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Artists
Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial
October 19 – December 31, 2001
During a year in which
hundreds of events have celebrated Detroit’s
three-hundredth birthday, "Artists
Take on Detroit: Projects for the Tricentennial"
is both one of the last and most ambitious.
Ten installations by fifteen artists show
a side to life in the city that runs counter
to many widespread attitudes toward Detroit.
The choice of installation art to express
these ideas is deliberate. The aesthetic
power of this idiom comes from the direct
participation of the viewer, who is encouraged
not simply to observe the work of art
but rather to enter into a real experience.
These works are participatory even if
the interaction is simply navigation through
the space. Each implies a relationship
between the physical location and aesthetic
content, and its immediacy makes a direct
connection to actual visual, historical,
or social conditions. The projects challenge
the viewer’s expectations about artistic
materials and conventions and bridge traditional
art boundaries.
Installation art at
the Detroit Institute of Arts has had
a long, if sporadic, history. In the mid-1970s,
the "Works in Progress" series
gave artists — primarily local ones
such as Nancy Gordon and Jim Pallas —
public spaces within the museum to transform.
Installation work was deemphasized during
the 1980s in favor of more traditional
approaches to exhibition planning, but
the concept picked up again in the mid-1990s
with "Interventions" (1995),
"Changing Spaces: Artists’ Projects
from the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia"
(1997), "Slim’s Bike" (1999),
and "Bill Viola: Video Installations"
(2000). Over the years, the museum-going
audience in Detroit has thus had the opportunity
to experience the transformative aesthetic
that fuels installation art.
Conceived on a more
ambitious scale, "Artists Take on
Detroit" expands on the emphases
of those earlier shows. Original plans
for the show envisioned works located
outside the museum building, even embedded
in Detroit neighborhoods. As the exhibition
evolved, the projects drew ever closer
to the museum, many taking their cues
from the relationship of the museum to
the community, the visitor to the museum,
or the artists to the museum. The DIA
building as a site was integral to most
of the projects, some even coopting gallery
spaces and challenging traditional notions
of gallery display. The exhibition flows
from quiet to noisy spaces, interactive
to contemplative galleries, social to
intimate areas.
Viewers’ experience
of the individual installations, however,
leads inexorably to considerations of
the way the installations work together
as a whole and to thoughts about the complexity
of life and ideas in Detroit. None of
the projects deal directly with themes
that might be considered stereotypically
Detroit — jazz, cars, civil rights
— but these issues are touched on
obliquely in a number of places. Tyree
Guyton’s Open
House is clearly rooted in his
ongoing Heidelberg Project, in which he
transforms houses in a Detroit neighborhood.
Here, he departs from it in some significant
ways. For the first time, Guyton has built
his own house, in square footage the size
of a typical single family house but with
a ground plan that is evocative of a church.
The black skeleton of its walls and roof
are covered with posters from past political
campaigns, as well as dolls, shoes, pieces
of cars, and memorabilia. A model of the
White House, as a symbol of national unity,
holds pride of place inside. Further enlivened
by a sound track that combines history,
patriotic rhetoric, music, and the sounds
of an empty house, the experience is decidedly
different from a visit to Heidelberg Street.
Elegant and rickety at the same time,
Open
House is Guyton’s most overtly
political statement to date, calling for
compassion and brotherhood while highlighting
divisions. Its very public location in
Prentis Court insures that nearly every
visitor to the museum will come face to
face with this installation.
Strange
Früt: Rock Apocrypha, by
the Destroy All Monsters Collective (Cary
Loren, Mike Kelley, and Jim Shaw), is
in its own way political and physically
inescapable. It is the only work not specifically
created for this exhibition. Four huge
banner-like paintings hang against the
walls of the museum’s Great Hall;
these feature local sites and landmarks,
overlaid with portraits of early Detroit
rock-and-roll musicians and local television
personalities. An accompanying video runs
continuously in the Prentis Court screening
room some distance away. Its tongue-in-cheek
critique of white suburbia in the 1960s
and the Detroit rock scene — during
the period when the Collective’s
"noise" band was formed —
is softened by its nostalgic appeal to
the "baby boomer" generation
of Detroiters.
Two projects aim to
make local history both personal and universal.
Petah Coyne’s Altar
Mary, installed in the museum’s
sixteenth-century French chapel, is a
gentle but strong feminist statement.
Inspired by the wave of Irish immigrants
who came to Detroit at the end of the
nineteenth century, this work conveys
the power and majesty of the Catholic
Church and its chilling influence on the
lives of women. An abstract figure, described
by the artist as a nun, seems to melt
into the wax-dripped wall of the sculpture,
surrounded by extinguished candles and
frozen flowers. The silk draping over
the pedestal suggests a wedding gown,
a signifier of an event long considered
the most important of a woman’s life.
For working class Irish girls of the 1800s,
entry into marriage or the convent (marriage
as the "bride of Christ") is
the defining, triumphal moment of their
lives. Quiet, sweet sadness underlies
the exquisite beauty of this installation.
Similarly, Joseph Wesner’s
Voyageurs
looks back to an earlier time and
suggests that it is not so far removed
from contemporary life. In a darkened
room, two large screens fill the back
wall and floor with video projections
of rowing a boat. The rhythmic movement
and regular plash of the oars is hypnotic;
one feels one’s own body moving and
breathing in unison with the sound. Neither
the boat nor the body of the rower is
made explicit; the sound and image of
the water and the oar have an abstract
elegance. Considering the river as a means
of passage, as the defining and enduring
feature of the city’s topography,
and as a border of the United States,
this work is rich with associations. The
experience of the voyageurs, early
explorers who navigated the Detroit River
by canoe, still has relevance for those
who use their physical power to row on
the river.
The river is one unifying
thread of this exhibition, tying together
Wesner’s elegant space with at least
two others. Blackout,
by Mike Kelley, takes its name from the
frieze of photographs that lines two walls
of the installation space. These images
were originally conceived as a panoramic
view of the banks of the Detroit River,
but due to a camera malfunction, they
are almost completely black. The edges
of each print only hint at the original
view. The photographs are a partial backdrop
to a giant sculpture of astronaut John
Glenn, surrounded by low tables, which
like the sculpture, are covered in mosaic.
The mosaic pieces are cast-off bits of
objects such broken bottles and cracked
dishes that Kelley salvaged from one of
the islands in the river; the sculpture
is a recreation of the commemorative statue
of John Glenn in Kelley’s school,
John Glenn High School in Westland, Michigan.
The sophistication of the photographic
images is in sharp contrast to the folk-art
quality of the mosaic work. This recurring
counterpoint between "high"
and "low" art is underscored
by photographed stories from the archives
of the Wayne/Westland Eagle, a
neighborhood newspaper, which show the
absurdity, and often, the elegance of
everyday life.
Relics,
by Scott Hocking and Clinton Snider, updates
the tradition of assemblage so characteristic
of art in Detroit. The installation’s
primary feature is a grid of hundreds
of two-foot square boxes, each containing
a piece of cast-off machinery, a portion
of a decayed wall, or some other formally
interesting but no longer useful object.
The boxes are placed seemingly at random
but the installation as a whole has a
strong internal visual logic. It overwhelms
the viewer with sheer numbers and variations.
This twenty-first century version of a
Wunderkammer puts on display, instead
of the natural wonders and objects of
earlier centuries, the ennobled remains
of twentieth-century industry.
Michael Hall’s
installation objectifies the history of
Michigan artists.
In A Persistence
of Memory, he explores the notion
of forgetting and remembering. Paintings
chosen from the DIA collection hang facing
the wall, so that the viewer sees only
their backs. Thus, not only is each painting’s
power as an image denied, but the painting
itself becomes a three-dimensional object
with its own story to tell. Signatures,
labels, stickers, and other evidence suggest
that these works are more than the image
on their fronts. A dumpster in the center
of the floor, called a "gatherer"
by the artist, collects photos of the
images as well as museum data about them.
This receptacle is linked to the paintings
on the wall, Hall’s artistic antecedents,
by the "shadow" of one of his
own sculptures, outlined in black tape
on the floor and wall. For the last few
years, Hall has devoted his intellectual
life to recontextualizing the art of the
Great Lakes region and the Midwest, and
this installation records much of his
extensive research.
The museum itself has
a history, only imperfectly known and
tied to the history of the city. Lorella
Di Cintio and Jonsara Ruth in Traces
of Then and Now endeavor to reveal
hidden aspects of that history. Through
the magic of technology, one part of their
project returns a gallery to something
like its original appearance. The artists’
subtle modification of light and dark
reverses the usual balance of the room.
The projection of a Tintoretto painting
on the ceiling, where it had hung years
ago, makes the space seem lighter and
more expansive. The paintings below, lit
softly as if by candles, are no longer
the primary focus of the room. Upon entering,
the viewer immediately looks up into the
brightness; only after the eyes adjust
can the paintings be satisfactorily viewed.
The other part of Di Cintio and Ruth’s
project reveals the structure and materials
behind the museum’s grand architecture.
Live video, showing any movement or shift
of light, reveals the barrel vault above
the Great Hall. Elegantly simple in contrast
with the ornate hall, this structure represents
one of many essentially private area of
a very public building. Construction materials
from the museum building and from a typical
Detroit single-family dwelling are displayed
in traditional museum cases; these materials
are a reference to the differences and
similarities between public and private
architecture.
Two of the installations
were done with significant participation
by the community and were planned to express
the relationship among artists, community,
and history. Fast
Forward, Play Back, by architect
Ronit Eisenbach and dancer/choreographer
Peter Sparling, examines the past and
present of Dossin Elementary School in
northwest Detroit. The perspective on
the past is provided by Sparling, who
attended the school as a youngster. The
imprinting of elementary school is expressed
in the video vignettes of Dossin students
as well as Sparling’s dance company.
Set in a gallery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
French art, Eisenbach’s structure
of blackboards is etched with Antoine
de la Mothe Cadillac’s writing about
the founding of Detroit in 1701, overlaid
with thoughts about Detroit and life written
in chalk by the students.
By contrast,
Riches of Detroit: Faces of Detroit,
by Deborah Grotfeldt and Tricia Ward,
looks to the future and holds out the
hope that art can effect change in children’s
lives. This documentary project chronicles
the development of the artists’ intervention
into the community. The artists established
themselves as residents in a neighborhood
not far from the DIA and forged an alliance
with a local high school for teen mothers.
Together, the students and the artists
constructed an art park, renovated residences,
and built furniture, involving members
of the community. The artists’ hope
is that through this project, the lives
of the students will be enhanced and that
the neighborhood will continue to function
as a self-sustaining unit.
Through a shared spirit
of hope, creativity, and imagination,
the ten projects in this exhibition reveal
new facets of the definition of Detroit.
The works themselves are transient and
will cease to exist in their current form
when the exhibition ends, but their visual
impact and intellectual challenges will
endure, making this exhibition a fitting
end to a celebratory year.
MaryAnn
Wilkinson
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Detroit Institute of Arts
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