Mid-Michigan modern

We recently ventured to Midland, two hours north of Detroit, to tour the Alden B. Dow Home & Studio, and to Flint, where we visited Lawrence Halprin's Riverbank Park. Both sites were recommended to us by friends, and both represent significant but perhaps underappreciated achievements in modernist design in Michigan. I'm grateful to have had the chance to get to know both of these developments, and to assess the startling contrasts between them.

 

ALDEN B. DOW HOME AND STUDIO

Alden Dow (1904-1983) was a son of Herbert Henry Dow, founder of Dow Chemicals, and the philanthropist Grace A. Dow. He was a prolific modern and organic architect (after Frank Lloyd Wright), leading the design of more than 500 buildings across the country. In Midland, in particular, his influence was profound—he designed dozens of residential, civic, and commercial buildings, and his promotion of modernism evidently attracted a number of other similarly-inclined architects to Midland, resulting in a remarkable preponderance of modernist structures in this curious, conservative company town.

Grace A. Dow Memorial Library, also designed by Dow (That fascia is made of glass! And was evidently just restored last year.)

Dow designed his home and studio, nestled among extensive greenery and a manmade pond, between 1934 and 1941.

Seen from either its commercial entrance (above) or residential, the sprawling, low-slung building belies its astonishing 22,000 square feet. I learned from our tour guide that it is constructed primarily out of block made from recycled ash from Dow Chemical. The architect called this material "unit block," and it distinguishes many of his other residential buildings throughout Midland.

The block is everywhere in the house and on the grounds, and also extends the home into the pond via a scattering of pedestrian islands made from the same material, which elegantly collapse the border between the structure and the landscape. This is also a playful gesture, one that invites a visitor to explore, to wander, to hop among the stones—which, according to our guide, was typical of Dow's sensibility.

We couldn't take pictures in the house, but that spirit of adventure or escapade permeates inside, whether in the extreme compression and expansion of space from room to room, in long interior and exterior hallways, or the surprisingly vivid use of bright, saturated colors—pinks, purples, and greens that reference the lush flora outside—to draw one's attention up toward windows and ceilings that soar and fold.







The tour was an extraordinary experience, a rare opportunity to spend time in a truly beautiful, expansive, and well cared for place that was nonetheless human-scale, vivacious, warm, and idiosyncratic—an enlivening, playful, ever-shifting wonderland of ingenious and humane design.

Afterward, we embarked on a couple-hour interlude that basically consisted of us driving around Midland, spotting and pausing to admire more than a dozen modernist homes, and getting to know a friendly local named Laura who was initially suspicious of our interest but then proud to point out a few key streets where we could maximize our mid-century rubbernecking. Then we hit the road to Flint—just about halfway back home from Midland to Detroit.

RIVERBANK PARK

In the mid to late-1970s, Flint's fortunes were faltering. In an effort to revitalize the downtown, boosters and philanthropists organized the construction of a new downtown park to be designed by the firm of Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009), a Bay Area-landscape architect noted for his dynamic public spaces. Or so we learned from Cade Surface, a friend of a friend who has studied Riverbank Park extensively and has advocated for its preservation, and who happens to live just a few blocks away.

Cade took us all around the ten acre park, explaining that it embodies a key concern of Halprin's, who worked closely with his wife, the choreographer Anna Halprin: it is a space that invites people not simply to walk through it, but to dance—that is, to move through it in various and imaginative ways. In addition to the variety of perspectives it offers from which to watch other people, Riverbank Park, like the Dow House, encourages people to hop from space to space, to climb, to explore, to discover.

As you can see from the photos, Riverbank Park is made mostly of concrete, a material I'm personally very fond of (hence my interest in going there!). I'm one of those Brutalist weirdos who wants to tell you how soulful concrete is, how comforting and natural. I guess there is something about its sturdy matter-of-factness, or maybe its roots in the ancient world, that draws me to it. And there is, in fact, a classical quality to Riverbank Park, with its succession of outdoor rooms, its oculi and amphitheatre, its insistence on the ideal of the public.

But Riverbank Park was meant to be more than concrete geometric forms, grass, and trees; it was at one time permeated and enlivened by the Flint River itself, via a feat of engineering that involved the use of two nearby dams, an Archimedes screw, and an aqueduct, a system whereby water regularly coursed through the structure, cascading down steps and spouts and into pools and channels.

Photo of functioning Riverbank Park by Adam Pagnier

Currently, the park is dry, which gives it an austere and forlorn feeling. Cade explained that on advice from the federal government, Flint has gone about dismantling the two dams to minimize the risk of flooding downtown. The aqueduct and Archimedes screw have also been removed. It sounds like water can still be made to pass through the park piecemeal, but with effort, and only on special occasions.







The future of the park is uncertain. Our quick visit suggested that it is still used, but in addition to the malfunctioning water system, Riverbank Park does not seem to be well cared for (little wonder, in a city that, according to Cade, has just one full-time employee working for the entire park system). Cade said that one plan calls for most of it to be leveled and replaced with grassland. Along with other community members (including Emma Davis, a dance instructor at UM-Flint, who staged a community-driven performance there in 2014), he continues to advocate for its preservation as a place of local and national distinction, citing its singular character and the fact that numerous of Halprin's other spaces elsewhere in the country remain both vital and protected.

Part of what made our visit to the park somewhat sad is the profound disconnect between the soaring ambitions of its creators (one might say their hubris) and the earthbound economic reality of life in Flint. This was meant to be a grand place, and evidently it was, for a time—but grand places are expensive to maintain. How could Riverbank Park possibly have thrived after the successive social and economic crises that have rocked Flint's beleaguered citizens these last decades?

Even dry, still, skeletal, the park is a beautiful place. Yes, there is something integral missing, but it still feels sacred and surprising, like something from a dream. And in fact, as I fell asleep later that night in Detroit, I started dreaming that I was back there, under the sun, but that there was water rushing all around, down the steps, through the channels, spilling into basins, catching the light, splashing. The park was alive with water. It was a lovely vision of a rare and special place. I don't know if, after an hour and a half introductory visit, I have any right to advocate on behalf of the preservation of Riverbank Park, but I can't help but hope that I'll get a chance to experience that vision for real one day, and that many others will too. 

B-side: Ghost busses and phantom transit data

I published an article in Model D this week that describes my and Michel's surprisingly rich six month experience living car-less in Detroit. In it, I glancingly touched on something I wanted to dig into a little deeper here: my experience using the DDOT bus system.

I'm a very recent DDOT user, having just gotten started in October. As I mentioned in the article, I have really come to love riding the bus in Detroit. I look forward to it, every time, for a whole bunch of reasons.

View from my bus last week

But as much as the system has evidently improved in the last couple years, it still has its problems — namely, busses occasionally not showing up when they're supposed to. As I mentioned in the article, this has been an infrequent occurrence, in my experience, but that doesn't mean that it's not a maddening, frustrating inconvenience when it happens. It's a real killjoy, especially in the cold. It's also unsettling, in a very specific way. You're standing there, squinting into the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the indistinct but telltale orange marquee lights that means a bus is coming, wondering — did I get it wrong? Did I miss the bus? (Did it come early?) Is it five minutes away? Is it ten minutes away? Is it just not coming? Should I call a Lyft? Should I wait for the next one? Then you see those lights, and you feel relieved, but it gets closer and you see that it's not your bus at all, but another line, going someplace else.

Besides the glaring, systemic problem of the bus not being on time, there's another problem here, a human-scale problem: a problem of information. You don't know. There are tools that are supposed to help you know, but these are confusing and, evidently, inaccurate. For instance, the first time I caught the bus, I used DDOT's "Text My Bus" service, where you send a text and get an automatic response telling you how far away the bus is. It worked perfectly — it said the bus was five minutes away, and five minutes later, the bus showed up. But the next time, it said the bus was two minutes away, and two minutes later, no bus. Five minutes later, no bus. Ten minutes later? No bus. I texted again: next bus, 35 minutes. It was like a ghost bus had gone by.

"Use Transit," a friend said when I relayed my experience, referring to the free smartphone app that purports to offer realtime bus tracking info. "It's more accurate." Great! So I downloaded Transit, and after struggling a bit with the so-simple-it's-complicated-interface, I got the hang of it (or thought I did). Transit uses GPS to determine where a user is and shows the buses that should be coming by, displaying a list of upcoming, realtime pickup times. Except, when I started using it...more ghost busses. More confusion. What was going on here? Transit is supposed to be displaying real time data about the busses in Detroit. But is it?

I posed this question to the folks at Transit and got an illuminating response from a friendly representative named Katie. "Transit does in fact offer real-time information in Detroit for DDOT buses as well as SMART buses, and the new Q Line," she wrote. But she said that she noticed that some DDOT busses didn't have realtime data available. You can tell when there is realtime data, she said, by the radio wave icon that appears next to certain departure times. In the screenshot below, realtime data is only available for the 4:48 and 6:12 bus. The other times are all extrapolated from bus schedule data.

It's a subtle thing, that little radio wave icon. I never even noticed it before Katie brought it up, and the folks at Transit would do well to make its significance clearer up front. But now that I know, it's great! At least now, I know what I know, and what I don't. (And a few subsequent tests have proven this out — each time I've seen those radio waves, the bus in question has come right when it's supposed to.)

But that bit that I don't know remains problematic. Why, on the screenshot above, do only two of seven busses have realtime data? Why can't I know exactly when all those busses are coming? To understand that, I turned to Neil Greenberg, manager of service development and scheduling for DDOT. (He's also a bona fide transit enthusiast, a former bus driver, and the mastermind behind Freshwater Railway, the intricate but totally made-up regional Detroit transit system that made a splash in 2011 when it got Detroiters dreaming about what real, connected transit here could look like.)

"The realtime DDOT data just isn't consistent," Neil admitted. It's not reliable." The problem, he said, is that DDOT is using a 25 year old AVL, or automatic vehicle locator, computer system. "When you try and feed data from an old system into a newer system," he said, "things really get messy." So in the transfer, the data become unreliable. Buggy. It's the same problem for Text My Bus that it is with Transit — as users, we simply cannot expect reliable data every time, or even most times. His advice? Use bus schedules instead. The busses, after all, tend to come when they're scheduled, so in the absence of consistent realtime data, the schedule's the most reliable option.

The good news here is that, according to Neil, DDOT is currently embarking on a multi-year tech upgrade that will include a complete replacement of the AVL. "We're investing pretty heavily in all new systems," he said, "not just for the AVL, but downstream from that — apps, data processing, everything that ultimately makes it to the customer's hand. It'll be great to have. We don't just want something new, we want something that we can maintain and keep up to date." He expects the overhaul to be complete in 2019-20, and lists better realtime data as a major goal. He cited other forthcoming improvements, too, including a notification system to alert riders about delays, and a new website that would help make the experience of learning how to use the bus system more straightforward and accessible to more Detroiters.

So evidently, there's a lot to look forward to. For now, of course, the most pressing concern remains the big one: those late or MIA busses. The best way to address that problem, Neil counsels, is to let DDOT know about it. "We really like complaints," he said, "but please don't just blow steam and tell us how we wronged you; tell us when, where, and what line. We need specifics."

Ideally, of course, the bus system wouldn't wrong its riders at all, but as you may have noticed, we don't live in an ideal world. I'm going to keep riding DDOT because I like it and it's convenient and, in my experience, it usually works just fine. I'm sure, here and there, another bus or two is going to not show up, and I'm sure I'll feel frustrated and wronged and curse the fact that we just can't seem to get transit right in this town. But I'm glad I spent some time digging into this, because I'll also take some comfort from the thought that something better might be coming down the road. If I squint, I can almost see it.

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.

After last week's big snow

Beautiful people at the Dally

Yesterday was the 40th annual Dally in the Alley! The one-of-a-kind independent street festival takes place in and around the alleys in a tiny section of the Cass Corridor neighborhood of Midtown (right near where I work at the Green Garage). I started going to the Dally when I was at Wayne State in the early 2000s, and I look forward to it every year.

Maybe I idealize it all out of proportion, but Detroit feels different during Dally. For a hot second we're tight, not spread out. Not divided but loving and inclusive. Queer and open and fly as hell, not "straight-acting" and blue collar-dowdy. It's like the neighborhood puts on a mask, but it's a mask that shows the truth, because it's all real; we're all here. We're just distributed, typically -- kept apart by highways and sprawl and racism and fearful urban planning, I guess. For one full day in September, though, you can shake off the weight of the cars and the stadiums and the empty lots and live a different Detroit dream: small, freaky, human, and pretty damn splendiferous. (The fact that it's managed to go on without corporate sponsorship for 40 years is some kind of miracle manifested by an incredible volunteer corps.)

Back in 2009 and 2010, I brought my camera to Dally and had a lot of fun shooting what I saw. I decided to do the same this year and I'm really glad I did. There was a special energy about the 40th Dally. The vibes seemed extra loving and the freak flags seemed to be flying extra high. Maybe we need it more now, in these godawful Trumpy times. Resist, resist.

My favorite shots are below. I hope the love comes through.

Essay'd 2!

Last Thursday, Wayne State Press and Essay'd threw a party at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to commemorate the publication of our new book, Essay'd 2: 30 Detroit Artists!

Promo poster by artist Scott Northrup (Essay'd #47, authored by yours truly)

Essay'd 2 follows last year's Essay'd in presenting short, illustrated essays about contemporary Detroit artists. It's an outgrowth of our ongoing web project that does the same, only it looks much nicer and is actually printed on paper!

It was such a beautiful night, with family and friends showing up in force to celebrate, peruse & purchase the book, eat some locally grown & prepared food, and generally bask in the good Detroit art vibes. This was our second book launch at MOCAD, and it's starting to feel like a momentous occasion, a unique opportunity to bring people together around Detroit art.

Artist Tylonn J. Sawyer (Essay'd #41) and me. Photo by Tylonn J. Sawyer

I'm proud of Essay'd's success, to date, in uplifting Detroit's diverse art community in an informed way. (In addition to the career-survey essays we write & publish, we also host artist talks and gallery exhibitions, all of which is to connect metro-Detroiters more deeply to the remarkable art that's being made all around them.) In the lead-up to the launch, I had the opportunity to talk a bit about the book and about some Detroit artists with Ryan Patrick Hooper on WDET, Detroit's public radio station. If you'd like to listen to the 7 minute spot, you can find it here. 

And if you're looking to pick up a copy of the book, you can find copies at the bookstores of the DIA and MOCAD, or order online at WSU Press's site or Amazon.

Keeping time with Merce Cunningham in Chicago

I took a quick trip to Chicago last weekend to see some art! Though brief, it was full—a grateful getaway and a memorable aesthetic adventure.

The impetus was Tesseract, a new dance/video work created by video artist Charles Atlas and dancer-choreographers Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell. Tesseract was performed at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)—and at the Walker Center in Minneapolis the week before—as part of "Common Time," a knockout Merce Cunningham exhibition currently on view at both institutions.

From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Photo courtesy of the MCA.

Atlas enjoyed a decades-long collaborative practice with Cunningham (1919-2009), documenting many of the legendary choreographer's dances, but also creating with him a host of experimental dance-for-camera works that radically reimagined the relationship between dance and video. Riener and Mitchell, meanwhile, were both acclaimed dancers in Cunningham's company near the end of its long run. (It disbanded, per the choreographer's instructions, upon his death.) So their new collaboration is a little "Merce Cunningham: The Next Generation," as Oren Goldenberg, a Detroit video artist and one of my travel buddies, put it. (Oren, who makes terrific dance-for-camera videos himself, is the subject of my next Essay'd essay, which will be out in a couple weeks.)

I was so curious to see what these three Mercists had made together. It turned out to be interesting, stylish, and ambitious but, I thought, ultimately a bit of a mess.

Oren's Star Trek reference ended up being pretty appropriate: Tesseract, which is half 3D dance video and half live performance with live video effects, has a decidedly sci-fi flavor. There were alien landscapes, alien scenarios, alien architecture, and (in a surprising and funny moment) an alien language; there was an especially beautiful dancer in shiny silver and black that looked and moved like an automaton; and, of course, there was the self-consciously hi-tech quality of the performance itself: not only the 3D dance film of the first half (a pretty exciting experience and, I thought, a delightful use of the medium), but also the live video effects of Act 2, which found a graceful (you might say dancerly) Steadicam-equipped videographer onstage with the dancers, whose likenesses were simultaneously projected onto a scrim and digitally manipulated by Atlas in real time.

From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Photo by Ray Felix, courtesy of the Walker Art Center.

There was, in the end, much to appreciate about Tesseract, especially in the 3D film, which cut between six different scenarios with markedly different sets, choreographies, costumes, and video effects. My favorite was a sort of Martian landscape, complete with a little Ray Bradbury building on the horizon, in which a group of orange-clad dancers with little geometric growths in their costumes were green-screened into the scene, collage-like, and proceeded to manipulate and move, slowly and exploratorily, through a series of larger shapes with which they were each paired. Subtle, mysterious, seductive stuff.

From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Production photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.

Aside from a few decidedly over-the-top moments, I found myself mostly absorbed by the video, but I had a harder time getting into the live performance. It wasn't just that the on-stage videographer was distracting (he was); it was also that the video effects felt a little hokey and arbitrary, and that they reminded me of stronger, surer works that incorporated similar effects more successfully, like Lucinda Childs's 1979 Dance, which I saw on the same MCA stage in 2009 (and which I wrote about in this very blog!), and Cunningham's own Biped (1999), which made an indelible impression when I saw it in Ann Arbor all the way back in 2004. Both of those pieces include images of moving bodies projected onto a scrim in front of the dancers, but in each, the live dancing and the film/video effect are integrated into a coherent whole.

From Dance (2009 revival) by Lucinda Childs. Photo by Sally Cohn, courtesy of L'Obs.

Tesseract emulates both of those classic works, with the key difference that now the video is live. Does it need to be? It felt showy and a little contrived—something done because it could be done, rather than something undertaken to meaningfully advance the relationship between dancer and moving image. A stimulating challenge, no doubt, for the whole team of artists, but does it justify the distracting and distancing effect on the audience? I give the creative trio credit for much about Tesseract, which, in the end, I'm glad I saw (and which was, I ought to say, a robust and tentacled work, not easily summed up) but ultimately I felt that it didn't hang together. It lacked a center, and at the same time there was so much of it. (Do I sound like a cranky minimalist?) It seemed, as Oren remarked later, experimental in a way that connotes something still being worked out—something unfinished, in process.

More coherent, even in its overabundance, was "Common Time," the Cunningham exhibition that occupied the entire fourth floor of the MCA, and which we returned to the museum the next day to experience. Its theme is the dense network of creative collaborations and relationships that typified Cunningham's practice—and that brought dance into fruitful contact with the wider art world.

66-76-89 (1990) by Nam Jun Paik

Cunningham was an inveterate collaborator, working with a dizzying array of influential (largely New York-based) artists over his long career. They created sets, costumes, music, soundscapes and, in the case of Atlas and fellow video artist Nam Jun Paik, films and videos that augment, complement, complicate, and ultimately co-create Cunningham's work. (Cunningham maintained a remarkable degree of trust in his many collaborators, who were typically encouraged to pursue their own visions independently. Often, it was only in performance that all the elements would come together.) The exhibition overflows with these materials, including sets by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Morris; costumes by Rei Kawakubo; scores and sound art by John Cage and Pauline Oliveros; and more Cunningham videos than I had ever hoped to see in one place. In addition, there are a number of standalone works by many of these artists, as well as ephemera from others with whom Cunningham did not actively collaborate, but who labored around the same time and place in their own influential and boundary-breaking ways, like Trisha Brown and Yoko Ono.

Autobiography (1968) by Robert Rauschenberg

"Common Time" is lavish, overwhelming, transcendent. It is at once a sprawling survey of some of the most groundbreaking American artists of the latter half of the 20th century, and a tightly focused examination of some of the circumstances and concerns that united them. (It's nuts to think that this is just half of a show, the other half filling the galleries of the Walker in Minneapolis.)

Most exciting, to me, was MC⁹, an unforgettable, immersive installation by Charles Atlas that reinforced my admiration for his work (any ambivalent impressions of Tesseract notwithstanding). Picture it: you enter a long, dark room, one of the MCA's impressive barrel vault galleries, and find yourself surrounded by an architecture of screens: monitors of varying sizes, many quite large, most sleek and flat, a few boxy; some mounted above your head, and others installed at body level. There is an incredible visual and aural commotion as nine channels featuring looping excerpts from 21 different Atlas/Cunningham dance-for-camera collaborations made over 40 years are simultaneously played (so that multiple screens display the same works at the same time, while different screens display others). Videos do not play back-to-back; edited between them are either a countdown, such as you'd see on an old film header (complete with penetrating, metronomic tones marking the descent), or else (literally) luminous, saturated color fields, a huge pink rectangle here, a green one there, that briefly catch and fill the eye, offering a respite from the relentless movement in the videos, and casting colored reflections on the bodies of the other spectators, who stand and take it all in or perambulate through the ad hoc promenade—agog, indifferent, or somewhere in between.

Installation view of MC⁹ (2012) by Charles Atlas

I got lost in that room, and might have stayed for hours. There was so much happening, so much to take in. It was a dreamy, mysterious space, both cavernous and intimate. There was an overlapping of sound—warm, ambient, and suddenly clear—and everywhere you looked, there were bodies in motion (in that crisp, awkward, balletic Cunningham style), bodies both historic and near-contemporary, in black and white and vivid color, life-size bodies that were imaginatively de- and re-contextualized, tracked up close by fluid, moving cameras, and depicted in images nested within images. A techno-temple to a titan, made of time. I took a brief video inside with my phone. It's just a phone video, nothing special (actually it's pretty bad), and it offers the barest glimpse of the thing itself, but I'm compelled to share it anyway:

I left "Common Time" and Chicago with a feeling of gratitude for having seen so much work by Cunningham and his cohort, and also with a sense of the weight and fullness of his long life. Cunningham died at 90, and had been working, collaborating, and documenting his efforts for nearly 60 of those years. I am inspired by this life: by the extent of his accomplishments, by his evidently vast capacity for friendship, and by his openness to time and chance and to moving forward with the world.

On the subject of time and aging, I should wrap up by mentioning that the MCA has another terrific exhibition up right now, "Eternal Youth," that would itself have been worth the trip from Detroit. It's a group show concerned with youth culture since the 1990s. I'm not going to go into it at length here, but suffice it to say that it's a sexy, funny, challenging, and queer-forward show, full of inventive, absorbing work by a diverse roster of artists both well-known and emerging. As such, it's a nice counterweight to the somewhat High Art seriousness of "Common Time," which might even seem a little stuffy, a little camp, by comparison.

* * *

Coda: While at the MCA, I was delighted to run into my friends Lesley and Megan from Detroit, who took me around "Eternal Youth" and showed me some of their favorite pieces. Here they are watching one of my favorites, a 20 minute video by Jumana Manna called Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010), an earthy, engrossing exploration of the macho mystique of East Jerusalem thug culture. (You can watch it on Vimeo here.)