It was recently announced that after more than five decades of abandonment and neglect, the sprawling, decrepit Packard Automotive Plant on the east side of Detroit will be demolished by its ostensible current owner Dominic Cristini. (For news coverage, click here, here, here, and here.) Designed in the early 1900s by industrial architect Albert Kahn, the 40-acre, 3.5 million square foot complex was once the headquarters and main production site for the Packard Motor Car Company, one of the premier American luxury automobile brands of the 20th century. The plant was the first large-scale reinforced concrete industrial construction project in the world and at its opening in 1907 was considered to be the most advanced facility of its kind anywhere. The plant’s opening preceded by three years Henry Ford’s legendary Highland Park Plant (also designed by Kahn and immortalized by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Journey to the End of the Night — for $5 a Day) and the moving assembly line by six years.

Since its closing in 1958, the complex has progressively fallen into decay with several sections in collapse as a result of exposure to the elements and a succession of fires; although, most of the buildings remain structurally sound due to their reinforced concrete construction. Much of the wiring and other building materials have been stripped by scavengers over the years. In recent times, the plant has also served as an enclave for so-called urban explorers, graffiti artists, and purveyors of the photographic genre known as “ruin porn.” Without question, the most significant work done in this environment is that of Detroit artist Scott Hocking.

Born in Detroit in 1975, Hocking has been surveying the postindustrial landscape of Detroit for more than a decade. His project Relics, begun in 2001 in collaboration with Detroit artist Clinton Snider, has collected thousands of found objects and organized them into various grid configurations, which are exhibited from time to time. The result of an ongoing series of Situationist-like derives (drifts) through the city’s wastelands, Relics gathers up the castoffs of modernity’s material culture and presents them as metonyms of lives and livelihoods ruined in the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist mode of production, a tidal wave of creative destruction under which vast sections of Detroit have been literally and figuratively washed away. Permeated with the smell of grime and decay and odors of chemicals whose half-lives will persist into future centuries, the assemblages of broken toys, appliance fragments, rotted clothing, rusted machine parts, architectural remnants, and other abandoned ephemera, register the psychic realignment that has taken place in the migration from the age of mechanical reproduction to the regime of neoliberalism, of all that was once solid melting into air.

Hocking’s installation in the Packard Plant, Garden of the Gods (2009-2011), is among his most remarked-upon works, and it is arguably one of the most significant. Situated in a section of an upper floor where the roof has collapsed, the piece uses columns still standing amidst the rubble as pedestals upon which are perched old TV consoles retrieved from elsewhere in the building. (At one point in its devolution, the plant was used in part as storage space. One loft area was apparently used by a television repair and recycling service, the remains of which are still there.)

Taking its title from a sedimentary rock formation in the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois, Garden of the Gods takes each of its 12 monuments as a member of the Greek pantheon. Over time some of these have also fallen over and other pieces of the structure have collapsed. The process of entropy has been photographically documented periodically since the TVs were first installed in 2009.

Hocking readily acknowledges the site-specificity of this and other works, yet at the same time he gestures toward a broader historical view. From a mythological perspective, Garden of the Gods is a meditation on the hubris and repeated failure of humankind’s stratagems of control over nature, a mytheme that goes back into distant times. (For an excellent interview with the artist on this and other aspects of his work, see Sarah Margolis-Pineo’s “Seeing Beauty in All Stages.”)

Closer to the present, Garden of the Gods can be read as a dystopian reflection of the effects of spectacle society. Hocking talks of thinking about the site originally as reminiscent of a classical amphitheater, a stage upon which to present a cast of epic characters. Coming then upon the trove of abandoned televisions sets, he instantly made the connection between the upright pillars and the TV consoles as the appropriate dramatis personae. “It is almost too simplistic that the TVs are new gods,” the artist has said. But I would argue that in this regard Garden of the Gods is in fact quite astute.

In his classic study Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams asserts that the rise of TV as the quintessential mass medium of the postwar era is inextricably bound up in its ability to communicate over large distances via the broadcast signal. In the United States, television worked in concert with the personal automobile and the suburban single-family housing development to de-massify the urban core and construct a national imaginary based on the concept of “mobile privatization,” the idea that one could survey the outside world from the comfort and security of one’s own living room. (An excellent study on the effects of this process in American society during the 1960s and beyond is Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior.) And while the inner city has been substantially abandoned and thus devastated, the suburbs surrounding Detroit are actually quite the opposite. (Oakland County, just north of the city, is one of the nation’s most affluent areas.) Mobile privatization became the means by which the public sphere imploded only to be replaced by the isolation of a domestic simulacrum whose only respite is consumerism, the true god being worshipped through the medium of TV.

The physical and psychic traces of the repercussions of mobile privatization and its consumerist orientation are stunningly apparent in Detroit. In light of the recent, and some say terminal, crises of the modern capitalist world-system, Garden of the Gods is a harbinger of what the future may hold.

A version of this post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

This post continues the analysis begun in Part I of this series, relating art in Detroit to concepts of the Situationist International. Part I provides an introduction and discussion of the concept of psychogeography. Part II discusses the concepts of derive and detournment. The final part, part III, looks at the gift and potlatch.

A second Situationist concept relevant to a discussion of the art of the commons in Detroit is derive, typically rendered in English as “drift,” the practice of meandering, unpredictable explorations of an environment in which its psychogeographic characteristics are exposed. The artist Scott Hocking has been exploring the nether regions of the erstwhile Motor City for more than a decade. In addition to sculptural installations that respond to the physical environment, the artist has recorded his perambulations in a series of documentary photographs organized under topics such as “bad” grafitti, abandoned boats and other vehicles, and present-day locations that were once sites of ancient burial mounds. As Debord notes in “Theory of Derive,” derive isn’t an entirely aimless pursuit, but one driven by an awareness of psychogeographical effects. One of Hocking’s more noteworthy derives is Detroit Love (2007-present).

The project is a miscellany of picturesque images of scenes around the city, moments in place and time that reveal the artist’s emotional connection with the environs. The images are often tinged with irony, capturing residues of the collective memory slipping away. Others show the persistence of the life force amidst the ruins. Among the former are Grand Army of the Republic, a head-on view of a Romanesque structure, built in 1899 originally for the Civil War veterans of the Union Army. Shortly before the last vet died in the early 1940s, the City of Detroit took over management of the building, using it as a social services and community center until closing it permanently in 1982. Another is Blue Bird Inn, which in the 1950s and ’60s was a mainstay of Detroit’s vibrant jazz scene, featuring local artists like Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, and the Jones Brothers, Elvin, Thad, and Hank, all of whom would go on to become major figures of the post-bebop era in New York City. Among the latter are images of the city’s wildlife now free to roam the depopulated zones being reclaimed by nature, the process whereby the beach beneath street has been revealed. Each image reflects on the environment in an archeological way not from the perspective of nostalgia. Each represents different aspects of the here and now, for better or worse.

A third concept is detournement, diversion or derailment, which is the practice of reusing existing cultural expressions in a way that gives them new meaning and effect. On a formalist aesthetic level, this can be seen as basically the practice of collage, which since the time of the Cubists has allowed pieces of the broken world to be incorporated into works of art. But from the Situationist point of view, it specifically refers to interventions into the materials, processes, and codes of the culture industry (or as the Situationists would have it, spectacle society) the ephemera of a throwaway civilization. As Debord and Letterist Gil J Wolman write in “A User’s Guide to Detournement” (1956), “The cheapness of [the spectacle’s] products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding,” a statement itself detourned from the description by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto of the role of low-cost commodities in propagating the hegemony of capitalism around the globe.

George Rahme makes work using the remix aesthetic that Situationist detournement anticipated. In the present day, remix has penetrated popular culture primarily through the sampling, looping, and other sonic manipulations of club music, a creative form in which the artist is also proficient, having performed as a musician and DJ in the US and Europe. In his visual production, Rahme similarly assembles found and common materials into scenic mixed-media extravaganzas that look like the hallucinatory reveries of a schizoid Thomas Kincaid (or perhaps it’s just an overdose of X).

Many of Rahme’s works use cheap art reproductions retrieved from thrift shops and other secondhand sources as their foundation. These kitsch substrates are embellished with collaged elements and hand painting. The resulting pastorals can be read as allegories of postindustrial Detroit, a city that as Ground Zero of Fordist modernity was first made and then unmade by the commodity system.

A popular genre much in the news these days is ruin porn, mostly photographic representations of Detroit’s decrepit physical plant that meditate on the half-vacant city as a memento mori of capitalist over-accumulation. The ruin figures prominently in the art of the Romantic period dating back to the late 18th century. And the sublime awe of nature in the process of reclaiming the provinces of culture is a significant impulse within it as well as in the fetishizing of decay in ruin porn with which it is inextricably connected. Rahme seems to take aim directly at these postmodern Romantics with his lowbrow amalgamations of bad taste, using the detritus of consumer culture, and in particular so-called high art that has been run through the grinder of the spectacle’s image processor and rendered banal, to expose its collective id.

The small collage 8,557 (2009) is a direct take off on Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog (1818), one of the most famous images of German Romanticism. Rahme’s version is constructed on top of a poster of the Alps that features the names of various mountain peaks and their elevations. The title happens to be the elevation of the Scheien Pass near Davos in Switzerland. Besides being a popular ski resort, it’s also the site of the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, one of the prime mechanisms through which what London School of Economics sociologist Leslie Sklair terms the transnational capitalist class quite literally rules the world. Numeric indices are the blunt measuring stick by which capitalism rationalizes all things. And it was Fordism’s failure to “make the numbers” that inevitably led to Detroit’s decline in the face of globalization.

Below: Kristen Gallerneaux’s recording of Scott Hocking’s practice of derive.

Get In My Car & Drive: Nowhere in Detroit (Episode 1) from Kristen Gallerneaux on Vimeo.

Coming next part III: the gift and potlatch in the art of the commons.

In the Romantic mythologies of the market niche formerly known as the counterculture, the Situationist International occupies a special place. Founded officially in Alba, Italy, in 1957 and dissolved in 1972, the SI sought alternatives to the strictures of the capitalist ruling order by exploring techniques for opening up experience to the fulfillment of authentic desire. Among those techniques were derive, the drift, unplanned excursions typically into the urban environment to uncover its objective and subjective conditions; detournement, diversion or derailment, the appropriation and alteration of images and other expressions of the market system that would expose their contradictions; and the potlatch, grand expenditures of time and resources in defiance of capitalist rationality and utility. The SI is said to have played a leading role in the general strikes in France in May 1968, inspired the fashion, music, and lifestyles of 1970s punk subculture, and set the agenda for postmodern media interventions such as, sampling, and other forms of hacktivism. McKenzie Wark’s new book The Beach Beneath the Streets: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International takes its title from one of most the famous SI phrases from May ‘68: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (“Under the pavement, the beach!)

Given his profile as a prominent contemporary media theorist, it should come as no surprise that Wark has been heavily influenced by Situationism. Indeed, his celebrated book A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard, 2004) took obvious cues from SI frontman Guy Debord’s magnum opus, The Society of Spectacle, both in terms of its sublimely aphoristic form and its cryptic theoretical content. His next book Gamer Theory (Harvard, 2007) was in essence a requiem for the unrestrained spirit of play animating the notion of derive, now corralled within the multilevel structures of computer video games, set by the boundaries of what Wark terms their ruling “allegorithms” (a mashup of the words allegory + algorithm, meant to convey the way in which imaginative possibility has been short-circuited by the digital code embedded in predetermined game narratives). Most recently, Wark lectured on the Situationists at Columbia University, the documentation of which has been issued by Princeton Architectural Press under the title 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. The Beach Beneath the Streets expands on that last text, including whole sections that have been incorporated nearly verbatim.

Following the concept of derive, Wark meanders through the Situationist labyrinth, paying special attention to the byways that have often been overlooked by the purveyors of what has now become an academic cottage industry. As with other accounts, Wark starts the story with the Letterists, the mid-twentieth-century French avant-garde movement led by Romanian poet and filmmaker Isadore Isou and of which Debord was a member, that sought to deconstruct the semiotics of aesthetic practice down to the level of pure signifier. Other influences on the Situationists include the unrepentant nineteenth-century plagiarist Comte de Lautreamont and twentieth-century urbanologist Henri Levebvre. But contrary to standard procedure, Wark de-emphasizes Debord to focus on other personalities and currents, especially those outside the Parisian circle. Wark cannot help but summon Debord from time to time, of course, for leaving him out entirely would be akin to staging Hamlet sans the Dane. But Debord emerges in this telling as more of a superego, seeking to control the group with his dictates and excommunications, whereas the deviancies of the others expose its arguably more genuine id.

Among the most important figures in this regard is Danish artist Asger Jorn, who was one of the founding members of the Stituationist International. Though he officially quit the SI in 1961, Jorn for many years continued to support the group financially off proceeds from the sales from his artwork, which had gained international renown and substantial patronage. For Wark, Jorn is significant as a model of the true spirit of the SI, in some respects more so than even Debord, who had ironically painted himself into a theoretical corner in trying to keep the group true to its ideals as he understood them. Wark doesn’t survey much of Jorn’s artwork, which has been well documented and analyzed, by former SI member T. J. Clark among others. He instead focuses on Jorn’s writing, relatively little of which has been translated into English and is mainly known through Jens Staubrand’s study of the artist’s publications under the auspices of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.  Inspired by Nietzsche, Jorn’s aesthetic and political philosophy opposed Dionysian demiurges of desire against the Apollonian refinement and restraint of bourgeois society to thereby unleash the demotic aspirations of potlatch vis-à-vis the duty of capital accumulation.

Jacqueline De Jong, a Dutch painter who for a decade was Jorn’s lover, is another noteworthy personage. From 1962 to 1967, she edited the Situationist Times, a renegade journal (if there can be such a thing in light of Situationism’s call for the continual creation of ever-new situations) published outside the imprimatur of the SI redoubt in Paris, a kind of Trotskyite riposte, as it were, to what may be seen as Debord’s perceived Stalinism. While Wark describes these and other ephemera in some detail, it would have been nice to have some visuals to accompany the narrative. This is something 50 Years of Recuperation has and it is all the better for it. The Beach Beneath the Streets instead has a foldout graphic essay as its dust jacket titled Totality for Kids, featuring illustrations by Kevin C. Pyle and detourned snippets of text selected by Wark from Situationist primary sources. It’s amusing enough, I suppose.

But this is to kvetch about what is all in all, another masterful Wark performance. As with earlier books, Wark seamlessly weaves together a dizzying array of sources both vintage and contemporary. He connects SI debates with present-day questions of cultural politics. He offers a number of well-wrought turns of phrase. The book is less stylized than much of his recent output but very agreeable to read. In this respect it constitutes a welcome respite from the hagiography and over-heated prose of what Wark has elsewhere termed the “hypo-critical theory” within which Situationism has often come to be entangled. And in surveying that which would not be recuperated, Wark honors the SI’s legacy.