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 reading and reviewing McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, I couldn’t help but think about the practice of art in the city of Detroit. Wark’s title refers to the Situationist idea of deconstructing the process by which nature has come to be overwritten by culture particularly in the urban environment. This in part entails the recognition that:

“The conceit of private property is that it is something fixed, eternal. Once it comes into existence it remains, passed in an unbroken chain of ownership from one title-holder to the next. Yet in the course of time whole cities really do disappear. We live among the ruins. We later cities know that cities are mortal.” (29, emphasis added)

In the case of Detroit “the course of time” has progressed rather quickly, basically with the onset of post-Fordism in the early 1970s, though some commentaries rightly see the seeds as having been planted in the suburbanization of the region that began soon after the Second World War. This reversal of the conceit of private property provides the basis for what I have called the art of the commons, art that is neither public nor private but that exists in a space in between. And many of the practices that comprise this work have something in common with what Wark tells us about the Situationists. In this post, I will reflect on the Situationist understanding of  psychogeography as it appears in Detroit art work. Part II will similarly examine derive and detounement and part III will analyze the gift and potlatch.

In the “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” the Situationist theorist Guy Debord writes that psychogeography concerns the study of “specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals.” One of the more well-recognized mappings of the ghost world of Detroit is the one undertaken by Tyree Guyton on the city’s East Side in the form of the Heidelberg Project. Guyton objectively and subjectively marks out the territory of his experience over the years of the neighborhood where he grew up.

The objective might be best represented in the form of the polka dot, which Guyton uses to delineate physical space and to unite the public sphere of the street with the private domain of homes long since abandoned.

An example of the subjective is Soles of the Most High, a tree clad with scrap wood on its trunk and festooned with shoes hanging from its crown.

“Shoe trees” have a number of interpretations, from simply banal evidence of practical jokers tossing footwear out of their owners’ reach, to more sinister explanations of gangland territory marking rituals to folklore legends of serial killers using them as trophy displays of their victims. In Guyton’s case the tree takes its inspiration from the artist’s grandfather, Sam Mackey, a descendent of slaves who helped start the Heidelberg Project in 1986 and who had told Guyton of lynching trees from his youth in the rural South where all that passersby could see were the soles of the victims’ shoes dangling overhead. (For more on the visual representation of lynching in Guyton and other contemporary art, see chapter 6 of Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob, Rutgers, 2004, which has a detail of Soles of the Most High on its cover.)

Embedded within this apparition is the psychogeographical trace of the exodus that took African Americans from sharecropping peonage in the Jim Crow South to “free” wage-labor in the factories of the Promised Land in the North, a redemption that turned out to be only too short-lived as the sense of terroir established in neighborhoods such as Heidelberg disintegrated under post-Fordist deindustrialization and urban disinvestment, which has ironically opened up vast tracts of abandoned land in Detroit that are fertile grounds for the practice of the art of the commons.

Coming next, part II: Derive and Detournement 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.