Detroit: now with people in it!

Gheorghina, Chadsey High School, Detroit, Dawoud Bey, 2003, chromogenic print. Detroit Institute of Arts

(originally published 10/20/11 in Bad At Sports)

For decades, Detroit has performed a facile and impoverished symbolic role in our regional and national consciousness. You know what the city represents almost by instinct: abandonment, danger, the slow yet violent death of once-mighty American industry — the death, even, of the American city.

The proliferation of this looming, limiting symbolism has been accelerated, in the last decade, by advances in digital photography technology and online connectedness, which have made exhibiting photographers of us all. Amateurs and professionals alike come from all over to photograph Detroit’s ruins (and then share them with their social networks). These crumbling structures are astonishing, when you’re not used to them (and even, sometimes, when you are). They’re hulking, haunting, impossible, darkly transcendent. Photographed, they have real power as memento mori. A “unique glimpse into the sublime, where time seems suspended and the glory of a civilization now past has taken hold of the onlooker” motivates the taking of such pictures, according to Detroit Institute of Arts photography curator Nancy Barr.

But, of course, these photos are contentious. They typify the “predatory side of photography” that Susan Sontag wrote about in 1977 in On Photography. (“The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.”) They’re touristy, superficial, embarrassing; more to the point, they nakedly dramatize the power dynamics that sustain a society in which some people are born and live among ruins and others can swoop in, photograph them, and return to their lives of material comfort.

And they keep us cornered, these photos. “This is what you are,” they say blandly to a city that is tired of getting shit on by hostile outsiders. They come to define us, to those who don’t know our warmth and industriousness.

But things are changing. Thanks in part to the same connecting technologies and tendencies that encourage the proliferation of ruin porn, new and expanding narratives about Detroit are being successfully disseminated alongside the old ones. Yes, we’re post-industrial; yes, we’re poverty-stricken; yes, we’ve got all these decrepit buildings to deal with; yes, yes, yes.

But! There are people here. All kinds of people, in fact. People who are struggling, yes, but also people who are choosing to live differently. People who’ve lived here all their lives and people who come from far away. People who are finding new ways to support one another. They’re designing and creating viable public spaces, they’re farming the land, they’re learning to live in ways that are not inherently hierarchical, they’re making art out of the rubble. Is all this new? No. But for the first time in a long time, it’s news. In a surprising turn, the people in this city are starting to compete with violent death and empty buildings as objects of outsider interest.

Detroit Revealed, the new exhibition at the DIA that showcases ten years of Detroit photography by eight different photographers (four local, four not), reflects Detroit-as-symbol in the expected ways (“predictable,” the exhibition text readily admits), but also in some of these newly-understood ways. It’s notable because it reflects a tentative understanding of Detroit’s real urban complexity, a complexity that has lately eluded it in the popular consciousness.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.

Communicating with the city itself: Minimaforms brings "Memory Cloud" to Detroit

Photo by Jiinyi Hwang

(originally published 9/29/11 in Bad At Sports)

For three successive nights starting Friday, September 30, the experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms will install Memory Cloud: Detroit in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The interactive piece (a “transient light environment,” in the words of its creators) will consist simply of manufactured fog and words written with light. Those words, which will be projected onto the rolling fog as it fills the nighttime sky, will be yours, if there’s anything in particular you’ve been meaning to say to Detroit.

This isn’t the first Memory Cloud. Minimaforms (which consists of brothers Theodore and Stephen Spyropoulos) originally installed the piece in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2008. Participants contributed text messages about whatever they liked, then watched as those messages were projected onto the fog, growing, shimmering, multiplying, and passing over their heads before finally disappearing. There were more than 1,500 messages submitted over three nights. Together, they formed a dreamy, evanescent pastiche of loves notes, cultural references, confessions, inside jokes, questions, pick-up lines, philosophical musings, calls to political action, reactions to participating in the piece, and much else. All of the messages from the three nights are archived here. They make for fascinating (and sometimes hilarious) reading. Some of my favorites include:

this makes me feel sexy
the future is here
Please will someone give me a job?!
do I dare disturb the universe?
I lost my knickers
Wigs are fun! you should try one
I iz in ur smoke makin ur arts

The Detroit version of Memory Cloud, while formally similar to the London performance, will have a tighter focus. In the weeks leading up to it, Detroiters were invited to submit “memories, stories, and personal aspirations for the city of Detroit” in 150 characters or less via the website Voice of Detroit. You’ll still be able to submit text messages at the event, but the content is likewise intended to be Detroit-centric, forming an “evolving diary,” a multifaceted exploration of a city created out of hundreds of subjective impressions.

Minimaforms creates temporary environments that are rooted in participation, communication, urbanism, and contemporary technology. With Memory Cloud, they give elegant, transient physical form to the digital spaces we’ve already become so used to inhabiting this century, spaces made from endless streams of others’ thoughts. But by giving us an event, an opportunity to physically exist in such a space together, they simultaneously reaffirm our ancient connections to place, and to one another.

The brothers were kind enough to answer a few questions over email about their work andMemory Cloud: Detroit. Because their practice tests the limits of what architecture and design can be, I thought I’d start with the basics.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.

Moments of transition: a conversation with Cedric Tai

"Inset" by Cedric Tai, 2010, stained oak and spray paint on acrylic plastic

(originally published 8/19/11 in Bad At Sports)

Cedric Tai really came to Detroit’s attention with his Brixel murals, dazzling and colorful pieces of public art funded by a Kresge Arts Fellowship and created, with active community participation, around Midtown Detroit. The murals are meant (in part) to draw attention to the beautiful brickwork that’s all over the city. (Brixel = brick + pixel, and the pieces definitely have a distinctly pixelated look; when I see them, I can’t help but think, delightedly, of original Nintendo game landscapes.) Creating each mural involves generating a pattern with a specialized computer program, then organizing a team of volunteers to execute it by painting individual bricks according to the pattern. They’re sort of like large-scale paint-by-numbers projects, offering participants who aren’t visual artists the valuable sense of what it feels like to produce public art. (Just don’t call it street art. Click here for an earlier interview I did with Cedric where he explains why he’s uncomfortable using that term to describe his Brixel work.)

But there’s much more to Cedric’s art than Brixels. He concentrated in painting (and art education) at Michigan State University, where he earned his BFA in 2007. His paintings, mostly executed on acrylic plastic, allow for considerably more fluidity than his Brixel work. Some of them evoke landscapes, others aerial perspectives of natural and man-made systems, and others little more than the materials and gestures used to create them. What unites them, to my eye, is a sense of transformation (nearly each piece seems to represent a moment of transition, arrested) and collision (there are usually several distinct visual languages competing for space on the canvas at once).

Cedric’s about to leave Detroit for Glasgow, where he’ll be pursuing an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (and most likely branching out into different media). We talked over email about his work, bartering in Detroit, art infrastructure and community, toxic materials, happiness, and his impending move.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.

"In Bloom" at the Susanne Hilberry gallery

(originally published 7/29/11 in KnightBlog)

You’ll find no flowers when you visit the Susanne Hilberry Gallery to see “In Bloom,” the four-person show on view there until August 6. Not real ones, anyway. There’s a Styrofoam box full of artificial flowers, watered fruitlessly by a half-hearted burble. And there’s an abundant sense of growing and blooming in much of the rest of the work. But almost none of it is natural growth; the work resolutely inhabits the realm of the artificial, only peeking out to see the natural world from inside material culture. Comprised largely of detritus from the consumerist machine that has come to constitute our environment, the work can only ever refer to nature, though natural ghosts insistently haunt the periphery.

Art referring to nature, of course, is nothing new. What is relatively new, the work suggests, is how very natural the artificial has become. In a 2008 reviewof work by Ivin Ballen, an artist in the show whose pieces include paintedtrompe l’oeil representations of duct tape and plastic bags, Lynn Crawfordmakes a surprising comparison to the mid-19th century landscapes of theHudson River School. But it makes sense; those artists represented the natural environment as they experienced it. For Ballen, today, duct tape and garbage bags are the environment.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Garage dance in Detroit: an interview with MGM Grand's Biba Bell

Photo by Michel Francois Soucisse

(originally published 7/14/11 in Bad At Sports)

I saw Modern Garage Movement (also known as MGM Grand) perform in Detroit for the first time in 2009. It was sheer luck, actually, since I’d never heard of them and had only learned about the performance from an overheard conversation at a cafe. Unsure what to expect, I showed up to a warehouse in Southwest Detroit, then in use as artist studios and a performance space by the 555 Gallery, and was directed to a huge, open room several floors up. It was the kind of space that you find scattered throughout Detroit: a gorgeous, creaking, post-industrial vastness, a bit decrepit but steadfastly built to last.

The atmosphere was disarmingly informal. Theatre chairs were arranged here and there, and the company’s three dancers chatted casually with the fifteen or twenty gradually arriving audience members. The dance began with just one dancer, lying on the floor. She spent several minutes there, gasping, heaving her torso, arching her back, and flopping her limbs heavily, dramatizing a profoundly disquieting sense of body horror. From my perspective, I couldn’t see her face, which reduced her form to something anonymous and animal.

The dance, Royce, evolved into a work of purposeful purposelessness, with the dancers at times stalking furiously around the confines of the space. Having been created over the course of a few weeks as a site-specific work, it also became a dance about the space. The dancers moved around the room’s numerous pillars in a way that emphasized the pillars as much as it did the dancers. During one especially breathtaking moment, all of the lights were turned off except those illuminating a single corner of the room. The dancing continued, now as a supporting, exclusively auditory phenomenon. (The dance had no recorded soundtrack, only the dancers’ footfalls and breathing, and the regular, rhythmic splash of passing cars driving through puddles.)

Royce was playful, too; at one point, the dancers offered the audience beer and bags of chips. At another, they started rolling objects in our direction: balls, industrial spools, tires. This level of audience acknowledgment and involvement is essential to MGM Grand’s work. Also essential is an experiential investigation of space, an interest in taking dances on the road and letting them change along the way, and a tendency to perform in unexpected places.

The company will be bringing its singular performance style to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit this Friday, July 15. They’re dancing Nut, a 2010 piece informed, in part, by the classic Motown female trio (and featuring Motown music, modified by MGM collaborator R. McNeill). Nut was conceived at MIT, developed in Detroit, and premiered in New York at The Kitchen. After Friday’s performance, it will continue to tour on the east and west coasts.

MGM Grand originated in San Francisco and its three choreographer-dancers, Biba Bell, Jmy Leary, and Piage Martin, live across the country. Bell currently lives in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, and I interviewed her after seeing a recent Detroit performanceshe choreographed as Urisov, a moniker used to identify her solo work, apart from MGM Grand. (Urisov is pronounced your eyes of, and is a reference to Part IV of Hymmnn, the concluding section of Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Kaddish).

That performance was at the 2:1 Gallery, a temporary sound art space in Detroit’s Eastern Market district. It included a dance (InGrain) during part of which the audience sat in the basement and listened to the dancers performing upstairs, as well as a sound piece (Four Corners) by Gregory Holm and Jeffrey Williams that included a vibrating tambura, a droning, electronically modified piano, and two singers vocalizing wordlessly into the rooms’ corners. I asked Bell about her distinct creative personae, her influences, and the approach MGM Grand takes toward making and performing dances.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.

Where we end and nature begins

(Originally published 7/8/11 in KnightBlog)

There’s just one day left to view “Prime Candidates,” the fascinating show currently up at 2739 Edwin in Hamtramck. Curator and gallery owner Steve Panton considers the work on display part of Detroit’s “dirtgeist,” a movement he associates with trash (plastic bags, especially) and nature. In it, participating local artists Scotty Slade and Andrew Thompson, as well as the Canadian duo Duke and Battersby, all pose intriguing questions about the points of intersection between human domesticity and the natural world.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

A different kind of theme park

(originally published 7/5/11 in KnightBlog)

I was glad I took time this Independence Day to explore Hamtramck Disneyland. That's the informal name of a legendary folk art installation that covers a residential backyard and two small garages, reaching, improbably, at least two stories into the air. What better way to celebrate the holiday than a stop in Michigan’s most ethnically diverse city, a tiny enclave of Detroit, to see a work of crowded, kitschy Americana made by a retired Detroit autoworker originally from Ukraine? Turns out Hamtramck Disneyland is a lot more than crowded and kitschy (though it is, gloriously, both of those things); it’s also a remarkable technical achievement and a compelling and joyful exploration of the US and all its messy contradictions.

Dmytro Szylak, who is now in his 90s, began the piece in 1992 and continues to add to it. It’s a dense but carefully arranged assemblage of windmills, toys, fans, propellers, art and religious iconography from various cultures, carved figures, model rockets, lawn ornaments, a massive model airplane, a couple carousels and several Santa Clauses (including one that’s gleefully riding in a helicopter). It has many moving parts. It’s crazy and overwhelming, described as both “Disneyland on acid” and “the physical embodiment of happiness” onYelp. It’s also an intricate structure and a remarkable feat of engineering (by which I mean it doesn’t fall down, even though it looks like it should).

Read the rest at KnightBlog.