Detroit Research Volume 1

31
function akin to redundancy in systems theory),
as the envelop of community, as the mark of the
anxiety of dispossession as Foucault put it – but
above all if space is not to become, yet again,
the functional space of urban renewal it must be
a practice, a practice of collaborative invention,
as the Lettrist International Gil J. Wolman put it:
L’espace est une invention: Space is an invention.
8 There is never simply space to be managed,
this is the functionalist fallacy. As Rilke wrote in
“The Eight Elegy,” the poem more than any other
in which we find the presentation of the Open,
We’ve never, no, not for a single day,
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into: always world,
and never nowhere without no [Nirgends ohne nicht]. 9
Space is always a particular world because the
result of the collaborative activity of world-making
and projection and as such an activity of negation,
the work of the negative from which no human activity
is exempt. In Detroit, in its urban fabric, in the
self-conscious art emergent from an engagement
with a care of the city, there is a poetics and ethic
of space which assumes rather than eschews the
sedimented, historical layers and tension of this
negation through play and representation.
Images from Ride It Sculpture Park (2012-present) and
The Heidelberg Project. Courtesy of Vince Carducci.
Social Practice cannot be a solution to the larger
structural, global problems of spatial justice – art
cannot offer solutions to anything of the kind and
to think so is merely delusional or childish – rather,
Social Practice, as one of the dominant modes of
contemporary art-thinking about social and political
relation, offers representations of critical alternatives
and gestures to what is lacking…It is as
citizens that we accomplish the rest.
A 250 person Clandestine in the David Whitney Building
to raise money for the Ruth Ellis Center. This is before the
renovation when there was no running water or electricity.
Reopening in 2014. Image courtesy of Phillip Cooley.