Detroit Research Volume 1

30
Memory Field, 2010, a form of earth sculpture in
layered rings incorporating groundcover, drainage
system, and cistern in and around which children
can play in open and new ways. 7 There is, too, the
PowerHouse Project, with its Play House (a community
performing arts center), and Skate House
which abuts the Ride It Sculpture Park (along the
East Division Freeway), not to mention Jon Brumit’s
Sound House (a novel sound and recording
studio where the house itself is treated as percussive
medium) which are further examples of the
exploration of spatial forms which necessitate of
the participants the open behavior in a new field
of composition, behavior of the kind called play.
Indeed, one of the strongest aspects of the new
kind of art practices emerging on the Detroit scene
is the exploration of place in a space between the
strictly and narrowly
private and the public,
in which people
explore forms of association
intimate yet
neither private nor
public, hence the role
of the many dinner
gatherings whether
in and around urban
gardens (Kate
Daughdrill) or in a
space such as Detroit
Soup run by Amy
Kaherl (which brings
together a greater social
diversity than any other art space in Detroit), or
as organized by Phil Cooley’s Clandestine dinners
in out of the way locations and buildings/structures
(which seek to activate abandoned buildings
through underground dining experiences), or in
the home which is also a studio and place of wider
association (part expanded kitchen, living area,
part lieu de passage), or, even, in larger cultural
practices such as the new venue of Culture Lab
Detroit initiated by Jane Schulak in 2013 which,
for example, organized a conversation on Social
Practice, architecture and design with Theaster
Gates, David Adjaye and the Campano brothers
followed by a dinner at the local venue Le Petit
zinc. The studio of a Scott Hocking, for example,
is one of the great distinctive spaces and meeting
places for resident artists and visitors to Detroit
worthy of comparison with some of the great poet
and artist studios of modernism; to visit Jon Brumit
and Sarah Wagner’s studios is to visit, at the same
time, their urban gardens and get a sense of how
they interact with their social environment; to get
to know the Columbia trained conceptual sculptor
Ben Hall is also to get to know his Russell Street
deli in Eastern Market as an extension of his practice;
Phil Cooley’s Ponyride complex has become
the housing for an assortment of diverse artists,
architects, and social entrepreneurs of which Veronika
Scott’s Empowerment Plan (which provides
employment and skill training for once homeless
women) has arguably become the most famous
resident; there is, too, the Imagination Station…
and before all of these there was – and remains –
the Heidelberg Project
created by Tyree
Guyton which, with
its stuffed toys and
re-purposed waste,
is the ur-model in Detroit
of public art and
playfulness in space
and representation
and, it is said, the
second most visited
site in Detroit after
the Detroit institute
of Arts. This model of
practice has begun
to reach out from the
core group of practitioners such as Brumit, Whyte,
Lerman, Hocking, Mitch Cope, Gina Reichert, Veronika
Scott, Daughdrill, Guyton, etc., each one of
whom was trained as an artist, to non-artists who
see in it a method for the possibility of changing
the representation of their neighborhood as well
as build community (however problematic this
term might be). An example would be the developing
Brightmoor Alliance in northwest Detroit.
There are so many ways of thinking space – as
intimacy (see, for example, the interview with
Timothy and Marilyn Mast, on the intimacy of
living with a collection of ceramic art long open
to artists in Detroit), as ludic invention, as heterotopias,
as voids (which can have a creative
^Graem Whyte and Faina Lerman, Memory Field (2010).
Groundcover, earth, drainage system, cistern, 3′ high x 100′ in diameter. Image courtesy of the artists.