimed to be "hardest working artist in Detroit") and cutting through all the bullshit. I will miss him.

The Art of Rick Vian in Retrospect

Detroit artist Rick Vian was invited to mount a retrospective show of his work at Janice Charach Gallery in West Bloomfield. Rick asked if I would write something about the show for distribution at the gallery. Below is the essay I wrote for the exhibition whose title is "Rick Vian: Keeping a Wet Edge." The show was on view in late fall 2016.

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Among the famous quotes of influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann is: “I bring the landscape home with me.” Nature is the origin of art, Hofmann maintains, as articulated in the connection between the world-as-experienced and its expression in even the most abstract forms of line, shape, and color. The phenomenology of perception—the embodied process of seeing, its translation from retina through the brain to the hand, and from there onto canvas—is the foundation of Rick Vian’s evolution as artist.

Perception, as the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, is an interactive process. As much as the mind is a receptor of visual phenomena, it is at the same time the organizer of it. Through his observations over the four-plus decades of his career as an artist, Vian has discerned patterns—in particular as he notes in his personal statement—of “networks that underlie and organize perception, and are inherent in the structure of the world we perceive.”

Rick Vian, The Vastness, 1977. Oil on canvas (All images courtesy of the artist.)

This is evident from the very beginning in works of the 1970s, such as those of the “Ellipses” and “Grid Projections” series and more obviously in the “Grid Landscapes.” In each case, the grid, rooted as it were in Vian’s observation of the growth and intertwining of tree limbs, provides an underlying structure from which patterns, shapes, and colors emerge, keyed to source inspiration in water, sky, and fauna.

How structures derived from nature find their way into the built environment can be seen in the series of abstract works completed in 1990s, many inspired by Vian’s experience as a commercial painter in industrial facilities. Spectator Sox (1999) uses colors derived from industrial code conventions for signifying things such as danger, safety hazards, and boundary demarcations, conventions that in many cases have been derived from the study of human psychology.

Spectactor Sox, 1999.

Vian has noted that he has embraced abstraction to allow for freedom of expression but that it needs to be grounded in visual reality. As part of maintaining that connection over the past twenty years, Vian has executed a number of highly representational paintings of the natural environs of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. These paintings are highly finished and accomplished works of art in and of themselves that also serve as phenomenological investigations into nature that inform the more abstract works especially of the last decade. (It should also be noted that however “realistic” the representational paintings seem to be, they are in fact constructions with the sky observed on one day often appearing in a painting of a tree observed on another.)

Gigantess, 2004.

In these mature paintings of the 2000s, Vian most fully realizes Hofmann’s aesthetic notion of nature embodied in the artist’s very being. “The Gitche Gumee” series inspired by the sublime force of Lake Superior and landscape-derived paintings such as the magisterial Poplar Trees in Fall (2013) and Sky in the Water II (2015) are tours-de-force of the painter’s art.

Through a lifetime of observation, reflection, and response, Rick Vian has given us new ways of seeing and understanding the world. 

Poplar Trees in Fall, 2013.

Gilbert Silverman: In Memoriam

Ed Fella, Cover for the Detroit Focus Gallery exhibition catalog "Gil Silverman Selects," 1983. (Collection Vince Carducci.)

Long-time art patron and collector Gilbert Silverman died June 13 at age 91. The only obituary I saw was in Crain's Detroit Business. (Surprised but then again not that the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press didn't cover it.) It focused primarily on Gil's identity as a real estate developer, mentioning only briefly his arts advocacy in the form of board memberships at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Those in the Detroit artworld who knew Gil, as well as those who only knew of him, knew he was much more than that. He was one of the major figures in Detroit's cultural history, dominating the last quarter of the twentieth century in the same way Detroit blue-blood W. Hawkins Ferry dominated the period after the Second World War and into the 1970s.

For a number of years in the 2000s, Gil and his life partner, the ever-graceful Lila who survives him, were represented on the ARTnews list of the world's top 200 collectors, primarily for their holdings in Fluxus and Conceptual art, although they collected widely in other areas as well. (I am particularly fond of the "Instruction Drawings," a collection of some 800 working drawings, installation instructions, musical scores, fabrication notes, and other items by the likes of Yoko Ono, Sol Lewitt, Dennis Oppenheim, John Cage, Andy Goldsworthy, and other Pop, Op, Conceptual, and Earth Art creators.) The Silverman Fluxus holdings, generally considered the largest and most important trove of its kind in the world, is surveyed in the catalogue raisonne Fluxus Codex, edited by Jon Hendricks (Abrams, 1988). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008, along with an archive of thousands of support items, including artists' correspondence and journals and related books and catalogues. Duplicates from the collection are also held by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In addition to the depth of the Silverman collection was its adventurousness. For years, there were only two collectors in the United States who owned the work of controversial avant-garde muckracker Hans Haacke, and the Silvermans were one of them. Haacke's work in the Silverman collection, the 1981 Der Pralinenmeister, a deconstruction of the machinations of German chocolate mogul Peter Ludwig, who leveraged corporate welfare and a low-wage pool of immigrant labor to expand his business empire and his art collection, was a highlight of the otherwise predictable, if bankable assemblage of trophy pieces in the 1981 DIA exhibition "Contemporary Art in Detroit Collections," which I reviewed for Detroit Focus Quarterly (Vol. 1, No. 2). (Der Pralinenmeister is still on view in the Silverman home in Bloomfield Hills.)

Like many people, I have my Gil Silverman stories, a couple of which I'd like to share in his memory.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I whiled away my day-job downtime by creating and sending out mail art and other ephemera. Some of it was documentation of the conceptual performance piece Getting Over at the Office (1987-2000), which I have written about. There was also a series of limited-edition postcards playing with language. ("Primitivism" in 20th-Century Linguistics,1985, for example, simply contained the words "No am Chomsky" typed in IBM Selectric sans serif font in the center.) Another series consisted of fake auction announcements appropriating the branding and graphic standards of Christie's auction house. Later editions in the series were branded "Chrispie's" with the heads of Snap, Crackle, and Pop in place of the portrait of founder James Christie that used to be above the name before the logo's modernization.

For a while I sold extra copies of these pieces at commodity prices—$18.95, $24.95, etc. Then one day I was in Susanne Hilberry Gallery (back when it was on the lower level of the 555 Building in downtown Birmingham) and I chanced upon a modest-sized Lucas Samaras pastel with a mid-five-figure price tag on it. I vowed to put an art-commodity price tag on the next work I submitted for exhibition. The opportunity came in 1992 as part of the Detroit Artists Market "Text and Image" show. I submitted a 1989 Christie's announcement titled American Art Since Elvis, a send up of Neoexpressionism, intending to put a $25,000 price tag on it. Before I handed it in my wife Sue suggested I reduce the price to $1500, commenting that anyone who knew me would know the joke but that at the same time someone might actually buy it.

Not long after the opening, I was having dinner with sculptor Gary Kulak and the "marvelous" art maven Mary Denison. Mary told me that she had talked to Gil Silverman who had seen my piece at the Artists Market. She said that he had really liked it but thought it was kind of expensive. I said to Mary (this is before the bottom dropped out of the art market in the mid-1990s): "You'd better tell Gil he should buy it now before the price goes up!" A few days later I got a call from Gerry Craig, who was DAM's director at the time, informing me that Gil had bought the piece and, as Michael Hall quipped when he heard about the transaction, that he had "paid retail."

When word got around about the sale, I was criticized by people who thought I had taken advantage of Gil and in so doing put the local art market at risk. But a couple of years later, he came up to me after a James Rosenquist lecture and introduced himself.

"You're Vince Carducci, aren't you," he said. "I'm Gil Silverman and I own some of your work."

"I know who you are," I said. "And I know you own my work."

He said with a laugh, "I must be the only asshole in Detroit who would pay what I did for that piece."

I said, "I don't know, I thought it was pretty astute."

He said, "Tell me the truth. You never expected to sell that piece at that price. Be honest. That money was like a gift from heaven."

I said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I did go out a buy a stereo with the money. But you'll be happy to know that there is a card on top of it that reads 'Gift of Lila and Gilbert Silverman.'"

He chuckled at that and we talked a little bit about the role of art collecting as a vent in the system of capital accumulation, a kind of potlatch of luxurious waste that establishes the sovereignty of the consumer. (I had been reading George Bataille's Accursed Share at that moment.)

Just then Lila walked up and asked what we were doing. Gil introduced me and told Lila that he had purchased one of my works and had it at the office, neglecting to ever tell her about it. It occurred to me that Gil indeed was sovereign, as Bataille had theorized, able to spend $1500 on impulse without checking with his spouse in the same way one of us might pick up a magazine or a cup of coffee on our way home. All those people who had criticized me really didn't understand who was in control. (To be sure, in 1983 the graphic designer Ed Fella did a catalog of an exhibition of artists selected by Gil, the cover of which was a photograph of them all caught in midair. Of that image, Ed said, "The collector says 'Jump!' and the artists say 'How high'?")

When I told the story of American Art Since Elvis to Paul Kotula, who at the time was managing Revolution Gallery in Ferndale, he thought that I should write up the narrative, mount it on the wall next to the stereo system, add a zero on the end of the price tag, and invite Gil in to see if he would buy it. We thought you could repeat that process with ever more extravagant purchases and keep adding zeros to see who blinked first—$1500, $15,000, $150,000, 1,500,000, 15,000,000, and so on. (Years later when studying with Jay Bernstein at The New School I read Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: "The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity" [p. 39]. That is, an artwork, as an autonomous object, is absolute exchange value without an iota of use value; therefore, no rational price can be assigned to it, as the contemporary art market so clearly demonstrates.) We never did do it, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that my piece went to MoMA as part of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives (File # VII.A.133).

The second, much-shorter story took place a few years later. I was still in my corporate-suit iteration, working as a marketing exec for a local financial institution that is now part of Bank of America.The company had recently been acquired in a cash buyout (not by BoA but by another organization based in Amsterdam) and a new CEO was in place. The company was getting an award from the Michigan State Housing Development Authority for its affordable housing efforts, and attending the awards dinner was one of the CEO's first public appearances. As an honoree, he was seated on dais next to Gil, who was then president of MSHDA. I was seated at a table off to the side with other representatives of the company.

As the story was later told to me, before things got started, Gil apparently turned to my CEO and said, "I'm Gil Silverman, president of MSHDA." My CEO said to Gil, "I'm Scott Heitmann, I'm the new CEO of Standard Federal." To which Gil said, "Standard Federal. You must work with Vince Carducci. He's the best artist in Detroit." I took it with a grain of salt, of course, thinking that Gil was being sociable and at the same time perhaps doling out a bit of puffery to bolster the value of his investment. (At a Friends of Modern Art panel discussion Gil once said that he never bought art as an investment, obviously so in my case, but that he did like to watch the auction returns to see the prices of the artists he owned go up. The Silverman Fluxus Collection and all of its archives were 100 percent donated to MoMA.)

Gil Silverman was quite a guy. He will be missed.

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Update: This post originally identified the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition of contemporary art in Detroit-area collections as "Detroit Collects." It also reported the exhibition as having taken place in 1982. This information has been corrected to identify the exhibition as "Contemporary Art in Detroit Collections" and the date as 1981.

Megan Heeres: The Artist as Invasive Species

In the summer of 2015, I wrote an essay for the catalog published by Simone DeSousa Gallery to document the solo exhibition "The More We Get Together" by Megan Heeres. I had long wanted to write something about Meg and was happy to finally have an opportunity to do so. Below is the text of the essay, which also corrects a misprint (my error not theirs) contained in the original. Copies of the catalog, which also includes a lot of good images and an essay by the redoubtable Sarah Rose Sharp, are available at the gallery or they can be ordered from the gallery's online store.

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Megan Heeres's "Invasive Paper Project" is a milestone in the artist's evolution. Begun in 2014, the "Invasive Paper Project," as its title conveys, uses fibers processed from invasive plants to create handmade paper products. From a more global perspective, it engages what French psychotherapist and philosopher Felix Guattari terms the three ecologies: mental, social, and environmental.

The "Invasive Paper Project" primarily uses three forms of so-called invasive plants commonly found in Detroit: phragmites, also known as the common reed, honeysuckle, an ornamental plant originating from Asia, and garlic mustard, an herb used in Europe for cooking and medicinal purposes. The plants have been harvested from various places around the city-parks, abandoned lots, and other green spaces of the once industrial colossus of Detroit now literally gone to seed. Each species requires different methods of processing to convert the raw fibers to pulp suitable for papermaking. Heeres has worked with several community organizations to harvest the plants and then used the materials to present papermaking demonstrations and workshops in her own facility, Threadbare Studios in Southwest Detroit, and at other locations around the city. In spring 2015, elements of the project were presented at Re:View (now Simone DeSousa) Gallery in the exhibition "The More We Get Together."

The "Invasive Paper Project" is a logical progression of Heeres's oeuvre out of the privileged sphere of the atelier and into the world. Heeres's earlier work, begun as a graduate student at Cranbrook Academy of Art, involved working with materials, processes, and time in order to explore situations of accretion (building up) and entropy (breaking down).

Megan Heeres, Home. HomGrown, 2012, installation view (source: Vimeo from Megan Heeres).

This is especially evident in the series "Material Mappings," which sets up situations for various materials to do what they will in response to time, gravity, and other environmental factors out of the artist's control. Home. HomeGrown, 2012, for example, filters various viscosities and colors of ink pumped up a tube and dripped through paper filters, which accumulate onto panels set on the floor, resulting in a series of aleatoric compositions created during the period of its installation.

More recently, Heeres's work has embraced an interactive aspect. This tends to take the form of installations either in the gallery or in public spaces in which the presence of the audience is registered in the work through changes in color, sound, and movement. Spaces of Sound (Thank You Mr. Cage), 2013, was installed in a stairway of the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. Consisting of linked Slinky toys and LEDs encased in paper tubes and suspended from the ceiling, the work used electronic sensors to change patterns of color in response to the movement of passersby up and down the stairs. Similarly, Beacon, 2014, installed in the bell tower of the First Congregational Church of Detroit during the Dlectricity festival, used electronically activated light and sound to reflect the ebb and flow of audience members. The installation added a site-specific narrative element in recognition of the historic role of the church as a terminus of the Underground Railroad.

Megan Heeres, Spaces of Sound (Thank You, Mr. Cage), 2013 (source: Vimeo from Megan Heeres).

The engagement with community that the interactive works investigate finds its fullest expression in Heeres's practice in the "Invasive Paper Project." Using a cybernetic metaphor, the project can be understood as a node for the convergence of various social networks in Detroit and potentially beyond. There are the community organizations with which Heeres interacts in bringing the project to inner-city neighborhoods where contemporary art often fears to tread. There are the environmental groups, such as the Student Conservation Association and the Detroit Picnic Club, that have helped guide Heeres in sustainable practices of harvesting invasive species. Then there is this thing called the artworld and its current preoccupation with art as a form of social practice. (With respect to that latter notion, it must be acknowledged that all art is social practice, but that is a topic for another time.)

The "Invasive Paper Projects" navigates the city's environment and social circles to open up contexts for interaction that ultimately may change the way we perceive our relationship with the world and with one another. It is thus an expression of what Guattari terms "ecosophy," a way of thinking and experiencing that holistically combines mental, social, and environmental awareness in order to acknowledge all that we share while at the same time accepting our differences.

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.

"Zen and the Art of Garbage Hunting and the Protectors of the Refuse": Mitch Cope at Popps Packing

Mitch Cope, Scrap-a-House, 2014. Archival ink jet print. (All images by Mitch Cope; courtesy of the artist.)

Artist and curator Mitch Cope is perhaps best known as one half, along with architect Gina Reichert of Design 99, a collaborative project situated at the intersection of art and design, whose work in the Detroit neighborhood known as Bangaltown has garnered international attention. Working with materials gathered as part of Design 99's neighborhood interventions, Cope has mounted a show of his own at Popps Packing that reflects upon the work he has been doing with Reichert over the past few years. And where the many projects of Design 99 focus on the ameliorative potential of design, i.e., the way in which it can be employed to solve a variety of problems, here Copes focuses more on the expressive aspects of art.

The exhibition consists of seven large-scale black-and-white photographs originally shot on 35mm negatives and digitally transferred.There are also two installation pieces, one of which included a video done under the auspices of Design 99.The photographs document the stockpiles of refuse that litter the neighborhood in which Cope and Reichert work and the installations use some of that material in their construction. The photographs assiduously document every bit of refuse appearing within the frame in the manner of an archeologist taking inventory of every shard of material culture uncovered at a dig site. (Example: Eddy's Pile, 2014: "1 shopping cart with vacuum parts, various Jeep car parts, 1 kid's push car, 3 black sofas, 1 cushy chair, 1 stool, 1 dresser, 2 baby mattresses, 1 playpen, assorted garbage, boys and girls clothing, various plastic bins, paperwork, miscellaneous VHS tapes, several yogurt cups, 1 TV.") The installations works are equally precise in their documenting of their components.

Steve's Pile, 2014. Archival ink jet print.

A conspicuous aspect of the photographs are the apparitions that appear above the junk in each. They evoke the spirits of long lost civilizations or perhaps the more recent traces of paranormal ectoplasm etched into Victorian-era photographs. In essence, they're avatars of the extinguished collective memories of the wasted lives that have been cast into the abyss, along with their dis-possessions, as part of capital's insatiable need for profit that for the better part of five decades has wreaked devastation on Detroit. One particularly haunting image is Ottoman, 2014, a lone piece of furniture sitting in the middle of the street at night with a faint ghost image in the background. The image is gritty with white spots scattered across the surface dropping out photographic detail, reminding me of the photographs Yosuke Yamahata took the day after the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, which registered the lingering presence of nuclear radiation in their reticulated emulsion. (Yamahata later died of cancer, likely from radiation poisoning.) Here the fallout is economic not military but palpable nonetheless.

The installations seemingly focus more directly on the physical artifact. Scrap-a-House Totem, 2014, set five interlocking shopping carts on end, reaching up to the ceiling, atop of which sat a charred recliner and a rocker held in place with a ratchet strap. The installation of a wing back chair set on linoleum flooring and truck tire for Garbage Totem #1: Clearing a Path to the Future, 2011, was actually constructed so as to provide a perch from which to view a 20-minute video documenting the retrieval of castoff mattresses from around the neighborhood and their installation on a dead pine tree spike in an exercise of repurposing the refuse of life into the refuge of art. 

In both instances, the reference to the totem is formal, a description of the stacking procedure. And yet at the same time it gestures toward a mythopoetic understanding of the totem that, as anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (who also gave us the useful concept of bricolage*) suggests, might serve to help make comprehensible the disconnect between the natural and the social worlds.  In this case, what one might see as the disconnect is the failed promise of the profit motive, the so-called invisible hand, and its ruinous effects as witnessed on the ground in Banglatown and elsewhere in Detroit.

Design 99, Garbage Totem #1: Clearing a Path to the Future, 2011. (5-minute excerpt of a 20-minute video.)

* The practice of bricolage by the avant-garde in the form of Cubist collage and the Dadaist readymade predates by several decades Levi-Strauss's use of the term in his 1962 book The Savage Mind. But Levi-Strauss's use of it in contrast to the concept of  the Engineer, in describing the difference between traditional practice and modern scientific thought, brought it into the lexicon of cultural studies where it has been retroactively applied.

"Mitchell Cope: Zen and the Art of Garbage Hunting and the Protectors of the Refuse" is on view until Saturday March 27, 2014, at Popp's Packing, 12138 St. Aubin, Hamtramck.

Creating Detroit

Architect and radio host Damian Farrell (right) and me in the studio of WLBY 1290 AM in Ann Arbor for the taping of a segment of the Lucy Ann Lance Show on design in Detroit.

Last week I was in Ann Arbor to tape a segment of the Lucy Ann Lance Show called "Damian on Design," which runs on WLBY 1290 AM radio in Ann Arbor. It features architect Damian Farrell and looks at the ways the aesthetics and function of design impact the way we live. I was speaking mainly about College for Creative Studies and its role in the revitalization of Detroit. We got into other subjects as well. You can watch a video podcast of the radio segment below:

The Arcadian Visions of Ton Matton

One of my New School dissertation committee members, Ken Wark, brought this Vimeo piece to my attention and I found it relevant to share. Ton Matton is a Dutch architect and environmental designer who currently resides in the village of Wendorf in northeast Germany near the Baltic Sea. Matton's residence/studio is an abandoned schoolhouse, which he rehabilitated and named "Werkstatt Wendorf" (Workshop Wendorf). For the last decade, it's where he's conducted experiments in what he terms "autarkic" (self-sufficient) design.

One of his projects is Bosbus (2004), a mobile nature preserve Matton constructed from an old municipal bus for the Rotterdam Architectural Biennale. Another is Bird Suburb (no date), an installation of dozens of identical birdhouses set at regular spatial intervals around his rural home that birds have refused to occupy, evidence in Matton's view of the inhospitable, indeed unnatural, quality of the cookie-cutter approach to suburban subdivision development.

Ton Matton, Bosbus, 2004, exterior view (above); interior view (below).

Matton's work resonates with some of what's being done in Detroit, which I have identified as the "Postindustrial Arcadia." A big difference, though, is that Matton left the city in an attempt to regain the state of nature whereas in Detroit the city essentially left us. Nature, which of course has been there all there, just made itself more visible in the process.

There's another difference that seems important to me. As noted above, Matton's work is experimental, proposing ideas to change ways of thinking, which is all well and good. But they seem to be bracketed in way that the cultural production in Detroit I'm talking about isn't. The Detroit projects (the Heidelberg Project, The Power House, Ride-It-Sculpture Park, DFlux, etc.) are embedded in their local environments, making them more concrete as it were. In fact, they are each in their way transformative. It's the difference between utopian thinking of the conventional variety and the "real utopia" I've written about. 

Ann Markusen on Creative Placemaking

Prof. Ann Markusen, 'Creative Placemaking: Artists, Designers, and Arts Organizations as Shapers of Urban Space and Vitality' from GSA on Vimeo.

Ann Markusen, economist, professor, and director of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota, is probably the main researcher of the idea of the "creative placemaking." (Click here to download a PDF of her paper on the subject prepared for the National Endowment for the Arts.) Markusen is more astute than Richard Florida in my opinion because she has really done the research in-depth as opposed to just gesturing toward it. I still have some issues with the idea as it relates to the whole gentrification thing, but it's worth checking out if only to understand the way things are being framed by high-level institutions such as ArtPlace. This lecture was presented a couple of years ago at the Glasgow School of Art, which is where 2009 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow Cedric Tai is currently doing his MFA.

Markusen's first foray into the impact of the creative industries on local economies is The Artistic Dividend (2003), written with David King and which uses data from the US Census to uncover the contribution artists make to regional development (download PDF). The perspective takes artists as entrepreneurs, essentially acting like small businesses not only selling their own wares but generating value-added economic activity through their consumption of services such as bookkeeping and computers, materials, and other things they need to do their work. The study focuses primarily on the Twin Cities area where Markusen herself lives and teaches.

Her next significant study, Crossover: How Artists Build Careers Across Commercial, Nonprofit, and Community Work (2006; PDF), was conducted for a partnership of private foundations, two in California and one in New York, and it looked at the socioeconomic networks artists negotiate in managing their careers, using empirical research gathered in LA and San Francisco. What she and her colleagues Sam Gillmore, Amanda Johnson, Titus Levi, and Andrea Martinez found is that artists (taken broadly to encompass visual artists, musicians, writers, performers, etc.) cross economic-sector boundaries regularly not only as part of putting together their livings but because of their desire to engage different communities. As sociologist Howard S. Becker noted in his 1982 study of the same title, there are many different art worlds (and even worlds outside of art) and artists often move between several without regard to aesthetic hierarchies.

Another study worth taking note of is Artists' Centers: Evolution and Impact on Careers, Neighborhoods, and Economies (2006; PDF), which is a predecessor of Markusen's work on creative placemaking. Where The Artistic Dividend studied individuals (in social science lingo "agents") and Crossover studied their interactions, Artists' Centers looks at the function of institutions (the structural yang of agency's yin) in fostering an environment in which the arts, and along with them development, can flourish. A group of researchers under the direction of Markusen and former student Amanda Johnson studied organizations and spaces across several artistic disciplines in smaller cities in Minnesota, British Columbia, and elsewhere to understand how they evolve and prosper, or fail as the case may be.

There are those who object, and with good reason, to Markusen's line of argument for essentially buying into the market logic that the traditional avant-garde was founded to reject. (She is an economist after all and so it makes sense that she sees things through that lens.) Studies of the dark side of the creative economy include Sharon Zukin's 1982 Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change and Richard Lloyd's Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Post-Industrial City. In these analyses, the rewards of creative placemaking are seen in the end to accrue to forces beyond the control of either artists or the local communities they intended to engage. Negotiating between Scylla and Charybdis is essentially the dilemma of cultural producers currently at work in postindustrial environments such as Detroit.

Companion MOCAD Exhibitions Debate the Future

Installation view of  "Vertical Urban Factory," 2012, showing the Ford Model T assembly line in 1913. (All photos by Corine Vermeulen, courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.)

While most art institutions have wound down for the summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has been busy cranking things up. The companion exhibitions now on view, "Vertical Urban Factory" and "Post-Industrial Complex," are arguably the most timely and thought-provoking in recent memory. Running through it all is the simple yet profound question: "Who owns the future?" This question not only applies to Detroit, although arguably this is the place where its implications are most starkly presented, but to the United States and indeed to the rest of the world. The exhibitions capture a dialectic of opposing forces at work in the city as it looks to reboot for the twenty-first century.

One force is working from the top down and it's what might be termed the "Techno Utopia." The other works from the bottom up and can be called the "Postindustrial Arcadia." The former seeks to catch the wave of postmodern capitalism; the latter exists if not in outright opposition then at least in resistance to it. One reinforces the typical gentrification model, the use of the so-called creative economy to drive speculation and investment, basically the purview of what post-OWS is known as the 1 percent. The other operates within the cracks of the capitalist system to open up new ways of thinking and living for rest of us. Tied together, the shows explore the potential for realizing what sociologist Erik Olin Wright terms "the real utopia."

The summer exhibition ("Vertical Urban Factory" and "Post Industrial Complex" are a curatorial yin and yang and thus need to be discussed as a single case study) pick up a narrative that began five years ago with the "Shrinking Cities" project, exhibited at MOCAD in conjunction with Cranbrook Art Museum. In that exhibition and its surrounding research, Detroit was posited as an extreme example of the abandonment of the urban environment in the wake of the demise of the modern mass industrial system AKA Fordism. 

"Shrinking Cities" is not the first effort at documenting this phenomenon. In the late 1990s, a group of architects, urban planners, and theorists converged on the city to study the psychogeography of its dissolution and produce the book Stalking Detroit, published in 2001, which still stands as required reading. Before that, Camillo Jose Vergara published his documentary photographic essays New American Ghetto, 1995, and American Ruins, 1999. In 1989, a team of Cranbrook architecture students, James Cathcart, Frank Fantauzzi, Terrence Van Elslander, Jean-Claude Azar, and Michael Williams, working under the direction of then architect-in-residence Dan Hoffman, produced 9119 St. Cyril Street that disassembled an abandoned bungalow on the city's east side and reinstalled it in piles in the Willis Gallery. They also guest edited a 1991 issue of New Observations magazine under the title "Editing Detroit."

Taken together, this first move is what one might call the deconstructionist phase of conceptualizing the evolution (or devolution as the case may be) of Detroit. It examined patterns of demassification, the rise of spectacle, and other manifestations amenable to postmodern critique. Its recent fetishization is the genre known as "ruin porn." (Kind of a stupid term actually, but if looked at through the lens of the feminist media theory concept of scopophilia, it's serviceable enough.)

The second chapter was the exhibition two years ago co-curated by then MOCAD Director and Chief Curator Luis Croquer titled "Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism," inspired by the work of visionary French architect Yona Friedman. Taking its cue from Friedman's 1958 manifesto, Mobile Architecture, a user-centric model of the built environment adaptable to the ever-changing needs of what would come to be known as postmodern society, an architecture that would tread lightly on the earth, going with the flows of an emerging global cultural economy, "Spatial Cities" was a thought experiment in different ways of approaching the built environment in Detroit and elsewhere in the shadow of the regime of post-Fordism. It was an iteration of aesthetic community, as understood in the work of Jacques Ranciere,  a conscious collective of ideas that acknowledges what is coupled with a vision of what could be.

The current MOCAD offering is a new phase, one that really gets down to brass tacks.

"Vertical Urban Factory," installation view.

Techno Utopia: Vertical Urban Factory

"Vertical Urban Factory" is an expansive investigation into the structure, ideology, and social effects of the modern capitalist political economy as seen through the evolution of the production system, which has increasingly come to dominate all aspects of everyday life. A team of designers and fabricators worked under the direction of curator and critic Nina Rappaport and graphic designer Sarah Gephart of MGMT. Design. The arrangement of wall texts, architectural models, and other objects is a fine example of museum installation as an art form and in particular the power of graphic design to visually organize and present complex information in a readily comprehensive way.

Entry into the exhibition starts with a display panel that explains the project's underlying strategy of focusing on the design, structure, and economics of multistory factories and their impact on the urban environment. As an expression of the modernist dictum form follows function, factories in the modern mass manufacturing system were initially conceived on one of two prototypes, integrated and layered. Integrated factories trace the progression of assembly work from start to finish either following gravity, working from the top floors down, or in defiance of it, working from the bottom floors up. Famous examples of the former include Henry Ford's Model T factory built in 1910 in Highland Park and of the latter the Fiat factory built in 1928 in Turin. Layered factories organize primarily batch work on each floor, the lofts of New York City and other urban areas being examples. Later in the century, work came to be organized horizontally in the sprawling production facilities of the suburban and exurban areas that contributed to the abandonment of inner cities such as Detroit.

On the wall across the way is a detailed timeline on the history of labor that comes right out of chapter 10 of Karl Marx's Capital, which discusses the working day. The wall panels trace the struggles between labor and management over the course of modern capitalism with notes on technical innovations and other landmark events inserted along the way. An introductory graphic compares the wages and hours of workers at the height of the Industrial Revolution in mid-nineteenth century England, the introduction of the high wage/high output model of Fordism in the early twentieth century, and Chinese workers today. Expressed in today's dollars, an English textile worker in 1842 made $81 a week whereas a Ford employee in 1914 effectively made $688 a week. (By contrast the current UAW-GM contract starts workers out at $600 for a 40-hour week.) Chinese workers today make about $209 a week. They also put in many more weekly work hours than their American counterparts. These statistics further give evidence for another chapter in Capital, namely chapter 16 on absolute and relative surplus value.

Working off David Ricardo's labor theory of value, which argues that the value of a good is proportionally related to the labor needed to produce or obtain it, Marx devised the concept of surplus value upon which capitalist exploitation of workers is based. Simplistically, workers in the capitalist system are compelled to contribute more of their labor power to producing commodities than is actually required due to the monopolization of the means of production by owners. Marx further distinguishes between absolute and relative surplus value, i.e., that which results from the expenditure of pure labor power and that which is leveraged by technological innovation. One of the great inventions of modernity in that regard is the moving assembly line, which as Terry Smith outlines in his brilliant analysis of Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry mural cycle, 1932-33, is a gigantic infernal machine for harvesting surplus labor power, so much so that Ford was able to double his workers wages, substantially reduce the price of his product, and still become one of the richest men of the Industrial Age.

The rub, however, is that relative surplus value is unsustainable over the long run and exploitation must revert to absolute surplus value to ensure continued capital accumulation. Mainstream economists (read: capitalist apologists) generally discredit the Marxist labor theory of value, and yet the evidence of the wage and work week graphs in "Vertical Urban Factory" suggests that a major contribution to corporate profits in recent decades has come from outsourcing production to substantially cheaper labor pools in China and other parts of the world.

"Vertical Urban Factory," installation view showing "Future Factory" display.

The rest of the exhibition comprises a visual ethnography of historical and current production zones in the United States, Europe, and emerging economies primarily in East Asia. Ultimately, the project embraces the Techno Utopia, optimistically arguing that architects, engineers, and urban designers can help to "integrate industry with everyday life, creating self-sufficient and sustainable cities." This will be accomplished primarily through creative economy solutions that are greener, more flexible, convergent, and connected. Unfortunately, broad application of many of these ideas, however admirable, depends on  capital investment for which there is little incentive in the existing environment of so-called strategic dynamism.

What is to be done in the meantime is where "Post Industrial Complex" comes in.

Postindustrial Arcadia: Post Industrial Complex

Assembled by MOCAD Curator of Public Engagement Jon Brumit and Curator of Education Katie McGowan, "Post Industrial Complex," according to the curators, surveys "human-scale production at the heart of Detroit." Many of the projects are examples of what the curators term "neo-cottage industries" that constitute a counterpoint to the story of large-scale production being told in "Vertical Urban Factory." The selection of inventors, artisans, hobbyists, and other creative types is intended to resist metanarratives, though, of course, as a critical perspective, that's a kind of metanarrative in and of itself. What holds the group together is a reliance on individual initiative in the face of an apparent lack of resources and institutional support.

Aisling Arrington and Jill Bersche, Human Powered Pothole Fixer-Upper, 2012.

Among the quintessential projects is the Human Powered Pothole Fixer-Upper, 2012, a couple of bicycles by Aisling Arrington and Jill Bersche that have been outfitted with makeshift devices for fixing potholes -- which proliferate on the poorly maintained streets of Detroit -- on the fly. (Full disclosure: Arrington and Bersche are students at College for Creative Studies where I am Dean of Undergraduate Studies.) In a city where public services are seriously dysfunctional on a good day, it's a DIY solution to provide for the common good literally at street level. The apparatuses are simple machines, bent chrome-plated bars fashioned to hold paint cans that mix concrete as riders pedal, ready for application as needed.

Anthony Reale, Strait Power, 2011.

Of ostensibly broader application is CCS adjunct faculty Anthony Reale's Strait Power, 2011, a marine hydroelectric generator turbine whose design is based on the anatomy of the basking shark, which spends 18 hours a day with its mouth open sifting for food and using the flow of water through its body to aid in swimming. Tests of the prototype conducted at University of Michigan's marine hydrodynamics lab suggest a 40 percent power improvement over a conventional single-blade turbine. One version of the Strait Power turbine is collapsible into backpack form for individual use to power small electric devices. A residential version supplies the power necessary to serve the power needs of a household. Tying multiple residential turbines together could be rapidly deployed for use in emergency situations.

Most of the remaining projects are of the amateur or handicraft variety. (Not a bad thing, BTW.) Fred Ellison creates mosiacs in the spare time he has from family obligations and a day job. Phenomenal Woman -- Evelyn Pickard makes jewelry with a meliorative spiritual intent in the face of tough times. Four Colors Productions uses the efficiencies of on-demand printing to create books that propagate the Ojibwe language, the region's native tongue. Angela Keil has been at work for a decade on a macrame sweater that has grown from a simple vest to a floor-length coat complete with hood. Perhaps the most well known of the group is Dozer, whose 1200 cc V-twin powered rolling steel sculptures have appeared in the Discovery Channel's "Great Biker Build Off." In all cases, personal labor is a form of expression and its result objects of cultural production as valid as any with institutional imprimatur.

The question of who owns the future is far from decided, but it's a vital question for us all to think about. The summer offering at MOCAD is a good place to start parsing out the terms of the debate.

"Post Industrial Complex," 2012, installation view.

"Vertical Urban Factory" and "Post Industrial Complex" are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave at Garfield, until July 29, 2012. Call 313-832-6622 or go to http://mocadetroit.org for information.

Note: Thanks to my dissertation committee at the New School for Social Research where the question "Who owns the future?" was first posed in relation to the field of contemporary cultural production in Detroit, and also my fall 2011 MFA Graduate Seminar II class at College for Creative Studies where the dialectic of the Techno Utopia and Postindustrial Arcadia was first worked out.

Clinton Snider: Painter Among the Ruins of Modernity

Clinton Snider, The Fall, 2009, oil on board, 12 x 12". (All images courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery.)

The ruin has had a prominent place in Western culture going back to at least the Renaissance. As Brian Dillon notes in his Cabinet essay "Fragments from a History of the Ruin," in Quattrocento Italy the ruin functioned as an indexical sign of classical culture, a trace of the Elysium that was lost with the fall of Rome and left to lie in pieces during the long night of the Dark Ages, legible only to those who had access to the redoubts of preserved knowledge. Early Renaissance paintings of St. Jerome, for example (see these works by Ercole de Roberti, 1470, and Giovanni Bellini, 1480/90), often depict the Great Doctor of the Church reading amidst a landscape of ruins, fasting, meditating, and otherwise preparing himself for the task of translating the Bible into Latin.

For the Romantics, the ruin was a symbol of artistic creation, a marker of irrepressible natural genius pushing through the strictures of academic form. Western civilization's vestige of the  Noble Savage, the artist was seen to possess intuitive knowledge that wells up solely from within. Through what Raymond Williams terms "the green language" -- reveries on the natural in words, images, and sounds -- Romantics sought to reverse the disenchantment of the world that came at the hands of industrial modernity, and in Romantic paintings, such as those of Caspar David Friedrich, the ruin serves as a harbinger of what is to become of its edifices.

Sociologist Georg Simmel presents a similar idea in his 1911 essay "The Ruin":

According to its cosmic order, the hierarchy of nature and spirit usually shows nature as the substructure, so to speak, the raw material, or semi-finished product; the spirit, as the definitely formative and crowning element. The ruin reverses this order.

For Simmel, the ruin is a symbol of the dissolution of moral codes and social structures, of estrangement and alienation, key aspects of the modern urban condition under capitalism. It's a theme that carries through much of his writing, in the famous 1903 essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" and in what many consider to be his masterwork, The Philosophy of Money (1907). But for Simmel, the ruin does not simply signal decay; it is a kind of collaboration between humankind and nature: "Nature has transformed the work of art [Simmel is referring to architecture] into material for her own expression as she had previously served as material for art."

The ruin holds a different fascination for postmoderns. This attraction goes beyond the proclivity for pastiche and quotation, as Svetlana Boym notes. It is neither the evocation of a Renaissance sensibility of a lost cultural utopia or a Romantic fantasy of a timeless natural arcadia. According to Boym, what she terms "ruinophilia" reflects an awareness of "the vagaries of progressive vision as such." It constitutes a multivalent perspective on place and time and of what may have been, is now, or might yet be possible. A contemporary, if arguably rather unsophisticated, expression of ruinophilia is the photographic genre known as "ruin porn," of which Detroit is America's top model. A much more thoughtful expression is the art of Clinton Snider, whose work from the last three years is on view at Susanne Hilberry Gallery.

Clinton Snider, Ten Thousand Things, 2011, oil on board, 32 x 54".

For more than a decade, Snider, sometimes in collaboration with fellow artist Scott Hocking, has surveyed the wreckage of the failed modernist utopia known as Detroit. (Their installation piece Relics, first shown in 2001, consists of some 400 boxes stacked up along the wall to form grids that catalog all manner industrial and domestic castoffs. For my review of a 2005 exhibition of it, click here.) Snider often paints on recycled substrates, adding an allegorical element to the physical forms. Many of these constructions violate the conventional quadrilateral pictorial field, fragmenting the image and metonymically referencing the broken worlds being depicted. The 2005 Yellow House, for example, is painted on uneven lengths of reclaimed wood slats nailed together to form the picture plane. It depicts an abandoned bungalow surrounded by barren trees, weeds, and cracked pavement, the image conveying a narrative of ruination that the recycled wood registers.

Installation view of Clinton Snider's exhibition at Susanne Hilberry Gallery, 2012.

With only a few exceptions, the new work accepts the framing constraints of the right angle, though it acknowledges material form in other, more subtle ways, not the least of which is the proliferation of small scale in the expansive white cube of Hilberry's ultra-modern exhibition space. Snider's subject continues to be living in the erstwhile Motor City in the aftermath of neoliberalism's scorched earth blitz, with the addition of new elements of fantasy.

A number of the works directly reference ruination. Black Top Forest, 2009, depicts tree stumps emerging from cracked asphalt, devastation doubled in the sense that a patch of pavement long abandoned is further devoided of the trees that subsequently grew there. Studebaker Razed, 2010, shows the rubble of the original manufacturing facility of the E-M-F Company, an automotive start-up from the turn of the twentieth century, when Detroit was the Silicon Valley of industrial production. The company was later absorbed by the Studebaker Corporation (which in turn was acquired by Packard) and the building later served as a parts warehouse for Chrysler and other companies before being completely destroyed by fire in 2005. The classical and Romantic ideas of the ruin are conflated in The Fall, 2009, which presents an example of modernist architecture in the process of being overtaken by nature.

Romantic studies have recently evolved an area known as ecocriticism to investigate the relationship primarily of literature to the environment. Inspired initially by the example of the nineteenth-century English Lake Poets and taking its cue from Raymond Williams, ecocriticism is also known as Green Romanticism. By contrast, Snider might be recognized as a proponent of the decidedly postmodern genre I term Brown Romanticism, which embraces the toxic world in all its ugly beauty.

Clinton Snider, Stalker, 2012, oil on board, 32 x 46".

A number of the new paintings look past the ruin to the life, however damaged, that persists amidst the devastation. Several of these show animals or solitary figures in otherwise desolate landscapes. One of the more hopeful, Heavenly Garden, 2008, shows urban farmers tending the land, making real a utopian vision of a postindustrial arcadia. (Detroit is one of the acknowledged centers of urban agriculture in the United States.)

A relatively new painting that points to an interesting, more allegorical direction is The Hay Wain, 2011. Here Snider riffs on the Romantic legacy he works both with and against. The Hay Wain refers of course to John Constable's 1821 masterwork of the same title that is a hallmark of Green Romanticism and a staple of the art history survey course. Constable's painting depicts a bucolic scene in the English countryside: in the middle of the canvas a couple of farmers guide a horse-drawn wagon across a stream next to which is a quaint peasant's cottage, a canopy of trees in the middle ground opens up onto a verdant pasture with cumulonimbus clouds dominating the sky in the background. Constable's pastoral was consciously created to stand in stark contrast to the gritty factories and their drudgery in the teeming dirty old towns of the Industrial Revolution, in full swing in England at the time.

Snider's rendition is of a subdivision development, the mass-produced knockoff version of the Romantic country idyll. Upon a bale of hay sits a fairy tale McMansion, with the clouds actually a plume of smoke emitting from the structure's chimney. It's a parable of the NIMBY utopia, an acknowledgment of the impossibility of ever getting back to a pristine nature at this stage of the game, what with climate change and all, and yet tinged with more than a little regret that things haven't worked out quite as planned in the great postwar escape into the country and into the past.

Ultimately, Snider's art is one of ambivalence. But it's an aesthetic perspective that commands attention in these times, as we are left to make our way through the ruins of modernity.

Clinton Snider, The Hay Wain, 2011, oil on canvas, 39 x 32".

The exhibition of Clinton Snider's new paintings runs through June 30, at Susanne Hilberry Gallery, 700 Livernois, north of 8 Mile, in Ferndale. Visit http://www.susannehilberrygallery.com/ or call 248-541-4700 for information.

Specters of the Cass Corridor @ N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

Davenport Apartments, built in 1905, in the Cass Corridor, stomping grounds of Detroit's first generation of expressionist artists. (Image: Andrew Jameson, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)

The Cass Corridor art movement is Detroit's aesthetic undead. Like a zombie rising up from the earth, it keeps coming back no matter how many times you try to kill it. And not unlike a George Romero B-grade movie, in some respects it's understandable why it continues to hold our fascination. It reflects a place and time of creative foment -- the slum area just south of the Wayne State University campus in the mid-1960s to late 1970s -- when art in Detroit appeared to be serious business indeed.

The Detroit art world was in fact pretty robust then. Artists were in their studios hard at work (and in the off-hours even harder at play), a small but intrepid band of collectors were supporting the artists' production, and both of the daily newspapers' full-time art critics (imagine that!) were conceptually connecting the dots and documenting it all. (Side note: My first encounter with the Cass Corridor came as a teenager in the suburbs reading Joy Hakanson Colby's multipage full-color spread on the scene in the now-defunct Detroit News Sunday Magazine.) The whole thing was capped off with a blockbuster exhibition mounted by the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980 titled: "Kick Out the Jams: Detroit's Cass Corridor, 1963-1977." Legends grew up around the major players that echo to this day.

One of the caretakers of the Cass Corridor legacy is Dennis Alan Nawrocki, an art historian and curator who was there for a good piece of the action and who from time to time has come forward to draw attention to Detroit's aesthetic heyday. The most recent iteration is currently on view at N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in the area now known as the Sugar Hill Historic District in Midtown. The show raises some timely and important questions, and Nawrocki and gallery director George N’Namdi deserve credit for mounting it.

The show is titled "Menage a Detroit: Three Generations of Detroit Expressionistic Art, 1970-2012." As the title suggests, the curatorial strategy is to trace a lineage from the originators of what might be termed the Detroit School to key followers who have emerged over the last 40 years. The first generation consists of the acknowledged masters of the movement who were represented in "Kick Out the Jams." These include Gordon Newton, Michael Luchs, and Robert Sestok, as well as other central figures such as Ellen Phelan, Nancy Mitchnick, and Nancy Pletos. The so-called second generation emerged in the 1980s and includes Gilda Snowden, Paul Webster, Kurt Novak, and Cay Bahnmiller, some of whom were also surveyed in a traveling exhibition titled "Guts," which Nawrocki curated 1982. More recently, according to Nawrocki's curatorial scheme, a third generation can be discerned, represented in this exhibition by Scott Hocking, Thomas Pyrzewski, Stephanie Sturon, and Steven McShane.

What constitutes a "Detroit style" has never been entirely certain. There's the use of recycled and mundane materials, which didn't really apply to artists such as Mitchnick and late great Bradley Jones (sadly not represented), who were (and in the case of Mitchnick still are) straight-up painters. About the closest thing is this idea of the expressionistic, which doesn't really fit Phelan or Yale-educated Cass Corridor mentor John Egner, artists who were really more concerned about the formalistic properties of material processes and not so much about expression, understood art historically as an individualistic existential/aesthetic response to what philosopher Charles Taylor in his important book Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity terms "radical Enlightenment," i.e., the scientific positivism whose brute instrumental rationality has wreaked havoc on the environment and society for some three centuries. In the work on view, the semiotics of expression appear to be a general character of formlessness, a Dionysian refusal to stay within the lines physically and metaphorically.

In his gallery talk on April 7, Nawrocki rightly noted that what at the time was perceived as a regional style with hindsight reflects larger trends in the mainstream art world. Particularly coming out of the 1960s and into the 1970s, the general tendency known as post-Minimalism manifested itself in various locations around the US, in the form of New Image (AKA "Bad") Painting in New York City, the Imagists and Hairy Who in Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area Funk, and Pattern and Decoration more broadly, not to mention the work of feminist artists in general. There was also the larger social context, which Nawrocki also rightly mentions and which all of these tendencies reflect. Again there's the influence of feminism (ironic given the testosterone-fueled mythology of the male Cass Corridor artists in particular), but also all of the liberatory social movements of the period -- civil rights, antiwar, the youth-quake, LGBT, etc. -- as well.

As it relates to Detroit, there are even broader world-historical trends that need to taken into account. To use the lexicon of postmodern political economists, these transformations generally go under the rubric of post-Fordism, the regime of capitalist production that arose in the late 1960s/early 1970s, coincident with the period of the Cass Corridor art scene, to supplant the system first dubbed in the 1930s by legendary jailbird Antonio Gramsci as "Fordism," by which he meant the high wage/high output policies of mass production and consumption pioneered and emphatically realized in the erstwhile Motor City. In contrast to Fordism's capital-intensive standardized, fixed modes of production (what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman terms "solid modernity"), post-Fordism embraces highly leveraged flexible, mobile operations (what Bauman calls "liquid modernity"). In the manufacturing sector it took root in such practices as lean production, outsourcing, and the disaggregation of the vertically integrated value chain. It's the logical evolution of capitalism as foretold by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, summarized in the famous line: "all that is solid melts into air."

Michael Luchs, Rabbit, 1977. Mixed media (Courtesy Wayne State University Art Collection. Photograph by Ruffy Lim.) 

And in Detroit, the dismantling of the Fordist system physically registered in the accelerated hollowing out  and collapse of the urban core, a transformation -- documented most notably by Thomas Sugrue in his 1996 book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit -- that in fact began with the suburban expansion of the postwar period. In the wake of the 1967 civil unrest, the "urban expressionism" of the Cass Corridor took up the broken pieces, physical and emotional, of the increasingly abandoned environment and fashioned them into rambunctious works of art. In the N'Namdi show, this tendency is represented by a couple of later works by Newton (the large mixed-media assemblage Oliver Twist: The Old Curiosity Shop, 1992) and Sestok (the steel sculpture Spring, 2004) but most contemporaneously by the stunning 1977 untitled construction by Luchs that uses rusty twisted wire mesh and a stretched out piece of tatty car seat upholstery to conjure up an image of a rabbit at rest in a postindustrial brownfield (an effect somewhat spoiled by the sleek black plinth upon which the work is mounted).

Paul Webster, Odalisque, 1989, mixed mediums (Image: courtesy of Wayne State University Art Collection, photograph by Dirk Bakker).

In the same way that the second generation of Abstract Expressionists took their cue from and refined the stylistic innovations of the initial masters of the New York School, the second generation of Detroit expressionism arose hot on the heels of the DIA blockbuster and the intense attention surrounding it. With the city's increasing deliquescence, more and more younger artists began working with recycled materials, which were abundantly present at hand. One such artist, Paul Webster, fashioned suave wall-mounted and free-standing sculptures from such locally sourced materials as recycled sheet metal and automobile windshield safety glass. Nawrocki does local art history a service by retrieving Webster's work from virtual obscurity.

Arguably, the most poignant of the second generation was Matthew Blake, who died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack in 2008 at age 43. His mature work, represented in the N'Namdi exhibition by a six-foot wide untitled piece from 1998, collected all manner of cast-off junk and fashioned it into large bas-relief sculptures painted a single color, typically white, unifying the disparate elements of shattered existences into complicated friezes connecting the detritus of Detroit's crumbling modernity with the ruins of civilizations past.

Also like the second generation of Abstract Expressionists in New York, some of the more interesting artists are those who moved away from elaborating on received aesthetics to establish their own identity. Perhaps the most dramatic of these transformations is Lois Teicher, who strained her initial embrace of the Motown assemblage technique through the filter of second-wave feminism to come out the other end an unabashed formalist. Her austere welded metal sculptures of geometric forms from the last two decades are a far cry from the untidy productions one generally associates with expressionism. The 1981 sculpture, I Feel Like a Choreographer, which consists of five upright painted wooden containers mounted on struts and wheels, captures the artist at the beginning of the transformation.

Scott Hocking, The Egg and MCTS, 5932, 2011, archival pigment print/site specific installation. (Image courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery.)

Ostensibly, a third generation is now at work, extending the Cass Corridor's legacy into the present. Scott Hocking is undoubtedly the best known of the group on view. His photograph The Egg and MCTS, 5932, 2011, documents an ongoing installation he has been working on in the Michigan Central Train Station, the hulking structure that is the first stop on any tour of the fabulous ruins of Detroit. The half-finished egg, visible in the center of the photograph, is shown situated in a hallway on one of the floors in the 18-story office tower that rises up behind the main station buiding, using shards from the broken marble walls that have been almost completely gutted by architectural scavengers over the years.

(It's interesting to compare Hocking's body of work with the recent paintings of his long-time collaborator Clinton Snider now on view at Susanne Hilberry Gallery. The gothic melancholy of Snider's paintings, evocative of Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and especially Charles Birchfield, foregrounds the Romantic aesthetic, and are thus seemingly more overtly expressionist, than Hocking's archeological investigations. The mediated nature of Hocking's digital images may also be seen to argue for a less expressionistic reading in relation to Snider's work, although the Romantic deep structure of photography as the ghost of the always already seen, the irretrievable past that continually haunts the present, is palpable in Hocking's work as it is in the new Patti Smith exhibition at the DIA. Click here to read my review.)

Dangerous Diane and the Dinettes, "Potentially Dangerous" b/w "It'soEasy (to make art)," 1978, 45 rpm single. (Pictured on sleeve: Diane Spodarek, center, Keith Aoki, above, Jim Hart and Tom Bloomer, right, and Randy Delbeke and Dwain Bacon, left, plus Dana Delbeke, age 3, on the steps of the DIA. Image courtesy of Diane Spodarek.)

Of course this isn't all there is to the story, as Nawrocki in his essay readily admits. Sandwiched in between the first and second generation of expressionists was a loose confederation of artists I have termed the "Lost Generation" of Detroit art. Working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this group was aligned with another tendency of the period, specifically, the post-studio practices of performance, video, and installation. Inspired by Fluxus, Conceptualism, Happenings, and the like, the Lost Generation rejected what they perceived to be the provincialism of the expresssionist aesthetic. Among its notable figures were Diane Spoderak, who in addition to making art published The Detroit Artists Monthly, a grassroots journal of aesthetic commentary, and the late Keith Aoki, who later became one of America's leading scholars on intellectual property law. And throughout it all has been the Beaux Arts and Arts and Crafts traditions that have been mainstays of art practice in Detroit going back into the nineteenth century.

As I have written in previous posts (see here, here, here, and here), a new practice has emerged in the city in recent years that builds upon the tradition of Detroit-style expressionism. The most important of this work eschews what Robert Bellah, et. al., in their study of American culture Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life term "expressive individualism," the hyper-narcissistic subjectivity of late-modernity whose excesses have fostered alienation and mistrust and contributed to large-scale social disintegration, a deracination of the national socius in parallel with the atomizing effects of post-Fordist political economy. Instead, this new art  engages in social practice, relational aesthetics, and other forms of community engagement. It seeks to imagine community through aesthetic means, to fill the interstitial gaps of capitalist disintegration in order to put into practice ideas that may help to make real the world that the dreamers have us told is possible. I have termed this tendency the "art of the commons." And I hope that by celebrating this new direction we can finally let the Cass Corridor (of blessed memory) rest in peace.

"Menage a Detroit: Three Generations of Detroit Expressionistic Art, 1970-2012" is on view until June 16 at N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, 52 East Forest, between Woodward Avenue and John R. in Detroit. Call 313-831-7800 for information.