In recent posts, Vince Carducci examining the urban environment in terms of psychogeography, derive and detournment, and the gift and potlatch, explored the art of Detroit, the city at the epicenter of Fordism and ground zero of post – Fordist devastation. While I think his inquiry is illuminating, showing art playing an important role in democratic society, I am skeptical about his political utopianism, as he stands on the shoulders of Marx and the Situationists and Ken Wark’s account of them. I don’t think that the full power of the artwork is captured as a critique of capitalism or that the full political significance of the work is in its message. We disagree, once again, on art as propaganda and how art becomes politically significant.

Artwork, and the world it creates when appreciated, is, in my judgment, more important than context. The art, its independent domain, is where the action is, which is then related to a variety of different contexts. To be sure, Carducci shows how this works. Detroit artists don’t only speak to each other, creating work that communicates for themselves and their immediate audience. They speak to the de-industrializing world, providing insights, suggesting an alternative way of living. But this can work in many different ways, not necessarily tied to political programs of the left or the right or the center.

Take an example drawn from two past posts: Ivo Andric novelistic depiction of The Bridge on the Drina inspired Elzbieta Matynia to reflect on the way that bridge, connecting Serbia and Bosnia, provided a space for interaction between people from elsewhere, at the kapia, the public square on the bridge, enabling civility. Her account, in turn, inspired me to reflect upon the bridges I observe on my daily run through the public park that was the Rockefeller estate, and provided me with critical perspective for thinking about the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year. Andric’s novel informed Matynia’s cultural theory, which gave me insight into everyday life, helping me confront a major natural and man made catastrophe in Japan, which, of course, was far from the world of Andric’s creation. The metaphor of the bridge opens up an imaginative field that moves freely.

I think it is this opening that is key to the role art plays in a democratic society. Art as art, art for art’s sake without elitism, is about the development of imagination, in form. It informs opinion, which potentially makes democratic deliberations more fruitful.

Thus, as Paul A. Kottman draws upon the works of Shakespeare to gain insight into the character of presidents past, he seeks to understand the birthers’ convictions about President Obama. “Just as nothing is going to count for Othello as evidence that Desdemona loves him, nothing will ‘prove’ to the ‘birthers’ that Obama and the civic world he represents are trustworthy.” Shakespeare is not a Republican or a Democrat, obviously, but he can inform democratic judgment, about the destructive power of skepticism of the other.

And Cecilia Rubino uses theater to remember and commemorate in a theater piece, dramatically confronting the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, while Judy Taylor uses mural painting to remember and commemorate Maine’s labor history. Taylor was commissioned to do this work. Rubino is committed to the political project of labor. For one, the work is a result of a market transaction, for the other, a matter of political commitment. But in both, the work speaks beyond the market and commitment. It opens imaginative space. The removal of the Taylor’s mural from public display is a scandal because banishment closes. It is repressive, beyond left and right.

The opening of imagination that is art is sometimes tied to a political cause and sometimes it has little or nothing to do with politics. But the opening itself serves democratic ends. It battles against cliché.  It enriches public life and human capacity. Sometimes, this has immediate political meaning and consequence. Vince and I are different, but not really in opposition, in that he seems to especially value the immediate and I prefer distance.

In upcoming posts, we will explore art that informs public imagination more slowly, less directly: Daniel Goode on listening creatively in New York. What I find most striking about his mini-reviews is that they show how listening is a way of thinking, providing insight. The insight is politically significant, even without any specific political end. And this is not about elitist institutions and sensibilities, high art as the grounds for philistine status acquisition, as I think a post or two on the rap scene by another new DC contributor, Lisa Aslanian will show.

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 fourth Situationist concept that can be discerned in the art of the commons in Detroit is that of the gift. Working off the research on gift economies of early social scientists such as Franz Boas and Marcel Mauss, and as subsequently interpreted by the renegade Surrealist Georges Bataille, the Situationists envisioned “a new type of human relationship.” This would entail neither the cold calculations of bourgeois exchange nor the asymmetrical obligations of aristocratic bequest, but would instead be based on the egalitarian reciprocity of gifts freely given and received. (See chapter 8, “Exchange and Gift,” in The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem for an outline of the Situationist conception of the gift.)

The gift is central to the practice of art in the face of the money economy argues Lewis Hyde in his now famous book of the same name. The gift economy informs many aspects of relational aesthetics, for example in the work of Rikrit Taravanija, who creates installations that are the setting for sharing meals and other types of social interaction. Detroit Soup similarly features monthly sharing of meals as a collaborative situation for building an aesthetic community. Dinners are prepared by volunteers who share their current projects and thoughts with attendees who contribute $5 toward the evening. Others then present ideas which are voted upon. The selected proposals are given the entire proceeds to fund execution. Additional events along the model of Detroit Soup are now proliferating around the city.

Below: Vanessa Miller and Amy Kaherl discussing Detroit Soup at University of Michigan.

The final concept proceeds directly from the gift and that is the notion of potlatch. A gift-giving festival and economic system practiced among indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest prior to the arrival of European colonizers, potlatch was taken initially by the Letterists, who named one of their official journals after it, and subsequently by the Situationists as a way out of what they perceived to be the increasingly reified relationships of capitalist commodity culture. The concept of potlatch figures prominently in Bataille’s book The Accursed Share, first published in France in 1949, where it constitutes a rejection of classical Western economic theories based on notions of rational choice. For Bataille, the excess accumulation of any system is destined to be released in luxurious waste, of which the arts were a form however admittedly noble. And for the Situationists, “release” meant first and foremost escape from the tick, tick, ticking of time ruled by the punchclock of capitalist production, which is divided between labor and leisure (the inverse and obverse of alienation within the commodity-spectacle system), starting with the dissolution of art as a separate activity into the practice of everyday life. (See, for example, “Theses on Cultural Revolution” by Debord published in Internationale Situationiste #1, June, 1958.)

In contemporary art, a degraded variety of potlatch takes the form of what Peter Schjeldahl terms “festivalism,” art that exists only in exhibitions and thus ostensibly resists commoditization. (Happily, however, “documentation” is there to step up to the plate and pay the bills.) Another well-known festival of luxurious waste is Burning Man, a week-long event that began in the mid-1980s in San Francisco and now takes place each year in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, culminating in the immolation of a large wooden effigy built for that purpose. In Detroit, a more Goth (and in my opinion more interesting) festival is Theatre Bizarre, a delirious extravaganza that takes place on a Saturday near Halloween in a decaying residential neighborhood near the old Michigan State Fairgrounds in the northern part of the city.

Begun by artists John Dunivant and Ken Poirier a decade ago, Theatre Bizarre is part carney side show, part burlesque theater, and part performance art. Dozens of volunteers come from all over the country in the weeks before to construct the midway, stages, and other attractions. The evening’s revelry features several hundred performers and other workers with attendance of approximately 2500-3000. In 2010, the City of Detroit shut down the project citing numerous code violations. In a New York Times article on the event, Dunivant stated, “We couldn’t have gotten away with this anywhere else in the world but Detroit.”

Below: Theatre Bizarre highlights.

How long an environment amenable to an art of the commons will last remains to be seen. Forces of what the Situationists termed “recuperation” are already at work. I, for one, hope that it turns out to be more than the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time.

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.