Detroit Research Volume 1

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1
Of course, Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationist International
went out of their way to say – protest – that they were
not art movements.
2
Here consider Nato Thompson: “The veritable explosion of
work in the arts has been assigned catchphrases, such as
‘relational aesthetics,’ coined by French curator Nicholas
Bourriaud, or Danish curator Lars Bang Larsen’s term ‘social
aesthetics.’ We can also look to Suzanne Lacy’s ‘new genre
public art,’ or the commonly known West Coast term ‘social
practice.’ Other precursors include Critical Art Ensemble’s
activist approach called ‘tactical media’ and Grant Kester’s
‘dialogic art,’ which refers to conversation-based projects. We
can also go back to Joseph Beuys’s ‘social sculpture.’ Numerous
genres have been deeply intertwined in participation,
sociality, conversation, and ‘the civic.’” Nato Thompson, “Living
as Form,” in Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from
1991 – 2011, ed. Nato Thompson (New York: Creative Time,
2012), 19.
3
But cf. the seminal work of Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative
Community, trans. Peter Connor and others (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Miami Theory Collective,
Community at Loose Ends (Minneapolis and Oxford,
OH: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
4
Joshua Decter, “Art, Urban Rebuilding, Social Justice, and
Sustainability: Toward a Case Study of New Orleans,” in
Heartland, ed. Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, and Stephanie
Smith (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, and Eindhoven:
Van Abbemuseum, 2009), 37.
9
Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Mural
(New York: The Detroit Institute of Arts and Norton, 1999),
168.
10
Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Mural, 168-169.
11
Song composed and recorded by Joe L. Carter, 1965, quoted
in Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, “Finally Got the
News,” Detroit: I do Mind Dying. A Study in Urban Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1998), 107. The
film Finally got the news can be watched at http://vimeo.
com/46740150
12
No museum, no gallery, has yet worked out how to put
such practices on effective display – see Boris Groys above
about the role of documentation in contemporary art - and
very few museums are willing to envisage the possibility that
the idea of the museum as currently figured - a box for the
public display of wealth; a place for the encounter with works
of seminal thought; a place to learn the art of attention at the
core of aesthetic conversation – may be conceptually redundant.
MOCA, LA in its Engagement Party, reflexively tracking
its own engagement with this kind of art practice, is opening
itself to the possibility that it, and the Museum, may learn how
to transform itself from built-in redundancy to rejuvenated living
form…But it remains an open question, of course.
124
5
Cf. Boris Groys, “A Genealogy of Participatory Art,” Introduction
to Antiphilosophy, trans. David Fernbach (London
and New York: Verso, 2012), 197-217, as also Groys’ essay
on Biopolitics and the prevalence of documentation in contemporary
art, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to
Art Documentation,” Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 2008), 53-65.
6
Cf. Elena Pulcini, Care of the World: Fear, Responsibility
and Justice in the Global Age, trans. Karen Whittle (Dordrecht
and London: Springer, 2013).
7
On Social Practice and care, cf. Michael Stone-Richards,
Care of the City: Detroit and the Question of Social Practice,
forthcoming Artifice/Black Dog Publishing, and the set of conversations
curated by Creative Time, Who Cares (New York:
Creative Time, 2006), as also Groys, “Art in the Age of Biopolitics:
From Artwork to Art Documentation.”
8
Grace Lee Boggs, “The Only Way to Survive is by Taking
Care of One Another,” Democracy Now, April 02, 2010, http://
www.democracynow.org/2010/4/2/grace_lee_boggs. Accessed
10-07-13.