The Creative Class Rises Again

When first published in 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class quickly established its author Richard Florida as an urban policy and business management guru. The Rise of the Creative Class heralded the emergence of a new class of worker who promised to lead the economy, and along with it the rest of society, to unprecedented levels of prosperity. The creative class, according to Florida, included scientists, engineers, artists, designers, media producers, and others whose primary function is "to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content." They are abetted in this endeavor by a whole host of high-level information workers—doctors, lawyers, accountants, educators, and the like—who draw upon complex bodies of knowledge to solve difficult problems that require high degrees of autonomy. To mark a decade of influence, the book was re-released in 2012 in a substantially updated version, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited, now out in paperback.

Based on statistical modeling of US Census information, demographic surveys, and economic data, Florida's theory holds that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of creative class workers tend to outperform other areas not so well endowed. Specifically, Florida's research zeros in on what he terms the "three T's" of economic development: technology, talent, and tolerance. The last indicator is based on the presence of so-called bohemians—musicians, writers, designers, and other arty types—and gays in a community. Together the three T's comprise the "creativity index" that measures a region's economic potential as a result of its supply of "creative capital."

The creative class thesis soon became the rationale behind a number of urban redevelopment projects, particularly in the Midwest where cities that were once paragons of America's productive might have struggled to find a place in the postindustrial economy. Municipal officials, corporate CEOs, foundation staff, and other policy wonks embraced the concept, citing Florida in their efforts to promote arts and culture districts and otherwise jump start their local creative economies. One such example was former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's 2003 Cool Cities initiative aimed at providing grants and other resources to the Rust Belt cities of Flint, Saginaw, and Detroit in hopes of bringing them back from near extinction.

As much as the book had its adherents among policymakers, it equally had its detractors on both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives decried the valorization of bohemian and "alternative" lifestyles while liberals denounced the apparent glossing over of the thorny issues of rising inequality and race. More academic readers questioned Florida's argument for its lack of precision it defining the composition of the creative class meaningfully and for his research methodology. Florida spends a good part of The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited responding to his critics.

Florida asserts that for the most part experience has borne him out. The regions he predicted to do well generally have done so even factoring in the financial upheavals of 2008. He further finds applicability of the creative class thesis in the global context as well. He leaves out any direct discussion of the critique by economist Ann Markusen whose competing concept of "creative placemaking" is more modest in its claims and seems to be more solidly grounded empirically. (Click here to download Markusen's white paper on creative placemaking written in collaboration with Ann Gadwa for the National Endowment for the Arts.) Although it should be acknowledged that the significance of place does factor highly in Florida's analysis but in a broader context. One area he does pay more attention to is inequality, adding a new section at the end devoted to the topic. However, even there he notes that he originally wanted a chapter on inequality in the earlier edition of the book but was dissuaded from it by his publisher who told him that the manuscript was already too long.

Florida has leveraged the creative class concept into big league consulting and punditry. His clients include Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, BMW, and Philips. He is in demand around the world as a speaker and is now a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine where he co-founded and edits The Atlantic Cities website. This is America, after all, where turning nothing into money is a time-honored tradition, so he can't be faulted for cashing in. Still, there is cause to circumspect about it all.

Florida's theory is actually a pretty grand thesis. And I'm convinced that most of those who claim to have adopted it, actually haven't read it or at least have misunderstood it. A big problem is that they don't seem to recognize what Florida freely acknowledges about statistical research, namely that correlation does not imply causation. In this case the presence of the creative class (a fuzzy concept to be sure) in a metropolitan area is associated with economic growth but may not in fact be the root cause of it. There may be what statisticians term intervening variables at work. Many proponents seem to have just picked up the "creative" buzzwords and run with them, often to perdition. By the same token, the critics likely haven't read Florida either; they're really criticizing the use the other people who haven't read him have made of his work.

In a nutshell, Florida is one-upping Karl Marx, casting the creative class as the rightful inheritors of the fruits of the Earth. The creative class is distinct from the service class, who occupy low level McJobs with virtually no upside potential, and the working class, whose prospects have been and continue to be in decline. Like Marx's proletariat, the creative class is currently a class in itself—a class having a common relation to the means of production—in need of evolving the collective consciousness of a class for itself—a class organized in pursuit of its own interests.

To help them accomplish that mission, Florida sets forth a "Creative Compact," a new and improved New Deal akin yet ostensibly superior to the social compact of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s that led to the last golden age of broadly experienced prosperity. Florida's compact calls for the "creatification" of everyone in order to unleash their greatest potential. This is achieved essentially by doing a lot of the things the old New Deal and its subsequent iterations portended to do, such as broadening access to educational opportunity, promoting diversity, strengthening the social safety net, reviving cities, etc., only more so.

The Creative Class, Revisited cites a lot of social science literature as part of its argument (Weber and Durkheim in addition to Marx, Mark Granovetter, Daniel Bell, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and others), but there's a big sociological question being left on the table, specifically the question of agency. Sociologically, agency is the capacity to act, individually or collectively, in accordance with one's will. It is typically juxtaposed to structure, the social patterns and institutions (i.e., customs, ideologies, class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) that constrain that capacity. In Marx, structure is the capitalist system, which ties the capacity to act to one's position in relation to the means of production. Both capitalist and worker are constrained in different ways with different potential outcomes by the relentless drive for profit.

At several points in The Creative Class, Revisited, Florida references Fordism, the economic and social system of standardized industrial production, named for Henry Ford, that engendered broadly shared prosperity for a good part of the twentieth century. Fordism, in Florida's telling, was "dumb growth," growth that presumed more and more material output as de facto the best marker of prosperity. Fordism was a key driver of productivity in the Organizational Age, the age of large hierarchical bureaucracies and the conformist identities that were necessary to keep the system going. But that system neglected to account for such externalities as sustainability and personal self-actualization. For Florida, the death knell of the Fordist/Organizational Age was the Great Recession of 2008.

The creative economy by contrast is supposedly smart growth; what we lack is the proper metric by which to assess it. The Creativity Index is Florida's attempt to develop such a metric, which in addition to productivity takes into consideration happiness and well-being. (How it does that is unclear. Is having a high presence of bohemians and gays in one's community necessarily correlative to increased happiness and well-being?) But other than general references to globalization and the role of information within it, the structure under which the creative economy operates is left unstated.

In truth there have been a number of attempts to define the current structure going back several decades. Among the earliest is Michel Aglietta's theory of capitalist regulation, first published in France in 1976. Regulation theory is part of a broader analysis of contemporary capitalism gathered under the rubrics post-Fordism and neoliberalism. Prominent researchers include Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey, the Italian autonomists, and others too numerous to mention here. This structure indeed contrasts to the Fordist/Organizational regime in many of the ways Florida describes but it maintains relationships of power he doesn't examine.

The creative class is crucial to the post-Fordist system, but its agency within that structure is something many researchers would question. McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto, for example, similarly casts what Florida terms creatives (Wark calls them hackers) as a class in itself but counterposes it to a "vectoralist" class, a reconstituted capitalist elite so named for their control over the nodes and networks of information and thus capital flows. One of the vectoralist's primary tools for separating hacker-creatives from the fruits of their labor is the regime of intellectual property that induces producers to sign away their copyrights, patents, and trademarks for a fraction of their true value.

Then there's the case of the prosumer, the mash-up of producer and consumer roles under Web 2.0 whereby users of social media such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and the like entertain themselves and their friends by creating and sharing content for free while being sold to advertisers for a profit that accrues to vectoralists like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Jack Dorsey, and their venture capitalist partners.

Finally, there's what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello term "the new spirit of capitalism," an economic and ideological order under which we get to work for little or no pay in return for the privilege of self-expression in the manner of the Romantic artist starving in the garret. (For an excellent critique of the business mantra "Do what you love; love what you do," see the essay "In the Name of Love" by Miya Tokumitsu in Jacobin.)

And all of this is as much potentially subject to outsourcing to lower-cost production zones in lesser-developed parts of the world as Fordist manufacturing jobs have been, as many members of the creative class have discovered as of late, much to their chagrin.

To his credit, Florida takes note of the precarious nature of creative class work. He calls for more security and greater equity at several points in the book and the Creative Compact is his blueprint for getting there. He expresses hope for the potential of a broadly shared prosperity with the concluding statement that "every single human is creative." Even the notion of the creative class as a class in need of developing a collective consciousness as a class for itself hints at the specter that haunts The Creative Class, Revisited, the specter of the commonwealth that continues to elude us.

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.

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.

Scott Hocking's Garden of the Gods

The long-abandoned 3.5 million square foot Packard Automotive Plant, production site of one of America's premier automotive luxury brands, has been recently slated for demolition (photo: Albert Duce, Creative Commons license CC BY-SA 3.0).

It was recently announced that after more than five decades of abandonment and neglect, the sprawling, decrepit Packard Automotive Plant on the east side of Detroit will be demolished by its ostensible current owner Dominic Cristini. (For news coverage, click here, here, here, and here.) Designed in the early 1900s by industrial architect Albert Kahn, the 40-acre, 3.5 million square foot complex was once the headquarters and main production site for the Packard Motor Car Company, one of the premier American luxury automobile brands of the 20th century. The plant was the first large-scale reinforced concrete industrial construction project in the world and at its opening in 1907 was considered to be the most advanced facility of its kind anywhere. The plant's opening preceded by three years Henry Ford's legendary Highland Park Plant (also designed by Kahn and immortalized by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Journey to the End of the Night -- for $5 a Day) and the moving assembly line by six.

Since its closing in 1958, the complex has progressively fallen into decay with several sections in collapse as a result of exposure to the elements and a succession of fires; although, most of the buildings remain structurally sound due to their reinforced concrete construction. Much of the wiring and other building materials have been stripped by scavengers over the years. In recent times, the plant has also served as an enclave for so-called urban explorers, graffiti artists, and purveyors of the photographic genre known as "ruin porn." Without question, the most significant work done in this environment is that of Detroit artist Scott Hocking.

Born in Detroit in 1975, Hocking has been surveying the postindustrial landscape of Detroit for more than a decade. His project Relics, begun in 2001 in collaboration with Detroit artist Clinton Snider, has collected thousands of found objects and organized them into various grid configurations, which are exhibited from time to time. The result of an ongoing series of Situationist-like derives (drifts) through the city's wastelands, Relics gathers up the castoffs of modernity's material culture and presents them as metonyms of lives and livelihoods ruined in the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist mode of production, a tidal wave of creative destruction under which vast sections of Detroit have been literally and figuratively washed away. Permeated with the smell of grime and decay and odors of chemicals whose half-lives will persist into future centuries, the assemblages of broken toys, appliance fragments, rotted clothing, rusted machine parts, architectural remnants, and other abandoned ephemera, register the psychic realignment that has taken place in the migration from the age of mechanical reproduction to the regime of neoliberalism, of all that was once solid melting into air.

Scott Hocking and Clinton Snider, Relics, 2001, mixed mediums (original installation view at the Detroit Institute of Arts). (All Hocking images courtesy of the artist and Susanne Hilberry Gallery.)

Hocking's installation in the Packard Plant, Garden of the Gods (2009-2011), is among his most remarked-upon works, and it is arguably one of the most significant. Situated in a section of an upper floor where the roof has collapsed, the piece uses columns still standing amidst the rubble as pedestals upon which are perched old TV consoles retrieved from elsewhere in the building. (At one point in its devolution, the plant was used in part as storage space. One loft area was apparently used by a television repair and recycling service, the remains of which are still there.) 

Taking its title from a sedimentary rock formation in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Garden of the Gods takes each of its 12 monuments as a member of the Greek pantheon. Over time some of these have also fallen over and other pieces of the structure have collapsed. The process of entropy has been photographically documented periodically since the TVs were first installed in 2009.

Top: Scott Hocking, Garden of the Gods, West, Summer.
Middle: Garden of the Gods, West, Winter.
Bottom: Garden of the Gods, Northeast, Snow.

Hocking readily acknowledges the site-specificity of this and other works, yet at the same time he gestures toward a broader historical view. From a mythological perspective, Garden of the Gods is a meditation on the hubris and repeated failure of humankind's stratagems of control over nature, a mytheme that goes back into distant times. (For an excellent interview with the artist on this and other aspects of his work, see Sarah Margolis-Pineo's "Seeing Beauty in All Stages.")

Closer to the present, Garden of the Gods can be read as a dystopian reflection of the effects of spectacle society. Hocking talks of thinking about the site originally as reminiscent of a classical amphitheater, a stage upon which to present a cast of epic characters. Coming then upon the trove of abandoned televisions sets, he instantly made the connection between the upright pillars and  the TV consoles as the appropriate dramatis personae. "It is almost too simplistic that the TVs are new gods," the artist has said. But I would argue that in this regard Garden of the Gods is in fact quite astute.

In his classic study Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams asserts that the rise of TV as the quintessential mass medium of the postwar era is inextricably bound up in its ability to communicate over large distances via the broadcast signal. In the United States, television worked in concert with the personal automobile and the suburban single-family housing development to demassify the urban core and construct a national imaginary based on the concept of "mobile privatization," the idea that one could the survey outside world from the comfort and security of one's own living room. (An excellent study on the effects of this process in American society during the 1960s and beyond is Joshua Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior.) And while the inner city has been substantially abandoned and thus devastated, the suburbs surrounding Detroit are actually quite the opposite. (Oakland County, just north of the city, is one of the nation's most affluent areas.) Mobile privatization became the means by which the public sphere imploded only to be replaced by the isolation of a domestic simulacrum whose only respite is consumerism, the true god being worshipped through the medium of TV.

The physical and psychic traces of the repercussions of mobile privatization and its consumerist orientation are stunningly apparent in Detroit. In light of the recent, and some say terminal, crises of the modern capitalist world-system, Garden of the Gods is a harbinger of what the future may hold.

Above: Scott Hocking, Zeus Summer.
Below: Zeus Destroyed.

Robert Frank: Detroit Experiences @ the DIA

So I'm playing catch up here. But with the show coming down & the Independence Day weekend upon us, it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the best exhibitions in Detroit so far this year, Detroit Experiences, Robert Frank: 1955,@ the DIA.

Anyone familiar with photographic history or with Beat culture knows Frank's masterpiece The Americans, published in the US in 1959 with a preface by Jack Kerouac. In 2009, the National Gallery of Art mounted a 50th-anniversary exhibition of the photos collected in the book, which traveled, fittingly enough, to San Francisco and New York.

Taking a cue from that, DIA Associate Curator Nancy Barr rifled through the DIA's own substantial photography collection and came up with a trove of images taken as part of the original project, all done during the Detroit leg of Frank's road trip sponsored by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She selected more than 60 drawn from a pool of some 1500 in the collection and, in a curatorial move of pure inspiration, installed them in the galleries behind the south wall of Diego Rivera's magnificent Detroit Industry (1932-33) murals. The exhibition includes the Detroit images contained in The Americans plus many that have never been seen before in public.

I saw the show several times, in part because I took all of my CCS classes there as part of the required coursework. As a result, there are many ways I could riff on this exhibition and I'll touch on a couple.

First, is the art history part. In the catalog, Barr notes that Frank was motivated to take up the project due to the influence of Walker Evans, whose book American Photographs (1938) is a direct predecessor. She also references Charles Sheeler, who in 1927 was commissioned by the NW Ayer ad agency to photograph the Rouge Plant for its client the Ford Motor Company. Then there's Rivera, of course.

Frank's project is almost the mirror image of Evans. For one thing, Evans was working on commission from the Farm Security Administration and other government sponsors to capture a particular view of America, namely, of the impoverished rural communities in need of welfare-state intervention during the Great Depression. Frank had unprecedented free reign to photograph at will in the Rouge Plant and elsewhere, courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation.

The reversal is also reflected in content: where Evans was "praising" the deserving poor, Frank was at pains to register his idea of the underbelly of the American Dream. Evans's pictures were taken with an 8x10 view camera, which required conscientious set up and resulted in razor-sharp images, capturing "reality" in detail. Frank, on the other hand, worked almost surreptitiously, using a lightweight 35mm camera to shoot on the fly. His photographs are often blurry, poorly lit, and gritty in the density of their grain.

Comparing Frank's images with those of Sheeler, we can see another dialectic at play. In Sheeler's photographs, technology is the hero, ruling over the natural landscape with the productive might of a Prometheus unbound but ultimately for the good of humankind. With Frank, technology is also the master but instead of helping us enjoy the fruits of material abundance, it lords over us, alienating us from one another and from our natural selves. (This is essentially what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are getting at when in Dialectic of Enlightenment they state in one of their key passages: "Myth becomes Enlightenment; Enlightment is a myth.")

Second, is the issue of content. As part of the project, Frank endeavored to capture specific iconic images: American flags, automobiles, workers, and cowboys among the most prominent. Frank was essentially on the lookout for key images of American ideology as represented in its visual culture. The flag, of course, is the logo of Team America ("Fuck Yeah!"), and an early image in the series from 1955 presents one in the form of a plastic inflatable pillow perched above a Detroit bar flanked by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Cars are abundant in the photographs and they certainly represent a central aspect of American culture, specifically mobility, at a time when Detroit was ground zero for that idea, both in terms of producing the physical means to freely move from place to place and in providing the economic means for the average worker to do so.

In writing about his subject, Frank, as noted in the catalog, says, "America is an interesting country, but there is a lot here that I do not like and that I would never accept." The workers in the Rouge Plant provide the images to express some of that disaffection. There are many photographs framing workers as literally trapped within the maw of industrial capitalism, lost in the machinery to which they are bound by wage labor. In others, the division of labor between those who work and those watch workers work is represented in the physical barriers erected between management and also consumers who tour the plant for their leisure.

The alienation of the individual in modernity is a trope that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism, carries through the avant-garde, and remains with us in a highly degraded state in the form of lifestyle consumption. At the time Frank took these photographs there was something called the "other-directed" critique that was being mounted against the perceived ills of mass conformity as embodied in "the lonely crowd," "the organization man," "the status seekers," etc. The Beats and their progeny -- the hippies, the punks, and now vegans, DIYers, etc. -- reacted against this "square" culture with reveries of their own individual hipness. We all know where that -- what sociologist Robert Bellah calls "expressive individualism" -- has gotten us. And these days we might be tempted to look back on those times with fondness.

To be sure, one of things I noticed quite often as I hung around the galleries were viewers who ironically used the images as objects of nostalgia. I think it's good to keep in mind Frank's original intention but to also acknowledge a certain amount of elitism at play. The people captured in those images literally made America and even with all the troubles then it wasn't an entirely bad place to be, especially when you consider what's become of us.