Hall Rant, Take 3

In this third and final installment on his thoughts regarding the Detroit bankruptcy's "Grand Bargain," artist, curator, and critic Michael Hall reflects on the 1964 film The Train, starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, and Jeanne Moreau, and its relevance to the "Art vs. Pensions" question. 

There is no doubt that preserving the Detroit Institute of Arts as a cultural asset serves the greater good. And yet, the way in which the process has evolved is dispiriting to say the least. As Hall notes, there is something bigger at play, namely, the role of art within what we might call "the civic ideal," what Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (still the best book on democracy and also the best book on America) terms the "habits of the heart," which in America have historically sought to strike a balance between liberty and equality, the rights of the individual and the responsibility to the community. 

In democratic theory, it is the role of civil society, of which cultural institutions are integral part, to mediate between the private sphere of the market and the public sphere of the state. This is not to say that privatizing the DIA will result in its walking away from its community mandate. Settling the issue will enable the staff to get back to business and not be distracted by the machinations of those for whom truly nothing is sacred outside of the grim and relentless pursuit of profit. But it is to note that the change in status is another, in my opinion significant, splintering of the city's collective consciousness. For a penetrating analysis of the "Pension" side of the debate, see this article on "Detroit's Grand Bargain" by Aaron Petkov published recently in Jacobin.  

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The Train Theatrical Trailer (1964)

MOVIES IMITATING LIFE: Cultural Patrimony and Train Wrecks

This time it was Detroit public television jumping into the debate swirling around the ongoing Detroit art museum mess.  How curious it was! You have to go back to a time before Nixon to find public broadcasting substantially supported by public dollars. Long suspicious of culture as a civic good, American lawmakers have incrementally (but steadily) pushed public broadcasting down the road to “privatization” (read mendicancy) for decades. So was it an intentional irony or an inadvertency when Detroit Public TV broadcast The Train (1964) from the DIA film archive on its Friday night Film Festival?  Knowingly or not, by airing this film, the station offered Detroiters what I view as one of the best critiques to date of the inevitable privatization of Michigan’s preeminent “public” art museum.

The Train is set in WWII France—during the last days of the German occupation. The plot of the film involves a willful, effete German colonel (Paul Scofield) hell bent to ship a trainload of stolen Parisian art treasures to Berlin in the face of the oncoming Allied liberation. To achieve his aim, however, the Colonel must thwart a series of plots and subversions initiated by French Resistance fighters determined to keep the train in France without damaging its precious cargo.  In the ensuing gauntlet, the imperious Nazi officer matches wits with a wily French railway dispatcher (Burt Lancaster) who reluctantly takes charge of the effort to “save” the train.

Let’s review: a heartless connoisseur of fine paintings is pitted against a gaggle of heroic, oppressed burghers in a desperate struggle to control a load of wooden crates stuffed with priceless cultural patrimony. The haughty Colonel asserts his personal, cultivated “taste” as his claim to the trove; the colorful but boorish resistance fighters unite to thwart his theft as a patriotic duty. With no orientation to “the finer things,” they, nonetheless, periodically muse among themselves about how when the war is over, it would be nice to see some of the pictures—in some museum, somewhere…sometime.  The Germans strap a gaggle of French peasants to the front of the locomotive to ensure safe passage for their loot. The Allied Supreme Command (speaking through a furtive intermediary who directs the Resistance) benevolently—but tentatively—puts the train on a “no kill list” and deploys its bombers to attack other targets of higher strategic value. 

Fast forward to Detroit today. The train has left the station. The elites have made their claim to the treasures in the boxcars and an array of unwitting city workers have been strapped to the engine as hostages—the politicians and lawyers erratically jam and reset the switches on the tracks as the train lumbers along its juggernaut. Judges restrain the bombs they could rain down from their benches, but claim to be keeping “all options on the table.”  For its part, the press breathlessly reports every new development in the saga and fatuously cheers on all the protagonists. The journey (thus far) has seen lots of twists and turns, offense and defense—and more feints and deceptions than you could count. 

In the final four minutes of The Train, Lancaster finally stops the locomotive—cold. Enraged by this latest setback, the Colonel mows down the train’s fleeing hostages with a machine gun and then attempts to commandeer a passing convoy of German trucks to carry “his” precious trophies on to Berlin. The convoy commander ignores his directive and waves his troops and vehicles onward in their frantic evacuation.  Art, after all, is a luxury—certainly not something to deem a priority (or a necessity) in the midst of a frantic retreat.

Alone with his crated treasure, the Colonel confronts Lancaster for the last time.  Arrogant to the end, he chides and berates the dispatcher for his ignorance and lack of cultural refinement. Lancaster dispassionately eliminates him with a quick blast of automatic weapon fire and then, wounded and exhausted, limps off into the forested countryside.  He has completed “the people’s work.”  As the credits prepare to roll, the camera pulls back.  Its pitiless eye surveys the martyred hostages, the lifeless body of the Colonel and a few dozen plain wooden crates (each stenciled with the name of some great, modern, French master) all scattered about in the tall grass beside the derailed train.  Fade to silence.

Like this movie, the Detroit bankruptcy story will most likely never have a triumphal conclusion.  Yes, the paintings did stay in France (so goodness did win out).  Still, nobody in The Train ever uttered a line to suggest that there was any sort of public stake in the purloined paintings. The Nazis stole trophies worth lots of money. The resistance saboteurs fought to keep them in the name of the motherland.  And the Allied Command simply passed out strategic directives from afar, confident, perhaps, that fifty years down the road George Clooney and a team of Ivy League art historians would give voice to the idea of art as a public good—in another movie.

To my eye, the state of Michigan could learn a lot about its escalating political and intellectual decrepitude from this oddly cynical film.  While approving $195 million to “save” the Museum’s collection, the Michigan House of Representatives also passed a bill (no. 5571) barring the DIA from ever renewing the annual multi-million dollar support millage recently awarded to it by voters in the three counties comprising the city of Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. Subsequently, the Senate defeated bill 5571 and several regional corporations (including, most recently, the auto makers) rallied to save “our” art—ours, presumably because corporations are people, too.  The lawyers, bankers, and bondholders continue to argue about appraisals and about how to best monetize the museum as a financial asset. Meanwhile, nobody is really talking about the real train wreck in American education and the stenciled crates along the tracks running to and from Detroit that loom as eerie tombstones for the idea of art in the public interest.

From the perspective of someone with a belief in civic culture, I view the privatization of the DIA as a crisis as dire as the city’s bankruptcy, itself.  In Michigan’s ongoing Art vs. Pensions debate, the idea of culture as a civic good has no advocacy and no voice.  Just ask Detroit public television. 

Michael D. Hall                                                                                              

Hamtramck, MI

June 12, 2014

How I Got Over

Artist page from the exhibition catalog for "Urbanology: Artists View Urban Experience," 1989. Illustrated: The Artist performing "Getting Over at the Office" in situ, assisted by Jodi M. Young (AKA JMY) and Pauline Mataczynski. (Photo: Gordon Shelest. Image courtesy of the artist.)

For 13 years, from 1987 to 2000, I mounted a performance piece based on my corporate day job. Titled "Getting Over at the Office," it existed mainly in the form of documentation sent out intermittently to a small mailing list and artifacts I would distribute to anyone who came for a site visit. Some of the documentation was exhibited early on as part of a multi-site exhibition "Urbanology: Artists View Urban Experience." (Coincidentally, the portion of the exhibition I participated in took place in what was known as the Sarkis Gallery at College for Creative Studies where I now work.) The above image is reproduced from my artist's page of the catalog. The Artist's "signature" was actually done by the Marketing Department office assistant ("JMY"), a common practice in the corporate world for managing correspondence on behalf of busy executives. The e-journal ∞ Mile has published an essay in its May 2014 issue in which I reflect upon the performance a bit. It contains images of some of the performance documentation as well as links to related material. Click here to read it. While you're there, check out the rest of the issue and the archive. Some good stuff. I thank Stephen Garrett Dewyer and Jennifer Junkermeier, founders of ∞ Mile, for the opportunity to contribute my narrative to their project.

Damian on Design, Deux

On February 28, I was invited back on to the Damian on Design radio program, which airs on WLBY AM 1290 out of Ann Arbor. This time I brought along one of my favorite students, CCS Fiber Design Junior Samatha Mast. She recently won a prestigious finalist spot in an international design competition that will send her to New York in May, all expenses paid. We had a good conversation about that and many other things. This two-part video records the in-studio exchange. Thanks to Damian Farrell and Lucy Ann Lance for the invite and to Samatha for being so hard working and bright.

In Conversation with Cedric Tai

Cedric Tai and me at Re:View Gallery (Photo: Michelle Perron).

Fellow Kresge Fellow (Visual Art '09) Cedric Tai has a show up at Re:View Gallery on Willis in Detroit.  The show is titled "We Need More ________!" and it's a real departure from Tai's previous work, which recently has consisted of abstract painting. The new show is much more concept toying with the idea of work and the condundrums of it as it relates to the art world. The artist is working on site during the exhibition's run.

Tai invited me to have a conversation on Friday, April 11, that wasn't the typical artist/moderator thing. In fact, he interviewed me about my long-time performance piece "Getting Over at the Office" (1987-2000). The conversation went other places as well. Below is a Soundcloud recording of the talk, which took place on the patio in front of the gallery. Below that are some video clips that capture part of the day.

I thank Cedric and also gallery director Simone DeSousa for the invite. It was a fun outing. I will be writing something about the performance piece for ∞ Mile in the near future. It will have images of some of the documentation and some links to other stuff. Stay tuned.

Vince Carducci in conversation with Cedric Tai from cedrictai on Vimeo.

Vince Carducci in conversation with Cedric Tai (2) from cedrictai on Vimeo.

Cedric Tai, "We Need More _______!", continues at Re:View Gallery, 444 W. Willis, #112, Detroit, between Cass and Second, until Saturday, April 19. Call 313-833-9000 for information.

"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.