Monthly Arts Event "Soup" Goes National

The New York Times Arts & Design blog ran a post today about the

Detroit art scene. Essentially it reinforces the point I've been making about the art of the commons. (See my posts here and here.)

The story talks about the artists, several of whom have been discussed in this blog on the subject, who are using Detroit's open spaces, physical and social, as a basis for what might be called a new imagined community (to use another of Benedict Anderson's terms) based on collaborative aesthetics.

A major part of the Times story discusses this past Sunday's meeting of Soup, which I attended.

Soup describes itself alternately as "a collaborative situation," "a public dinner," "a theatrical performance," and "a relational gathering connecting various communities," among other things. The premise is that each month people gather to share a meal and decide on a project to support. (Above left: diners enjoying a bit of repast at Soup on Aug. 1. All photos: Louis Aguilar via iPhone.) Volunteers make the soup and other parts of the meal are donated. (This month's salad was prepared by filmmaker Katie Barkel and Avalon Bakery provided bread.) Each person attending pays $5, the total proceeds of which are given to the project chosen in a democratic process from proposals submitted prior to the event.

Soup was founded by Kate Daughdrill (Above right, center left) and Jessica Hernandez (Above right, center right). Daughrill is a second-year grad student in print media at Cranbrook and Hernandez's family owns the building in Mexicantown where the meetings are held. Sunday's gathering was the seventh and attended by more than 100 people. There are similar projects, based on different themes, in Grand Rapids, Chicago, Denver, and Baltimore.

The monthly meetings are hosted by the person(s) making the main course. This month, two artists who are in Detroit as part of a residency made possible by a fellowship funded in the Netherlands played host. Besides introducing the proposals, they spoke on their impressions of Detroit and what made it different from their European experience. The artists Joao Evangelista, orginally from Portugal (lower photo above, standing right), and Nikos Doulos, originally from Greece (lower photo above, standing left), noted the biggest difference being what they repeatedly termed "agency," which means the ability of people to just up and do things without asking any authority for permission. Although the artists didn't acknowledge it, the biggest reason this is possible here in the town-soon-to-be-formerly-known as the Motor City is simply that there's usually no one around to stop you. Taking advantage of the breakdown of the division between public and private, which characterizes Detroit arguably above any other (former) major city in America, is what the art of the commons is all about.

This month's funds went to support the rehabilitation of a pocket park in the Woodbridge neighborhood. The group will use the money to buy wood and other materials to repair playground equipment and otherwise fix up the site. This "microfinancing" aspect of Soup raises another important issue, namely that of what's now being called "solidarity economics." Solidarity economics presumes that we're all in this mess together and aren't just seeking to maximize individual advantage. Figuring out how to govern common resources for the benefit of us all is an essential part of moving us toward a truly sustainable environment. Indeed, one of the two 2009 Nobel Prizes for Economics was given to Elinor Ostrom, specifically for her work on governing the commons.

Granted a 100 or so people having dinner and deciding to help fix up a small park is a pretty modest example of how that might work. But as they say, even a journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.

Imagination Station

Image above: Artist Marianne Audrey Burrows painting Reclamation at the Imagination Station in Corktown. Photo taken by and courtesy of Stephen McGee.

Travis R. Wright has written some whacky stuff about art since becoming arts and culture editor of the Metro Times a couple of years back. (Take his Mark Dancey review. What's with the royal plural, dude? For rock'n'roll softcore erotica? Puhleeze!) His literature pieces are much more palatable, as they should be given that's more his area of expertise. But while I think the prose is still too flatulent (when will alternative-press guys in particular stop trying to channel Lester Bangs?), his story on Imagination Station in this week's Metro Times hit on something rather significant in the visual art scene in Detroit right now, even if it was more of a profile piece than a critical assessment.

To quickly recap, Imagination Station is a collaborative project working on rehabbing a couple of blighted Corktown structures that sit in the shadow of America's top model of ruin porn, the Michigan Central Train Station. It brings together artists, community activists, and new media mavens. It's another one of the ground-up efforts that these days I'm calling the art of the commons, which seem to characterize some of the most interesting cultural production in Detroit. (Click here to see my post on the topic from a couple of weeks back.)

Simply put, the art of the commons exposes the limits of proprietary rights, in both things and ideas, that have ruled cultural production since the early days of what Benedict Anderson calls print-capitalism. (As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, the printed book was the first capitalist commodity. It also created the autonomous artist and the notion of intellectual property.)

The proprietary concept got its first major challenge with deconstruction and the idea of the death of the author. In art, it emerged with postmodernist image appropriation in the work of people like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. (Or as Rosalind Krauss once put it in an especially vitriolic exchange with Donald Kuspit that took place @ the DIA, those artists who practiced "guerrilla pastiche" as opposed to the neo-Romantic hacks, like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, he was defending.)

Once deconstructed, proprietary cultural production's exposed flank opened the door for remixing and other forms of collaboration. Imagination Station is another example to add to the list, all the more so for the fact that many of the participants aren't "artists." (What does that term mean anymore, anyway? As opposed to some, I'm not troubled that Marianne Audrey Burrows might not be the most technically proficient painter. John Cage wasn't a steller pianist but what did that matter when it came to appreciating 4 minutes, 33 seconds or any other of his compositions? Similarly, aesthetics in the traditional sense isn't really what this project is about. And the fact that Jerry Paffendorf is selling virtual parcels of land so minuscule as to make any idea of return on investment completely absurd only reinforces my point about the breakdown in Detroit of the regime of property, to use Michael Hardt and Tony Negri's phrase.) (Click here for a critique of Hardt and Negri by David Harvey that ran in the November 2009 issue of Artforum along with Michael Hardt's reply.)

Of course, the forces of the dark side aren't going without a fight. That's why record companies are suing 14-year olds for sharing music P2P. But just like the pope trying to fend off the Reformation with Latin manuscripts and church frescoes, the current intellectual property regime won't be able to control the proliferation of the binary digit and all it has wrought (for better or worse), including collaborative projects like Imagination Station. Welcome to it. You don't have to believe that Imagination Station is a postindustrial equivalent of the Sistine Chapel to see it as a prime example of how local cultural producers are responding to Detroit's post-postmodern condition.