While most art institutions have wound down for the summer, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has been busy cranking things up. The companion exhibitions now on view, “Vertical Urban Factory” and “Post-Industrial Complex,” are arguably the most timely and thought-provoking in recent memory. Running through it all is the simple yet profound question: “Who owns the future?” This question not only applies to Detroit, although arguably this is the place where its implications are most starkly presented, but to the United States and indeed to the rest of the world. The exhibitions capture a dialectic of opposing forces at work in the city as it looks to reboot for the twenty-first century.

One force is working from the top down and it’s what might be termed the “Techno Utopia.” The other works from the bottom up and can be called the “Postindustrial Arcadia.” The former seeks to catch the wave of postmodern capitalism; the latter exists if not in outright opposition then at least in resistance to it. One reinforces the typical gentrification model, the use of the so-called creative economy to drive speculation and investment, basically the purview of what post-OWS is known as the 1 percent. The other operates within the cracks of the capitalist system to open up new ways of thinking and living for rest of us. Tied together, the shows explore the potential for realizing what sociologist Eric Olin Wright terms “the real utopia.”

The summer exhibition (“Vertical Urban Factory” and “Post Industrial Complex” are a curatorial yin and yang and thus need to be discussed as a single case study) pick up a narrative that began five years ago with the “Shrinking Cities” project, exhibited at MOCAD in conjunction with Cranbrook Art Museum. In that exhibition and its surrounding research, Detroit was posited as an extreme example of the abandonment of the urban environment in the wake of the demise of the modern mass industrial system AKA Fordism.

“Shrinking Cities” is not the first effort at documenting this phenomenon. In the late 1990s, a group of architects, urban planners, and theorists converged on the city to study the psychogeography of its dissolution and produce the book Stalking Detroit, published in 2001, which still stands as required reading. Before that, Camillo Jose Vergara published his documentary photographic essays New American Ghetto, 1995, and American Ruins, 1999. In 1989, a team of Cranbrook architecture students, James Cathcart, Frank Fantauzzi, Terrence Van Elslander, Jean-Claude Azar, and Michael Williams, working under the direction of then architect-in-residence Dan Hoffman, produced 9119 St. Cyril Street that disassembled an abandoned bungalow on the city’s east side and reinstalled it in piles in the Willis Gallery. They also guest edited a 1991 issue of New Observations magazine under the title “Editing Detroit.”

Taken together, this first move is what one might call the deconstructionist phase of conceptualizing the evolution (or devolution as the case may be) of Detroit. It examined patterns of demassification, the rise of spectacle, and other manifestations amenable to postmodern critique. Its recent fetishization is the genre known as “ruin porn.” (Kind of a stupid term actually, but if looked at through the lens of the feminist media theory concept of scopophilia, it’s serviceable enough.)

The second chapter was the exhibition two years ago co-curated by then MOCAD Director and Chief Curator Luis Croquer titled “Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism,” inspired by the work of visionary French architect Yona Friedman. Taking its cue from Friedman’s 1958 manifesto, Mobile Architecture, a user-centric model of the built environment adaptable to the ever-changing needs of what would come to be known as postmodern society, an architecture that would tread lightly on the earth, going with the flows of an emerging global cultural economy, “Spatial Cities” was a thought experiment in different ways of approaching the built environment in Detroit and elsewhere in the shadow of the regime of post-Fordism. It was an iteration of aesthetic community, as understood in the work of Jacques Ranciere, a conscious collective of ideas that acknowledges what is coupled with a vision of what could be.

The current MOCAD offering is a new phase, one that really gets down to brass tacks.

Techno Utopia: Vertical Urban Factory

Entry into the exhibition starts with a display panel that explains the project’s underlying strategy of focusing on the design, structure, and economics of multistory factories and their impact on the urban environment. As an expression of the modernist dictum form follows function, factories in the modern mass manufacturing system were initially conceived on one of two prototypes, integrated and layered. Integrated factories trace the progression of assembly work from start to finish either following gravity, working from the top floors down, or in defiance of it, working from the bottom floors up. Famous examples of the former include Henry Ford’s Model T factory built in 1910 in Highland Park and of the latter the Fiat factory built in 1928 in Turin. Layered factories organize primarily batch work on each floor, the lofts of New York City and other urban areas being examples. Later in the century, work will come to be organized horizontally in the sprawling production facilities of the suburban and exurban areas that will contribute to the abandonment of inner cities such as Detroit.

On the wall across the way is detailed timeline on the history of labor that comes right out of chapter 10 of Karl Marx’s Capital, which discusses the working day. The wall panels trace the struggles between labor and management over the course of modern capitalism with notes on technical innovations and other landmark events inserted along the way. An introductory graphic compares the wages and hours of workers at the height of the Industrial Revolution in mid-nineteenth century England, the introduction of the high wage/high output model of Fordism in the early twentieth century, and Chinese workers today. Expressed in today’s dollars, an English textile worker in 1842 made $81 a week whereas a Ford employee in 1914 effectively made $688 a week. (By contrast the current UAW-GM contract starts workers out at $600 for a 40-hour week.) Chinese workers today make about $209 a week. They also put many more weekly work hours than their American counterparts. These statistics further give evidence for another chapter in Capital, namely chapter 16 on absolute and relative surplus value.

Working off David Ricardo‘s labor theory of value, which argues that the value of a good is proportionally related to the labor needed to produce or obtain it, Marx devised the concept of surplus value upon which capitalist exploitation of workers is based. Simplistically, workers in the capitalist system are compelled to contribute more of their labor power to producing commodities than is actually required due to the monopolization of the means of production by owners. Marx further distinguishes between absolute and relative surplus value, i.e., that which results from the expenditure of pure labor power and that which is leveraged by technological innovation. One of the great inventions of modernity in that regard is the moving assembly line, which as Terry Smith outlines in his brilliant analysis of Diego Rivera‘s Detroit Industry mural cycle, 1932-33, is a gigantic infernal machine for harvesting surplus labor power, so much so that Ford was able to double his workers wages, substantially reduce the price of his product, and still become one of the richest men of the Industrial Age.

The rub, however, is that relative surplus value is unsustainable over the long run and exploitation must revert to absolute surplus value to ensure continued capital accumulation. Mainstream economists (read: capitalist apologists) generally discredit the Marxist labor theory of value, and yet the evidence of the wage and work week graphs in “Vertical Urban Factory” suggests that a major contribution to corporate profits in recent decades has come from outsourcing production to substantially cheaper labor pools in China and other parts of the world.

Of ostensibly broader application is CCS adjunct faculty Anthony Reale’s Strait Power, 2011, a marine hydroelectric generator turbine whose design is based on the anatomy of the basking shark, which spends 18 hours a day with its mouth open sifting for food and using the flow of water through its body to aid in swimming. Tests of the prototype conducted at University of Michigan‘s marine hydrodynamics lab suggest a 40 percent power improvement over a conventional single-blade turbine. One version of the Strait Power turbine is collapsible into backpack form for individual use to power small electric devices. A residential version supplies the power necessary to serve the power needs of a household. Tying multiple residential turbines together could be rapidly deployed for use in emergency situations.

While the question of who owns the future is far from decided, the terms of the debate are on view at MOCAD. It’s a vital question for us all to consider.

“Vertical Urban Factory” and “Post Industrial Complex” are on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave at Garfield, until July 29, 2012. Call 313-832-6622 or go to http://mocadetroit.org for information.

Note: Thanks to my dissertation committee at the New School for Social Research where the question “Who owns the future?” was first posed in relation to the field of contemporary cultural production in Detroit, and also my fall 2011 MFA Graduate Seminar II class at College for Creative Studies where the dialectic of the Techno Utopia and Postindustrial Arcadia was first worked out.

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.