In the current issue of The Baffler, journalist Thomas Frank takes on the notion of “vibrancy,” a term which has recently come to underpin cultural policy at the national level. As Frank reports, vibrancy is an attribute of so-called creative placemaking, the stimulating effect that culture ostensibly brings to the local environment, a kind of artsy aura that is taken to result in economic revitalization in the long run. The concept of vibrancy is being promoted in particular these days by ArtPlace, a collaboration of the National Endowment of the Arts, 10 major foundations, including the locally based Kresge Foundation, and six of the nation’s largest banks. In Frank’s analysis, vibrancy is shown to be the latest term of art, as it were, that substitutes an ephemeral quality of hipness for the erstwhile solidity of a once activist welfare state. It’s the successor paradigm to the creative economy and other gambits of gentrification, shifting responsibility for the public domain onto private individuals, in this case artists and other creative types.

Much of Frank’s critique is well taken. And yet, one wonders what other recourse there might be at this juncture? What, to coin a phrase, is to be done? In this age of compulsory diminished expectations, working with what’s at hand, bricolage as an aesthetic approach and a way of life, seems like a viable solution if only by default. Hell, even The Baffler has a Kickstarter campaign underway.

One acknowledged agent of vibrancy here in the Motor City is Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization created by 2011 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellows Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert of Design 99. Power House Productions recently received a $250,000 grant from ArtPlace to convert three vacant houses in their neighborhood into sites for art and community engagement. The piece of the overall project that seems to have the most immediate effect is Skate House, which is part of the Ride It Sculpture Park. When completed, Skate House will feature an indoor skateboarding track and residence for visiting skateboarders and artists.

The Ride It Sculpture Park is situated on four adjacent vacant commercial lots at the terminus of the Davison Freeway, the nation’s first below-grade limited access urban highway, opened in 1942 to service nearby defense manufacturers during WWII when Detroit was known as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” The project is a collaboration with skateboard enthusiasts and artists in the area as well as nationally. Design 99 and artist Jon Brumit are the principal park design team and video artists. Other collaborators include skateboard accessories providers Emerica and Independent Truck Company, media outlets Thrasher, Slap, and Juxtapoz, and a crew of volunteers. A fundraiser auction of artist’s skateboard decks, including one designed by international artist Matthew Barney, netted more than $25,000 for the project. A Crowdrise campaign exceeded its goal.

The neighborhood in which the park is located has come to be known as Banglatown, for its large population of Bangladeshi Muslims, who began arriving in the area about 30 years ago, mainly from Queens, New York, in search of better quality of life. On the face of it, it’s not an area one would consider an obvious candidate for that much-vaunted vibrancy. While the neighborhood isn’t nearly as abandoned as many in the city which have literally reverted to open field (see the Detroit Works Project Framework Zones Map), Banglatown’s housing stock doesn’t exactly pass muster as the stuff from which gentrification is typically made. Much of it dates from before the Great Depression when Detroit’s booming auto industry brought masses of immigrants into the city who took up residence in quickly built, modest housing constructed of relatively inexpensive materials. Besides being flimsy, it isn’t especially distinctive in terms of design. Indeed, Banglatown isn’t nearly as picturesque as Bushwick.

But it’s what’s there and it’s cheap. Brumit and his partner the artist Sarah Wagner (and their son Otto) are the owners of the New York Times celebrated $100 house. Other artists have acquired properties in the neighborhood at auction for the low four figures and below. The houses are generally in pretty bad shape. In fact, a couple of them acquired by Design 99 were in such a state as to be beyond repair and instead became material for site-specific art installations. To be sure, even completely discounting the considerable sweat equity that has gone into rebuilding the structures and factoring in only materials, the restoration efforts will likely never pay out in terms of the resulting market value.

Although not officially completed, the first phase of Ride It Sculpture Park is substantially in place and functional. The concrete construction features several ramparts, quarter and half pipes, spines, and banks. There’s a built-in barbeque pit off to one side. The facility is already being used by skateboarders and BMX riders, many of whom have come from far beyond the neighborhood, having heard of the park through skateboarding community social networking on Facebook and Twitter. The national organization Boards for Bros has given away skateboards to kids who couldn’t afford to buy their own, and more seasoned riders have helped neophytes get on board so to speak.

How long projects like this will continue to be possible is an open question. Recently a small group of investors in nearby Macomb County, a primarily working class suburban region and Tea Party stronghold northeast of the city, purchased every available tax-foreclosed property (a total of 645 parcels, including 403 residential) for a lump sum of $4.7 million. The inventory in Detroit exceeds that by many multiples. (By one estimate the total hit for tax-foreclosed properties in Detroit would come to more than a quarter of a billion dollars.) But news outlets such as NPR have reported stories of foreign investors from places like London and Dubai buying up large lots of Detroit real estate in speculation.

At street level, whether Ride It Sculpture Park constitutes vibrancy or not doesn’t seem particularly important, much less whether it should trouble us if it does. For now, the collaborators of the project have mended a hole in the social fabric of their local community, and skateboarders in Banglatown are busy perfecting their flips and grinds.

How long projects like this will continue to be possible is an open question. Recently a small group of investors in nearby Macomb County, a primarily working class suburban region and Tea Party stronghold northeast of the city, purchased every available tax-foreclosed property (a total of 645 parcels, including 403 residential) for a lump sum of $4.7 million. The inventory in Detroit exceeds that by many multiples. (By one estimate the total hit for tax-foreclosed properties in Detroit would come to more than a quarter of a billion dollars.) But news outlets such as NPR have reported stories of foreign investors from places like London and Dubai buying up large lots of Detroit real estate in speculation.

At street level, whether Ride It Sculpture Park constitutes vibrancy or not doesn’t seem particularly important, much less whether it should trouble us if it does. For now, the collaborators of the project have mended a hole in the social fabric of their local community, and skateboarders in Banglatown are busy perfecting their flips and grinds.

This post originally appeared in Motown Review of Art.

Ride It Sculpture Park, Tony Miorana from Power House Productions on Vimeo.

Over the last year and a half, I have looked at the field of cultural production in Detroit through several lenses. As I’ve reflected on things a little more, I have  come to see that these lenses are interconnected. What’s more, they point to a way in which certain art projects in Detroit are perhaps opening up an avenue for thinking about how we might actually go about making that other world the new social movements slogans tell us is possible.

I first have looked at Detroit from the perspective of what I call the art of the commons. This lens reveals a significant (though certainly not exclusive) tendency within contemporary Detroit art that has emerged in those spaces where the distinctions between public and private seems to have dissipated as part of the process of demassification of the city’s core, which has taken place over the last four decades. (As Marx declared, “All that is solid melts into air.”) The resulting abandonment of commercial and residential property, its subsequent neglect, and its reclamation in many quarters by nature has figuratively and in not a few cases quite literally opened up a new field of cultural production. Referring back to the medieval commons (land left open for grazing, farming, and other uses by anyone without requiring individual ownership — the term “commoner,” i.e., one without hereditary title, comes from it), the art of commons trespasses the boundaries of conventional property relations of modern capitalism.

The idea that private property is essentially an ideological construction, something legitimated by hegemonic authority underlies the psychogeographic investigations of the urban landscape undertaken by the Situationist International. This is my  second filter. In particular, the SI concepts of derive (drift), detournement (diversion, derailment), the gift economy, and potlatch provide useful ideal types for understanding how cultural producers in Detroit negotiate the city’s postindustrial condition. (See the post “Beneath the Pavement, the Beach!” for my analysis of Detroit art from a Situationist perspective.)

The work has resulted from these investigations seems to be best embodied by the third lens, Jacques Ranciere‘s notion of aesthetic community. As I have noted in my post, “Aesthetic Community in Detroit,” this conception of community isn’t defined by the network of producers so much as it is by the conscious collective of ideas they are making tangible. There is the sense data of course, that is, the material artifacts, spatial constructions, and interpersonal connections, but more important is the dialectical relationship of the acknowledgment of what is coupled with the vision of what could be. Putting this vision into practice is the lynchpin of what Ranciere identifies as the connection between aesthetics and politics.

How we might look at this confluence of ideas from a sociological perspective can be found in Eric Olin Wright‘s model of social change, the real utopia. As opposed to conventional utopias, which are ideal communities of admittedly unattainable perfection, real utopias, according to Wright, combine “principles and rationales for different emancipatory visions with the analysis of pragmatic problems of institutional design.” Real utopias are ways of envisioning conditions of social and political justice that are at once desirable, viable, and achievable. In keeping with this, real utopias are thus models of emancipatory social transformation, alternative ways of providing for human well being. The aesthetic community of Detroit operates as such a real utopia, in the “niches, spaces, and margins of capitalist society,” in what I have been calling the commons.

There is no better example of this in Detroit than work that has been done over the last five or so years by Design 99, the collaboration of artist Mitch Cope and architect Gina Reichert. Started as a design consulting studio and retail space, Design 99 has evolved into broad-based conduit for exploring models of contemporary art and architectural practice and community engagement. In 2008, Design 99 acquired a foreclosed and abandoned residential structure on Detroit’s northeast side for $1800, which they began to use as a test site for sustainable design and social practice. Project plans called for the structure to be rehabilitated using recycled materials and be completely energy self-sufficient, combining wind and solar technologies for all of its power needs. The project soon attracted attention and support from local residents. Kids started coming by to help paint and plant, and the daily proceedings became a source of conversation for adults.

In 2009, Cope and Reichert formed Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization to extend their work into the nearby neighborhood in a more comprehensive and coordinated way. Founded in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, the organization started as defensive mechanism against the increase in crime and vandalism that plagued the already blighted neighborhood. The “power” in Power House soon came to be more than a descriptor of its energy sources; it came to mean more significantly empowerment of the local community. Power House Productions facilitated the acquisition of eight more houses and three empty lots in the neighborhood. Five of those properties are currently undergoing rehabilitation for use as primary residences. There are also community gardens, neighborhood clean-ups, and neighborhood watch programs in effect. Future plans call for a neighborhood bike shop (Detroit has become a major bike city), a series of artists residencies and workshops, and a skateboard park. The San Francisco-based magazine Juxtapoz also partnered with Power House Productions recently on a multiple-location art-installation project.

Related projects have now followed. The University of Michigan School of Architecture sponsored five graduate fellowships in 2009-2010 to conduct design research, purchasing a house in the neighborhood to allow them to work at full scale. Chicago-based artists Sarah Wagner and Jon Brumit moved in and formed the project DFLUX Research Studio to explore the possibilities of emergent creative cottage industries, famously purchasing a house for $100 in which to conduct their activities. The artist Graem Whyte (himself co-director of another nearby artists’ enterprise Popps Packing) is working on the Squash House project, a site-specific interaction space focusing on play and gardening as the primary mechanisms for community building. Like the Power House, it will be energy self-sufficient and use recycled materials wherever possible.

In his book Envisioning Real Utopias, Wright identifies two interstitial strategies, “revolutionary” and “evolutionary,” both of which are connected to the anarchic idea of politics outside the modern state. The former ultimately proposes a rupture with the political economy of capitalism, the latter a more gradual “withering away” as it were. The interstitial strategies of cultural producers in Detroit strike me as being more of the evolutionary variety. (Indeed, local activist and theorist Grace Lee Boggs notes that the new social movements in Detroit are putting the “evolution” in the “revolution.”) As Wright notes, evolutionary interstitial strategies often emerge in situations where conventional structures are simply not available. It’s essentially a form of social bricolage (in contemporary parlance DIY), which has the potential to become a new order. As Wright further notes, the bourgeois class, and thus modern capitalism, emerged in what Wallerstein terms “the long 16th century” from the interstices of the medieval system. While it may be admittedly utopian to think so at this point, we could be in the process of witnessing a similar transformation today.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

In a recent contribution to the Huffington Post, author and community organizer Yusef Bunchy Shakur and co-author Jenny Lee write: “Detroit is modeling life after capitalism.” One of the ways this is happening is through the work of artists who are helping to envision what that life might look like. These artists are constructing what the French philosopher Jacques Ranciere calls an “aesthetic community.”

The aesthetic community of Detroit is more than simply a collection of artists and other creative types working in the same location. It’s a community of sense, as Ranciere expresses it, which operates on three levels.

The three senses of aesthetic community:

The first level of aesthetic community is a certain combination of sense data — materials, forms, spaces, etc. — that constitute the work. In particular in Detroit, this often consists of using recycled castoff materials, adopting makeshift techniques for fashioning them into artistic expressions, and doing so in locations that have been abandoned or otherwise marked by neglect. The notion of aesthetic community at this level comprises what Ranciere terms a “regime of conjunction,” that is, a bringing together of disparate elements into a meaningful whole.

The second level opens up a tension between this regime of conjunction and what Ranciere terms the “regime of disjunction.” The latter can be understood as the way the work points to that which is absent, specifically in the case of Detroit the sense of community dislocated as a result of the ravages of capitalism, the lack that registers the social, economic, and political deracination whose residue is emphatically apparent in the postindustrial wasteland of Detroit.

This aspect of aesthetic community is not the same as what another French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, terms the “inoperative community,” the longing for the original idea of community that was lost or broken in the transition to modernity, the dialectic of what sociologists term Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. That’s about Romantic nostalgia, the province essentially of so-called “ruin porn.” Instead, it’s what enables the third level of aesthetic community to come into play.

The third level of aesthetic community intertwines the “being together” of the first level with the “being apart” of the second level to produce a new sense of community, in the present and in its potentiality. It’s a recognition of what is, coupled with a prospect of what may be to come. It’s a sensibility, according Ranciere, which aesthetics shares with politics.

Some aspects of aesthetic community in Detroit:

The Heidelberg Project
Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project has been extensively written about. Its significance as an expression of aesthetic community has been less remarked upon. As is well known, Guyton’s project reclaims a largely abandoned two-block area in a neighborhood on the city’s east side. Its primary materials are castoffs the artist typically retrieves from around the city. One of the elements, the polka dot, festoons buildings and the street, conjoining elements of a broken urban environment into an aesthetic whole. Other aspects point to the second level of Ranciere’s concept, for example, the flat cutout images of New York taxis spread around the project, serving the needs of a public that isn’t there but could be if the environment were different.

Over the 25 years of its existence, the Heidelberg Project has moved from being simply an art environment to a community activity and education space. Kids shoot hoops at the basketball net set up in the center of the street. A regular schedule of events is maintained, bringing people together under a  multicultural umbrella. The 2011 Summer Solstice celebration featured demonstrations of Brazilian capoeria, music, dancing, and food. A gathering later in the summer featured a spoken-word performance event and concert of funk, hip-hop, and electronic music. The Heidelberg Project also has a library and recently began an endeavor to promote local ecological and social sustainability.

The City of Detroit government has had an ambivalent relationship with the Heidelberg Project over the last 25 years, including bulldozing over sections of it on two occasions, only to see it rebuilt and expanded each time.These police actions and their ultimate futility point to a political aspect of the Heidelberg Project. Again, Ranciere provides insight into the discussion.

For Ranciere, “the essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space.” Its essence, he writes in “Ten Theses on Politics,” is to make manifest the disjuncture between the state as a site of power and politics as a field of action — a field Ranciere calls “democracy,” the space created of, by, and for the rule of the people and their claim to legitimacy, regardless of station. And so it is that the politics of aesthetic community are on view on Heidelberg Street.

Detroit Soup
Another example is the Detroit Soup project founded by artist Kate Daughdrill and musician Jessica Hernandez. Detroit Soup is a monthly dinner-fundraiser for creative projects happening in Detroit. It takes place in a donated loft above a bakery in Mexicantown on the city’s northeast side.  Attendees make a $5 contribution and share a meal made by volunteers. Artists and other individuals present creative projects, which are then voted on by the group. The proposal with the most votes gets the evening’s proceeds. Grantees usually return at a later date to present the results of their completed projects. The funding amounts are small, but the process entirely grassroots.

During the course of the meeting, other activities take place. The most important is bringing various creative communities into contact with one another, a process of transforming aesthetic community as an idea into a democratic community in fact. What’s more, similar fundraising initiatives have spread throughout the city, providing additional nodes in the social network and strengthening the mesh of interrelationships among cultural producers in the city.

Because we have survived the most thorough divestment of capital that any major U.S. city has ever seen; because we have survived “white flight” and “middle class flight,” state-takeovers, corruption and the dismantling of our public institutions; because the people who remained in Detroit are resilient and ingenious, Detroiters have redefined what “revolution” looks like.

This revolution is still in progress and certainly far from being won; it’s a revolution that is both aesthetic and political. Its spirit is embedded in the city’s motto adopted in the wake of the Great Fire of 1805, as if prefiguring Ranciere by some two centuries, “Speribus meliora; resurget cinerabus” — “We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes.”

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.