Wicker Park: Looking at "Stickwork" in Detroit

Last Sunday morning, after the season’s first snow, Michel and I went to Eliza Howell Park in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood to see North Carolina artist Patrick Dougherty’s recently created “Stickwork” sculpture. 

Commissioned by Sidewalk Detroit, this temporary installation (expected to last about two years) was created with the help of over 150 local volunteers, who worked together to harvest overgrowth from trees in three Detroit parks, strip the branches of their leaves, and help the acclaimed artist and his son erect the final structure.

Created in community, Detroit's Stickwork sculpture feels like a house for everybody, with rooms and pathways, portals and porches, at the same time it’s a great benevolent creature crouching in the landscape. 

We were glad to have a reason to make our first trip to Eliza Howell, which, at 250 acres, is Detroit’s fourth largest park, with two miles of trails running along the Rouge River and through woodland and prairie landscapes. 

It’s also a park that is a part of me, in a manner of speaking, since my dad’s family lived in Brightmoor and used to spend time at Eliza Howell before they moved to the suburbs in the mid '70s.

We had a classic Detroit neighborhood/public art moment while we were checking out Stickwork—a friendly couple showed up with their young kids and asked us to take their Christmas card photo in front of the sculpture, after which we asked them if they knew where we could find the trails. “Oh yeah,” one of them said, “just go the wrong way down the one way road here (honestly it’s fine) and look for the orange car, which is Mr. Weber’s car, which should be parked by a big tree. He takes a two hour walk through the trails every day and he should be there at this time. The trailhead will be close by.” 

The directions were perfect—we found the car, the tree, and the trail, had an inspiriting winter walk, and met Mr. Webber along the way. (If you look at the park’s website, you can see his beautiful pictures of Eliza Howell’s wildlife—we were happy to see both deer and a woodpecker on our route.)

Detroit's Stickwork sculpture is a great gift to the City from Sidewalk Detroit. I'd like to take the opportunity to say that, for me, it hits all the right notes to make highly successful public art, or what would more appropriately/meaningfully described in this case as urban environmental art (that is, art made to engage and enrich urban landscapes and communities). It: 

• Involved the local community in its creation, granting participants access to the therapeutic benefits of making something together—while not sacrificing the artist's strong, coherent vision and well-developed sensibility
• Creates ongoing opportunities for residents of and visitors to the neighborhood to meet and build connections, and to have access, at no cost, to the salutary and stimulating effects of exceptional art
• Raises awareness of the local place where it's sited, increasing foot traffic to and identification with the park and the neighborhood
• Possesses qualities of the truly mysterious, surprising, and beautiful, encouraging acts of urban escapade and discovery that are not commercial/market-mediated 
• Is broadly accessible, both physically and conceptually (it's hard to imagine someone unfamiliar with trends in art feeling it's "over their head" and therefore alienating) 
• Is temporary, liberating it from pretensions to monumentality and better suited to the vicissitudes of the urban environment—anticipating and avoiding situations in which its maintenance over time would drain organizational/municipal resources, or in which it would decay, like so much environmental art in and around Detroit, due to the lack of those resources or a realistic long-term plan for its maintenance.

Stickwork has the additional benefit of doing a bit of actual ecological work, since the act of removing the overgrowth it's made of promotes the source trees' long-term health. And with its pitch-perfect siting in Eliza Howell Park, it also has the potential to serve as a gateway to a more ecologically-minded future for Detroiters. This is not a new trend in the history of American art, but it is one that continues to resonate in this devastating era of climate change, and that means a lot in this city, so much of which has been ravaged by eco-blind industrial and auto-oriented development.

I'm grateful to Sidewalk Detroit, the artist, the City of Detroit, and the Greening of Detroit for working together to make Stickwork happen here. We need it, maybe now more than ever.

Essay'd: Lester Johnson

I'm pleased to share my latest short piece for Essay'd: a consideration of the work of Detroit visual artist Lester Johnson (b. 1937). 

Johnson has lived and worked in Detroit his entire life, and has had a significant impact on the artist community here, both as a maker and an educator (he taught at the College for Creative Studies for 35 years!). I first learned of his work through my ongoing research into the proliferation of visionary abstract public art in Detroit in the early 1970s. His now-lost mural Continuum (1974), painted on a Detroit Edison substation at Grand River and Scotten in the neighborhood where he grew up, was one of eight murals commissioned by New Detroit, Inc. between 1972 and 1974 in an attempt to uplift the city after the devastation of the 1967 uprising.

Lester Johnson with Continuum, 1974, Detroit News photo courtesy of
Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

When I interviewed him for the essay, I asked Johnson if he could summarize the most crucial concerns of his long and varied practice. He surprised me by focusing on the increasingly collaborative nature of his work, saying that the great lesson of his life in art is: "You never accomplish anything by yourself." That's the theme I chose to emphasize in my piece. Consider it, this fraught July 4th, as a paean to interdependence, offered as an American alternative to our mania for personal liberty at any cost.

Read it at essayd.org.

Making rock music with Kathy Leisen

Oh Detroit, what have we done to deserve Kathy Leisen?

If you don't know Kathy, she's an artist, musician and singer with a voice like a smoldering, late night campfire beneath a big, starry sky somewhere out West, with some ragged clouds just starting to roll in and drizzle, but it's OK because you're with your friends and you've had a little whisky and you just spent the whole day outside. Her band Soft Location, with their mellow, slow-burn rock tunes crowned by Kathy's aching lyrics of love and longing, is a Detroit essential. Put on a Soft Location record and time slows; you drift a little. You melt. Here, listen:

Kathy also happens to be disarmingly graceful, forthright, and generous of spirit. I will perhaps forever associate her with the peaceful, matter-of-fact good vibes of the Detroit art community. She's one of the first people I met, seven or so years ago, when I started writing about Detroit art with any semblance of seriousness, and I won't soon forget the kindness and openness with which she welcomed me (nervous, unsteady) into the little sound art gallery in Eastern Market where she was noodling on an acoustic guitar.

Last weekend, she amply demonstrated that welcoming spirit in "Harmony By Any Means Necessary," an intimate performance at Popps Packing, the Hamtramck home, studio, and artspace of artists Graem Whyte and Faina Lerman. The concert was part of the Lounge of Saturn, an ongoing exhibition and performance series at Popps featuring work by a dizzying array of Detroit artists.

Popps Packing

For the occasion, Kathy donned a plain, billowy garment that her friend, the artist Chad Wentzel, created, a sort of giant apron that makes her one with her keyboard. ("I feel like I'm getting ready to go into surgery," she joked as she slipped into it. Chad told me that his ambition is to make a room-sized version of this piece, an environment, basically, that would join Kathy and her keyboard with the audience, a la James Lee Byars, maybe. Sounds like fun.)

As she set up the keyboard, Kathy placed five or six stones, maybe 2-5 inches long each, along the top of it, as well as a couple rolls of masking tape, and told the assembled company that she needed some help with the performance—or the game, as she put it. ("Art should be fun, shouldn't it?") The idea was that she would start playing, and then we would commence to shape the music together, with each audience member encouraged to walk up at any time and place a stone on a key, or group of keys, or else tape down a particular key. As the tones shifted, Kathy would correspondingly modulate the tone of her voice, producing a unique, improvised composition, co-created on the spot.

I've seen Kathy use her stones in a more straightforward solo performance recently, at the Shells record release party at Trinosophes, and it's a subtle but powerful gesture. Visually, tactilely, the stones carry a certain weight. They're of course such natural objects, freighted with idiosyncratic meanings about their (be)holder's connection to the natural world, about childhood exploration, ancient beginnings and environmental degradation. There is something fruitful, dialectical, about the relationship between the stones—with their utter simplicity, their mute, compact, essential rock-ness—and the keyboard, the big sound machine, hard-angled and complexly engineered. Their union (their reconciliation) could be gimmicky or precious, but it's not; instead, it's unexpected, a little whimsical, and quite elegant.

The sound, meanwhile, is notably...visual. There's the background, the pure, hard tones of the keyboard, which are minimal, even, unambiguous, and insistent: a drone. (A plane.) And the foreground: Kathy's voice, reverb-ed and echoing, freeform, soft, shifting, and abstract. (There are lyrics there, but they're fuzzy and indistinct—mostly you can make out an "I" here, a "you" there—all, perhaps, you need to know.)

With participation, of course, there is much more: you hold the rocks in your hands. You make choices, informed or not. (Kathy is definitely not worried about whether or not participants "know" music, which is in itself pretty incredible.) You perform the ritual; you walk up and make an offering, to...what? The god of music, maybe, or to Kathy, or to the Earth itself. And you do it in concert, with strangers, perhaps, or with friends. You play (in more ways than one) and then enjoy the remarkable result: that voice, that sad, silver voice, ringing out over the tones that you've manifested, together.

"Harmony By Any Means Necessary" was all over pretty quickly. Just three distinct compositions, maybe 15 or 20 minutes in total, but what a gift: a precious opportunity, these days, to shake off the weight of things, the anxiety, the despair, the ceaseless chatter, and to make something that stands apart—something simple and still, sacred and shared.